 |
SNS Special Letter SAVING CORAL: A STORY OF RISK AND RESILIENCE By Stuart Sandin, Clinton Edwards, and Eliah Aronoff Spencer Register for Future in Review now to take advantage of our summer pricing at $4,900. The price jumps up to $5,900 starting Sept 1. _______ Introduction | Berit Anderson Every four years, the National Intelligence Council publishes the Global Trends Report, which does its level best to identify key trends and uncertainties that will shape the global strategic environment over the next 20 years. The most recent, published in March 2021, outlines main themes for the decades ahead. Key among them is what they call adaptation, which, they write, "will be both an imperative and a key source of advantage for all actors in this world" in dealing with the climate emergency, demographic shifts, and shifting international political tides. A superior word, in my opinion, is resilience. Resilience, as a term, captures not only the idea that adaptation is needed to adjust to our rapidly changing world, but also the emotion behind that act. Adapting will be difficult and gritty, yes, but our collective ability to do so will reap immense ecological, emotional, and cultural benefits. There are few people I know who embody the idea of resilience more than the team of authors behind this week's Special Letter. Evan Anderson and I began working with Eliah Aronoff Spencer last fall on behalf of Future in Review to support a set of interdisciplinary initiatives out of UC San Diego focused on fostering resilience through the intersection of technology, scientific research, creativity, and community. This letter outlines just one of those initiatives: a groundbreaking approach to global coral stewardship out of Scripps Institution of Oceanography that blends cutting-edge academic research, advanced machine learning, and digital twins with citizen science, narrative change, and creative storytelling to uplift and support community-based ecological management. You'll have the chance to meet the authors - and to play with digital twins of coral from their 100 Island Challenge at this year's FiRe conference. In the meantime, we couldn't be prouder to count them as members of Strategic News Service. I trust you'll feel the same after reading this week's Global Report. _______
Our planet's coral reefs are in peril, suffering myriad insults that have raised fears that ours will be the last human generation to see these ecosystems alive. The implications of this possibility are profound. Coral-reef ecosystems provide essential food for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The unparalleled biological diversity of coral reefs produces drugs that extend the lives of billions more. When coral reefs are lost, tropical shorelines become unprotected from the waves linked with even modest storms. And for many low-lying island nations, the growth of coral reefs is fundamental to keeping the land itself above sea level. The gravity of the potential loss of coral reefs globally is terrifying and has permeated our perspective on ocean futures. But the story of the planet's coral reefs has not yet been closed.
|
