When Al Gore ran for presidency on a campaign dedicated to education and action to stop global warming, it was a time many of us were introduced to the concept of the impending crisis. Lately it has become harder to deny.
Now people in Pennsylvania are watching their homes washed away by flood waters. We are seeing people in Hawaii running to the sea as fires consume their island. The smoke from fires in Canada is covering our skies. Vast deadly tornados are causing damage across the Midwest. More hurricanes of unusual power. And let’s not forget the extremes of heat and cold we have seen across the country.
Suffering around the world is rapidly increasing. Droughts are destroying crops, rising waters are displacing communities, vital needs are not being met, mass migrations are occurring, and food prices are rising. These dynamics give rise to greater numbers of refugees, terrorism, war, and even human trafficking.
South Carolina has so far have been spared from the worst of this, but it is becoming hard for us to ignore the weekly disasters in the news. Right now, we are all experiencing higher food costs, much of which is the result of supply chains being stressed. Manufacturers in the Upstate are currently dealing with this issue.
Transdisciplinary leaders and representatives from around the world are gathering in Greenville Nov. 14-15 for a Climate Emergency Response Forum (CERF) hosted by World Systems Solutions (WSS), a 501c3 nonprofit working in partnership with the Global Action Coalition, located in Greenville. The organization is currently developing a global utility as a conscious collaboration engine to align, mobilize, and synchronize humanity in common purpose to solve the climate emergency and interrelated crises.
This is the inaugural event in a series of high-level forums. Attendees will include former U.S. generals, ambassadors and government officials, spiritual leaders, AI experts, climate experts, corporate executives, scientists and other representatives to collaborate on solutions and stabilize new networks in the short time available.
No single organization or nation can solve the climate crisis alone. The CERF approach will focus on how to bring together many organizations and institutions into long term collaborative union and build new structures for solutions generation that actually do have the resources, technology and skill to solve it at the necessary global scale.
Participants will work with potential probable scenarios unfolding as a result of the 1.5 degree centigrade temperature increase and the escalating poly-crisis. They will be considering how together we can create solutions amidst these very possible conditions and dynamics because we recognize that these scenarios will be an amplification of what is happening now.
To help us find our way forward together, World Systems Solutions (WSS) is hosting this series of ongoing workshops designed to create a new paradigm for addressing the climate crisis. This forum in the Upstate will generate a ripple effect toward humanity working together on feasible solutions before we find ourselves in the scenario above, wishing we had done more.
While the event is centered in Greenville, its reverberations are global. Collaboration is always welcome as all of our contributed efforts are vital to the global solutions generation process.
WSS is developing relationships with local organizations and offering sponsorship opportunities to aligned parties. Join us in welcoming these luminaries from across the globe. To learn more, visit wssnow.org.
Rob Rowen is the president and executive director of Global Action Coalition, a non-governmental organization working in Nepal and Djibouti. He is a Greenville resident.
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