President Steenkamp: Climate resilience now a critical survival skill

Right now, nations are once again gathering in Egypt for COP 26.

We all have plenty to talk about — too much, in fact.

This year has seen iconic waterways from the Mississippi to the Loire run nearly dry, a deadly heatwave in India and Pakistan and Europe’s highest recorded average temperatures.

We have to act now to make our communities more resilient, because for all the damage of these events, more extreme ones are on their way.

It’s time for us to stop kidding ourselves that events like this are one-off occurrences we can’t anticipate.

Royal Roads’ own Dr. Robin Cox and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon, both experts in emergency management and crises, say these underlying trends and risks have been clear to specialists for years. Each disruption is making others worse, as already-stressed systems cave one after the other under the collateral pressure.

We need to move beyond dividing our attention among the many crises we’re facing and see how they’re connected.

Read the full opinion in the Vancouver Sun.