Sustainable Humanistic Medicine in a World of Climate Change and Digital Transformation

Author(s):  
Ana Hategan ◽  
Sumit Chaudhari ◽  
Jane Nassif
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amparo Marin de la Barcena Grau

Sustainability, regulation and environmental issues such as climate change and resource scarcity are emerging as key trends with decisive impact on company’s Risk management, value creation and growth strategy. This combination represents one of the biggest opportunities to Society as a whole, including organizations, Governments and citizens. Typically, companies possess vast amounts of data, most of it unutilized. Many are now making investments in digital transformation, which generates even more data. The issue is how to generate social impact returns. The use of data and data analytics is centuries old, but with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), jointly with other distributed ledger technologies (Blockchain, Cloud) that are advancing rapidly, there are major opportunities to capture value better, cheaper and faster. Speed is of the essence, and success depends on how fast organizations understand the need for non-financial risks management and respond to data-driven intelligence by reallocating resources to accomplish what needs to be done more efficiently. The reason for impact returns is understanding the benefit as a common value, not exclusive to companies, but it also has to distribute value among individuals, communities, and why not, to contribute to regenerate our planet based on a new economy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 255-284
Author(s):  
Alex Brummer

This chapter looks at the priority projects, the climate change agenda, and the low interest rate environment that constitute a big step forward for UK. It illustrates the UK as a country where Conservative and Labour parties after a decade of austerity agree that the UK needs to invest for the future. It also discusses the priorities of digital transformation and a lower carbon Britain outside the EU that look even more desirable after the Covid-19 experience. The chapter highlights Britain as the master of capital investment in the Victorian era as much of the infrastructure for creating the railways, the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the Bazalgette sewage system in London was designed and built in that period. It points out how long-term investment for the greater public good is not something that the UK has excelled at in more modern times.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (10) ◽  
pp. 1441-1455
Author(s):  
Matthias Wenzel ◽  
Hannes Krämer ◽  
Jochen Koch ◽  
Andreas Reckwitz

Even though organizational activities have always been future-oriented, actors’ fascination with the future is not a universal phenomenon of organizational life. Human experience of the future is a rather young product of modernity, in which actors discovered the indeterminacy of the future, as well as their abilities to ‘make’ and, in part, even control and de-problematize it through ever-more sophisticated planning practices. In this essay, we argue that actors have recently ‘rediscovered’ the future as a problematic, open-ended category in organizational life, one that they cannot delineate through planning practices alone. This, we suggest, has been produced through a pluralization of what we refer to as ‘future-making practices’, a set of practices through which actors produce and enact the future. Based on illustrations of the experienced problematic open-endedness of the future in prevalent discourses such as climate change, digital transformation and post-truth politics, we invite scholars to explore future-making practices as an important but under-appreciated organizational phenomenon.


Author(s):  
Alexander G. Sokolov ◽  
Valery M. Abramov ◽  
Eugene P. Istomin ◽  
Ekaterina A. Korinets ◽  
Vladimir A. Bolshakov ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 723-729
Author(s):  
Roslyn Gleadow ◽  
Jim Hanan ◽  
Alan Dorin

Food security and the sustainability of native ecosystems depends on plant-insect interactions in countless ways. Recently reported rapid and immense declines in insect numbers due to climate change, the use of pesticides and herbicides, the introduction of agricultural monocultures, and the destruction of insect native habitat, are all potential contributors to this grave situation. Some researchers are working towards a future where natural insect pollinators might be replaced with free-flying robotic bees, an ecologically problematic proposal. We argue instead that creating environments that are friendly to bees and exploring the use of other species for pollination and bio-control, particularly in non-European countries, are more ecologically sound approaches. The computer simulation of insect-plant interactions is a far more measured application of technology that may assist in managing, or averting, ‘Insect Armageddon' from both practical and ethical viewpoints.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Millington ◽  
Peter M. Cox ◽  
Jonathan R. Moore ◽  
Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).


2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Moss ◽  
James Oswald ◽  
David Baines

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