In June 2020, Central Texas entered the yearly flash flood season in unusual circumstances. In addition to the well-known weather-related emergency, daily living was also being radically shaped by nation-wide protests defending Black Lives, and four months of the coronavirus pandemic. In Austin, where I resided with my family, life in the intersection of these phenomena is significantly different for different people. During my time in Texas and the US this year I could reflect on the relations between experiences of crisis and changes in women and racial minorities’ political engagement. Recent shifts in grassroots politics and governance are shaping each other. To understand the long-term consequences of governing multiple coexisting crises, one needs to also understand how and why minority politics are changing. 

I had come to Austin in mid-February on a Fulbright grant to study the politics of flood management among East Austin’s Latino and Black minorities and especially women. As the pandemic lockdown complicated my access to face-to-face research, I reached out to ethnographic reflexivity to understand minorities’ experiences of multiple coexisting crises. When exercising ethnographic reflexivity, research is understood to be more trustworthy and analytically stronger because the reflexive author is aware of how her own positionality – here, as a woman and a mother in a half-Finnish, half-American-Latino family – shapes her analytical lens.

In the US as in much of the rest of the world, life amidst the pandemic is significantly different for women and men, and for different ethnic groups. Mothers with caring responsibilities have seen their effectiveness at work decline sharply while their partners have been able to maintain their productivity (Lewis 2020). In the US, many mothers have made the choice to leave their jobs to be able to assume the traditional caring role during the continued lockdown. 

In Texas and a few other conservative states, healthcare politics during the Covid-19 pandemic have also nearly produced an emergency for women’s reproductive rights: For roughly a month in the spring of 2020, abortion was included among the “nonessential surgical procedures” that had to be cancelled or postponed to make sure coronavirus patients were getting the care they needed. Motherhood in a pandemic is different depending on who you are and where you reside.

Later in the spring, when Black Lives Matter emerged as a nationwide movement against police brutality towards black people, Austin, Texas, saw attempts to manage pressing minority issues conflict with Covid-19 politics. At the core of these political struggles are fundamentally different understandings of emergency and safety, that get expressed in conflicting demands to either maintain or reallocate funding for the police. While an organization that seeks to promote safety at the University of Texas demands that police funding be kept in order to ensure the availability of first dispatchers and emergency workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, an organization supporting racial minority rights requires that funding for police be reallocated to “other emergency services that will actually help empower the minority community” (Venkataramanan 2020). Suddenly, healthcare competes with the rights of ethnic minority citizens.

And therefore, while white America grapples with the coronavirus, for many ethnic minorities, the health emergency is one more among multiple crises, some of them structurally constituted. As an ethnographer with no access to follow the daily lives of people, my means to understand what goes on for Black and Latina women around me are mostly limited to the shared experience of the everyday constancy of motherhood with a baby – as Lynn Steger Strong writes, children are “so surely and so endlessly just there”. For a mother of a Latino baby, I see that this experience stands for the entire family: Social distancing is harder to do when family is much more than those who live with me under the same roof. In other words, as daily living for all Texans becomes radically shaped by lockdown policies, “the rhythm of motherhood and family” stays somewhat the same to me and others. However, my experience of one emergency is very different from many Black and Latina women’s multiple coexisting emergencies. 

Later, in the middle of the summer, as I was given the privileged opportunity to relocate with my family to Finland, many American minorities were turning towards grassroots activism. For some militant Texans, such as one group in Dallas, this meant taking up arms to defend private business owners’ rights to maintain doors open while the State radically limited business operations to halt the pandemic. Before its annexation to the US, Texas was its own country, and currently it has e.g. complete energy independence. Thus combined discourses of economic revival and armed activism are for many people constitutive of a Texan identity. For many minorities, however, as the yearly floods threatened their housing and Covid-19 posed a risk to their lives that was multiple times the risk to white Americans, the co-emergence of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter came as a chance to take part in shaping the longer term of politics.

Now in November 2020 after the presidential elections, it is obvious that in addition to ethnic minority groups, women were among those who saw that a lot needed to change. According to the sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol, interviewed by the Atlantic, roughly 2 500 activist groups led by women emerged during the spring and summer of 2020 (Godfrey 2020b). Many of them were Republican women disillusioned by Trump, who saw becoming Democrat as their only option (Godfrey 2020a). Many were Black women who either are inactive Democrat voters (ibid.) or women who cannot, now or any other time, imagine voting other than Democrat (Crumpton 2020).  

Journalist Elaine Godfrey writes that the shift in American grassroots politics may extend far beyond presidential elections. She cites Skocpol: “It’s a renaissance of a very long-standing form of American civic engagement”. According to Godfrey, especially women have the potential to shape the long term of politics through statehouse races, local party organizations and school boards. 

For social scientists seeking to understand the long-term consequences of governing emergencies, conceptualizing governance by turning a blind eye to shifts in civic engagement is not really an option. While electoral cycles strongly limit the potential of politicians to prepare for the long term, progressive civic groups that are not constrained by the same short-sightedness may have the ability to pressure for changes that take into account the further future. In a world of complex and intertwined crises, responding to emergency is increasingly a bottom-up issue.

WISE organized a virtual symposium on “Creeping socio-ecological catastrophes: Is excluding the long term in decision-making inevitable?” on 4 November 2020.

In addition to WISE researchers, the invited participants were Tony Barnosky, Stanford University; Arjen Boin, Leiden University; Olivier Borraz, SciencesPo; Mikulas Cernota, University of Economics in Bratislava; Ashley Dawson, City University of New York; Michael Depledge, University of Exeter; Alkistis Elliott-Graves, Bielefeld University; Eeva Furman, Finnish Environment Institute; Paula Puskarova, University of Economics in Bratislava; Emery Roe, University of California Berkeley; and Limor Samimian-Darash, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Please refer to the bios at the end of this text for more information about the participants.

Based on the video material we sent to the participants beforehand, we asked them to critically reflect on the simulation exercise, Policy Operations Room (POR), which we arranged for the top politicians and a group of experts from the City of Helsinki in November 2019. We also asked them to briefly describe their current approach to the symposium theme, creeping catastrophes. The interventions and the lively discussions that followed constituted a sort of international academic situation room, which we thought was a fruitful and exciting way to update each other what is going on in different parts of the world right now.

WISE professor Janne I. Hukkinen giving a 10-minute briefing on the Helsinki Policy Operations Room (POR):

A Zoom recording of the 3-hour symposium:

Participants’ bios:

Barnosky, Anthony, Stanford University, California, US

Anthony D. Barnosky is Executive Director of Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve and Professor of Biology at Stanford University and Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Author of numerous scientific publications, op eds, blog posts, and books, Barnosky has spent three decades conducting research related to past planetary changes, and what they mean for forecasting the changes to come on Planet Earth in the next few decades.  He has worked in South America, India, China, Africa, Europe, and the western USA in a quest to learn how past species reacted to major environmental changes and what that tells us about the changes to come in our future. His popular books—Dodging Extinction (UC Press, 2014) and Tipping Point for Planet Earth (coauthored with Elizabeth Hadly, Thomas Dunne / St. Martin’s Press, April 2016) — examine the state of the planet today and how we can guide it toward a future we want, rather than one that inadvertently happens to us.

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Boin, Arjen, Leiden University, the Netherlands

Arjen Boin is Professor of Public Institutions and Governance at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University. Before he moved to Leiden, he was a professor of public governance and crisis management at the Utrecht School of Governance and associate professor at the Public Administration Institute, Louisiana State University.

Boin has published widely on topics of crisis and disaster management, leadership, institutional design and organizational issues. His most recent book, Managing Hurricane Katrina (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), investigates the lessons that should be learned from this mega-disaster. Boin is the previous editor of Public Administration (Wiley), a premier journal in the field, and serves on the editorial board of the following journals: Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration (Routledge), Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management (Wiley), Risks, Hazards and Crisis in Public Policy (Wiley), and International Journal of Emergency Management (Inderscience). 

He is also a managing partner at Crisisplan BV and a founding member of the European Societal Security Research Group.

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Borraz, Olivier, SciencesPo, Paris, France

Olivier Borraz is a CNRS Research professor and the Director of the Centre for the Sociology of Organisations. Over the last 20 years, he has conducted research in the field of risk governance and regulation, and more recently crisis preparedness and management. Initially interested in risk governance related to environmental health, with case studies on controversies, scientific expertise, and decision-making process, he later moved on to the study of risk-based regulation. On this latter topic, he undertook with colleagues a comparison of the diffusion of risk-based instruments in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands, in sectors as diverse as occupational health, flooding, food safety and education. This led to several major publications highlighting the role of institutional variables in the implementation of risk-based regulation and the variations between countries in what risk actually means.

His more recent work focuses on crisis preparedness and management, with a study of the French nuclear sector and currently a research project on volcano alerts in the French Antilles with the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. In 2020, he published with Henri Bergeron, Patrick Castel and François Dedieu a book on the handling of the Covid-19 crisis in France.

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Černota, Mikuláš, University of Economics, Bratislava, Slovakia

Mikuláš Černota is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of International Relations of the University of Economics in Bratislava. His specialisation lies at the interdisciplinary issues of the natural resources management, human impact to the environment, environmental migration, development issues and climate change diplomacy. He was a member of the Managing Committee of the COST Action IS 1101 Climate Change and Migration: Knowledge, Law and Policy, and Theory. He has wide experiences from being a member of the research groups from Finnish Forest Research Institute in Helsinki, École Nationale du Génie Rural des Eaux at des Forets in Nancy and Swedish Agricultural University in Uppsala.

His focus is on the current challenges of the principles of sustainable management of Earth’s resources and human population nexus in the frame of ethical and socio-economic conditions and interdisciplinary solutions to development issues such as food security, human health and adaptation to climate change and degradation of natural resources.

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Dawson, Ashley, City University of New York, US

Ashley Dawson is currently Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island. Much of Dawson’s work hinges on the experience and literature of migration, including movement from postcolonial nations such as Jamaica and Nigeria to the former imperial center and from rural areas to mega-cities of the global South like Lagos and Mumbai. He has also worked recently on global media cultures and on contemporary discourses of U.S. imperialism.

Dawson is the founder of the Climate Action Lab at CUNY and a member of the Occupy Climate Change! research project headquartered at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Sweden. Dawson is also a long-time member of the Social Text Collective, where he served for many years as editor of Social Text Online. In this capacity, he curated dossiers of essays on topics as diverse as the legacy of Black British intellectual Stuart Hall, the strengths and pitfalls of the Occupy movement, and the politics of debt, among many other subjects. His recent books include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, and Extinction: A Radical History.

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Depledge, Mike, University of Exeter, UK

Emeritus Professor Michael Depledge is Chair of Advisory Board at the University of Exeter Medical School. Since 1990 he has been an expert advisor on marine pollution to the United Nations, working in Brazil, Costa Rica, India, China, Vietnam and several other countries to develop the RAMP (Rapid Assessment of Marine Pollution) programme for UNEP’s Global Oceans Observing System (GOOS).

Depledge is interested in all aspects of biology, but especially the ways in which anthropogenic activities affect the environment and human health. The ecotoxicological research he conducted has focused on the effects of environmental pollutants on the physiology and behaviour of marine invertebrates and subsequent ecological and evolutionary consequences. He has a particular interest in biomarkers that allow changes in the health and physiological status of organisms to be monitored over time. Another aspect of his work has been to look at how environmental change impacts the health and wellbeing of humans.

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Elliott-Graves, Alkistis, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Elliott-Graves is a Junior-professor in Philosophy at Bielefeld University. Her main research areas are general philosophy of science and philosophy of applied sciences (especially Ecology and Climate Science). Her interests are in complex systems: what makes them interesting but also difficult to investigate. Elliott-Graves’s recent work focused on the difficulty of making precise and accurate predictions in Ecology and Climate Science, and what this means for the scientific status of these disciplines. She is currently working on the broader implications of this research for the relationship between traditional philosophy of science and applied scientific practice.

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Furman, Eeva, Finnish Environment Institute, Finland

Professor Furman’s duties include directing the Environmental Policy Centre and being part of the lead group of Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE). She leads national and international research projects and her positions of trust include chairing and participating boards in the fields of sustainable development, environment, biodiversity and ecosystem services and of research linked to them.

Furman has been researching and developing environmental and sustainable development governance for more than 20 years. The last 10 years she has been occupied by Europe wide research collaboration where the focus has been on challenges and solutions for human environment relationship. Before that Furman was involved in intergovernmental environmental collaboration in the Arctic, Asian and European context.

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Hukkinen, Janne I., University of Helsinki, Finland

Janne I. Hukkinen (PhD, University of California Berkeley, 1990) is professor of environmental policy at the University of Helsinki. He studies the cognitive aspects of sustainability assessment and strategy, with empirical applications in participation, expertise and risk in environmental policy. Hukkinen is a Member of The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, Editor of the journal Ecological Economics, and Expert Counsellor on the Environment for the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland. In addition to over 90 peer-reviewed scientific articles or book chapters, he is the author of Sustainability Networks (2008) and Institutions in Environmental Management (1999), both published by Routledge.

Järvensivu, Paavo, BIOS Research Unit, Helsinki

Paavo Järvensivu, D.Sc. (Econ.), is a senior researcher at BIOS, an independent multidisciplinary research unit which studies the effects of environmental and resource factors on Finnish society and develops the anticipatory skills of citizens and decision-makers. Currently, he studies the political economy and culture of ecological reconstruction, a rapid and managed transition of the key social-ecological systems of society. To read more on ecological reconstruction in Finland, please visit https://eco.bios.fi.

In WISE, Järvensivu is a subproject leader and coordinates stakeholder interaction. BIOS researchers were largely responsible for the design and execution of the Policy Operations Room in Helsinki, a simulation exercise held for the city’s top political leaders and experts in November 2019.

Puskarova, Paula, University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovakia

Paula Puskarova serves as the Vice-Rector for Research and Doctoral Studies at the University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her current research interests entail regional growth, knowledge and human capital management and migration, inequality spillovers, environmental spillovers as well as other spatial externalities arising from international movements of labor and capital. Each year, she authors a chapter in the Slovakia‘s leading economic scientific monograph – Evolution and perspectives of global economy – published by Slovak Academy of Sciences.

She has experience with EU-level project management and in economic modelling (published author in the field of spatial modelling and regional development). She has published in Economic Systems, Political Economy, Measurement, Comparative Economic Research, International Journal of Management and Economics, Economic Research Guardian.

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Roe, Emery, University of California Berkeley, California, US

Emery Roe is a practicing policy analyst and Senior Researcher working on science, technology and environmental controversies. He specializes in developing better management strategies in large technical systems for the provision of high critical services, such as electricity and water. He is author or co-author of many articles and books, including Narrative Policy Analysis (1994), Taking Complexity Seriously (1998), Ecology, Engineering and Environment (2002), High Reliability Management (2008), and Reliability and Risk(2016)

Roe has helped design and direct initiatives on, among others, agriculture and urban sprawl in California’s Central Valley, indicators of ecosystem health in the San Francisco Bay-Delta region, campus/community partnerships in underserved urban minority neighborhoods, and research on issues at the intersection of global population growth, natural resource utilization and the environment.

His blog is: When complex is as simple as it gets

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Samimian-Darash, Limor, Hebrew University, Israel

Limor Samimian-Darash is an anthropologist, Associate Professor at the Federmann School of Public Policy and Government at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include security and preparedness, anthropology of the state and policy, biosecurity, emergency, theory of risk and uncertainty, and governing technologies of the future (scenarios).

She has studied for more than 10 years the topics of preparedness for future risks and uncertainties in fields of health and security. In the past few years she has specifically focused on scenarios as a dominant way to address future uncertainties through imagination and narration. In her ISF-funded research (2015-2018) Turning Points exercises in Israel, she explored through extensive fieldwork, nation-wide emergency preparedness exercises. In her current research project on Global Scenarios, funded by the ISF (2019-202) she examines forms, practices, and conceptualizations of future plausibilities through scenarios in global organizations in the fields of health and energy. Her BSF-funded research on future imagination technologies (2019-2022), examines comparatively modalities of future imagination, design, and planning in the high-tech sector in Israel and the US.

Samimian-Darash was chosen as one of five promising early-career social scientists in Israel, for the Alon Fellowship (2013–2016). Her recent publications include: ‘Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases’ (University of Chicago press); ‘From Crisis to Emergency: The Shifting Logic of Preparedness’ (Ethnos); ‘Practicing Uncertainty: Scenario-Based Preparedness Exercises in Israel’ (Cultural Anthropology); ‘Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty’ (Current Anthropology). Her forthcoming book entitled: Uncertainty by Design: Imagining and Enacting the Future through Scenarios.

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The cascade of disruptions during the first quarter of 2020 – wildfires in Australia, flooding in Europe, mass migration from the Middle East, and the coronavirus pandemic – predicts the new normal. From now on, we will be reducing the causes of future socio-ecological disruptions while still recovering from the effects of the latest disruption. When prevention of disasters is constrained by coping with them, it is time to rethink what we mean by mitigation and adaptation. 

In the turmoil of the Covid-19 pandemic, disaster reduction organizations such as the World Health Organization focus on mitigation, in other words, limiting the adverse impacts of the virus (1). Calling these actions mitigation may confuse the devoted climate change researcher, who since the IPCC’s first assessment report in 1990 has thought of limiting adverse impacts as adaptation (2). Were they to apply their own terminology to pandemics, climate change researchers would say that mitigation of a pandemic refers to interventions aiming to reduce its causes.

It is high time to clarify concepts when two expert communities dealing with urgent, critical and intertwined global challenges risk confusing causes and effects in their public communication about crises. It turns out the conceptual minefield also provides good reasons to re-think the meaning of mitigation and adaptation. Let us first look at the details of the terminological confusion. 

When the disaster reduction community talks about mitigation, it means “the lessening or limitation of the adverse impacts of hazards and related disasters” (see Table). Compare this to the climate change community’s definition of adaptation: “The process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects.” One can hardly argue that “lessening adverse impacts” would differ much from “adjusting to climate effects.” What is mitigation for the disaster reduction community is adaptation to the climate change community.

Table: Comparing the terminology of climate change and disaster reduction (3,4)

A closer look at the Table reveals even more intriguing nuances. The climate change community and the disaster reduction community seem to be in broad agreement over the meaning of the term adaptation. Put succinctly, it means “adjustment to climate and its effects” to both communities (Table). But then the disaster reduction community makes a conceptual leap that effectively equates adaptation with mitigation. Adaptation is defined as “adjustment to climate and its effects, which moderates harm” while mitigation is “limitation of adverse impacts of disasters.” Since it is difficult to see any real difference between “moderation of harm” and “limitation of adverse impacts of disasters,” the disaster reductionists in fact state that mitigation is adaptation.

In sum, we have the disaster reduction community’s understanding of mitigation being the same as their understanding of adaptation, which in turn means the same as the climate change community’s understanding of adaptation. This leaves mitigation as understood by the climate change community as the outlier in this conceptual scheme: “A human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.”

To be true, the climate change community has in a 2018 IPCC Report (5) on the risks of extreme events recognized the contradiction in terminology between the two communities. But the report’s often-heard conclusion that “climate adaptation and mitigation can complement each other” is not entirely satisfying. At least three reasons motivate revisiting the concepts.

First, the climate change research community has for years been split between those studying mitigation and those studying adaptation. Since climate research is inevitably politically charged, mitigation researchers are often seen as the optimists with a can-do attitude and adaptation researchers as the pessimists who have given up on pro-active measures to counter climate change. When decision makers responsible for science policy attach politically charged labels to the purportedly neutral categories of adaptation and mitigation, the association can be toxic for both the science and policy of climate change. Mere pleas for the complementarity of mitigation and adaptation have little effect on contestation over the visibility and resources of research.

Terminology in crisis

Second, both the science and discourse on climate change have since the IPCC’s 1.5-degree report (6) switched to crisis mode. What used to be climate warming is now climate heating. What used to be climate change is now climate emergency. The playing field has changed. Any measure to mitigate climate change today takes place in the broader context of climate adaptation, simply because we are already in the middle of largely uncontrolled climate change. 

The conceptual change is akin to the one observed in sustainable development, where the image of an equally balanced triplicate of social, economic and ecological sustainability has been replaced by concentric circles of the economy enclosed within society, which in turn are enclosed within ecosystems. Just as any socio-economic policy is subject to ecological boundary conditions, so is any climate mitigation measure subject to the limits posed by the adaptation measures we are already struggling with.

Third and following from the last point, the climate change community’s definition of mitigation would be more realistic if it adopted the same kind of conceptual “fuzziness” that is observed in the disaster reduction community’s definitions. Recall how the disaster reduction community specified its definition of adaptation (“adjustment to climate and its effects”) with a qualifier (“which moderates harm”), which effectively equates adaptation with mitigation in disaster reduction. The climate change community would be wise to modify its definition of mitigation with the same qualifier: “A human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities.” 

The key benefit of this redefinition of mitigation for the climate change community would be enhanced attention on precaution. Rather than accepting any mitigation action as long as it reduces the sources or enhances the sinks, the intervention would additionally need to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. Excluded from these precautionary mitigation efforts would be those that fail to moderate harm. The terminological modification would entail considering the technological, institutional and economic path dependencies of mitigation options. In other words: Are the mitigation options appropriate in light of what we know about existing adaptation challenges? What future adaptation challenges would the mitigation options potentially generate, if implemented?

Legacy problems

Unfortunately, path dependencies often pose policy dilemmas, because mitigation becomes much more difficult when considered in light of adaptation. For example, globalized industrial production based on fossil fuels served us well until its negative impacts on planetary ecosystems became clear. As a result, the fossil infrastructure is now a burden. And Finland’s industrial lock-in with paper and pulp manufacturing was a great bioenergy innovation when carbon neutrality was the target of climate policy: carbon neutrality was achieved as long as forest growth equaled the consumption of wood by the industry. Now that carbon negativity is necessary and forests are the only feasible carbon sink, the industrial lock-in has become a burden. 

Sometimes only crises reveal the unwanted lock-ins. Finland’s public daycare system, which during normal times enables both parents in a family to work, has become a Catch-22 vulnerability during the coronavirus pandemic. Shutting down daycare centers would be key to stopping the spreading of the virus. But it would also prevent vitally important work by those parents who have jobs in the critical functions of the society. For the time being, daycare centers remain open – an epidemiologically suboptimal solution. 

When considering future mitigation options, precaution and foresight are needed more than ever. A carbon capture and storage project that fails as a result of an unstable subsurface environment and leads to large scale releases of carbon dioxide will wipe out the originally intended mitigation and forge a path to nothing but adaptation. Equally questionable is climate mitigation through mass production of solar panels and windmills, if implemented with technologies that require costly adaptation to the adverse impacts of rampant mining of rare earths.

Precautionary foresight is the key lesson that the disaster reduction community has to offer to the climate change community. Climate mitigation interventions make sense only to the extent that they do not endanger our adaptive capacity. 

Most of us expect for lights to turn on with the push of the button without giving any thought to how much our everyday lives depend on energy. Energy is not only used to power the electric devices we use, to heat our homes and to fuel the cars we drive, but also to manufacture and ship all the stuff we have around us. The amount of energy everyone in the developed world uses today was historically available only to kings. This is possible thanks to the enormous energy systems in our countries.

In the WISE project, we are looking at the resilience of complex social and technological systems. How for example can widespread energy systems survive extreme and unexpected events and recover afterwards? While many of the traditional threats to energy systems (primarily geopolitical risks, extreme weather events and technical failures) are well known, there are many important threats with little consideration given so far.

Renewable, distributed and digital – all good, right?

Renewable energy (RE) sources allow decarbonization of energy systems, which is urgently needed to mitigate major and potentially irreversible risks of climate change. However, shifting to renewable energy changes energy systems in various ways. Instead of fuel stocks, production flows are a main concern, and they are highly variable due to changing environmental conditions. The system will also be more decentralized. At the same time, monitoring and control of energy systems is being rapidly digitalized.

All these changes have the potential to increase the resilience of energy systems in the face of traditional threats. In fact, security considerations are used to promote development and adoption of renewable energy, sometimes more successfully than promotion based on environmental grounds. But as with all change, this will also present new risks. These four key examples call for caution in the energy transition.

Climate impacts to RE: Energy production from renewable sources inherently depends on variable weather conditions. As climate change progresses, current weather patterns are subject to change. This is a concern, as power producers need to ensure the economic payback of a plant during its operational lifetime. With increased proportion of renewable energy, unexpected decrease in production may become a capacity adequacy concern for the whole system. Even though existing studies project the changes to be small and context-dependent, results are subject to significant uncertainties.

Collapse of petro-states: For countries dependent on fossil fuel imports, this transition brings significant economic and security benefits. In the long run, even major exporting countries may benefit as they avoid “the resource curse” of oversized extractive sectors. But in the short term, the transition creates a lot of economic and political pressure. If pressures appear rapidly and are poorly managed, these states could collapse altogether. The low oil prices in 1980s are considered an important factor in decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Political and social instability of such events could spill over presenting major geopolitical risks.

Cybersecurity of energy systems: Digital systems in energy infrastructure control more and more critical operations, connect a plethora of devices, are accessed by an increasing number of people, use huge amounts of data and a variety of software solutions. This increases the potential to disturb system operation and damage infrastructure. Especially as connected devices are more widely distributed, high-level security options are not available in places like the homes of end-users. Numerous digital security solultions are developed for data networks, but they are often not applicable for fundamentally different energy systems. Increasing number of users heightens the possibility of careless use, and diversifying software solutions increase potential of security gaps. Cyber-attacks can be used alongside other means such as physical attacks and energy system operation personnel coercion. While cyber-security is a widely acknowledged issue, industry remains slow in taking appropriate measures.

Platforms: Recent developments in the field of smart grids have enabled new ways of controlling energy and information flows. Subsequently, digital platforms and algorithms are being developed to record and steer energy flows between end-use loads, power production, and storage units. Platforms also enable crowdfunded investments into renewable energy production. Digital platforms can promote decarbonization and enhance the system resilience. On the other hand, the same platforms can introduce new and complex dynamics with undesirable consequences. Simplicity and cost gains may be made at the expense of crucial social functions or public goods. Barriers against new entrants may emerge, resulting in market monopolization. Strain on the grid may increase. The resilience implications of these and other examples are often indirect and therefore not clear. Even benefits from the decentralized physical systems promoted by the platforms are not obvious, as the actual number of platforms themselves (judging from the developments in social networks) could be very small. Hacking a very large platform could have more damaging implications than even hacking a major component in a highly centralized power system.

How bad could it be?

Not all relevant threats to energy systems are known. Some unknown events, so called black swans, have the potential to cause enormous damage. But how can anyone prepare against the unknown? One way to do it is to consider worst-case scenarios irrespective of their likelihood. Investigating highly unlikely scenarios like demon invasion can perhaps provide valuable real-world insights, but examples of more likely threats with potentially catastrophic consequences are easy to find.

Cascading failures: These refer to sequential power system component failures caused by another component failure. Resulting damages could be very large, including system-wide blackouts, even when the initial disturbance is relatively weak. Cascading failures appear when system components are highly interdependent, which is not always visible due to overall system complexity. Duplication of system components can mitigate the effects of interdependence but cannot eliminate them.

Cascading failures within power systems have been studied for a long time, but risks continue to increase due to wider geographical interconnection. Thus the worst-case scenario is no longer a countrywide but a continent-wide blackout. With increasing cross-sectorial integration due to the digitalization of energy systems and the electrification of heating and transport, cascading failures across multiple sectors become more likely. From resilience perspective, cross-sectorial integration removes crucial “firebreaks” that allow isolation and containment of threats. Therefore, designing additional firebreaks could be important to avoid catastrophic all-encompassing failures.

Multiple contingences in a short time period: Disturbances affect the capability of energy systems to supply energy as well as to withstand such events in the future, their resilience capacity. Even when a system withstands the disturbance it was designed for, its capability to withstand another but not necessarily the same type of disturbance could be greatly reduced for some time. Multiple disturbances appearing in a short time period can cause damage that is much more significant than from events with longer time intervals between them. While the occurrence of multiple contingencies in a short period is unlikely, it is not impossible. Linkages between different contingencies would greatly increase the likelihood of such events. For example, a poorly maintained component is more likely to fail in a grid under stress from environmental conditions or due to failure of another component than during normal operation. Another example could be cyber-attacks performed strategically during or slightly after an extreme weather event.

Humans as part of energy system: Large numbers of people are working in planning, operating and maintaining energy systems. A lot of these jobs require specific qualifications limiting the pace of replacement, which could be an issue in case of severe epidemics or military conflicts. Other major human related risks include intentional damage done by insiders in an institution, poor management of security credentials, and operational mistakes. This is extremely important with critical infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants.

Space weather: The sun releases charged particles whose direction, amount and energy can vary significantly. During so-called geomagnetic storms, the flow of charged particles can be strong enough to disturb the Earth’s magnetosphere temporarily. These storms can create strong magnetic fields inducing large currents in long conductors, like power transmission and communication lines. These currents in the power system can be dangerous to various system components with transformers being among the most vulnerable. Most generators are connected to the grid through transformers and thus would not be strongly affected by such currents. However, in case of transformer failure, a sudden loss of load would put the generator at risk of overheating. A number of geomagnetic storms have been recorded with largest of them taking place in 1859. A storm of such magnitude today could damage a large number of power system components globally. Repairing all damaged components may require much more spare parts than there are stocked in. Capabilities of manufacturing and delivery of new components themselves would be affected by the storm. Modern power systems may also not be able to operate without well-functioning communication systems even if physical system components are in order. Prolonged dysfunction of energy systems could harm other vital systems, like food production, that relay significantly on uninterrupted energy supply.

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Decarbonization of energy systems is a vital component in moving societies towards zero-carbon and further towards net carbon-negative economies. Renewable energy, increasing electrification and the attendant decentralization and cross-sectorial integration of energy systems are key features of avoiding the hell of climate change. But as the devil is in the details, other gates of hell may open if such challenges to resilience are not taken seriously.

In the WISE project, part of the work has consisted in identifying resilience gaps related to the Baltic Sea. In the environmental policy WISE sub-group (EPRG), we have focused particularly on maritime safety. In this blog, I reflect upon the significance of recent trends toward automated pilotage from the point of view of navigational reliability.

In a December 2017 piece of news, the CEO of Finnpilot Pilotage, Kari Kosonen, was asked whether he thinks remote pilotage is a threat or an opportunity. “- Definitely an opportunity”, he answered. He is not alone in thinking this. The digitalization and automatization of marine shipping are experiencing something of a boom nationally and internationally. Hopes are high for “autonomous shipping”. “In addition to innovations, this will bring international buzz and investments to Finland, and with them growth and jobs”, according to Harri Kulmala, CEO of Dimecc Oy. Initially, the idea has been to pilot ships remotely or from the shore, but also unmanned pilot vessels managing feeder traffic to island bases such as those of Örregrund, Harmaja, Utö and Isokari are said to be in sight.

That’s what we know. What we don’t know are the details of this sought-after automation, and like so much in policy and management, the details are everything.

Automated pilotage for what class of vessels operating under what types of conditions? Shipping operations even under “normal” sea conditions are rarely invariant, with all manner of surprises possible and contingencies needed to be prepared for. This says nothing about what happens to automatic pilotage when the vessel’s real-time operations are temporarily disrupted or have failed indefinitely, requiring manual control and direct operator management. The real-time risks to be managed for vary not only across normal operations, but also for disrupted, failed and recovered operations, whether the pilotage is automated, manual or the degree to which it is one or the other. Equally important is the question of what level of autonomy is being sought for the vessels and conditions of operations (for example, a dynamically positioned ship relies on a greater level of autonomy than the autonomously remote operating vehicles used by the vessel for its below-sea operations)? Specific details and scenarios are called for and the stakes are high in getting the answers right before proceeding further with the promises of automatic pilotage.

Here’s why. On the one hand, as our EPRG-WISE research on navigational resilience gaps has shown, one of the main unresolved challenges in navigational reliability is that of the human herself. Most of the time, things go well. Sometimes, however, human helmsmen tire and fall asleep behind the rudder. Some helmsmen don’t know how to navigate icy waters. Not all seafarers are fluent in English, which is the official language in international navigation. Humans seek profit and rationalize away crew in order to cut back on costs with implications for human and environmental safety. On the other hand, recent research has also identified many possible new risks with greater levels of pilot automation. For example, the lack of crew onboard might lead to no bodily feeling of how the ship is rocking, that is to no “ship sense” among the on-shore ship remote operators. The predominance of on-shore remote control could also lead to skill shortage and skill degradation. Also, as has been pointed out, babysitting automated systems at a distance might lead to overwhelming boredom among personnel, leading to loss of vigilance and lowered levels of preparedness for surprises.

From the point of view of navigational reliability, then, we seem to face a well-known paradox between demands of autonomy and demands of skilled expert intervention: 1. The higher the autonomy level, the less the demand for a human operator (with skills shortage and degradation as a possible result); but 2. the demand for an experienced operation is highest during unforeseen contingencies, emergencies or crises (when little time remains to take effective action in the face of a now increased degree of system complexity). How to resolve this dilemma?

The standard answer is and must be: more simulations and operator trainings to ensure that human operators remain on top of things. In simulating critical navigational situations of, say, failure of automated navigation, it is possible to demonstrate how one can learn that what one thought one knew one really didn’t know; or that one knew more than one actually thought; or both. Given the changed task description of maritime crew, however, enthusiasm for such simulation exercises might be hard to muster. Indeed, there are already indications that increased automation in shipping is reducing the motivation among students to engage in maritime education, as some now tell us. One way out of the dilemma could be to increase the level of complexity of the simulations themselves. It might, for instance, be simulated that some sort of societal crisis leads to the current navigational systems being compromised, this in turn giving rise to new questions of the locus of control over vessels. Or the simulation could contain elements of no longer being able to manage the navigational system for keeping surprises at bay, such as a situation in which, say, an autonomous cargo ship collides with a passenger ferry containing migrants of unknown origin and health status. These would be highly challenging situations already under current manned conditions, and it might be worth the effort to consider—well in advance—what kind of additional challenges and possible new risks the called for higher levels of automation might bring with them. And far from overwhelmingly boring.

WISE aims to improve decision making in the context of wicked socio-environmental disruptions. Tackling such a complex task requires the diverse expertise and skills offered by an interdisciplinary team. However, interdisciplinarity brings with it a tendency toward miscommunication at the outset of a project, leading to frustration and inefficient work. As an interdisciplinary team ourselves, we at WISE have determined that differing conceptualizations of the concept of “risk” are a primary source of miscommunication within the group. Risk, already understood to be a difficult and divisive concept, occurs frequently during discussion of wicked socio-environmental problems, thereby prompting an investigation of the group members’ understandings of the concept. By explicitly identifying and discussing the different schools of thought regarding risk, we hope to improve within-group communication, hasten the process of building group cohesion, and improve our ability to leverage individual assets. We hope that by scrutinizing our own sources of miscommunication and addressing them, we can both improve our own interdisciplinary teamwork and provide an example for other teams to do the same, enabling us to more efficiently get to the important work of solving today’s most pressing issues.

Decision-making in the context of wicked socio-environmental problems demands interdisciplinary engagement. But why? Because wicked socio-environmental problems are by their very nature interdisciplinary. They are complex, tangled, interacting amalgamations of issues situated where the natural world, economics, politics, and society collide. To make this point clear, imagine if your nation were plunged into some ultimate worst-case scenario tomorrow, forced to juggle simultaneous crises. A wave of desperate refugees has arrived, a record-breaking winter storm hits, electricity outages ensue, a particularly vicious strain of influenza has landed in your capital city, and an oil spill disaster has taken place along your coast. Remember, these events do not occur in some isolated theoretical vacuum, they take place in a complicated global society, interacting with one another and sending ripples around the world.

It is absolutely plain, at least to me, that no one person or group would be sufficient to put out all those fires. Similarly, the painstaking work of foreseeing such calamities, preparing for them, building resilience, and developing adaptation strategies necessitates a wealth of expertise and skills. What would happen if ecologists, artists, engineers, economists, soldiers, or politicians were left alone to untangle these problems? I can imagine a spectrum of negative outcomes from, failing to get the job done, to leaving out critically important pieces of the puzzle, to outright chaos.

We, at the WISE project, are bound and determined to ensure Finnish decision-makers are prepared to deal with the wicked socio-environmental challenges ahead. Since we have made it our responsibility to grapple with these unwieldy problems, the masterminds behind the project gathered together what they knew they would need, a highly interdisciplinary team. If you ask us about our work, our backgrounds, and our interests you will get a level of diversity that would make Darwin’s finches blush.

Anyhow, with our team in place, it was time to get down to business. We enthusiastically plunged into the promising pool of interdisciplinary collaboration, as we tried to determine how to best use everyone’s expertise. But then, something happened. We started to smell the slightest whiff of tension in the air, some nagging underlying feeling that “I’m not sure what she is trying to say and I’m pretty darn sure she didn’t catch my drift either.”

So it is clear that dealing with wicked socio-environmental problems requires diversity, but as we discovered, this great melting pot of knowledge does not immediately result in effortless and productive task mastering. Interdisciplinarity brings with it, its own challenges. Chief among these is communication, which is undeniably important for the success of this type of teamwork. This is no great revelation. Many others have pointed out the challenges of interdisciplinarity and among these, communication issues are a dime a dozen.

Alright, so in our first year we were an interdisciplinary team trying to work through some communication challenges, difficult, but not particularly unique. The issues we were trying to communicate about though, now those were something special. We were trying to discuss amongst ourselves big complex challenges, taking place at a large scale, in multiple sectors, perhaps over very long time scales, and with a high degree of uncertainty. Often at the center of these discussions was the term “risk.” What is the risk of this? Of that? How do we mitigate the risk? How do we prepare for the risk? How do we manage the risk? How do we make sure decision makers are prepared to deal with the risk?

This combination, risk in the context of big complex challenges, is not something the human brain seems to be particularly good at. For context, think about why it is so difficult to talk about climate change and figure out what to do about it. Here we were, an interdisciplinary group, which we already know are susceptible to communication challenges, trying to communicate about something the human brain has a hard time computing. Not only that, but we need to devise a national level policy mechanism to help decision-makers deal with these difficult issues and how can we ever manage that, if our own team is not on the same page? Clearly, we have a big job to do.

With the funding clock ticking and plenty of work to get done, we decided the best course of action was to cut to the chase and root out the source of the communication conflicts surrounding risk. Why waste time mired in misunderstanding when we have bigger problems to solve? To determine the differences in the conceptualization of risk within our group, we interviewed each group member and analyzed texts they considered foundational to their understanding of the concept via topic modelling.

We discovered:

1. Risk is a flexible term, with different meanings depending on the context and on the person using it.
2. The quantification of risk is a particularly divisive issue. Some are certain it is possible to quantify risks in the context of wicked socio-environmental issues, others are less sure. Some believe it is necessary, others do not. Some have clear ideas about how to accomplish quantification tasks and some find other tasks more pressing. Some see negative moral ramifications in quantifying risk and others have no such qualms. The large-scale and complex nature of the problems WISE focuses on seems to exacerbate the differences in opinion and understanding about the quantification of risk.
3. Interests related to risk are highly diverse. Some group members tend to focus on particular harmful events, others are interested in assessing risk either qualitatively, quantitatively, or both, some are interested in how the public responds to risk or crises, still others are interested in building societal resilience to risks, and the list goes on.

By explicitly identifying and discussing the different schools of thought regarding risk, we hope to improve within-group communication, hasten the process of building group cohesion, and improve our ability to leverage our individual assets. We hope that by scrutinizing the sources our own sources of miscommunication and addressing them, we can both improve our own interdisciplinary teamwork and provide an example for other teams to do the same, enabling us to more efficiently get to the important work of solving today’s most pressing issues.