Webinar explores survival, adaptation and opportunity in crisis

AMMAN — Human civilisation has never been more complex than in an interconnected world and people have to develop strategies for the survival and adaptation to different disasters, said US environmental geographer Ruth DeFries.

Speaking during a webinar organised last week by Columbia University in New York and its Amman branch to discuss her book titled “ What Would Nature Do?”, DeFries  said that the nature has the abundance of time, but humans do not.

“ However, every time a crisis happens there is an opportunity to learn,” DeFries, who is a professor at Columbia University, said, quoting Winston Churchill’s motto “Never let a good crisis go to waste”.

Defries argued how fundamental strategies, investments in diversity, redundancy over efficiency, self-correcting feedbacks, and decisions based on bottom-up knowledge enable life to persist through unpredictable situations.

Also speaking during the webinar, Executive Vice President for Global Centres and Global Development at Columbia University Safwan Masri said that preparedness to deal with various crises like the current pandemic of COVID-19 should be learned from DeFries book.

“ The global stability is perceived as a humanity endevour reliying on policy,” he said.

“Evolution is how nature plays this game, adapting and using multiple paths to survival,” Masri said.