COVID-19, resilience, and circular economy
Part of the Community Resilience series
The past few weeks, we have been exploring how circular economy can contribute to community resilience during times of crisis. We believe that circular economy can help build local resilience in cities for future crises and that it has a role to play in recovery from the current pandemic.
But don’t just take our word for it. Today’s post is a podcast from one of our friends and partners in this work, Amsterdam-based Metabolic. CEO Eva Gladek recently recorded a podcast about how we can use this current crisis as an opportunity for local and global shifts to a sustainable world. Listen to the podcast, and then check out Metabolic’s website to learn more about their interesting work with cities (hint: they’ve worked with Charlotte, NC and Boulder, CO to develop circular action plans!)
Excerpts quoted: Eva Gladek on the Sustainability Agenda Podcast
Resilient supply chains
."..there are a few ways in which we've clearly exposed some of the cracks in the system, and shown how it's not resilient when it comes to the global economy, some pretty drastically. So for one thing, we've obviously revealed the fragility of the way we've organised our supply chains. If you've ever looked at network diagrams showing theoretical networks that can either be organised as hubs and spokes or distributed networks with multiple hubs or mesh networks. They have different levels of resilience to impacts. And so we have been very lulled into a kind of sense of security with everything humming along so well for so many decades that we've actually started to really centralise certain types of production and certain types of knowledge,resource flows. So we have gotten to a less resilient supply chain network that has been very hard hit by the crisis.
There were reports of around 70% of companies experiencing some kind of supply chain disruption. Of course, there were lots of discussions around the disruption in the supply of pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, concerns about electronics and certain types of goods that are manufactured in particular parts of the world running out. So that's one indication that we don't have robust self-sufficient communities or regional supply chains that cover all the bases and that's something that I think there is going to be a rebound on moving forward - looking to create more local resilience. And this isn't about closing off economies or necessarily deglobalising, it's more really about thinking about the different types of potential disruptions that could take place and how to build a more resilient supply network.
Circular economy and cities
And when it comes to the circular economy, it's also highly beneficial because we need to move toward a situation where we actually have urban centres not just serving as consumers, as resource drains drawing materials from the hinterlands and from other parts of the world, but rather also figuring out how to repurpose those materials and close cycles within the peri-urban area of those cities and those regions, because it doesn't make sense to continuously transport in and out all of this material. And it actually creates much more resilient hubs and communities with more diverse economic practices and activities. So there is a kind of dual pathway there about creating more resilience to shocks as well as increasing the potential of a local circular economy.
Resilience
"...the very common definition of resilience has to do with the ability of a system to withstand shocks, and to maintain its functioning. Now, that's not necessarily something that we always want, because some of the systems that we've had are really problematic and we don't actually want them to maintain their current levels of functioning. So I think it's really about identifying the kind of parameters and characteristics of society that we wish to maintain and keep, and ensuring that those qualities can survive any kind of crisis or change. So it has to do with creating adaptability and self learning mechanisms and indeed buffering capacity, strong communities and having fundamental mechanisms for self replicating solutions and distributing knowledge and allowing people to kind of adaptively grow out of crises.
Systems thinking
"...systems thinking is, in many ways, very straightforward. It's the recognition that everything is connected. And that if you take an action, there isn't just one immediate reaction, but a whole cascade, a whole ripple effect of things that knock on from that one action. And in the model of the world that most of us have been trained in through school, we take a very reductionist or we're taught a very reductionist approach where a leads to b and that's, that's it and you don't look outside that scope. But the problem is there are many problems that result from this kind of reductionist view rather than a systems view. And sometimes I explain this by using a simple metaphor of the Rubik's cube. So if you have a Rubik's cube and you're trying to solve it, and you're trying to and you approach it from a reductionist viewpoint, you'll look at one of the squares that you want to move to a particular location, and then you'll take the actions needed to twist the cube so that it moves to that spot. Now, of course, it's a complex puzzle that's based on an algorithm, if you want to solve it, and so if you twist it, just to move that one square to the location you want it to go, it's going to scramble the rest of the cube, so you'll just keep messing it up over and over again. So you really need to understand the system of the cube, the algorithm that's behind the solution to be able to actually crack the puzzle.
