Thursday, August 21, 2014
The Next Big Idea for the Next Decade: The Resilience Dividend
As the world continues to change at a rapid pace, it is important to focus on building resiliency, writes Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, in a blog post that originally appeared on Medium.com.
Here is an excerpt from her post:
"In a conversation with The Washington Post's Phillip Kennicott, I made the case for why building resilience is among the most important priorities of our lifetime, provoked by the three trends I believe will most shape the world for the next decade:
"The first is the rapid, astonishing pace of urbanization. With a global population headed towards 9 billion by mid-century, people will be mostly located in cities, in increasingly fragile ecosystems.
"The second is climate change, which, over the past decade, has emerged as an undeniable threat to cities, institutions and businesses. For example, hot weather kills more Americans than all other natural disasters combined, and experts predict that summer heat waves will only worsen, leading to even more illnesses and deaths.
"The third trend is globalization. Vulnerability in one place leads to vulnerability in another. Economic shocks and infectious diseases travel quickly, without mind for man-made borders. This will only continue to intensify."...