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Dear Colleague
In this month's Humanitarian Futures newsletter
- Crisis Threats, Humanitarian Action and Outer Space
- Partnerships Across Sectoral Boundaries
- Futures Orientation – Speculative and Anticipatory
- Innovation – Non-linearity as Key
- Motivations – Mutual Self-interest
- Displacement and Covid-19
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Crisis threats, Humanitarian Action and Outer Space
For many people around the world, attention will inevitably be focused on the longer-term consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. This will increasingly be global and the resulting transformations will affect virtually all aspects of societal structures, economies, domestic and international politics.
Given the global context, we wondered if you might consider the space programmes PLATO; intended to study planets around our solar system, JUICE; designed to explore the gaseous planet Jupiter, and EUCLID; focused on mapping the geometry of the universe, may have some relevance when we think about today's and tomorrow's humanitarian crises.
We think that they do and that it is space exploration and innovation that will offer more and more opportunities for dealing with a growing number of crisis threats, now and in the longer term.
There are two reasons we wanted to bring this to your attention. The first is that in the midst of what appears an unprecedented global crisis, there are so many aspects of space-oriented science and technology finding ways that can strengthen humanitarian action around the globe.
This theme is underpinned in the 13 January 2020 UN Economic and Social Council Report of the Secretary-General, ‘Exploring space technologies for sustainable development and the benefits of international research collaboration in this context’. The report
explores the role of space technologies in accelerating sustainable development and the benefits of international research collaboration in this context. It presents applications of space science and technology for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, including in ensuring food security, reducing the risk of disasters, preventing humanitarian crises, monitoring natural resources and reducing poverty, as well as telecommunications and health. It analyses how new technological developments that reduce the costs of using space-based applications and collaborations among local, national, regional and international stakeholders can potentially increase the uptake of Goals- relevant applications….
The second reason is that so many outer space perspectives provide very positive insights into how humanitarian organisations can strengthen their capacities to anticipate, adapt, innovate and collaborate more effectively.
With this in mind, we would like to suggest four lessons that relate to outer-space exploration and innovation that clearly have Earth-based implications:
Partnerships across sectoral boundaries
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently noted that ‘unlike the way the space program started, NASA will not be racing a competitor. Rather, we will build upon the community of industrial, international, and academic partnerships forged for the space station. Commercial companies will play an increasing role in the space industry: launching rockets and satellites, transporting cargo and crew, building infrastructure in low-Earth orbit.’
To see some suggestions about how to put this sort of ‘collaborative advantage’ into practice in the humanitarian context, take a look at the HF post, Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success
Futures orientation – speculative and anticipatory
Daring to think speculatively often takes decision-makers and policy planners outside of their ‘comfort zones.' However, from the perspective of those involved in outer-space exploration and innovation, as the Planetary Visions 2050 conference made clear, it is vital that those concerned with the present also consider plausible futures. This is not to predict, but rather to ensure that organisations have the anticipatory and adaptive capacities to deal with the “what-might-be’s”. The Planetary Visions 2050 conference brought those involved in the practicalities of outer space research together to look into plausible futures to consider ‘where do we go now, and how, and most importantly, why?’ Nobody can anticipate the totality of risks and opportunities that might lie ahead, but participants at the conference did not regard the past as a sign post to the future, feeling that they had to be far more speculative to be sensitive to the longer-term - upon which human exploration in outer space as well as ways to mitigate crisis threats on earth will depend.
If you want to further strengthen your own organization’s capacities to be anticipatory, take a look at the Humanitarian Futures Testing the Future Exercise Guide
Innovation – non-linearity as key
Solutions to complex problems rarely result from linear approaches. Solutions may stem from unexpected sources and from sectors that have no direct bearing on the problem at hand. From the outer space perspective, successful searches for new ways of doing things, including solutions to complex problems, may stem from innovations and innovative processes from other sectors. Research programmes dealing with outer space issues have on various occasions proven that by investigating how to live in space – for example, on the Moon or Mars – we have advanced our knowledge about living more sustainably on Earth, including more efficient closed water recycling facilities and easy-to-grow nutrition supplements that can sustain life in harsh environments. (See UNDRR's Space: the final frontier of disaster risk reduction)
You may further find the HF post Practical Approaches to Innovation and Innovative Practices to be a useful resource.
Motivations – ultimately mutual self-interest
In an interview three years ago, George Whitesides, Chief Executive Officer at Virgin Galactic and co-chair of the Global Future Council on Space Technologies, said that ‘there is no nationally owned sector of space. It’s all shared, so the responsibility is global. This is the same thing here on Earth, when you look at international waters. The pollution in our waters is an international problem. In space, we have a growing amount of debris that comes from old satellites, launch vehicle stages, collisions and so on. It is very hard to clean up areas of space that have been filled with debris. Radio frequency is another shared resource which is actually being handled rather well right now, but it will continue to be something we need to pay attention to’. (See the World Economic Forum post, Where will space exploration take us)
These comments, for those with humanitarian roles and responsibilities, are not to deny compassion or empathy as motives, but as noted before, mutual self-interest may in the final analysis provide a more consistent motive for collaboration and cooperation.
We discuss this further in Humanitarian Motives: Mutual Self Interest Versus Compassion
Displacement and Covid-19
While the focus of this newsletter may seem to have ignored the immediate crises compounded by Covid-19, particularly for the internally displaced and asylum seekers, we wanted to share with you something in the more immediate -- a submission on displacement and Covid-19 which Randolph and others drafted, and which was presented by the United Against Inhumanity network to the UK’s Parliamentary Select Committee on International Development on 8 May.
The submission can be reviewed on the HF website here
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Needless to say, the HF Team wishes you well in these challenging times, and as always welcomes your comments and recommendations.
With our best regards -- Randolph
The Humanitarian Futures team
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