What might it take for our society – let’s start here in the Western Cape as an example – to become highly reliable at protecting its citizens, both in the short term and into an imaginable future? Is this not what lies beneath any organized society – the desire for enough safety that citizens can reliably build complex, satisfying lives? Western Cape residents who lived through the recent drought will notice a number of parallels with the fast-emerging Covid-19 crisis. By exploring a handful of these in this online dialogue we can perhaps identify one or two core requirements that citizens will rightly demand of their government and of other institutions on our collective journey towards that ‘highly reliable’ goal.
Peter Willis has spent the last two years developing the Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative, a groundbreaking project to document, through 39 in-depth filmed interviews and about fifty short extracted films on specific topics, how Cape Town responded to the drought, and share the lessons from that experience with other cities around the world. Previously he was for 12 years the Africa Director of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, of which he is still a Senior Associate. He is also a Fellow of the Institute for Strategic Risk Management. He is currently starting a global project to help decision-makers faced with responding to the Covid-19 crisis.
Join us online on Thursday 2 April at 12:30 via Zoom: https://maties.zoom.us/j/756605282