Four For Friday | May 24, 2024
Four For Friday | May 24, 2024
LF124 | Community weaving, retrofitting improves resilience of homes, don't mess with fertility & trees can reduce ER visits by half.
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!
Community Weaving playbook
This Community Weaving playbook describes elements of a healthy community. It draws on field research and indigenous wisdom to create a simple framework that uses evocative names, that we’d generally call in more dry terms: goals, networks, process, stakeholders and roadmaps:
The Fire: The possibility that brings us together.
The Web: The relationships that hold us together.
The Rhythm: The rituals that connect us.
The Circles: The roles we can play.
The Spiral: Our individual and collective journeys.
There’s also a ‘community weaving canvas’ for those starting to build their communities and looking to make them healthy and inclusive. Thanks to Srikanth for the spot for the spot.
Simple retrofitting makes homes resilient
2023 had the hottest summer in 2000 years, and as such homes became deathtraps. However, some relatively simple retrofitting was able to increase the time it took for homes to get hotter than 33 degrees from 12 hours to 37 hours. Similarly, in freezing conditions, retrofitting could extend the length of time a house remains comfortable (above 15 degrees) from just 2 hours to 42 hours; which will likely make a big difference to the safety of residents, given power may be impacted during heatwaves or winter storms.
The solutions used in the test were: adding extra insulation, enhancing air sealing, and integrating a layer of phase-change materials (PCMs):
PCMs absorb or release large amounts of heat as they transition between liquid and solid states. While they are not used in operational buildings yet, large-scale and field tests have shown a lot of promise for weatherization.
Paying women to have babies doesn’t work
The Economist’s characteristically straightforward argument is that the increasingly common practice of countries paying women to have babies is expensive and wrong-headed, and instead we need to adapt societies to declining and aging populations.
Declining fertility is a cause for concern globally. At the extreme, South Korea, with a fertility rate of just 0.7 is expected to lose 60% of its population by the end of the century.
France is apparently spending up to 4% of GDP on family policies each year and it’s estimated that each birth costs $1-$2m.
Instead, the bulk of the decline in the fertility rate in rich countries is among younger, poorer women who are delaying when they start to have children, and who therefore have fewer overall. More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate since 1990 is caused by a collapse in births among women under 19. That is partly because more of them are going to college. But even those who leave education after high school are having children later.
While this analysis has logic, the article doesn’t address the charged emotional narratives around a declining population and the existential questions and ego that are associated with a declining population. And like it or not, ego is one of the biggest factors in world politics today.
Trees can cut ER visits by half
People living in cities are today experiencing deadly heatwaves three times more frequently than in the 1980s, and almost 4,000 Californians died from heat related problems in the decade to 2020.
It turns out something as simple as planting more trees and increasing the amount of sunlight reflected from surfaces such as roofs could offer enough relief during a heatwave to cut the number of overheated people seeking help in hospital emergency rooms by as much as 50%.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen