Sustainability - Difficulty in understanding Complexity means we will get Surprises. Traffic accidents or stock market crashes. But complexity also exacerbates intrinsic volatility of the human-environment system. Earthquake to tsunami to nuclear accident

Sustainability - Complexity is hard to understand & predict. Reductionist models don’t work. Risks, resilience, & Sustainable Development need to deal with ambiguity & uncertainties. Deal with Challenges of safe navigation of human-environmental systems

Easier to write longer views on LinkedIn. We learned no lessons or listened to people - especially those who are unhappy with the system - to avoid disasters from repeating themselves. Reacting is necessary but being Proactive is critical for Resilience

Sustainability - Self-organisation arises out of complexity like swarms of fish, birds, etc. Entropy appears to decrease locally but overall, it still increases. Seen as Order for free because pattern appears without any external forcing. Complex events!

Sustainability - Ant colonies, our brains & the earth system are complex but all components work together to produce purposeful functions. That’s Emergence out of Complexity. Different systems combine - religion, individuals, values/choices. For ex., Pro-environmental behaviour!

Sustainability - Manifestations of complexity typically appear as Big Impacts from Small Perturbations. Ice-albedo feedback from orbital forcing or CO2 increase is a good example. Polar amplification now affects the entire globe! Unintended consequences!!

Sustainability - Complex earth system can be perturbed locally. It’s an open system with humans as a component. Boundaries, descriptive (observations/facts), & prescriptive (norms/evaluations) statements form a nexus. Global problems with local values.

Sustainability - part of Learning & Adapting is grasping Complexity of human-environment system. Complex network of components with infinite non-linear feedbacks leading to emergent solutions. Form & Function with uncertain/dynamic/ambiguous characters.

Trump finds people who agree with him. Sadly so do reporters. What’s coming up this year or this decade in terms of global warming & location-specific impacts? We don’t know. So choices have to be made carefully. Both in Actions & Words. Avoid hype. Solve

Sustainability - Anticipate, recognise, learn & adapt are the steps to operationalising Resilience. Needs a purpose to define function & give it form. Overcome our own biases, & social, political, administrative, environmental and technical challenges.

Sustainability - Resilience must be consistent with other frameworks such as Adaptation, Mitigation, Disaster Management. Disaster Management is separated into Pro-& Re-active (disaster management/recovery, adaptation resilience) actions. Need Consistency

Sustainability - ministries work in silos & we think of the earth system in terms of components - water, food, energy. Silos are serious challenges to building Resilience. Politics, economies, & legal frameworks are also tunnels. Need Systems thinking!

Sustainability - Environment itself may not cooperate in Resilience Building because of all the internal feedbacks from on location to all & delayed responses. Technical success in adaptation now may become obsolete because of climate change! Stay ahead!

Officially I am in my sunset years now. But sunset can be beautiful if I can find positivity and constructive attitude. Any students can contact me to ask any questions or doubts. Young scientists are welcome too. Old people can join me for a chai or a drink.

Sustainability - social/cultural values/norms can provide cohesion but also drive divisions. Consumption/wealth as status symbol! Bandwagon effect, mob mentality can be negative. But can they also drive positive behavior & lead to Sustainability? Possible

Sustainability - we discard facts in favor of our beliefs. We overestimate predictability of events that have happened - we say, I can’t believe they didn’t see it coming or I told you so! We expect future to mimic the past. Confirmation bias. Dissonance.

Sustainability - rapid changes limit the value of lessons from past experiences. Cognitive biases are also handicaps - discounting the future, underestimating risk, overestimating our ability to deal with them, etc. Resilience itself makes us feel immune!

Advisors pick committees & some students wish they had someone else on the committee. Advisors avoid certain people for a reason which may not be what’s best for students. My asvice to students? Always focus on students when you become an advisor😀. Be constructive and have fun!

Sustainability - Learning from experiences with all our biases should feed into structural/funcitonal form of human-environment system representation. Form is based on knowledge, rules, norms, and institutions. Action arenas, interactions, with Resilience

Cong GAO just started as a postdoc at Princeton. He built a nice story which is continuing with a few more interesting details. Subsurface ocean’s role in Cyclogenesis has typically been underestimated. He shows interesting links here. Enjoy life Cong!