Dear All,
Not too long ago, Suhail had shared some thoughts about how we might respond to this year’s Super El Niño as a collective. We took that call to action to heart. Socratus has been building some tools for grasping this uncertain future and I thought I should share them here.
This year’s Super El Niño is already here. The ocean is hotter than it has ever been, and so is the land. The southwest monsoon came in well below average, and several states have declared drought. Low pressure systems like Cyclone Arnab look set to become more common after the monsoon. We know even less about what it does to other species. Corals in Indian waters face bleaching. Then there are daily rhythms, mating seasons etc.
The next few months are going to be hard to predict. We need a collective effort to make sense of this Super El Niño, but even more importantly, we need to create a platform for collective action. Socratus has been building some tools for grasping this uncertain future and I thought I should share them here.
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The El Niño portal, running on our Wystem engine. It’s a knowledge commons for learning about the phenomenon and what’s being done as El Niño unfolds. Right now we are curating it from public data, but we’d much rather you helped curate it. If your organization is working on El Niño, send us your initiatives and research and we’ll put them up, so everyone can find the latest in one place. If you know someone else doing so, please connect us with them!
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Some stories of drought from the end of the South west monsoon have reached mainstream media, but what this meant for the pastoralist communities of Kutch and their livestock was far less discussed. Similarly, little is being said about the impact of a warmer ocean on fish catch and fisherfolk livelihoods. We want to highlight such stories through a webinar series where we centre the impact of such large-scale environmental change on those who have been living in tandem with nature for centuries and those who rarely feature in our imagination of adaptation and mitigation, i.e., other species we share this planet with. Would you like to speak in a webinar? Know someone else who might be a good speaker? Please let us know.
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Thermocene, a speculative workshop for warmer worlds. One way to prepare for a hotter planet is to imagine it in detail. Will working nights and sleeping through the day become normal for those who can manage it? Will human fridges, like the ones Japan installed this year, show up on every street corner? These are all possibilities, and our collective actions and decisions will take us to some but not others. We want to help communities imagine and shape these futures via our Thermocene workshop series, of which we have run two sessions already, in Bangalore and Goa. Interested in codesigning a Thermocene workshop? Please let us know.
These are our contributions to the common pool, and we are more than happy to host solutions you are thinking about or implementing or to direct visitors your way. This year’s El Niño is a good test of our collective ability to respond with wisdom in a warming world.
best,
Rajesh