![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/BTFR_longbaseline_noline.png?resize=700%2C275&ssl=1\")
In the last few posts we’ve discussed the local missing baryon problem in extragalactic objects spanning over ten orders of magnitude in mass from tiny dwarfs to rich clusters of galaxies. This discussion has so far been entirely in the context of LCDM. So – how does LCDM compare with MOND?
\n\n\n\nAs a refresher, these are the data we’re trying to understand:
\n\n\n\nThe flat rotation speed Vf is an indicator of the dynamical mass – that of the dark matter halo and all the baryons it contains in LCDM, and that of all the (presumptively baryonic) mass in MOND. In LCDM, it would be satisfactory for the baryon fraction of each object, mb = Mb/M200, to be equal to the cosmic baryon fraction (fb = 0.157 according to Planck). For MOND, what you see is supposed to be what you get, so the baryon fraction should be one.
\n\n\n\nAs we saw previously, mb = fb for rich clusters of galaxies. There is no local missing baryon problem for galaxy clusters: a satisfactory result. However, as we look at smaller systems, observations depart from this ideal. They do so systematically, with our accounting of baryons falling progressively shorter of our expectation as we examine progressively lower mass objects. This deficit is illustrated by the gray region here:
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/missingbaryons_log.001.png?resize=700%2C274&ssl=1\")
Everything is fine for clusters at the high mass end (Mb > 1014 M\u2609), and many people reasonably interpret that as corroboration of LCDM. For lower mass groups and bright galaxies, there is a deficit of a factor of two or three: an issue, but nothing too concerning by the standards of extragalactic astronomy, so this is widely ignored outside the community that works on it. The implicit assumption is that it’ll work out. But the magnitude of the problem continues to grow for smaller objects, becoming already an order of magnitude for intermediate mass galaxies. Not tiny dwarfs, just middle of the road spirals. The smallest mass dwarfs are worse off yet, missing over 90% of the baryons, approaching 98% or 99%. That is not satisfactory.
\n\n\n\nMaking a straight-up comparison with MOND is a little tricky because the concept of a baryon fraction is a non-sequitor. There is no dark matter halo to compare against. Instead, we return to the concept of the velocity factor. In LCDM, we relate the observed flat rotation speed to that of the total dynamical mass through Vf = fvV200. Indeed, we can ask what velocity factor we need to explain away the missing baryon problem: maybe there are no missing baryons, just a systematic divergence of the observed Vf from the halo V200. This can’t work, but it is useful to think about and provides a direct comparison with MOND.
\n\n\n\nIn MOND, Mb = AVf4 where A is the normalization& of the BTFR. We can thus define an equivalent to the velocity factor, the residual velocity, taken here to be the ratio of the observed velocity to that expected for the observed mass, \u0394M = Vf,obs/Vf,pred. If the mass is a good predictor of the flat velocity, then \u0394M = 1. This leads to
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/VelocityDeficit.png?resize=700%2C623&ssl=1\")
This is a straight-up comparison between the theories. Both theories suffer a missing baryon problem, but at different scales. The magnitude of each problem is indicated by the area of the shaded regions. (There is a dearth of data in our study* from 1013 < Mb < 1014 M\u2609, so we’ll just ignore that here.)
\n\n\n\nLCDM is spot on for clusters over the range 1014 < Mb < 1015 M\u2609: fv = 1 suffices to explain the data. Outside of that range, fv must increase systematically to make up for what we previously attributed to missing baryons. In effect, we’re making the dark matter halos smaller so that the baryon fraction works out. As noted before, this can’t work, as rotation curve fits restrict the viable range of the velocity factor to 1 < fv < 1.4, but we need it to grow to fv = 5. That’s silly: at that point, the dark matter halo is contributing so little to the observed dynamics that we wouldn’t infer its existence at all.
\n\n\n\nMOND is spot on over the range 5 x 105 < Mb < 5 x 1012 M\u2609: the data are consistent with \u0394M = 1. It falls short for rich clusters, where the observed mass of baryons in the intracluster medium (ICM) and the stars in galaxies predicts only ~80% of the observed velocity. This is the residual mass discrepancy in MOND.
\n\n\n\nFor perspective, it helps to plot the linear baryon fraction. The astronomical scales of astronomical data oblige us to use logarithmic scales in many circumstances, but this may lead one to under-appreciate the scale of the issue. So here is the baryon fraction again, in both LCDM and MOND, this time with a linear scale:
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/baryonfractionlinear.001-2.png?resize=700%2C615&ssl=1\")
Individual galaxies and groups of galaxies are missing a lot of baryons in LCDM. This is not a subtle problem. It is not explained by simulations, nor am I aware of a satisfactory% explanation. Worse, the apparent reason that we infer all these missing baryons is because the BTFR looks like the Mb ~ Vf4 of MOND rather than the M200 ~ V2003 of LCDM. With dark matter, we can accommodate pretty much any power law, or none at all – a lot of scatter would be more natural. So why did it have to be MOND? Even in ignorance of MOND the data pose a fine-tuning problem for LCDM. But it isn’t just a fine-tuning problem; it is a fine-tuning that arises because of MOND. To be successful, a LCDM model must be tuned to look like MOND. If it doesn’t, it’s wrong. If it does, why should we prefer a fine-tuned model to the theory that predicted the correct behavior in the first place?
\n\n\n\nMOND is not perfect here: it suffers a missing baryon problem in rich clusters. Since Mb ~ Vf4, predicting only ~80% of the observed velocity translates to missing ~60% of the mass. That’s a lot! But it could be worse: if, like Zwicky, we had done this experiment before the advent of X-ray observatories, we would be unaware of the mass of gas in the ICM, and infer that MOND was missing practically all (~96%!) the mass. That would seem utterly ridiculous, and we would conclude that MOND is wrong when much of the problem would have been that we were missing an important reservoir of baryons. Perhaps we still are. I do not like this possibility – there is still a lot of ground to make up, and I am not aware of a satisfactory solution. I guess I’m just a skeptic that way.
\n\n\n\nIf we think the residual mass discrepancy problem MOND suffers in rich clusters is serious and perhaps fatal, should we not also conclude the same from the local missing baryon problem in LCDM?
\n\n\n\nBut the bullet cluster double-secret falsifies MOND!
\n\n\n\nLet’s examine that assertion in the context of what we learned above.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/BulletCluster_JWST.png?resize=700%2C294&ssl=1\")
The bullet cluster is composed of two clusters that collided and passed through one another. The collision segregated the gas of the ICM (pink above) from the galaxies. This happens because gas is diffuse and collisional. The gas of the two clusters can’t help smacking into each other, slowing down and forming the shock front visible in the shape of the gas of the smaller cluster on the right. Galaxies, on the other hand, have lots of empty space between them. They are collisionless and pass right by each other. In doing so, they are slowed less than the gas, getting ahead of it, leading to the separation that we observe.
\n\n\n\nOK, cool. The argument one usually hears against MOND based on this is that the baryonic mass in gas outweighs that in galaxies, so the lensing signal should be centered on the gas: the blue should align with the pink, not with the galaxies. Instead, we see the opposite, so the mass has to be dark matter.
\n\n\n\nThis would be a good argument if the gas were all of the baryonic mass. This is a common assumption that makes sense in LCDM, where the baryon fraction checks out, so most people seem to stop thinking at that point. But each theory needs to be considered in its own context, and it cannot be the case in pure# MOND that we see all the baryons## in the picture above. That’s what we learned above. It may be unsatisfactory, but we knew this already before the bullet cluster was discovered (e.g., Sanders & McGaugh 2002). So the only new thing we learn from this aspect of the bullet cluster is that if there is an additional reservoir of baryonic mass, it is collisionless. It didn’t collide like the gas, it passed through like the galaxies. There are lots of candidate baryonic objects that fit that requirement: brown dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, very small rocks^. There is no requirement that the unseen mass be non-baryonic; we do not need the new physics of a new dark matter particle from beyond the Standard Model of particle physics on top of the new physics of MOND.
\n\n\n\nNow, as I think I’ve made clear, I am very uncomfortable with the apparent requirement that there is lots of undetected baryonic mass in clusters. If I were the MOND partisan that lots of people seem to assume I am, then I guess I’d portray this as a bold prediction. The dark baryons have to be there, and we should be turning all possible resources to detecting them, rather like we have for WIMPs. But I’m not that person. I am also not a person who sees this missing baryon problem for MOND as automatically worse than the missing baryon problem for LCDM. There is a much bigger deficit to be made up in LCDM, in many more systems### of very different types over a larger dynamic range in mass. The missing baryon problem in LCDM looks worse to me than that in MOND. Yet the community attitude seems to be largely unaware of it. Those who are seem mostly to presume that it’ll work out. Maybe, but this should not be accepted by assumption, it needs to be demonstrated. It has yet to be.
\n\n\n\nIf you think the missing baryon problem in clusters is a terrible problem for MOND, then you should be similarly worried that LCDM evinces the same kind of problem – one that is objectively larger in amplitude. It seems that, having accepted that there is dark matter, people don’t much care what it is. I do. The dark matter paradigm has obliged us to abandon parsimony. Not only does LCDM need two novel substances, dark matter and dark energy, it requires two kinds of dark matter: baryonic dark matter and non-baryonic dark matter.
\n\n\n\nThere is a communal failure of objectivity about this. The thought process is both transparent and simple: MOND doesn’t explain clusters; it requires dark matter. Therefore dark matter#### exists and it is silly to think about MOND. That would make sense if it weren’t a logical fallacy. Instead, it provides a permission structure to remain ignorant of what MOND gets right. I get that; there’s a lot to know. But I would also suggest that ignorance does not provide a strong basis for drawing scientific conclusions, especially for a subject so rife with confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/lcdmmondflowchart.png?resize=700%2C525&ssl=1\")
&The normalization is related to Newton’s constant and Milgrom’s constant through A = \u03b6/(a0G) where \u03b6 is a factor of order unity that depends on the geometry of the system. It is one for spheres, and always approaches the limit \u03b6 \u2192 1 at sufficiently large radii, but observations are usually obtained at radii where the flattened geometry of disk galaxies is relevant, so in practice \u03b6 \u2248 0.8. This can be derived from the geometry (all purely conventional; nothing to do with MOND) or one can obtain it empirically by comparing A = 50 M\u2609 km-4 s4 from fitting the BTFR to data for galaxies with known a0; for a0 = 1.2 x 10-10 m s-2, (a0G)-1 = 63 M\u2609 km-4 s4, so \u03b6 =A(a0G) = 50/63 = 0.8.
\n\n\n\n*There remains room for improvement for poor clusters (here I call 1013 < Mb < 1014 M\u2609 objects “poor clusters” because astronomical terminology can always be made worse). A particular issue is the quantity of intracluster gas, which dominates rich clusters (and is readily detected in X-rays), but seems to be absent in the smallest groups. There has to be a transition in between, but is it smooth so that all poor clusters have the same amount, or is there a huge variation in ICM mass among poor clusters? I have seen anecdotal indications that poor clusters that are detected in X-rays extend the trend of rich clusters while those that aren’t don’t, as if the residual mass discrepancy MOND evinces in clusters is somehow related to the presence of X-ray gas.
\n\n\n\n%There are lots of unsatisfactory explanations. Some sound more plausible than others, but all fail to engage with the underlying prompt: why do the data look like MOND if we live in a universe made of dark matter?
\n\n\n\n#It is possible that the problem MOND faces in clusters might not be one of missing mass, but rather it could be an indication of a deeper theory that is not exactly like pure MOND.
\n\n\n\n##If there is additional mass in clusters, it doesn’t necessarily have to be baryonic. It could, in part, be neutrinos or sterile neutrinos or other more exotic beasts of the unknown meagerie of our enormous universe. However, there is no requirement that the unseen mass be anything other than mundane, ordinary matter.
\n\n\n\n^Though an amusing thought, very small rocks do not make a viable candidate dark matter object any more than witches float because they weigh the same as a duck.
\n\n\n\n###I have heard otherwise brilliant scientists dismiss the successes of MOND as a fluke. MOND has made too many successful predictions for that to be a reasonable assertion; it is a good example of what Putnam meant by “no miracles.” Yet the same scientists will cite the consistency of the baryon fraction in clusters to the cosmic baryon fraction as something that cannot be a fluke, ergo LCDM must be right. So which fluke is worse? I do not have patience to list all of MOND’s successful predictions here, though there are many reviews that do so and there will be a long paper soon that does more. What I will note here, having just done the exercise, is that the cluster baryon fraction is more likely to be a fluke. In order to estimate a baryonic mass for each cluster, we extrapolate the so-called beta profile that describes the distribution of X-ray gas. That’s a reasonable thing to do, and when we do it, we get an answer that is satisfactory in LCDM. However, it is not a small extrapolation. We are inferring a lot of baryonic mass at large radii from the fit of the beta profile at smaller radii. That’s the obvious thing to do, and I think it is probably correct, but it is also something that could go badly wrong. We experimented with other plausible gas mass profiles, and the answer can vary a lot, often leading to considerably fewer baryons than the cosmic fraction. That would be bad for LCDM, and also make the problem MOND suffers (too few baryons) worse, so it doesn’t help anything. But if there is a fluke here, it is more likely to be the coincidence of the cluster baryon fraction with the cosmic baryon fraction than is the consistency of the observed BTFR with the prediction of MOND for most of the rest of the universe.
\n\n\n\n####This is where sloppy terminology leads to a logical fallacy: people equate “dark matter” with non-baryonic cold dark matter. The latter is a subset of the former; the unseen mass in MOND need not be the same as the non-baryonic stuff that we commonly assume the dark matter is.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/d5w24-kmm75","guid":"https://tritonstation.com/?p=12733","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/baryonfractionlinear.001-2.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783036800,"rid":"m40x2-7ev08","summary":"In the last few posts we've discussed the local missing baryon problem in extragalactic objects spanning over ten orders of magnitude in mass from tiny dwarfs to rich clusters of galaxies. This discussion has so far been entirely in the context of LCDM. So \u2013 how does LCDM compare with MOND?","tags":["Dark Matter","LCDM","MOND"],"title":"Missing baryons: LCDM and MOND compared","updated_at":1783350547,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2026/07/03/missing-baryons-lcdm-and-mond-compared/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/02dpqcy73","name":"Centre de biophysique mol\u00e9culaire"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Hinsen","given":"Konrad","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0330-9428"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"2488dc7f-4f82-4051-8490-22d2cd8d472d","created":1719792000,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/2488dc7f-4f82-4051-8490-22d2cd8d472d/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.khinsen.net/feeds/all.atom.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://blog.khinsen.net/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"khinsen","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Konrad Hinsen's blog","updated":1783343549,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Konrad Hinsen's blog","blog_slug":"khinsen","content_html":"Convivial technology was defined by Ivan Illich in his 1973 book \"Tools for conviviality\" as technology that supports a convivial society, which is a society that strives to grant each of its members as much agency as is possible without infringing on other members' agency. Conviviality is thus about equality, about the absence of dominance relations. Convivial technology is shaped by its users according to their needs, rather than being controlled by entities such as companies or governments, which then derive power over the user base by exercising control.
\n\nOne of Illich's examples is transportation, with bicycles being convivial whereas railways and cars are not. Cars in particular have turned into what Illich calls a \"radical monopoly\": a technology that imposes itself on everyone. Once a society has adapted its landscape and infrastructure to cars, walking or cycling become insufficient as a means of locomotion for most people, if only because typical distances are now typical distances for driving, not walking. Moreover, the total societal cost for car-based mobility is enormous, if you count in the cost of road construction, traffic accidents, environmental pollution, and much more.
\nA recent paper entitled \"Conviviality for Digital Degrowth\", by Sophie Quinton and Jean-Bernard Stefani, discusses how today's digital technology is not convivial, and outlines how this could change as part of a transition to a degrowth society. It motivated me to finally write down my personal story, which is about something much more modest: the conviviality of digital technology in scientific research. It's something I have been thinking about for thirty years, even though I wasn't aware of Illich's work and terminology until recently.
\nLet me start with the observation that most pre-digital technology in scientific research is convivial. Theoretical tools (theories, models, etc.) are developed and evolved completely inside the scientific community and belong to no individual nor any institution. Scientific instruments and experimental setups are designed either by scientists, or explictly for scientists and in close collaboration with them. Neither kind of tool is controlled by outside entities, with the possible exception of very large instruments such as CERN. Nobody can decide that scientists may no longer use NMR spectrometers, nor that they have to replace all pre-2000 microscopes by new ones. This has changed with the adoption of digital tools and the integration of digital technology into scientific instruments. Theoretical tools are now often software, whose complexity makes its behavior inscrutable to its users and puts them at risk of losing their tools to software collapse. Scientific instruments increasingly rely on built-in computers that create exactly the same issues. Finally, digital technology has enabled industrial-scale production of data, e.g. in DNA sequencing, and that technology is itself not convivial either.
\nConviviality matters for science for multiple reasons. One of them is epistemic: if you want to derive knowledge from your work, you need to know exactly what you are doing, and that includes a detailed understanding of your tools. Moreover, research is much facilitated if you also have the inverse: the ability to create a tool that does exactly what you want to do. And since science is a collective activity, in which participants critique and build on each other's work, the understanding of tools needs to be shared inside a discipline. There have always been limits to this shared understanding, in particular concerning specific physical devices or unique experimental setups, but building shared understanding on a best-effort basis has always been one of the tacit underpinnings of science. This best effort has been abandoned in the digital era, as I discuss in an analysis of trust issues with scientific software,in which conviviality plays an important role.
\nWhen I started doing computational studies of colloidal suspensions in the late 1980s for my master's degree and then my PhD, research software was still quite convivial. Like most PhD students, I wrote medium-size Fortran programs, which ran on any computer with a Fortran compiler, from the Atari ST I had at home to the Cray X-MP that I used for production runs. Other scientists could read and understand my code in a few days, given sufficient motivation, and I know that some actually did, because I received questions from them by e-mail. It was also quite common for PhD students to look at and comment each other's programs. Publishing software was still exceptional, but publication venues did exist, and I ended up publishing the main code library underlying my work in low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics in 1993. Unfortunately I didn't publish, nor properly archive, the small bits of code that did the actual computations for concrete specific systems, and that is why the results of my papers aren't reproducible any more. But the library still works exactly as it did in 1993, and still finds new users.
\nWhen I moved on to a postdoc in another field, biomolecular simulation, I discovered a very different world. There were only three big simulation programs that everybody worked with: AMBER, CHARMM, and GROMOS. Only a very small number of researchers understood them in detail and could modify them. Everyone else computed whatever the software allowed them to compute, rather than what they actually wanted to compute. But even the correct use of the software was a challenge if you weren't in personal contact with the development teams, as documentation tended to be incomplete and outdated. Biomolecular simulation software was clearly not convivial, an observation that I attributed to the complexity of the underlying theoretical models. I was also finding out about the politics favoring the concentration of power over software, but I didn't make the connection at the time.
\nThe objects of biomolecular simulations, proteins and nucleic acids, were much more complex than the hard-sphere colloids I had studied in my PhD. Managing protein structures and the force fields defined on them in Fortran 77 is difficult and laborious. Maybe we could make biomolecular software more convivial by using a high-level programming language? That idea lead me to discover the Python language, become a founding member of the Matrix-SIG that developed Numerical Python, the precursor to today's NumPy, and write one of the first scientifc libraries in Python, the Molecular Modelling Toolkit (MMTK), first published in 1997.
\nFrom a technical point of view, MMTK did enable convivial biomolecular simulation. I have been in contact with various researchers, mostly PhD students, who implemented new simulation methods on top of MMTK and shared their work as add-on Python modules. However, I also found out that the majority of researchers in my field didn't care about conviviality at all. The power gradient between the big groups that developed the main software packages and the smaller groups of users was part of the research system, interwoven with apprenticeship relations, grant reviews, etc. Most researchers didn't choose a software package on its scientific or technical merits, but on the political merits of joining its user community. Among Illich's five threats to conviviality, I observed polarization and radical monopoly. As an illustration of the latter, some PhD students who contacted me with questions about MMTK asked me not to talk to their supervisors about their use of MMTK, because \"for political reasons, I am supposed to use software X\".
\nAn individual or a small group cannot hope to address the social issues that encourage dominance structures over conviviality. Conviviality can only happen if a majority of a community adopts it as a value. What small groups of people can do, however, is develop and use convivial tools at their modest scale, to demonstrate that it is possible, and to provide a model that others can learn from if they want to. I was fortunate enough to have a stable position in French public research that allowed me to maintain this attitude in spite of its risk of reduced productivity. What I hadn't expected, however, because I didn't know about Illich's work yet, is the destruction of conviviality from the outside that followed.
\nThe history of the scientific Python ecosystem is an interesting case study for Illich's conviviality framework. He describes two watersheds that institutions and technologies pass through as they gain in importance:
\n\n\nAny industrialized institution will go through two watershed moments. At first, its progress provides clear and substantial benefits to society. But second, its overdevelopment begins to run counter to its original goal and in fact becomes destructive to society.
\n
Python for science reached the first watershed around 2000, only five years after the first release of Numerical Python. There was a solid foundation consisting of Python, Numerical Python, a few general-purpose utilities (plotting etc.), and domain-specific libraries for a few disciplines. Researchers could convivially develop and share Python scripts and modules, including if necessary so-called \"extension modules\" written in C or Fortran for performance.
\nFive years later, development shifted to NumPy, a new project aiming at a unification of Numerical Python and its offshoot numarray, which catered for different application domains with different priorities. One of NumPy's explicit goals was to encourage further growth of the user community, by making it more easier to learn for users of its main commercial competitor, Matlab. That was the point at which I started to feel uncomfortable with the ecosystem's direction. Numerical Python had a small and consistent API, inspired by APL. NumPy added an alternative API inspired by Matlab, and made breaking changes to the API inherited from Numerical Python. This meant imposing adaptation work and a higher cognitive load on existing users for the sole benefit of attracting new ones. Growth took priority over the qualities that make software convivial.
\nThe second watershed was reached between 2010 and 2015. Due to a combination of growing ecosystem complexity, growing corporate influence on development decisions (Google in particular became an important sponsor), and the rise of a breaking-change version of Python (Python 3), the scientific Python ecosystem flipped from a stable infrastructure for research projects to an unstable software layer whose frequent breaking changes required researchers to invest more and more time just to keep their code in a usable state. Conviviality was lost.
\nIn the following years, the Python developer community first encouraged and then increasingly forced authors of Python software to migrate to Python 3. In the FOSS spirit, Python 3 should have been considered a fork of Python 2, and both versions should have been allowed to coexist for as long as there were people willing to maintain them. But many people rightly recognized that this would have split the Python community into two competing factions. The bolsheviks, supporting Python 3, decided to kill Python 2 by various means, including highly questionable methods such as the Python 3 Wall of Shame, an online pillory listing projects that had not yet made the migration. This was possibly the most destructive event in the history of FOSS, and in particular a lot of domain-specific research software, the kind that only a handful of people would ever have heard about, was made unusable. Today, scientific Python is a typical industrial software product that happens to be free (as in beer). It is a good support for large corporate libraries such as PyTorch, but no longer a good choice for typical research teams that don't have the resources for dealing with high rates of tech churn (Illich's obsolescence). It is now more difficult to run a five-year-old Python script than a 40-year-old Fortran program, and even if it runs, it may not produce the same results as it did in the past.
\nMy own MMTK library became practically unusable with the demise of Python 2. Porting it to Python 3 would have been a major effort, and I wasn't motivated to do that work. It would have been difficult (e.g. check line by line for divisions whose semantics had changed) and laborious (the C extension modules, written for Python 1.4, would have to be rewritten from scratch). But most of all, it would have been only the first step into a treadmill of continuous software collapse and repair. Together with a handful of colleagues that depended on MMTK, I looked for funding to have someone else do a port to Python 3 and maintain it, without success. MMTK is now a museum piece. You can still run it via reproducibility infrastructure such as Guix, but it is no longer a reasonable basis for new research projects.
\nThe scientific Python ecosystem is the example I know best for progressive loss of conviviality, but the phenomenon is much more widespread. For another illustration, see the historical account of developer-user relations in computational chemistry by Wieber and Hocquet (preprint) that outlines how the conviviality of computational chemistry in the 1960s was lost as licenses, limited access to the source code, and ultimately the transition to software as a service increasingly restrained the agency of researchers.
\nAfter the end of my long and ultimately failed Python-for-conviviality experiment, I have been playing with a few other ideas for convivial computational science. One of them is Digital Scientific Notations. This is mostly a new label for what computer scientists call formal specification languages. Mostly but not quite: no existing formal specification language I know of would qualify as a Digital Scientific Notation, simply because existing languages were made for different application scenarios. And that's why I designed my own Digital Scientific Notation, called Leibniz, for my experiments.
\nThe basic idea is simple: the human-computer interface for many aspects of computational science should not be code, but specifications. The relation between specifications and the code that implements them is roughly the same as the relation between a set of mathematical equations and a function that solves them (see here for a longer explanation). Specifications are often simpler than their implementations, and in general more modular: you can just throw any two specifications together, assuming coherent notation, and you get a new specification (which may or may not be useful). Researchers discussing computational models would never have to leave the level of specifications, leaving the technicalities of implementation to specialists (software engineers) or to computers (if you think \"AI\" now, you are not wrong but there are also much older deterministic techniques to \"solve\" specifications, such as the Bird-Meertens formalism). Leibniz is designed to resemble mathematical notation more than programming languages, hoping that people will feel more familiar with it. But I am not yet at the point of having done real computational science in Leibniz. For now, all I have is implementations of toy problems.
\nMy second conviviality-related project is HyperDoc. It addresses the problem of scientific publishing in the digital era. The idea that data and code should be published along with an article is almost mainstream by now, but most people imagine three different entities (paper, code, data), published in different places and at best linked to each other. But in a convivial setting, code is written primarily for humans, not machines. It should be part of the paper, or part of what replaces the paper, and reviewed exactly like a paper (see here for details). Data should be explorable as well right from the discussion of the science it supports. Moreover, these papers on steroids should be composable: you want to re-use data and code of papers you cite, and allow the reader to navigate freely across citations. Putting all these requirements together leads to a hypermedia structure, where code becomes a medium alongside text, graphics, videos, etc. For a more detailed discussion of the foundations, see my Substrates 2026 paper, and for a direct experience, play with the demo server.
\nWhat remains to be done before I can envisage using my new toys for a real research project is integrating Leibniz into HyperDoc. Not difficult, but a bit laborious. Maybe I will profit from the quiet summer period to get started.
\nBack to the paper by Quinton and Stefani. It takes a much broader view of digital technology at the societal level, and discusses the relation of conviviality to degrowth. At the smaller scale of computational science, there is a similar relation: conviviality requires a limit to the scale of computations. Much of high-performance computing, for example, looks difficult or even impossible to make convivial. It requires optimizations, sometimes specific to one machine, that severely increase the code's opacity, and that is an obstacle to conviviality. The computational resources themselves are another obstacle, making it difficult to impossible for researchers to repeat, possibly with variations, the work of their peers. As Illich points out concerning industrial processes in general, this doesn't mean that we have to stop doing HPC, but we have to take into account non-conviviality as a problem that needs to be compensated by conviviality-restoring measures such as democratic governance. That holds even more for the rapidly growing use of extreme-scale machine learning techniques, usually referred to as \"AI\", which push polarization and obsolescence to another level, and which, if widely adopted, will establish a radical monopoly impacting not only scientific research, but all of our societies' knowledge management.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/3hg8z-5ha93","guid":"https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/07/06/conviviality.html","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783296000,"rid":"67q6p-2tw51","summary":"Convivial technology was defined by Ivan Illich in his 1973 book \"Tools for conviviality\" as technology that supports a convivial society, which is a society that strives to grant each of its members as much agency as is possible without infringing on other members' agency. Conviviality is thus about equality, about the absence of dominance relations.","title":"Conviviality in computational science","updated_at":1783346143,"url":"https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/07/06/conviviality.html","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"Adapt Research"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"bfd37b46-cbce-4a47-9a9d-fdc1d9c8b8d2","created":1753833600,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"As we build our world we build our minds","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/bfd37b46-cbce-4a47-9a9d-fdc1d9c8b8d2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://adaptresearchwriting.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress.com","home_page_url":"https://adaptresearchwriting.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"adaptresearchwriting","status":"active","subfield":"2306","title":"Adapt Research Ltd","updated":1783341914,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Adapt Research Ltd","blog_slug":"adaptresearchwriting","content_html":"A practical follow-up to the \"Reality of Everything\" Symposium and other recent discussions of humanity's predicament
\n![\"\"](\"https://adaptresearchwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/markus-winkler-trcafmv5vk-unsplash.jpg?w=1024\")
TLDR/Summary
\nA superb diagnosis, with the terms left undefined
\nGatherings like the Reality of Everything Symposium are strong on diagnosis: speaker after speaker showed, compellingly, that human society is in overshoot, that planetary boundaries are being breached, and that our crises are interlocking rather than separate.
\nWhat such events seldom do is define the words carrying the argument. Global catastrophic risk, systemic risk, polycrisis and metacrisis sometimes get used almost interchangeably, partly blurring into an anxious hum.
\nThat blurring matters, because it is difficult to prioritise within, or act upstream of, a problem space you cannot name.
\nThis blog is a short field guide, organised as a chain of four questions, each reaching a little deeper than the last.
\nFirst question: what could go badly wrong? (Global catastrophic risk)
\nStart with the hazards themselves. Global catastrophic risk (GCR) is the study of events and processes large enough to overwhelm civilisation's capacity to cope: nuclear war, engineered pandemics, extreme outcomes from artificial intelligence, famine-creating volcanic eruptions, and runaway climate change.
\nThese risks are sometimes defined as those that would put the lives of 10% of humanity at risk, up to and including human extinction. The field's contribution is a long horizon and a willingness to take seriously events that are unlikely in any given year but so consequential their expected harm can dwarf that of familiar disasters, a blind spot the UN's own 2025 Global Assessment Report and Pact for the Future now concede.
\nFor readers who arrived through climate, this is the first and most useful reframing: climate change is not a category of its own, apart from \"other\" risks, but one member of the GCR family. Treating it as one thread among several, rather than the whole cloth, is what lets the rest of the picture come into focus (we develop this widening of the lens here in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand).
\nSecond question: how do failures spread? (Systemic risk)
\nKnowing which hazards could be catastrophic is not the same as understanding how a shock propagates. That is the work of global systemic risk, and it involves a genuine shift in perspective: instead of seeing the global system as an innocent bystander that receives hazards from outside (eg pandemics, storms, or volcanic eruptions), systemic-risk thinking treats the system itself as a generator of them.
\nLiu and Renn distil the hallmarks: densely connected feedback networks, in which effects loop back to change their own causes; strong nonlinearity, so a small nudge can trigger a disproportionate response once a tipping point is crossed; causation that jumps across sectoral and national borders; and deep uncertainty, because the system's behaviour cannot be read off from any single part.
\nA useful mental image, repurposed from Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam, is a hundred ladders leaning against a wall. Tie them together for \"efficiency\" and each ladder becomes steadier on its own, less likely to fall. But if one does fall, it now drags all the others down with it. That is tight coupling: the very connections that make a system efficient in calm times make it fragile in a crisis. The 2011 T\u014dhoku earthquake rippling through just-in-time supply chains, and the 2021 Suez Canal blockage halting roughly a tenth of world trade from a single stuck ship, are textbook cases of triggers tipping stressed systems into crisis.
\nTwo refinements are worth carrying forward. The Cascade Institute's stress\u2013trigger-crisis model separates the slow-moving stresses that quietly erode a system's resilience (over-connection, homogenisation, concentration) from the fast-moving triggers that finally tip it over. And Arnscheidt and colleagues name risk-creating actors, those who extract a local advantage while loading cost onto the whole system, as a primary driver of global vulnerability. We return to this idea below.
\n![\"\"](\"https://adaptresearchwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image.png?w=468\")
Third question: how do crises compound? (Polycrisis)
\nSystemic risk explains how one system tips over. Polycrisis describes what happens when several do so at once and turn out to be wired together. Lawrence and colleagues give the field its working definition, the causal entanglement of crises across global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity's prospects, and specify how that entanglement happens, through three pathways.
\nThe first is common stresses: a single underlying pressure, climate change being the obvious one, simultaneously weakens food, water, migration and security systems, so separate crises flare up together not by coincidence but from a shared root. The second is domino effects: a crisis in one system directly triggers one in another, as when a regional conflict becomes an energy shock, which becomes a food-price shock, which becomes political instability somewhere else entirely. The third, and most insidious, is inter-systemic feedback: two crises reach back and worsen each other in a loop, each making the other harder to resolve.
\nRun those pathways together and you get the defining feature of a polycrisis, the whole is genuinely worse than the sum of its parts, precisely because the parts are no longer independent. The years 2020\u20132023, when a pandemic, a European war, and energy, food and inflation shocks all fed into one another, are the case study everyone now reaches for.
\nLiu and Renn clarify the complementarity: systemic risk research specifies the conditions under which cascading failure becomes possible, polycrisis research tracks the cascades once entangled, and neither yet explains why governance consistently fails to adapt.
\nSomewhat soberingly, the most comprehensive systematic review of polycrisis to date catalogues the component crises and their drivers, then characterises many of those drivers as asserted rather than analysed. The field has mapped the entanglement in impressive detail but cannot yet say why it keeps happening, or why most of these crises, flagged as far back as the 1970s (eg Club of Rome report), remain unresolved. Which brings us to the deepest question.
\nFourth question: why do we keep generating a fragile world? (From what to why)
\nThere is a pattern. Each of the first three questions excels at describing what is happening and how it unfolds; none quite explains why humanity keeps generating the conditions behind catastrophic, systemic and polycrisis risk in the first place.
\nBiology offers a precise way to name the gap. Ernst Mayr distinguished proximate causes, the immediate mechanism, as in \"the bird migrates because shortening days trigger a hormonal response\", from ultimate causes, ie the evolutionary reason the mechanism exists at all. Crucially, these are not two links in one chain but two answers to different questions about the same behaviour: how it works, and why it was selected for.
\nAlmost everything governments fund, and almost everything discussed at events like Reality of Everything, acts on our behaviours and their fallout. Cut emissions, reduce consumption, diversify trade, stockpile fuel, plan for the next storm. This work is necessary. But it operates on the expression of humanity's drives and their downstream consequences while leaving the ultimate question untouched: why do humans reliably develop the appetites for growth, status and accumulation whose collective expression produces these risks?
\nSuppress one proximate expression and the underlying disposition, its evolutionary rationale and sustaining forces still intact, tends to resurface through another. That is why symptom-by-symptom effort keeps falling behind: we are managing the outputs of drives whose reason for being we have not addressed.
\nThe fields already working at the ultimate level are behavioural and evolutionary sciences. The same two questions extend beyond genes. Institutions and norms are culturally transmitted traits with their own proximate mechanisms, meaning how they operate today, and their own ultimate explanations, meaning why competition between groups selected and spread them. That dual structure is what earns \"institutional\" its place alongside the evolutionary drivers. These fields trace some of today's crises to a \"human behavioural crisis\", a suite of drives toward growth, status and consumption that were once adaptive and are now exploited at planetary scale.
\nReach further back and the pattern is evolutionary. Competition between human groups, cultural niche construction, and technological evolution have ratcheted us toward ever-greater scale and environmental control, while rewarding strategies that pay off locally even when ruinous globally, the \"risk-creating actors\" of the systemic-risk literature, now seen from below. This is the multipolar trap, in which each player, acting rationally in its own interest, helps produce an outcome nobody wants.
\nSo what, precisely, is the Metacrisis?
\nHere the vocabulary finally separates cleanly. A crisis is a single system in trouble. A polycrisis is many crises causally entangled, worse than the sum of their parts. The metacrisis is the layer beyond both: the ultimate, upstream drivers, behavioural, institutional and evolutionary, that keep generating and re-generating the whole mess.
\nI think this can be tightened one step further. Rather than a vague gesture at \"everything, but deeper,\" the metacrisis can be defined as the degradation of the conditions that allow risk-reducing solutions to accumulate and persist, a crisis not of any particular risk but of humanity's capacity to adapt to large-scale risk at all.
\nIn evolutionary language that capacity is called evolvability, and when its supporting conditions erode together, good solutions stop compounding and governance fails consistently across otherwise unrelated domains. Where the more familiar framing locates the metacrisis in a crisis of collective sense-making, of how we perceive and make meaning, this one locates it a step wider, in the adaptive machinery that would let good solutions take hold and accumulate at all; sense-making is then one input to that capacity rather than the whole of it.
\nI flag this lens for completeness; it is deliberately provocative and, for now, a theoretical framework rather than the settled account, developed in current work and presented in nascent form at recent risk-science conferences. Watch this space for my imminent pre-print research paper.
\nWhy this matters, especially if you came via climate concern
\nIf you arrived at the 'Reality of Everything' and global risk through climate change, the upshot is liberating rather than deflating. Climate change (CO2/radiative forcing) is one of nine planetary boundaries, and the climate crisis is one expression of a larger predicament driven by common upstream forces.
\nSeeing the through-line, hazards, stresses, how they spread, how they compound, and why we keep making them, lets you do two things at once: keep pushing on the proximate work that is urgent and real, while recognising where climate action connects to other risk like pandemic preparedness, trade and supply-chain resilience, and the health of the institutions on which all risk mitigation depends.
\nNaming the space is the difference between fighting symptoms one at a time and acting on the mechanisms that produce them. That is the conversation we hope events like Reality of Everything can grow into next, and it is one this small field guide is meant to kick start.
\nThanks again to the Symposium organisers and participants.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/8k5zp-bjb60","guid":"http://adaptresearchwriting.com/?p=7711","image":"https://adaptresearchwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/markus-winkler-trcafmv5vk-unsplash.jpg?w=1024","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783296000,"rid":"qt9mj-ckk71","summary":"A practical follow-up to the \"Reality of Everything\" Symposium and other recent discussions of humanity's predicament TLDR/Summary A superb diagnosis, with the terms left undefined Gatherings like the Reality of Everything Symposium are strong on diagnosis: speaker after speaker showed, compellingly, that human society is in overshoot, that planetary boundaries are being breached, and that \u2026 Continue reading \"Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Systemic","title":"Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Systemic Risk: A Definitional Field Guide to the Reality of Everything","updated_at":1783346052,"url":"https://adaptresearchwriting.com/2026/07/06/polycrisis-metacrisis-systemic-risk-a-definitional-field-guide-to-the-reality-of-everything/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Southan","given":"Christopher"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"236b0edf-87bd-4d58-aacc-91b920daf466","created":1760313600,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Technical notes from the interface between bioinformatics and cheminformatics by Chris Southan","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/236b0edf-87bd-4d58-aacc-91b920daf466/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://cdsouthan.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default","filter":null,"generator":"Blogger","home_page_url":"https://cdsouthan.blogspot.com/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"cdsouthan","status":"active","subfield":"1312","title":"Bio <-> Chem","updated":1783338030,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Bio <-> Chem","blog_slug":"cdsouthan","content_html":"\u00a0
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The London Climate Week launch on 21 June 2026 of a new call from global partners turned three years of listening to community-based health workers into money on the table. What the room did not decide is whether the money will reach them the same way the listening did.
\n\n\n\nWhen the rains close the roads around Fada, in eastern Burkina Faso, a woman in labour cannot reach a clinic, and the clinic cannot reach her.
\n\n\n\nSo the community stopped waiting for the roads.
\n\n\n\n\"Some roads are impassable during the winter months, making healthcare inaccessible,\" the midwife Maiga Nana Jacqueline recounted.
\n\n\n\n\"To remedy this, village midwives from these communities have been trained to assist in childbirth. Hygienic deliveries are taking place without complications.\"
\n\n\n\nNo ministry programme.
\n\n\n\nNo donor grant.
\n\n\n\nA community deciding that childbirth would no longer depend on a passable road, and training its own midwives to make sure of it.
\n\n\n\nMaiga did not tell that story in London.
\n\n\n\nShe told it, in her own words, somewhere else entirely, and where stories like hers get told turns out to decide whether it ever reaches a funder.
\n\n\n\nLearn more: How health workers are leading community responses to climate change impacts on health
\n\n\n\nThat is worth keeping in mind, because about around 80 people had gathered on the summer solstice in London to reckon with stories exactly like hers, inside a members' club called The Conduit, while the city sweltered through its second heat wave of the year.
\n\n\n\nThe occasion was the launch of the first funding opportunity from Nexa, a global climate and health innovation initiative led by Grand Challenges Canada and the Science for Africa Foundation, together with a global consortium of partners.
\n\n\n\nAmbassadors, ministers, scientists, and funders filled the room.
\n\n\n\nDrinks waited on a rooftop five floors up.
\n\n\n\nThey had come to shorten the distance between the trained midwives of Fada and funders gathered in a London club, before the next rainy season cut another community off.
\n\n\n\nThe useful thing to know about that distance is that it has already been crossed once, by a network most of the room had never heard of.
\n\n\n\nThe question the evening left open is whether Nexa's global leaders will use that network, or build past it.
\n\n\n\nThe proof that the distance can be closed was already in the room, in the form of a survey.
\n\n\n\nWhen Grand Challenges Canada, the Science for Africa Foundation, and The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) announced the Global Climate and Health Survey in The Lancet Global Health in January 2025, they made a specific promise: to reach the people closest to the crisis and to centre local voices, using participatory research rather than a questionnaire pushed out from headquarters.
\n\n\n\nThe survey went on to become one of the largest of its kind, reaching over 6,400 respondents.
\n\n\n\nIts scale is not the interesting part.
\n\n\n\nWhether that promise held, and how, is.
\n\n\n\nTGLF built and piloted the survey, then spent three months in dialogue with its Teach to Reach community before collecting a single response, and kept that dialogue going for four months into 2025.
\n\n\n\nThat patience was built on nearly a decade of prior work convening frontline health workers.
\n\n\n\nLearn more: A short history of the first five years of Teach to Reach
\n\n\n\nWhat happened next explains where the promise held.
\n\n\n\nThe Foundation issued a call through Teach to Reach.
\n\n\n\nAlongside the 24,610 participants, 107 locally-led organizations across 28 countries committed to supporting the survey.
\n\n\n\nThis diverse group spanned organizations from local government health clinics and community groups to faith-based clinics and a midwives' union.
\n\n\n\nTogether, they reach more than 15 million people.
\n\n\n\nNearly half are government organizations, embedded in national health systems.
\n\n\n\nThey ran the mobilization on the ground, from the provincial health division of Haut-Katanga in the DRC to the Oyo State Primary Health Care Board in Nigeria.
\n\n\n\nThe bottom line?
\n\n\n\nMore than 60% of every response collected came in through the Teach to Reach network, carried by those organizations and by the individual health workers the network had spent years connecting to one another.
\n\n\n\nThe volume matters less than what it was made of.
\n\n\n\nStrip Teach to Reach out and the survey does not just shrink, it loses the very people it set out to reach.
\n\n\n\nWhat would have remained is the familiar pattern: a survey about vulnerable communities, answered mostly by people at a distance from them.
\n\n\n\nThe network inverted that, so the people inside those communities ran the survey rather than being studied by it.
\n\n\n\nThat is the finding underneath the finding, and the one Nexa should weigh most heavily.
\n\n\n\nThe route from a flood to a funder already exists, and the network that carried the survey is what keeps it open.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe survey's own results are still being analyzed.
\n\n\n\nBut the same participatory method has already produced a published body of evidence, drawn not from the survey but from the accounts of over 1000 health workers across at least 60 countries gathered through the same Teach to Reach process, with eight take-aways and fourteen recommendations that follow from them.
\n\n\n\nIt is worth reading closely by everyone who was in the London room, because it describes, in the workers' own words, how a coalition like Nexa could find new, fruitful ways to connect with local actors.
\n\n\n\nTeach to Reach is where Maiga Nana Jacqueline from Fada District, Burkina Faso, told her story.
\n\n\n\nIt is where these accounts are gathered, from health workers writing in from their own clinics and districts, and it is why the distinction matters.
\n\n\n\nA story told from a London stage reaches the people in the room.
\n\n\n\nA story told through Teach to Reach reaches a published report, a set of recommendations addressed to funders, and thousands of peers facing the same rains, and it does so without the worker ever having to leave her post.
\n\n\n\nThat same process does something Nexa says it wants to do.
\n\n\n\nIt carries the voices behind the data upward, from a clinic in Kinshasa to a report a funder can read, and back down again as something the community can use.
\n\n\n\nNone of the contributors quoted here were in the London room, yet through Teach to Reach they were present in it.
\n\n\n\nWhat ran through their accounts was initiative, not helplessness, and much of it was organized by women.
\n\n\n\nIn Doba, in southern Chad, the public health technician Naingar Service described who was holding the line on children's health: \"It is above all the women who have adopted a responsible attitude to children's health. They organise themselves into groups to contribute money for any health problems affecting their families.\"
\n\n\n\nThese are savings groups doing the work of health insurance, in a place where formal insurance does not reach.
\n\n\n\n\"With no funding, no guidance, just an initiative to use local means, there is a will,\" said Nathan Binene Kayeye of the DRC.
\n\n\n\nIn Cameroon, the community facilitator Rameaux Nkollo described a method: \"Once solutions come in and we work inclusively, all together, each with a small idea, we move forward better.\"
\n\n\n\nThe stories, findings, and recommendations in this article do not come from the Global Climate and Health Survey. Those results, quantitative and qualitative, are still being analyzed and will appear in a forthcoming report.
\n\n\n\nThey come from an earlier and separate body of work: Teach to Reach 11: Local action to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis on health, the twentieth Listening and Learning Report from The Geneva Learning Foundation, released in May 2026.
\n\n\n\nThat report is itself the product of a participatory process, not a survey.
\n\n\n\nFrontline workers shared written accounts before, during, and after Teach to Reach 11, a global peer learning event held in December 2024, answering plain questions.
\n\n\n\nWhat happened?
\n\n\n\nWhat did you do?
\n\n\n\nHow did you know it worked?
\n\n\n\nDid the community help?
\n\n\n\nFrom the 24,610 health workers registered across more than 70 countries, 100 detailed accounts spanning at least 19 countries were selected for publication.
\n\n\n\nThe report was written first to give the findings back to the workers who produced them, and second so that national and global actors learn to see the value of what frontline workers know.
\n\n\n\nTwo companion articles distil it: eight take-aways from the accounts, and fourteen recommendations drawn from them.
\n\n\n\nIf the survey proved the route existed, the panel that followed named the way it could be lost.
\n\n\n\nModerated by Doris Wangari, it seated Dr Devotha Nyambo of the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology in Tanzania, Dr Claude Pirmez of Fiocruz in Brazil, and Reda Sadki of The Geneva Learning Foundation.
\n\n\n\nReda Sadki set the promise and the trap side by side.
\n\n\n\nThe survey had surfaced not dozens but hundreds of local solutions, most of them financed by communities themselves.
\n\n\n\n\"What could be more sustainable than local actors not asking government for assistance, not asking international donors?\" he asked, and then turned the question over.
\n\n\n\nSelf-reliance that no one matches becomes a cost the poorest absorb alone.
\n\n\n\nInvest in better policy and better science without \"a commensurate investment in communities and in local action,\" he warned, and \"5, 10, or 15 years down the line, communities are going to reject both.\"
\n\n\n\nThe warning read as a design brief.
\n\n\n\nFund the science and skip the network that produced the evidence, and the coalition widens the very distance it came to close.
\n\n\n\nLearn more: Reda Sadki's remarks at the Nexa funding announcement in support of local community responses
\n\n\n\nDr Nyambo brought the same conviction from data, describing a community-rooted early-warning system for outbreaks in Tanzania.
\n\n\n\nDr Pirmez brought three decades of research at Fiocruz.
\n\n\n\nWangari closed by naming where the panel had arrived.
\n\n\n\n\"Local knowledge is not simply complementary. It's essential. We have to understand it and integrate it.\"
\n\n\n\nThe politicians in the room argued for speed.
\n\n\n\nMete Coban, Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy, said he had come to the work not as an environmentalist but from \"a very deprived community,\" where \"half a million people will never ever be able to breathe the full capacity of their lungs because of a crisis that they didn't cause in the first place.\"
\n\n\n\nHe offered Nelson Mandela's line, \"it always seems impossible until it's done,\" with proof: experts once told London it would take 193 years to meet legal air-quality limits, a target the city hit in nine.
\n\n\n\nProximity was his whole argument.
\n\n\n\nCities are \"cutting carbon emissions five times faster than the national average,\" he said, \"because we know our residents much closer in a way that governments don't.\"
\n\n\n\nThen the night's most unscripted moment.
\n\n\n\nH.E. Shimane Lawrence Kelaotswe, High Commissioner of Botswana, rose to speak although \"I was not supposed to say anything.\"
\n\n\n\nTurning to the London heat wave everyone had spent the evening complaining about, he reset the scale.
\n\n\n\n\"You call it a heat wave. In Botswana we're talking about 45 or 49 degrees Celsius.\"
\n\n\n\nNow sixty years old, he recalled seeing winter rain in his country for the first time only in 1990.
\n\n\n\n\"We thought maybe we were coming to the end of the world.\"
\n\n\n\nHis warning doubled as the coalition's mandate.
\n\n\n\n\"Right now, if you don't involve the communities, we're going to get a shock of our life.\"
\n\n\n\nHere the evening turned from diagnosis to commitment.
\n\n\n\nDr Karlee Silver, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, framed Nexa as an invitation that \"gives action-oriented organizations a trusted, proven network of regional leaders to help direct their resources effectively,\" which is, she said, \"how we move the needle on the climate crisis, by connecting the global and the local, and meeting our most urgent needs.\"
\n\n\n\nThe commitment was funded, not hypothetical.
\n\n\n\nFive African governments, South Africa, Senegal, Malawi, Rwanda, and Botswana, had committed roughly \\$2 million between them, with Grand Challenges Canada and partners pledging to match it.
\n\n\n\nThey had joined, Dr Tom Kariuki of the Science for Africa Foundation stressed, \"not in the middle when things have already rolled out, but at the very beginning.\"
\n\n\n\nOn the partner panel, Dr Daouda Diouf of the Sanofi Foundation and the High Commissioners of Malawi and Rwanda returned to one theme: trust built over years, not over grant cycles, is what decides whether resources ever reach a village.
\n\n\n\nA video message from Hillary Rodham Clinton (whose organization is amongst the funders) and closing remarks from Prof Shaukat Abdulrazak, Kenya's Principal Secretary for Science, Research and Innovation, pressed the same point.
\n\n\n\nThe science exists.
\n\n\n\nThe task now is to act on what workers closes to the communities already know.
\n\n\n\nWhat should give that money its direction could be grounded in recommendations that frontline workers' own accounts produced, addressed by name to global partners like the ones in the room.
\n\n\n\nThey are specific. Three examples:
\n\n\n\nThese recommendations carry a weight that a strategy document cannot.
\n\n\n\nThey are not the preferences of an intermediary.
\n\n\n\nThey come from the communities Nexa's partners say they intend to serve, which makes them less a critique than a set of instructions the coalition asked for.
\n\n\n\nWith its call for proposals only now launching, Nexa can still decide to follow them.
\n\n\n\nAnyone who wants to test them against the source can now put questions directly to the underlying evidence, through a chat interface built on three years of frontline accounts.
\n\n\n\nLearn more: Climate change and health: 14 recommendations for health workers, national planners, and global partners
\n\n\n\nThe survey settled one question.
\n\n\n\nA participatory approach reaches the most vulnerable communities as leaders rather than subjects, and it does so because the design and the mobilization were built with the Teach to Reach network over years, not weeks.
\n\n\n\nThat network is the asset Nexa inherits, whether or not it decides to use it.
\n\n\n\nThe open question is whether the next step will be built the same way, and the workers have already described what that would take.
\n\n\n\nFunding that reaches community-led action \"in weeks.\"
\n\n\n\nWorker protection written into \"every emergency response grant.\"
\n\n\n\nCommunity financial mechanisms, the women's solidarity funds, the savings groups, recognized \"as health system infrastructure\" instead of being bypassed by cash programmes designed in capital cities.
\n\n\n\nA call for proposals can be run at arm's length, judged by reviewers who have never met the people they are funding.
\n\n\n\nOr it can carry the same logic that made the survey reach so deep.
\n\n\n\nThe individual leaders and organizations that carried the survey already know which local solutions work in their own districts, and which recommendations match conditions on the ground.
\n\n\n\nKept in place and resourced as a standing backbone, rather than disbanded once the data was in, they could do for the money what they did for the survey.
\n\n\n\nThey can find the frontline, vouch for what actually works, and carry a proposal written in a village to a decision made in a capital.
\n\n\n\nAs the Kenyan health worker Joseph Njoroge put it, \"community ownership and involvement in the whole process is quite important for the success of climate change interventions.\"
\n\n\n\nThe Guinean physician Issa Barry named the gap that a backbone closes. \"Communities are always ready. Often it is language that creates the gap. We speak in technical terms.\"
\n\n\n\nSomewhere in the Teach to Reach network are the village midwives of Fada, still delivering babies safely on the days the roads are gone.
\n\n\n\nBetween July 2023 and June 2026, The Geneva Learning Foundation's climate and health programme listened to health workers like them, and it did so by working with them rather than around them.
\n\n\n\nThat programme is a working prototype of the layer the global response has been missing, the connective tissue between commitments made in conference halls and the communities where those commitments either reach people or come to nothing.
\n\n\n\nWhether it becomes a permanent part of how the world responds depends on what a coalition like Nexa decides to fund.
\n\n\n\nOn the longest day of the year, in a London club, the money arrived.
\n\n\n\nThe remaining task is to spend it the way the listening was built.
\n\n\n\nSanchez JJ, Gitau E, Sadki R, Mbuh C, Silver K, and the Climate and Health Expert Panel. The climate crisis and human health: identifying grand challenges through participatory research. Lancet Glob Health 2025;13(2):e199-e200. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(25)00003-8
\n\n\n\nSadki R. Climate change and health: 14 recommendations for health workers, national planners, and global partners. The Geneva Learning Foundation; 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/hs8am-cn216
\n\n\n\nSadki R. Climate change and health: 8 take-aways from community-based responses. The Geneva Learning Foundation; 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/fxxec-dxj41
\n\n\n\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation. Lessons in resilience: what health workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America know and do in response to worsening climate change impacts on their communities. 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/bc869-5z763
\n\n\n\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation. New insights report: health workers are leading community responses to climate change impacts on health. The Geneva Learning Foundation; 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/v01fe-myj60
\n\n\n\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation. Talk to the evidence: a chat interface to explore what health workers know and do about climate change and health. 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/7gdaj-f8588
\n\n\n\nJones I, Njua Mbuh C, Steed I, Sadki R. Teach to Reach 11: Local action to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis on health. Listening and Learning report 20. Geneva: The Geneva Learning Foundation; 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18246203
\n\n\n\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation. What you can do if climate change is harming your community's health: a practical guide to the Certificate peer learning programme for leadership in climate change and health. 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/c05zy-caf92
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/yamtp-9dw88","guid":"https://redasadki.me/?p=24043","image":"https://redasadki.me/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/nexa_flood_to_funder.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783209600,"rid":"kz2kk-er764","summary":"The London Climate Week launch on 21 June 2026 of a new call from global partners turned three years of listening to community-based health workers into money on the table. What the room did not decide is whether the money will reach them the same way the listening did.","tags":["The Geneva Learning Foundation","Climate And Health","Climate Change","Frontline Health Workers","Grand Challenges"],"title":"Climate change and health: from flood to funder","updated_at":1783335903,"url":"https://redasadki.me/2026/07/05/climate-change-and-health-from-flood-to-funder-and-from-rhetoric-to-action/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"The Geneva Learning Foundation"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"7e26491f-41c6-4665-9088-5aa6643a1ba8","created":1731196800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Learning to make a difference","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/7e26491f-41c6-4665-9088-5aa6643a1ba8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://redasadki.me/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://redasadki.me/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"redasadki","status":"active","subfield":"3304","title":"Reda Sadki","updated":1783331789,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Reda Sadki","blog_slug":"redasadki","content_html":"Climate change is harming the health of the communities you serve.
\n\n\n\nNexa is a new funding programme that aims to invest money in local solutions to that harm.
\n\n\n\nThis guide helps you decide, quickly, whether to apply, what Nexa wants to fund, and how the process works.
\n\n\n\nIt is written for a community-based leader who is short on time.
\n\n\n\nThe deadline is soon. All applications must be submitted through the Fluxx portal by 22 July 2026, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (6:00 p.m. UTC).
\n\n\n\nRead this guide, then go straight to the official documents.
\n\n\n\nLearn more:
\n\n\n\nNexa is a climate and health initiative co-led by Grand Challenges Canada and the Science for Africa Foundation, working with a group of global partners and funders.
\n\n\n\nIt aims to mobilise more than 50 million U.S. dollars to support locally led solutions in low- and middle-income countries.
\n\n\n\nNexa was shaped by the largest climate and health survey ever done, which gathered the voices of 6,400 health and humanitarian workers.
\n\n\n\nThe Teach to Reach network contributed over 60% of the responses to this survey, with over 100 locally-led organizations becoming survey partners reaching 15 million people in the most climate-vulnerable parts of the world.
\n\n\n\nIn other words, the programme was designed around what frontline workers, perhaps including you, already reported.
\n\n\n\nIts leaders are clear about why this matters.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\"Those closest to these challenges are often closest to the solutions. Nexa demonstrates what is possible when African priorities, local innovation, and global collaboration come together around a shared goal.\" \u2013 Dr Tom Kariuki, CEO, Science for Africa Foundation
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"Nexa is about supporting bold, locally led innovation to transform how people stay healthy in the face of climate change.\" \u2013 Dr Karlee Silver, CEO, Grand Challenges Canada
\n
Your application is more than a request for money.
\n\n\n\nIt is a chance to put what you know, and what your community has already built, in front of the people who fund global health.
\n\n\n\nEvery strong, community-rooted application also strengthens the case that local solutions deserve investment, which helps every leader who applies after you.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\"We found not dozens but hundreds of local solutions, self-funded by the communities themselves. There needs to be a commensurate investment in local action.\" \u2013 Reda Sadki, The Geneva Learning Foundation
\n
You do not have to build your idea alone.
\n\n\n\nThrough Teach to Reach, you can meet peers who face the same climate and health challenges, and learn from what they have tried.
\n\n\n\nBefore you spend time on an application, check three things.
\n\n\n\nIf you cannot meet all three, this call is not the right fit for you today.
\n\n\n\nTip: if you can name the community you serve, show that your team is rooted there, and point to the country on the eligible list, you have passed this step.
\n\n\n\nNexa does not fund every good idea.
\n\n\n\nIt funds one specific thing: a solution that helps local health actors turn climate warning signals into fast health action.
\n\n\n\nThe health problem you address must be caused, or made much worse, by climate change.
\n\n\n\nNexa focuses on three climate hazards:
\n\n\n\nYour project must fit at least one of these two areas of focus:
\n\n\n\nThe people Nexa most wants to protect are pregnant women, children, older people, and those living with certain long-term illnesses (heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease, and chronic kidney disease). Your project should aim to improve their health access or outcomes.
\n\n\n\nAsk yourself one question. \"Would my solution still be needed if climate change stopped?\" If the honest answer is no, your idea is a strong fit, because climate is at its core.
\n\n\n\nThere are two tracks.
\n\n\n\nChoose the one that matches how far along your idea already is.
\n\n\n\nThis is your choice to make, based on your own honest reading of your work.
\n\n\n\nIf you do not yet have evidence that your idea works, choose Proof of Concept.
\n\n\n\nApplying to Transition to Scale without proof is strongly discouraged, because it will not be considered.
\n\n\n\nYou apply online, through one portal only.
\n\n\n\nThe review panel looks for four things \u2013 a bold innovation, real potential for impact, a workable plan, and a team with a genuine connection to the community. Read your draft as if you were the reviewer, and make sure each one is easy to find.
\n\n\n\nGive yourself time, because you cannot edit after you submit.
\n\n\n\nFeatured image: Screen shot of the Nexa launch video, 21 June 2026.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/a64wv-rzc23","guid":"https://redasadki.me/?p=24082","image":"https://redasadki.me/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/nexa-communities-featured.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783296000,"rid":"8za18-dsr76","summary":"Climate change is harming the health of the communities you serve. Nexa is a new funding programme that aims to invest money in local solutions to that harm. This guide helps you decide, quickly, whether to apply, what Nexa wants to fund, and how the process works.","tags":["The Geneva Learning Foundation","Africa","Climate And Health","Climate Change","Community Health"],"title":"Climate change and health: how to apply for Nexa's funding","updated_at":1783327996,"url":"https://redasadki.me/2026/07/06/climate-change-and-health-how-to-apply-for-nexas-funding/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Rutz","given":"Adriano","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0443-9902"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Adriano Rutz","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0443-9902"}],"community_id":"9d85a476-b411-4d80-89d5-500bb0f3750d","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Personal website of Adriano Rutz","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/9d85a476-b411-4d80-89d5-500bb0f3750d/logo","feed_format":"application/feed+json","feed_url":"https://adafede.github.io/posts.json","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://adafede.github.io","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":null,"slug":"adafede","status":"active","subfield":"1312","title":"Adriano Rutz","updated":1783280271,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Adriano Rutz","blog_slug":"adafede","content_html":"I have finally opened a Posts section on my website! Every post should now automatically get a DOI.
This is something I have wanted to do for a long time, largely inspired by the tireless and consistent example set by Egon Willighagen (Willighagen 2024b, 2024a, 2025).
\nIt was today's post of (Fenner 2025) that finally motivated me to look into it again. That led me down a productive rabbit hole to set up Rogue Scholar: first landing on (Csefalvay 2023)'s excellent guide, and then (Fruehwald 2025)'s clear write-up, both of which made the process of integrating Rogue Scholar into a Quarto-based site surprisingly smooth.
\nAll the changes are documented in the following commit:
\nhttps://github.com/Adafede/adafede.github.io/commit/bc2dfe6f
\nIf you care about attribution, long-term archiving, DOIs and metadata, I highly recommend looking into Rogue Scholar.
\nEdit (1): I realized that integrating CiTO could be a significant enhancement. With some effort (and thanks again to Egon), I managed to implement a working solution for the HTML and PDF outputs, see (Willighagen 2023). However, the solution for the XML feed still feels suboptimal.
\nEdit (2): After some help from Egon and Martin, I could improve my feed with correct CiTO annotations and their cool custom json feed, see: https://adafede.github.io/posts.json!
\n@online{rutz2025,\n author = {{Adriano Rutz}},\n title = {Open {Science} {Upgrade:} {Adding} {Blog} {Posts} to My\n {Website} and {Linking} to {Rogue} {Scholar}},\n date = {2025-08-04},\n url = {https://adafede.github.io/posts/2025-08-04_rogue_scholar.html},\n doi = {10.59350/yckwd-9vm79},\n langid = {en}\n}\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation's Reda Sadki spoke on the expert panel at the launch of the Nexa funding announcement in London on 21 June 2026, in conversation with panelists Dr Devotha Nyambo of the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology in Tanzania, Dr Claude Pirmez of Fiocruz in Brazil. The panel was moderated by the Science for Africa Foundation's Doris Wangari.
\n\n\n\nDoris Wangari: Many global conversations about climate and health happen very far away from the communities that experience these impacts. Why is it important to reach out to local actors and amplify their voices?
\n\n\n\nThank you for the great question, and hello to everyone here.
\n\n\n\nAt The Geneva Learning Foundation, we believe it is critical to make that conjunction between local action and global actors.
\n\n\n\nThere is a big gap, and there is a risk of falling into that gap from both sides of the fence.
\n\n\n\nThere is a backstory to this survey.
\n\n\n\nIn 2023, we were working with the communities we nurture \u2013 a network of local actors across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with about 70% of the network in West and Central Africa.
\n\n\n\nWe kept hearing some pretty worrying things from them about the impacts of climate change on health.
\n\n\n\nSo we said: why don't we ask the community? 4,700 people showed up to that event in 2023.
\n\n\n\nThat is when we felt we had a responsibility to go further.
\n\n\n\nWe did the first part of our mission: to ask the community, to listen, and then to give back to the community what we had learned.
\n\n\n\nBut we realised that at a time when there was real mobilisation by global actors, with a lot of interest and goodwill from international partners, we were not going to be able to carry those voices alone, to elevate them where they needed to be heard.
\n\n\n\nThat is where we connected with Grand Challenges Canada and the network of innovators around it.
\n\n\n\nThat was three years ago.
\n\n\n\nWhat I am even more excited about now is the opportunity in front of us, and what we have learned about local action so far.
\n\n\n\nDoris Wangari: You've done several surveys. Why should people care about this one? Why should policymakers and funders care?
\n\n\n\nThere is a very significant learning in this survey, a very significant risk we should all consider, and a fascinating opportunity we should not miss.
\n\n\n\nThe learning first.
\n\n\n\nThere were three qualitative questions in the survey.
\n\n\n\nOne was very simple: do you have a lesson learned, a challenge, or a success story you would like to share?
\n\n\n\nIt was optional. People could skip it, because our focus was on barriers and threats.
\n\n\n\nAnd yet more than 2,400 respondents chose to take their time, on their own dime, with no compensation offered, to answer it.
\n\n\n\nWe have dug into that data and just published an insights report \u2013 what we call a listening and learning report.
\n\n\n\nWhat we found is fascinating, but also frightening.
\n\n\n\nIt is a real double-edged sword.
\n\n\n\nOn one side, we found not dozens but hundreds of local solutions and innovations being implemented by local actors, and usually self-funded by the communities themselves.
\n\n\n\nFor example, in response to the increasing frequency of floods, there are women who self-fund the transport to take other women who are about to give birth around the flooding to reach the clinic.
\n\n\n\nThat is just one example.
\n\n\n\nBecause of the scale we were able to reach with Grand Challenges, we now have hundreds of such documented examples.
\n\n\n\nBut here is the other edge.
\n\n\n\nWe all want sustainability.
\n\n\n\nAnd what could be more sustainable than local actors who are not asking government for assistance, not asking international donors?
\n\n\n\nThen, what is our responsibility, and what is our role in response to that?
\n\n\n\nThat brings me to the risk.
\n\n\n\nThis kind of self-organised action can only go so far.
\n\n\n\nThere has to be a match between the resources available and the actions that are actually working on the ground.
\n\n\n\nWe are seeing significant and very necessary investment in improving policy, in building the evidence base, in mapping the landscape of climate change and health.
\n\n\n\nBut if there is no commensurate investment in communities and in local action, we will end up with better policy and better science. And, 5, 10, or 15 years down the line, communities will reject both.
\n\n\n\nThat is the risk I believe we face.
\n\n\n\nAnd the opportunity is simply to figure out \u2013 maybe to invent \u2013 new ways of working together.
\n\n\n\nThere is an amazing group of people in this room who are constantly inventing, so this is the right group to take hold of this message.
\n\n\n\nFor that group of women in the DRC who are self-organising and self-funding a way for pregnant women to give birth safely. What is our role?
\n\n\n\nWhat is our responsibility?
\n\n\n\nWhat can we do, and how should we do it?
\n\n\n\nThat is the question before us.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/30wjb-w3d40","guid":"https://redasadki.me/?p=24039","image":"https://redasadki.me/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/nexa_remarks.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783209600,"rid":"ep0j2-4p159","summary":"The Geneva Learning Foundation's Reda Sadki spoke on the expert panel at the launch of the Nexa funding announcement in London on 21 June 2026, in conversation with panelists Dr Devotha Nyambo of the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology in Tanzania, Dr Claude Pirmez of Fiocruz in Brazil.","tags":["The Geneva Learning Foundation","Climate And Health","Climate Change","Global Climate Change And Health Survey","Grand Challenges"],"title":"Climate and health: Reda Sadki's remarks at the Nexa funding announcement in support of local community responses","updated_at":1783285189,"url":"https://redasadki.me/2026/07/05/climate-and-health-reda-sadkis-remarks-at-the-nexa-funding-announcement-in-support-of-local-community-responses/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"The Geneva Learning Foundation"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"7e26491f-41c6-4665-9088-5aa6643a1ba8","created":1731196800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Learning to make a difference","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/7e26491f-41c6-4665-9088-5aa6643a1ba8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://redasadki.me/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://redasadki.me/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"redasadki","status":"active","subfield":"3304","title":"Reda Sadki","updated":1783331789,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Reda Sadki","blog_slug":"redasadki","content_html":"On 21 June 2026, Grand Challenges Canada and Science for Africa Foundation convened a global consortium of partners to London. Together, they announced a new call to \"invest in bold, locally led solutions that help health systems anticipate and respond to climate-driven health threats\". Here are seven notable quotes we wrote down during the event.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\"It's a model that is locally led, locally and globally connected. Solutions are most effective when they are rooted in the realities and priorities of the people they intend to serve. For Africa, climate resilience and health resilience are now inseparable. Solutions are most effective when they are rooted in the realities and priorities of the people they intend to serve\u2026 Countries have made that commitment to join Nexa at the outset \u2013 not in the middle when things have already rolled out, but at the very beginning. They want to be part and parcel of this.\" \u2013 Dr Tom Kariuki, CEO, Science for Africa Foundation
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"You call it a heat wave. In Botswana we're talking about 45 or 49 degrees Celsius. Right now, if you don't involve the communities, we're going to get a shock of our life.\" \u2013 H.E. Shimane Lawrence Kelaotswe, High Commissioner of Botswana to the United Kingdom
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"We found not dozens but hundreds of local solutions, self-funded by the communities themselves. There needs to be a commensurate investment in local action. Otherwise, the risk is that we may find ourselves with better policy, better science\u2026\u00a0and 5, 10, or 15 years down the line, communities could reject both.\" \u2013 Reda Sadki, The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF)
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price.\" \u2013 Wangari Maathai, quoted by Dr Tom Kariuki, Science for Africa Foundation
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"Half a million people in London will never ever be able to breathe the full capacity of their lungs because of a crisis that they didn't cause in the first place. It always seems impossible until it's done. Cities are cutting carbon emissions five times faster than the national average, because we know our residents much closer in a way that governments don't.\" \u2013 Mete Coban MBE, Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"Local knowledge is not simply complementary. It's essential. We have to understand it and integrate it.\" \u2013 Doris Wangari, Africa Science Foundation, panel moderator
\n
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/1d1zz-wmk49","guid":"https://redasadki.me/?p=24041","image":"https://redasadki.me/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/nexa_best_quotes.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783209600,"rid":"skbqe-35b03","summary":"On 21 June 2026, Grand Challenges Canada and Science for Africa Foundation convened a global consortium of partners to London. Together, they announced a new call to \"invest in bold, locally led solutions that help health systems anticipate and respond to climate-driven health threats\". Here are seven notable quotes we wrote down during the event.","tags":["The Geneva Learning Foundation","Climate And Health","Climate Change","Grand Challenges","Health Workers"],"title":"Climate and health: seven quotes from global leaders putting money on the table for local communities","updated_at":1783285186,"url":"https://redasadki.me/2026/07/05/climate-and-health-seven-quotes-from-global-leaders-putting-money-on-the-table-for-local-communities/","version":"v1"}}],"items":[{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"Atarraya"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"f17066f5-0dbf-48d0-a413-b22a79861a94","created":1723852800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Nuestras historias","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/f17066f5-0dbf-48d0-a413-b22a79861a94/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogatarraya.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://blogatarraya.com","issn":null,"language":"spa","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"atarraya","status":"active","subfield":"1202","title":"BLOG ATARRAYA","updated":1783031304,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"BLOG ATARRAYA","blog_slug":"atarraya","content_html":"","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/81fh9-qvh81","guid":"https://blogatarraya.com/?p=7132","language":"es","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783296000,"rid":"ewrb7-85c83","tags":["Historia Jur\u00eddica","Historia Pol\u00edtica","N\u00famero 31"],"title":"La continuidad del Antiguo R\u00e9gimen Americano","updated_at":1783358744,"url":"https://blogatarraya.com/2026/07/06/la-continuidad-del-antiguo-regimen-americano/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/051fd9666","name":"Case Western Reserve University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"McGaugh","given":"Stacy","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9762-0980"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f","created":1713312000,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"A Blog About the Science and Sociology of Cosmology and Dark Matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/82262dc6-3666-40e2-939a-d4d637d0fd8f/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://tritonstation.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://tritonstation.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tritonstation","status":"active","subfield":"3103","title":"Triton Station","updated":1783347837,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Triton Station","blog_slug":"tritonstation","content_html":"\"That's how we can move the needle on the climate crisis: by connecting the global and the local, and meeting our most urgent needs.\" \u2013 Dr Karlee Silver, CEO, Grand Challenges Canada
\n
In the last few posts we’ve discussed the local missing baryon problem in extragalactic objects spanning over ten orders of magnitude in mass from tiny dwarfs to rich clusters of galaxies. This discussion has so far been entirely in the context of LCDM. So – how does LCDM compare with MOND?
\n\n\n\nAs a refresher, these are the data we’re trying to understand:
\n\n\n\nThe flat rotation speed Vf is an indicator of the dynamical mass – that of the dark matter halo and all the baryons it contains in LCDM, and that of all the (presumptively baryonic) mass in MOND. In LCDM, it would be satisfactory for the baryon fraction of each object, mb = Mb/M200, to be equal to the cosmic baryon fraction (fb = 0.157 according to Planck). For MOND, what you see is supposed to be what you get, so the baryon fraction should be one.
\n\n\n\nAs we saw previously, mb = fb for rich clusters of galaxies. There is no local missing baryon problem for galaxy clusters: a satisfactory result. However, as we look at smaller systems, observations depart from this ideal. They do so systematically, with our accounting of baryons falling progressively shorter of our expectation as we examine progressively lower mass objects. This deficit is illustrated by the gray region here:
\n\n\n\nEverything is fine for clusters at the high mass end (Mb > 1014 M\u2609), and many people reasonably interpret that as corroboration of LCDM. For lower mass groups and bright galaxies, there is a deficit of a factor of two or three: an issue, but nothing too concerning by the standards of extragalactic astronomy, so this is widely ignored outside the community that works on it. The implicit assumption is that it’ll work out. But the magnitude of the problem continues to grow for smaller objects, becoming already an order of magnitude for intermediate mass galaxies. Not tiny dwarfs, just middle of the road spirals. The smallest mass dwarfs are worse off yet, missing over 90% of the baryons, approaching 98% or 99%. That is not satisfactory.
\n\n\n\nMaking a straight-up comparison with MOND is a little tricky because the concept of a baryon fraction is a non-sequitor. There is no dark matter halo to compare against. Instead, we return to the concept of the velocity factor. In LCDM, we relate the observed flat rotation speed to that of the total dynamical mass through Vf = fvV200. Indeed, we can ask what velocity factor we need to explain away the missing baryon problem: maybe there are no missing baryons, just a systematic divergence of the observed Vf from the halo V200. This can’t work, but it is useful to think about and provides a direct comparison with MOND.
\n\n\n\nIn MOND, Mb = AVf4 where A is the normalization& of the BTFR. We can thus define an equivalent to the velocity factor, the residual velocity, taken here to be the ratio of the observed velocity to that expected for the observed mass, \u0394M = Vf,obs/Vf,pred. If the mass is a good predictor of the flat velocity, then \u0394M = 1. This leads to
\n\n\n\nThis is a straight-up comparison between the theories. Both theories suffer a missing baryon problem, but at different scales. The magnitude of each problem is indicated by the area of the shaded regions. (There is a dearth of data in our study* from 1013 < Mb < 1014 M\u2609, so we’ll just ignore that here.)
\n\n\n\nLCDM is spot on for clusters over the range 1014 < Mb < 1015 M\u2609: fv = 1 suffices to explain the data. Outside of that range, fv must increase systematically to make up for what we previously attributed to missing baryons. In effect, we’re making the dark matter halos smaller so that the baryon fraction works out. As noted before, this can’t work, as rotation curve fits restrict the viable range of the velocity factor to 1 < fv < 1.4, but we need it to grow to fv = 5. That’s silly: at that point, the dark matter halo is contributing so little to the observed dynamics that we wouldn’t infer its existence at all.
\n\n\n\nMOND is spot on over the range 5 x 105 < Mb < 5 x 1012 M\u2609: the data are consistent with \u0394M = 1. It falls short for rich clusters, where the observed mass of baryons in the intracluster medium (ICM) and the stars in galaxies predicts only ~80% of the observed velocity. This is the residual mass discrepancy in MOND.
\n\n\n\nFor perspective, it helps to plot the linear baryon fraction. The astronomical scales of astronomical data oblige us to use logarithmic scales in many circumstances, but this may lead one to under-appreciate the scale of the issue. So here is the baryon fraction again, in both LCDM and MOND, this time with a linear scale:
\n\n\n\nIndividual galaxies and groups of galaxies are missing a lot of baryons in LCDM. This is not a subtle problem. It is not explained by simulations, nor am I aware of a satisfactory% explanation. Worse, the apparent reason that we infer all these missing baryons is because the BTFR looks like the Mb ~ Vf4 of MOND rather than the M200 ~ V2003 of LCDM. With dark matter, we can accommodate pretty much any power law, or none at all – a lot of scatter would be more natural. So why did it have to be MOND? Even in ignorance of MOND the data pose a fine-tuning problem for LCDM. But it isn’t just a fine-tuning problem; it is a fine-tuning that arises because of MOND. To be successful, a LCDM model must be tuned to look like MOND. If it doesn’t, it’s wrong. If it does, why should we prefer a fine-tuned model to the theory that predicted the correct behavior in the first place?
\n\n\n\nMOND is not perfect here: it suffers a missing baryon problem in rich clusters. Since Mb ~ Vf4, predicting only ~80% of the observed velocity translates to missing ~60% of the mass. That’s a lot! But it could be worse: if, like Zwicky, we had done this experiment before the advent of X-ray observatories, we would be unaware of the mass of gas in the ICM, and infer that MOND was missing practically all (~96%!) the mass. That would seem utterly ridiculous, and we would conclude that MOND is wrong when much of the problem would have been that we were missing an important reservoir of baryons. Perhaps we still are. I do not like this possibility – there is still a lot of ground to make up, and I am not aware of a satisfactory solution. I guess I’m just a skeptic that way.
\n\n\n\nIf we think the residual mass discrepancy problem MOND suffers in rich clusters is serious and perhaps fatal, should we not also conclude the same from the local missing baryon problem in LCDM?
\n\n\n\nBut the bullet cluster double-secret falsifies MOND!
\n\n\n\nLet’s examine that assertion in the context of what we learned above.
\n\n\n\nThe bullet cluster is composed of two clusters that collided and passed through one another. The collision segregated the gas of the ICM (pink above) from the galaxies. This happens because gas is diffuse and collisional. The gas of the two clusters can’t help smacking into each other, slowing down and forming the shock front visible in the shape of the gas of the smaller cluster on the right. Galaxies, on the other hand, have lots of empty space between them. They are collisionless and pass right by each other. In doing so, they are slowed less than the gas, getting ahead of it, leading to the separation that we observe.
\n\n\n\nOK, cool. The argument one usually hears against MOND based on this is that the baryonic mass in gas outweighs that in galaxies, so the lensing signal should be centered on the gas: the blue should align with the pink, not with the galaxies. Instead, we see the opposite, so the mass has to be dark matter.
\n\n\n\nThis would be a good argument if the gas were all of the baryonic mass. This is a common assumption that makes sense in LCDM, where the baryon fraction checks out, so most people seem to stop thinking at that point. But each theory needs to be considered in its own context, and it cannot be the case in pure# MOND that we see all the baryons## in the picture above. That’s what we learned above. It may be unsatisfactory, but we knew this already before the bullet cluster was discovered (e.g., Sanders & McGaugh 2002). So the only new thing we learn from this aspect of the bullet cluster is that if there is an additional reservoir of baryonic mass, it is collisionless. It didn’t collide like the gas, it passed through like the galaxies. There are lots of candidate baryonic objects that fit that requirement: brown dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, very small rocks^. There is no requirement that the unseen mass be non-baryonic; we do not need the new physics of a new dark matter particle from beyond the Standard Model of particle physics on top of the new physics of MOND.
\n\n\n\nNow, as I think I’ve made clear, I am very uncomfortable with the apparent requirement that there is lots of undetected baryonic mass in clusters. If I were the MOND partisan that lots of people seem to assume I am, then I guess I’d portray this as a bold prediction. The dark baryons have to be there, and we should be turning all possible resources to detecting them, rather like we have for WIMPs. But I’m not that person. I am also not a person who sees this missing baryon problem for MOND as automatically worse than the missing baryon problem for LCDM. There is a much bigger deficit to be made up in LCDM, in many more systems### of very different types over a larger dynamic range in mass. The missing baryon problem in LCDM looks worse to me than that in MOND. Yet the community attitude seems to be largely unaware of it. Those who are seem mostly to presume that it’ll work out. Maybe, but this should not be accepted by assumption, it needs to be demonstrated. It has yet to be.
\n\n\n\nIf you think the missing baryon problem in clusters is a terrible problem for MOND, then you should be similarly worried that LCDM evinces the same kind of problem – one that is objectively larger in amplitude. It seems that, having accepted that there is dark matter, people don’t much care what it is. I do. The dark matter paradigm has obliged us to abandon parsimony. Not only does LCDM need two novel substances, dark matter and dark energy, it requires two kinds of dark matter: baryonic dark matter and non-baryonic dark matter.
\n\n\n\nThere is a communal failure of objectivity about this. The thought process is both transparent and simple: MOND doesn’t explain clusters; it requires dark matter. Therefore dark matter#### exists and it is silly to think about MOND. That would make sense if it weren’t a logical fallacy. Instead, it provides a permission structure to remain ignorant of what MOND gets right. I get that; there’s a lot to know. But I would also suggest that ignorance does not provide a strong basis for drawing scientific conclusions, especially for a subject so rife with confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.
\n\n\n\n&The normalization is related to Newton’s constant and Milgrom’s constant through A = \u03b6/(a0G) where \u03b6 is a factor of order unity that depends on the geometry of the system. It is one for spheres, and always approaches the limit \u03b6 \u2192 1 at sufficiently large radii, but observations are usually obtained at radii where the flattened geometry of disk galaxies is relevant, so in practice \u03b6 \u2248 0.8. This can be derived from the geometry (all purely conventional; nothing to do with MOND) or one can obtain it empirically by comparing A = 50 M\u2609 km-4 s4 from fitting the BTFR to data for galaxies with known a0; for a0 = 1.2 x 10-10 m s-2, (a0G)-1 = 63 M\u2609 km-4 s4, so \u03b6 =A(a0G) = 50/63 = 0.8.
\n\n\n\n*There remains room for improvement for poor clusters (here I call 1013 < Mb < 1014 M\u2609 objects “poor clusters” because astronomical terminology can always be made worse). A particular issue is the quantity of intracluster gas, which dominates rich clusters (and is readily detected in X-rays), but seems to be absent in the smallest groups. There has to be a transition in between, but is it smooth so that all poor clusters have the same amount, or is there a huge variation in ICM mass among poor clusters? I have seen anecdotal indications that poor clusters that are detected in X-rays extend the trend of rich clusters while those that aren’t don’t, as if the residual mass discrepancy MOND evinces in clusters is somehow related to the presence of X-ray gas.
\n\n\n\n%There are lots of unsatisfactory explanations. Some sound more plausible than others, but all fail to engage with the underlying prompt: why do the data look like MOND if we live in a universe made of dark matter?
\n\n\n\n#It is possible that the problem MOND faces in clusters might not be one of missing mass, but rather it could be an indication of a deeper theory that is not exactly like pure MOND.
\n\n\n\n##If there is additional mass in clusters, it doesn’t necessarily have to be baryonic. It could, in part, be neutrinos or sterile neutrinos or other more exotic beasts of the unknown meagerie of our enormous universe. However, there is no requirement that the unseen mass be anything other than mundane, ordinary matter.
\n\n\n\n^Though an amusing thought, very small rocks do not make a viable candidate dark matter object any more than witches float because they weigh the same as a duck.
\n\n\n\n###I have heard otherwise brilliant scientists dismiss the successes of MOND as a fluke. MOND has made too many successful predictions for that to be a reasonable assertion; it is a good example of what Putnam meant by “no miracles.” Yet the same scientists will cite the consistency of the baryon fraction in clusters to the cosmic baryon fraction as something that cannot be a fluke, ergo LCDM must be right. So which fluke is worse? I do not have patience to list all of MOND’s successful predictions here, though there are many reviews that do so and there will be a long paper soon that does more. What I will note here, having just done the exercise, is that the cluster baryon fraction is more likely to be a fluke. In order to estimate a baryonic mass for each cluster, we extrapolate the so-called beta profile that describes the distribution of X-ray gas. That’s a reasonable thing to do, and when we do it, we get an answer that is satisfactory in LCDM. However, it is not a small extrapolation. We are inferring a lot of baryonic mass at large radii from the fit of the beta profile at smaller radii. That’s the obvious thing to do, and I think it is probably correct, but it is also something that could go badly wrong. We experimented with other plausible gas mass profiles, and the answer can vary a lot, often leading to considerably fewer baryons than the cosmic fraction. That would be bad for LCDM, and also make the problem MOND suffers (too few baryons) worse, so it doesn’t help anything. But if there is a fluke here, it is more likely to be the coincidence of the cluster baryon fraction with the cosmic baryon fraction than is the consistency of the observed BTFR with the prediction of MOND for most of the rest of the universe.
\n\n\n\n####This is where sloppy terminology leads to a logical fallacy: people equate “dark matter” with non-baryonic cold dark matter. The latter is a subset of the former; the unseen mass in MOND need not be the same as the non-baryonic stuff that we commonly assume the dark matter is.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/d5w24-kmm75","guid":"https://tritonstation.com/?p=12733","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/baryonfractionlinear.001-2.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783036800,"rid":"m40x2-7ev08","summary":"In the last few posts we've discussed the local missing baryon problem in extragalactic objects spanning over ten orders of magnitude in mass from tiny dwarfs to rich clusters of galaxies. This discussion has so far been entirely in the context of LCDM. So \u2013 how does LCDM compare with MOND?","tags":["Dark Matter","LCDM","MOND"],"title":"Missing baryons: LCDM and MOND compared","updated_at":1783350547,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2026/07/03/missing-baryons-lcdm-and-mond-compared/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/02dpqcy73","name":"Centre de biophysique mol\u00e9culaire"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Hinsen","given":"Konrad","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0330-9428"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"2488dc7f-4f82-4051-8490-22d2cd8d472d","created":1719792000,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/2488dc7f-4f82-4051-8490-22d2cd8d472d/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.khinsen.net/feeds/all.atom.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://blog.khinsen.net/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"khinsen","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Konrad Hinsen's blog","updated":1783343549,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Konrad Hinsen's blog","blog_slug":"khinsen","content_html":"Convivial technology was defined by Ivan Illich in his 1973 book \"Tools for conviviality\" as technology that supports a convivial society, which is a society that strives to grant each of its members as much agency as is possible without infringing on other members' agency. Conviviality is thus about equality, about the absence of dominance relations. Convivial technology is shaped by its users according to their needs, rather than being controlled by entities such as companies or governments, which then derive power over the user base by exercising control.
\n\nOne of Illich's examples is transportation, with bicycles being convivial whereas railways and cars are not. Cars in particular have turned into what Illich calls a \"radical monopoly\": a technology that imposes itself on everyone. Once a society has adapted its landscape and infrastructure to cars, walking or cycling become insufficient as a means of locomotion for most people, if only because typical distances are now typical distances for driving, not walking. Moreover, the total societal cost for car-based mobility is enormous, if you count in the cost of road construction, traffic accidents, environmental pollution, and much more.
\nA recent paper entitled \"Conviviality for Digital Degrowth\", by Sophie Quinton and Jean-Bernard Stefani, discusses how today's digital technology is not convivial, and outlines how this could change as part of a transition to a degrowth society. It motivated me to finally write down my personal story, which is about something much more modest: the conviviality of digital technology in scientific research. It's something I have been thinking about for thirty years, even though I wasn't aware of Illich's work and terminology until recently.
\nLet me start with the observation that most pre-digital technology in scientific research is convivial. Theoretical tools (theories, models, etc.) are developed and evolved completely inside the scientific community and belong to no individual nor any institution. Scientific instruments and experimental setups are designed either by scientists, or explictly for scientists and in close collaboration with them. Neither kind of tool is controlled by outside entities, with the possible exception of very large instruments such as CERN. Nobody can decide that scientists may no longer use NMR spectrometers, nor that they have to replace all pre-2000 microscopes by new ones. This has changed with the adoption of digital tools and the integration of digital technology into scientific instruments. Theoretical tools are now often software, whose complexity makes its behavior inscrutable to its users and puts them at risk of losing their tools to software collapse. Scientific instruments increasingly rely on built-in computers that create exactly the same issues. Finally, digital technology has enabled industrial-scale production of data, e.g. in DNA sequencing, and that technology is itself not convivial either.
\nConviviality matters for science for multiple reasons. One of them is epistemic: if you want to derive knowledge from your work, you need to know exactly what you are doing, and that includes a detailed understanding of your tools. Moreover, research is much facilitated if you also have the inverse: the ability to create a tool that does exactly what you want to do. And since science is a collective activity, in which participants critique and build on each other's work, the understanding of tools needs to be shared inside a discipline. There have always been limits to this shared understanding, in particular concerning specific physical devices or unique experimental setups, but building shared understanding on a best-effort basis has always been one of the tacit underpinnings of science. This best effort has been abandoned in the digital era, as I discuss in an analysis of trust issues with scientific software,in which conviviality plays an important role.
\nWhen I started doing computational studies of colloidal suspensions in the late 1980s for my master's degree and then my PhD, research software was still quite convivial. Like most PhD students, I wrote medium-size Fortran programs, which ran on any computer with a Fortran compiler, from the Atari ST I had at home to the Cray X-MP that I used for production runs. Other scientists could read and understand my code in a few days, given sufficient motivation, and I know that some actually did, because I received questions from them by e-mail. It was also quite common for PhD students to look at and comment each other's programs. Publishing software was still exceptional, but publication venues did exist, and I ended up publishing the main code library underlying my work in low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics in 1993. Unfortunately I didn't publish, nor properly archive, the small bits of code that did the actual computations for concrete specific systems, and that is why the results of my papers aren't reproducible any more. But the library still works exactly as it did in 1993, and still finds new users.
\nWhen I moved on to a postdoc in another field, biomolecular simulation, I discovered a very different world. There were only three big simulation programs that everybody worked with: AMBER, CHARMM, and GROMOS. Only a very small number of researchers understood them in detail and could modify them. Everyone else computed whatever the software allowed them to compute, rather than what they actually wanted to compute. But even the correct use of the software was a challenge if you weren't in personal contact with the development teams, as documentation tended to be incomplete and outdated. Biomolecular simulation software was clearly not convivial, an observation that I attributed to the complexity of the underlying theoretical models. I was also finding out about the politics favoring the concentration of power over software, but I didn't make the connection at the time.
\nThe objects of biomolecular simulations, proteins and nucleic acids, were much more complex than the hard-sphere colloids I had studied in my PhD. Managing protein structures and the force fields defined on them in Fortran 77 is difficult and laborious. Maybe we could make biomolecular software more convivial by using a high-level programming language? That idea lead me to discover the Python language, become a founding member of the Matrix-SIG that developed Numerical Python, the precursor to today's NumPy, and write one of the first scientifc libraries in Python, the Molecular Modelling Toolkit (MMTK), first published in 1997.
\nFrom a technical point of view, MMTK did enable convivial biomolecular simulation. I have been in contact with various researchers, mostly PhD students, who implemented new simulation methods on top of MMTK and shared their work as add-on Python modules. However, I also found out that the majority of researchers in my field didn't care about conviviality at all. The power gradient between the big groups that developed the main software packages and the smaller groups of users was part of the research system, interwoven with apprenticeship relations, grant reviews, etc. Most researchers didn't choose a software package on its scientific or technical merits, but on the political merits of joining its user community. Among Illich's five threats to conviviality, I observed polarization and radical monopoly. As an illustration of the latter, some PhD students who contacted me with questions about MMTK asked me not to talk to their supervisors about their use of MMTK, because \"for political reasons, I am supposed to use software X\".
\nAn individual or a small group cannot hope to address the social issues that encourage dominance structures over conviviality. Conviviality can only happen if a majority of a community adopts it as a value. What small groups of people can do, however, is develop and use convivial tools at their modest scale, to demonstrate that it is possible, and to provide a model that others can learn from if they want to. I was fortunate enough to have a stable position in French public research that allowed me to maintain this attitude in spite of its risk of reduced productivity. What I hadn't expected, however, because I didn't know about Illich's work yet, is the destruction of conviviality from the outside that followed.
\nThe history of the scientific Python ecosystem is an interesting case study for Illich's conviviality framework. He describes two watersheds that institutions and technologies pass through as they gain in importance:
\n\n\nAny industrialized institution will go through two watershed moments. At first, its progress provides clear and substantial benefits to society. But second, its overdevelopment begins to run counter to its original goal and in fact becomes destructive to society.
\n
Python for science reached the first watershed around 2000, only five years after the first release of Numerical Python. There was a solid foundation consisting of Python, Numerical Python, a few general-purpose utilities (plotting etc.), and domain-specific libraries for a few disciplines. Researchers could convivially develop and share Python scripts and modules, including if necessary so-called \"extension modules\" written in C or Fortran for performance.
\nFive years later, development shifted to NumPy, a new project aiming at a unification of Numerical Python and its offshoot numarray, which catered for different application domains with different priorities. One of NumPy's explicit goals was to encourage further growth of the user community, by making it more easier to learn for users of its main commercial competitor, Matlab. That was the point at which I started to feel uncomfortable with the ecosystem's direction. Numerical Python had a small and consistent API, inspired by APL. NumPy added an alternative API inspired by Matlab, and made breaking changes to the API inherited from Numerical Python. This meant imposing adaptation work and a higher cognitive load on existing users for the sole benefit of attracting new ones. Growth took priority over the qualities that make software convivial.
\nThe second watershed was reached between 2010 and 2015. Due to a combination of growing ecosystem complexity, growing corporate influence on development decisions (Google in particular became an important sponsor), and the rise of a breaking-change version of Python (Python 3), the scientific Python ecosystem flipped from a stable infrastructure for research projects to an unstable software layer whose frequent breaking changes required researchers to invest more and more time just to keep their code in a usable state. Conviviality was lost.
\nIn the following years, the Python developer community first encouraged and then increasingly forced authors of Python software to migrate to Python 3. In the FOSS spirit, Python 3 should have been considered a fork of Python 2, and both versions should have been allowed to coexist for as long as there were people willing to maintain them. But many people rightly recognized that this would have split the Python community into two competing factions. The bolsheviks, supporting Python 3, decided to kill Python 2 by various means, including highly questionable methods such as the Python 3 Wall of Shame, an online pillory listing projects that had not yet made the migration. This was possibly the most destructive event in the history of FOSS, and in particular a lot of domain-specific research software, the kind that only a handful of people would ever have heard about, was made unusable. Today, scientific Python is a typical industrial software product that happens to be free (as in beer). It is a good support for large corporate libraries such as PyTorch, but no longer a good choice for typical research teams that don't have the resources for dealing with high rates of tech churn (Illich's obsolescence). It is now more difficult to run a five-year-old Python script than a 40-year-old Fortran program, and even if it runs, it may not produce the same results as it did in the past.
\nMy own MMTK library became practically unusable with the demise of Python 2. Porting it to Python 3 would have been a major effort, and I wasn't motivated to do that work. It would have been difficult (e.g. check line by line for divisions whose semantics had changed) and laborious (the C extension modules, written for Python 1.4, would have to be rewritten from scratch). But most of all, it would have been only the first step into a treadmill of continuous software collapse and repair. Together with a handful of colleagues that depended on MMTK, I looked for funding to have someone else do a port to Python 3 and maintain it, without success. MMTK is now a museum piece. You can still run it via reproducibility infrastructure such as Guix, but it is no longer a reasonable basis for new research projects.
\nThe scientific Python ecosystem is the example I know best for progressive loss of conviviality, but the phenomenon is much more widespread. For another illustration, see the historical account of developer-user relations in computational chemistry by Wieber and Hocquet (preprint) that outlines how the conviviality of computational chemistry in the 1960s was lost as licenses, limited access to the source code, and ultimately the transition to software as a service increasingly restrained the agency of researchers.
\nAfter the end of my long and ultimately failed Python-for-conviviality experiment, I have been playing with a few other ideas for convivial computational science. One of them is Digital Scientific Notations. This is mostly a new label for what computer scientists call formal specification languages. Mostly but not quite: no existing formal specification language I know of would qualify as a Digital Scientific Notation, simply because existing languages were made for different application scenarios. And that's why I designed my own Digital Scientific Notation, called Leibniz, for my experiments.
\nThe basic idea is simple: the human-computer interface for many aspects of computational science should not be code, but specifications. The relation between specifications and the code that implements them is roughly the same as the relation between a set of mathematical equations and a function that solves them (see here for a longer explanation). Specifications are often simpler than their implementations, and in general more modular: you can just throw any two specifications together, assuming coherent notation, and you get a new specification (which may or may not be useful). Researchers discussing computational models would never have to leave the level of specifications, leaving the technicalities of implementation to specialists (software engineers) or to computers (if you think \"AI\" now, you are not wrong but there are also much older deterministic techniques to \"solve\" specifications, such as the Bird-Meertens formalism). Leibniz is designed to resemble mathematical notation more than programming languages, hoping that people will feel more familiar with it. But I am not yet at the point of having done real computational science in Leibniz. For now, all I have is implementations of toy problems.
\nMy second conviviality-related project is HyperDoc. It addresses the problem of scientific publishing in the digital era. The idea that data and code should be published along with an article is almost mainstream by now, but most people imagine three different entities (paper, code, data), published in different places and at best linked to each other. But in a convivial setting, code is written primarily for humans, not machines. It should be part of the paper, or part of what replaces the paper, and reviewed exactly like a paper (see here for details). Data should be explorable as well right from the discussion of the science it supports. Moreover, these papers on steroids should be composable: you want to re-use data and code of papers you cite, and allow the reader to navigate freely across citations. Putting all these requirements together leads to a hypermedia structure, where code becomes a medium alongside text, graphics, videos, etc. For a more detailed discussion of the foundations, see my Substrates 2026 paper, and for a direct experience, play with the demo server.
\nWhat remains to be done before I can envisage using my new toys for a real research project is integrating Leibniz into HyperDoc. Not difficult, but a bit laborious. Maybe I will profit from the quiet summer period to get started.
\nBack to the paper by Quinton and Stefani. It takes a much broader view of digital technology at the societal level, and discusses the relation of conviviality to degrowth. At the smaller scale of computational science, there is a similar relation: conviviality requires a limit to the scale of computations. Much of high-performance computing, for example, looks difficult or even impossible to make convivial. It requires optimizations, sometimes specific to one machine, that severely increase the code's opacity, and that is an obstacle to conviviality. The computational resources themselves are another obstacle, making it difficult to impossible for researchers to repeat, possibly with variations, the work of their peers. As Illich points out concerning industrial processes in general, this doesn't mean that we have to stop doing HPC, but we have to take into account non-conviviality as a problem that needs to be compensated by conviviality-restoring measures such as democratic governance. That holds even more for the rapidly growing use of extreme-scale machine learning techniques, usually referred to as \"AI\", which push polarization and obsolescence to another level, and which, if widely adopted, will establish a radical monopoly impacting not only scientific research, but all of our societies' knowledge management.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/3hg8z-5ha93","guid":"https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/07/06/conviviality.html","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783296000,"rid":"67q6p-2tw51","summary":"Convivial technology was defined by Ivan Illich in his 1973 book \"Tools for conviviality\" as technology that supports a convivial society, which is a society that strives to grant each of its members as much agency as is possible without infringing on other members' agency. Conviviality is thus about equality, about the absence of dominance relations.","title":"Conviviality in computational science","updated_at":1783346143,"url":"https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/07/06/conviviality.html","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"Adapt Research"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"bfd37b46-cbce-4a47-9a9d-fdc1d9c8b8d2","created":1753833600,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"As we build our world we build our minds","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/bfd37b46-cbce-4a47-9a9d-fdc1d9c8b8d2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://adaptresearchwriting.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress.com","home_page_url":"https://adaptresearchwriting.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"adaptresearchwriting","status":"active","subfield":"2306","title":"Adapt Research Ltd","updated":1783341914,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Adapt Research Ltd","blog_slug":"adaptresearchwriting","content_html":"A practical follow-up to the \"Reality of Everything\" Symposium and other recent discussions of humanity's predicament
\nTLDR/Summary
\nA superb diagnosis, with the terms left undefined
\nGatherings like the Reality of Everything Symposium are strong on diagnosis: speaker after speaker showed, compellingly, that human society is in overshoot, that planetary boundaries are being breached, and that our crises are interlocking rather than separate.
\nWhat such events seldom do is define the words carrying the argument. Global catastrophic risk, systemic risk, polycrisis and metacrisis sometimes get used almost interchangeably, partly blurring into an anxious hum.
\nThat blurring matters, because it is difficult to prioritise within, or act upstream of, a problem space you cannot name.
\nThis blog is a short field guide, organised as a chain of four questions, each reaching a little deeper than the last.
\nFirst question: what could go badly wrong? (Global catastrophic risk)
\nStart with the hazards themselves. Global catastrophic risk (GCR) is the study of events and processes large enough to overwhelm civilisation's capacity to cope: nuclear war, engineered pandemics, extreme outcomes from artificial intelligence, famine-creating volcanic eruptions, and runaway climate change.
\nThese risks are sometimes defined as those that would put the lives of 10% of humanity at risk, up to and including human extinction. The field's contribution is a long horizon and a willingness to take seriously events that are unlikely in any given year but so consequential their expected harm can dwarf that of familiar disasters, a blind spot the UN's own 2025 Global Assessment Report and Pact for the Future now concede.
\nFor readers who arrived through climate, this is the first and most useful reframing: climate change is not a category of its own, apart from \"other\" risks, but one member of the GCR family. Treating it as one thread among several, rather than the whole cloth, is what lets the rest of the picture come into focus (we develop this widening of the lens here in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand).
\nSecond question: how do failures spread? (Systemic risk)
\nKnowing which hazards could be catastrophic is not the same as understanding how a shock propagates. That is the work of global systemic risk, and it involves a genuine shift in perspective: instead of seeing the global system as an innocent bystander that receives hazards from outside (eg pandemics, storms, or volcanic eruptions), systemic-risk thinking treats the system itself as a generator of them.
\nLiu and Renn distil the hallmarks: densely connected feedback networks, in which effects loop back to change their own causes; strong nonlinearity, so a small nudge can trigger a disproportionate response once a tipping point is crossed; causation that jumps across sectoral and national borders; and deep uncertainty, because the system's behaviour cannot be read off from any single part.
\nA useful mental image, repurposed from Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam, is a hundred ladders leaning against a wall. Tie them together for \"efficiency\" and each ladder becomes steadier on its own, less likely to fall. But if one does fall, it now drags all the others down with it. That is tight coupling: the very connections that make a system efficient in calm times make it fragile in a crisis. The 2011 T\u014dhoku earthquake rippling through just-in-time supply chains, and the 2021 Suez Canal blockage halting roughly a tenth of world trade from a single stuck ship, are textbook cases of triggers tipping stressed systems into crisis.
\nTwo refinements are worth carrying forward. The Cascade Institute's stress\u2013trigger-crisis model separates the slow-moving stresses that quietly erode a system's resilience (over-connection, homogenisation, concentration) from the fast-moving triggers that finally tip it over. And Arnscheidt and colleagues name risk-creating actors, those who extract a local advantage while loading cost onto the whole system, as a primary driver of global vulnerability. We return to this idea below.
\nThird question: how do crises compound? (Polycrisis)
\nSystemic risk explains how one system tips over. Polycrisis describes what happens when several do so at once and turn out to be wired together. Lawrence and colleagues give the field its working definition, the causal entanglement of crises across global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity's prospects, and specify how that entanglement happens, through three pathways.
\nThe first is common stresses: a single underlying pressure, climate change being the obvious one, simultaneously weakens food, water, migration and security systems, so separate crises flare up together not by coincidence but from a shared root. The second is domino effects: a crisis in one system directly triggers one in another, as when a regional conflict becomes an energy shock, which becomes a food-price shock, which becomes political instability somewhere else entirely. The third, and most insidious, is inter-systemic feedback: two crises reach back and worsen each other in a loop, each making the other harder to resolve.
\nRun those pathways together and you get the defining feature of a polycrisis, the whole is genuinely worse than the sum of its parts, precisely because the parts are no longer independent. The years 2020\u20132023, when a pandemic, a European war, and energy, food and inflation shocks all fed into one another, are the case study everyone now reaches for.
\nLiu and Renn clarify the complementarity: systemic risk research specifies the conditions under which cascading failure becomes possible, polycrisis research tracks the cascades once entangled, and neither yet explains why governance consistently fails to adapt.
\nSomewhat soberingly, the most comprehensive systematic review of polycrisis to date catalogues the component crises and their drivers, then characterises many of those drivers as asserted rather than analysed. The field has mapped the entanglement in impressive detail but cannot yet say why it keeps happening, or why most of these crises, flagged as far back as the 1970s (eg Club of Rome report), remain unresolved. Which brings us to the deepest question.
\nFourth question: why do we keep generating a fragile world? (From what to why)
\nThere is a pattern. Each of the first three questions excels at describing what is happening and how it unfolds; none quite explains why humanity keeps generating the conditions behind catastrophic, systemic and polycrisis risk in the first place.
\nBiology offers a precise way to name the gap. Ernst Mayr distinguished proximate causes, the immediate mechanism, as in \"the bird migrates because shortening days trigger a hormonal response\", from ultimate causes, ie the evolutionary reason the mechanism exists at all. Crucially, these are not two links in one chain but two answers to different questions about the same behaviour: how it works, and why it was selected for.
\nAlmost everything governments fund, and almost everything discussed at events like Reality of Everything, acts on our behaviours and their fallout. Cut emissions, reduce consumption, diversify trade, stockpile fuel, plan for the next storm. This work is necessary. But it operates on the expression of humanity's drives and their downstream consequences while leaving the ultimate question untouched: why do humans reliably develop the appetites for growth, status and accumulation whose collective expression produces these risks?
\nSuppress one proximate expression and the underlying disposition, its evolutionary rationale and sustaining forces still intact, tends to resurface through another. That is why symptom-by-symptom effort keeps falling behind: we are managing the outputs of drives whose reason for being we have not addressed.
\nThe fields already working at the ultimate level are behavioural and evolutionary sciences. The same two questions extend beyond genes. Institutions and norms are culturally transmitted traits with their own proximate mechanisms, meaning how they operate today, and their own ultimate explanations, meaning why competition between groups selected and spread them. That dual structure is what earns \"institutional\" its place alongside the evolutionary drivers. These fields trace some of today's crises to a \"human behavioural crisis\", a suite of drives toward growth, status and consumption that were once adaptive and are now exploited at planetary scale.
\nReach further back and the pattern is evolutionary. Competition between human groups, cultural niche construction, and technological evolution have ratcheted us toward ever-greater scale and environmental control, while rewarding strategies that pay off locally even when ruinous globally, the \"risk-creating actors\" of the systemic-risk literature, now seen from below. This is the multipolar trap, in which each player, acting rationally in its own interest, helps produce an outcome nobody wants.
\nSo what, precisely, is the Metacrisis?
\nHere the vocabulary finally separates cleanly. A crisis is a single system in trouble. A polycrisis is many crises causally entangled, worse than the sum of their parts. The metacrisis is the layer beyond both: the ultimate, upstream drivers, behavioural, institutional and evolutionary, that keep generating and re-generating the whole mess.
\nI think this can be tightened one step further. Rather than a vague gesture at \"everything, but deeper,\" the metacrisis can be defined as the degradation of the conditions that allow risk-reducing solutions to accumulate and persist, a crisis not of any particular risk but of humanity's capacity to adapt to large-scale risk at all.
\nIn evolutionary language that capacity is called evolvability, and when its supporting conditions erode together, good solutions stop compounding and governance fails consistently across otherwise unrelated domains. Where the more familiar framing locates the metacrisis in a crisis of collective sense-making, of how we perceive and make meaning, this one locates it a step wider, in the adaptive machinery that would let good solutions take hold and accumulate at all; sense-making is then one input to that capacity rather than the whole of it.
\nI flag this lens for completeness; it is deliberately provocative and, for now, a theoretical framework rather than the settled account, developed in current work and presented in nascent form at recent risk-science conferences. Watch this space for my imminent pre-print research paper.
\nWhy this matters, especially if you came via climate concern
\nIf you arrived at the 'Reality of Everything' and global risk through climate change, the upshot is liberating rather than deflating. Climate change (CO2/radiative forcing) is one of nine planetary boundaries, and the climate crisis is one expression of a larger predicament driven by common upstream forces.
\nSeeing the through-line, hazards, stresses, how they spread, how they compound, and why we keep making them, lets you do two things at once: keep pushing on the proximate work that is urgent and real, while recognising where climate action connects to other risk like pandemic preparedness, trade and supply-chain resilience, and the health of the institutions on which all risk mitigation depends.
\nNaming the space is the difference between fighting symptoms one at a time and acting on the mechanisms that produce them. That is the conversation we hope events like Reality of Everything can grow into next, and it is one this small field guide is meant to kick start.
\nThanks again to the Symposium organisers and participants.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/8k5zp-bjb60","guid":"http://adaptresearchwriting.com/?p=7711","image":"https://adaptresearchwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/markus-winkler-trcafmv5vk-unsplash.jpg?w=1024","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783296000,"rid":"qt9mj-ckk71","summary":"A practical follow-up to the \"Reality of Everything\" Symposium and other recent discussions of humanity's predicament TLDR/Summary A superb diagnosis, with the terms left undefined Gatherings like the Reality of Everything Symposium are strong on diagnosis: speaker after speaker showed, compellingly, that human society is in overshoot, that planetary boundaries are being breached, and that \u2026 Continue reading \"Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Systemic","title":"Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Systemic Risk: A Definitional Field Guide to the Reality of Everything","updated_at":1783346052,"url":"https://adaptresearchwriting.com/2026/07/06/polycrisis-metacrisis-systemic-risk-a-definitional-field-guide-to-the-reality-of-everything/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Southan","given":"Christopher"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"236b0edf-87bd-4d58-aacc-91b920daf466","created":1760313600,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Technical notes from the interface between bioinformatics and cheminformatics by Chris Southan","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/236b0edf-87bd-4d58-aacc-91b920daf466/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://cdsouthan.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default","filter":null,"generator":"Blogger","home_page_url":"https://cdsouthan.blogspot.com/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"cdsouthan","status":"active","subfield":"1312","title":"Bio <-> Chem","updated":1783338030,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Bio <-> Chem","blog_slug":"cdsouthan","content_html":"\u00a0
The London Climate Week launch on 21 June 2026 of a new call from global partners turned three years of listening to community-based health workers into money on the table. What the room did not decide is whether the money will reach them the same way the listening did.
\n\n\n\nWhen the rains close the roads around Fada, in eastern Burkina Faso, a woman in labour cannot reach a clinic, and the clinic cannot reach her.
\n\n\n\nSo the community stopped waiting for the roads.
\n\n\n\n\"Some roads are impassable during the winter months, making healthcare inaccessible,\" the midwife Maiga Nana Jacqueline recounted.
\n\n\n\n\"To remedy this, village midwives from these communities have been trained to assist in childbirth. Hygienic deliveries are taking place without complications.\"
\n\n\n\nNo ministry programme.
\n\n\n\nNo donor grant.
\n\n\n\nA community deciding that childbirth would no longer depend on a passable road, and training its own midwives to make sure of it.
\n\n\n\nMaiga did not tell that story in London.
\n\n\n\nShe told it, in her own words, somewhere else entirely, and where stories like hers get told turns out to decide whether it ever reaches a funder.
\n\n\n\nLearn more: How health workers are leading community responses to climate change impacts on health
\n\n\n\nThat is worth keeping in mind, because about around 80 people had gathered on the summer solstice in London to reckon with stories exactly like hers, inside a members' club called The Conduit, while the city sweltered through its second heat wave of the year.
\n\n\n\nThe occasion was the launch of the first funding opportunity from Nexa, a global climate and health innovation initiative led by Grand Challenges Canada and the Science for Africa Foundation, together with a global consortium of partners.
\n\n\n\nAmbassadors, ministers, scientists, and funders filled the room.
\n\n\n\nDrinks waited on a rooftop five floors up.
\n\n\n\nThey had come to shorten the distance between the trained midwives of Fada and funders gathered in a London club, before the next rainy season cut another community off.
\n\n\n\nThe useful thing to know about that distance is that it has already been crossed once, by a network most of the room had never heard of.
\n\n\n\nThe question the evening left open is whether Nexa's global leaders will use that network, or build past it.
\n\n\n\nThe proof that the distance can be closed was already in the room, in the form of a survey.
\n\n\n\nWhen Grand Challenges Canada, the Science for Africa Foundation, and The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) announced the Global Climate and Health Survey in The Lancet Global Health in January 2025, they made a specific promise: to reach the people closest to the crisis and to centre local voices, using participatory research rather than a questionnaire pushed out from headquarters.
\n\n\n\nThe survey went on to become one of the largest of its kind, reaching over 6,400 respondents.
\n\n\n\nIts scale is not the interesting part.
\n\n\n\nWhether that promise held, and how, is.
\n\n\n\nTGLF built and piloted the survey, then spent three months in dialogue with its Teach to Reach community before collecting a single response, and kept that dialogue going for four months into 2025.
\n\n\n\nThat patience was built on nearly a decade of prior work convening frontline health workers.
\n\n\n\nLearn more: A short history of the first five years of Teach to Reach
\n\n\n\nWhat happened next explains where the promise held.
\n\n\n\nThe Foundation issued a call through Teach to Reach.
\n\n\n\nAlongside the 24,610 participants, 107 locally-led organizations across 28 countries committed to supporting the survey.
\n\n\n\nThis diverse group spanned organizations from local government health clinics and community groups to faith-based clinics and a midwives' union.
\n\n\n\nTogether, they reach more than 15 million people.
\n\n\n\nNearly half are government organizations, embedded in national health systems.
\n\n\n\nThey ran the mobilization on the ground, from the provincial health division of Haut-Katanga in the DRC to the Oyo State Primary Health Care Board in Nigeria.
\n\n\n\nThe bottom line?
\n\n\n\nMore than 60% of every response collected came in through the Teach to Reach network, carried by those organizations and by the individual health workers the network had spent years connecting to one another.
\n\n\n\nThe volume matters less than what it was made of.
\n\n\n\nStrip Teach to Reach out and the survey does not just shrink, it loses the very people it set out to reach.
\n\n\n\nWhat would have remained is the familiar pattern: a survey about vulnerable communities, answered mostly by people at a distance from them.
\n\n\n\nThe network inverted that, so the people inside those communities ran the survey rather than being studied by it.
\n\n\n\nThat is the finding underneath the finding, and the one Nexa should weigh most heavily.
\n\n\n\nThe route from a flood to a funder already exists, and the network that carried the survey is what keeps it open.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe survey's own results are still being analyzed.
\n\n\n\nBut the same participatory method has already produced a published body of evidence, drawn not from the survey but from the accounts of over 1000 health workers across at least 60 countries gathered through the same Teach to Reach process, with eight take-aways and fourteen recommendations that follow from them.
\n\n\n\nIt is worth reading closely by everyone who was in the London room, because it describes, in the workers' own words, how a coalition like Nexa could find new, fruitful ways to connect with local actors.
\n\n\n\nTeach to Reach is where Maiga Nana Jacqueline from Fada District, Burkina Faso, told her story.
\n\n\n\nIt is where these accounts are gathered, from health workers writing in from their own clinics and districts, and it is why the distinction matters.
\n\n\n\nA story told from a London stage reaches the people in the room.
\n\n\n\nA story told through Teach to Reach reaches a published report, a set of recommendations addressed to funders, and thousands of peers facing the same rains, and it does so without the worker ever having to leave her post.
\n\n\n\nThat same process does something Nexa says it wants to do.
\n\n\n\nIt carries the voices behind the data upward, from a clinic in Kinshasa to a report a funder can read, and back down again as something the community can use.
\n\n\n\nNone of the contributors quoted here were in the London room, yet through Teach to Reach they were present in it.
\n\n\n\nWhat ran through their accounts was initiative, not helplessness, and much of it was organized by women.
\n\n\n\nIn Doba, in southern Chad, the public health technician Naingar Service described who was holding the line on children's health: \"It is above all the women who have adopted a responsible attitude to children's health. They organise themselves into groups to contribute money for any health problems affecting their families.\"
\n\n\n\nThese are savings groups doing the work of health insurance, in a place where formal insurance does not reach.
\n\n\n\n\"With no funding, no guidance, just an initiative to use local means, there is a will,\" said Nathan Binene Kayeye of the DRC.
\n\n\n\nIn Cameroon, the community facilitator Rameaux Nkollo described a method: \"Once solutions come in and we work inclusively, all together, each with a small idea, we move forward better.\"
\n\n\n\nThe stories, findings, and recommendations in this article do not come from the Global Climate and Health Survey. Those results, quantitative and qualitative, are still being analyzed and will appear in a forthcoming report.
\n\n\n\nThey come from an earlier and separate body of work: Teach to Reach 11: Local action to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis on health, the twentieth Listening and Learning Report from The Geneva Learning Foundation, released in May 2026.
\n\n\n\nThat report is itself the product of a participatory process, not a survey.
\n\n\n\nFrontline workers shared written accounts before, during, and after Teach to Reach 11, a global peer learning event held in December 2024, answering plain questions.
\n\n\n\nWhat happened?
\n\n\n\nWhat did you do?
\n\n\n\nHow did you know it worked?
\n\n\n\nDid the community help?
\n\n\n\nFrom the 24,610 health workers registered across more than 70 countries, 100 detailed accounts spanning at least 19 countries were selected for publication.
\n\n\n\nThe report was written first to give the findings back to the workers who produced them, and second so that national and global actors learn to see the value of what frontline workers know.
\n\n\n\nTwo companion articles distil it: eight take-aways from the accounts, and fourteen recommendations drawn from them.
\n\n\n\nIf the survey proved the route existed, the panel that followed named the way it could be lost.
\n\n\n\nModerated by Doris Wangari, it seated Dr Devotha Nyambo of the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology in Tanzania, Dr Claude Pirmez of Fiocruz in Brazil, and Reda Sadki of The Geneva Learning Foundation.
\n\n\n\nReda Sadki set the promise and the trap side by side.
\n\n\n\nThe survey had surfaced not dozens but hundreds of local solutions, most of them financed by communities themselves.
\n\n\n\n\"What could be more sustainable than local actors not asking government for assistance, not asking international donors?\" he asked, and then turned the question over.
\n\n\n\nSelf-reliance that no one matches becomes a cost the poorest absorb alone.
\n\n\n\nInvest in better policy and better science without \"a commensurate investment in communities and in local action,\" he warned, and \"5, 10, or 15 years down the line, communities are going to reject both.\"
\n\n\n\nThe warning read as a design brief.
\n\n\n\nFund the science and skip the network that produced the evidence, and the coalition widens the very distance it came to close.
\n\n\n\nLearn more: Reda Sadki's remarks at the Nexa funding announcement in support of local community responses
\n\n\n\nDr Nyambo brought the same conviction from data, describing a community-rooted early-warning system for outbreaks in Tanzania.
\n\n\n\nDr Pirmez brought three decades of research at Fiocruz.
\n\n\n\nWangari closed by naming where the panel had arrived.
\n\n\n\n\"Local knowledge is not simply complementary. It's essential. We have to understand it and integrate it.\"
\n\n\n\nThe politicians in the room argued for speed.
\n\n\n\nMete Coban, Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy, said he had come to the work not as an environmentalist but from \"a very deprived community,\" where \"half a million people will never ever be able to breathe the full capacity of their lungs because of a crisis that they didn't cause in the first place.\"
\n\n\n\nHe offered Nelson Mandela's line, \"it always seems impossible until it's done,\" with proof: experts once told London it would take 193 years to meet legal air-quality limits, a target the city hit in nine.
\n\n\n\nProximity was his whole argument.
\n\n\n\nCities are \"cutting carbon emissions five times faster than the national average,\" he said, \"because we know our residents much closer in a way that governments don't.\"
\n\n\n\nThen the night's most unscripted moment.
\n\n\n\nH.E. Shimane Lawrence Kelaotswe, High Commissioner of Botswana, rose to speak although \"I was not supposed to say anything.\"
\n\n\n\nTurning to the London heat wave everyone had spent the evening complaining about, he reset the scale.
\n\n\n\n\"You call it a heat wave. In Botswana we're talking about 45 or 49 degrees Celsius.\"
\n\n\n\nNow sixty years old, he recalled seeing winter rain in his country for the first time only in 1990.
\n\n\n\n\"We thought maybe we were coming to the end of the world.\"
\n\n\n\nHis warning doubled as the coalition's mandate.
\n\n\n\n\"Right now, if you don't involve the communities, we're going to get a shock of our life.\"
\n\n\n\nHere the evening turned from diagnosis to commitment.
\n\n\n\nDr Karlee Silver, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, framed Nexa as an invitation that \"gives action-oriented organizations a trusted, proven network of regional leaders to help direct their resources effectively,\" which is, she said, \"how we move the needle on the climate crisis, by connecting the global and the local, and meeting our most urgent needs.\"
\n\n\n\nThe commitment was funded, not hypothetical.
\n\n\n\nFive African governments, South Africa, Senegal, Malawi, Rwanda, and Botswana, had committed roughly \\$2 million between them, with Grand Challenges Canada and partners pledging to match it.
\n\n\n\nThey had joined, Dr Tom Kariuki of the Science for Africa Foundation stressed, \"not in the middle when things have already rolled out, but at the very beginning.\"
\n\n\n\nOn the partner panel, Dr Daouda Diouf of the Sanofi Foundation and the High Commissioners of Malawi and Rwanda returned to one theme: trust built over years, not over grant cycles, is what decides whether resources ever reach a village.
\n\n\n\nA video message from Hillary Rodham Clinton (whose organization is amongst the funders) and closing remarks from Prof Shaukat Abdulrazak, Kenya's Principal Secretary for Science, Research and Innovation, pressed the same point.
\n\n\n\nThe science exists.
\n\n\n\nThe task now is to act on what workers closes to the communities already know.
\n\n\n\nWhat should give that money its direction could be grounded in recommendations that frontline workers' own accounts produced, addressed by name to global partners like the ones in the room.
\n\n\n\nThey are specific. Three examples:
\n\n\n\nThese recommendations carry a weight that a strategy document cannot.
\n\n\n\nThey are not the preferences of an intermediary.
\n\n\n\nThey come from the communities Nexa's partners say they intend to serve, which makes them less a critique than a set of instructions the coalition asked for.
\n\n\n\nWith its call for proposals only now launching, Nexa can still decide to follow them.
\n\n\n\nAnyone who wants to test them against the source can now put questions directly to the underlying evidence, through a chat interface built on three years of frontline accounts.
\n\n\n\nLearn more: Climate change and health: 14 recommendations for health workers, national planners, and global partners
\n\n\n\nThe survey settled one question.
\n\n\n\nA participatory approach reaches the most vulnerable communities as leaders rather than subjects, and it does so because the design and the mobilization were built with the Teach to Reach network over years, not weeks.
\n\n\n\nThat network is the asset Nexa inherits, whether or not it decides to use it.
\n\n\n\nThe open question is whether the next step will be built the same way, and the workers have already described what that would take.
\n\n\n\nFunding that reaches community-led action \"in weeks.\"
\n\n\n\nWorker protection written into \"every emergency response grant.\"
\n\n\n\nCommunity financial mechanisms, the women's solidarity funds, the savings groups, recognized \"as health system infrastructure\" instead of being bypassed by cash programmes designed in capital cities.
\n\n\n\nA call for proposals can be run at arm's length, judged by reviewers who have never met the people they are funding.
\n\n\n\nOr it can carry the same logic that made the survey reach so deep.
\n\n\n\nThe individual leaders and organizations that carried the survey already know which local solutions work in their own districts, and which recommendations match conditions on the ground.
\n\n\n\nKept in place and resourced as a standing backbone, rather than disbanded once the data was in, they could do for the money what they did for the survey.
\n\n\n\nThey can find the frontline, vouch for what actually works, and carry a proposal written in a village to a decision made in a capital.
\n\n\n\nAs the Kenyan health worker Joseph Njoroge put it, \"community ownership and involvement in the whole process is quite important for the success of climate change interventions.\"
\n\n\n\nThe Guinean physician Issa Barry named the gap that a backbone closes. \"Communities are always ready. Often it is language that creates the gap. We speak in technical terms.\"
\n\n\n\nSomewhere in the Teach to Reach network are the village midwives of Fada, still delivering babies safely on the days the roads are gone.
\n\n\n\nBetween July 2023 and June 2026, The Geneva Learning Foundation's climate and health programme listened to health workers like them, and it did so by working with them rather than around them.
\n\n\n\nThat programme is a working prototype of the layer the global response has been missing, the connective tissue between commitments made in conference halls and the communities where those commitments either reach people or come to nothing.
\n\n\n\nWhether it becomes a permanent part of how the world responds depends on what a coalition like Nexa decides to fund.
\n\n\n\nOn the longest day of the year, in a London club, the money arrived.
\n\n\n\nThe remaining task is to spend it the way the listening was built.
\n\n\n\nSanchez JJ, Gitau E, Sadki R, Mbuh C, Silver K, and the Climate and Health Expert Panel. The climate crisis and human health: identifying grand challenges through participatory research. Lancet Glob Health 2025;13(2):e199-e200. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(25)00003-8
\n\n\n\nSadki R. Climate change and health: 14 recommendations for health workers, national planners, and global partners. The Geneva Learning Foundation; 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/hs8am-cn216
\n\n\n\nSadki R. Climate change and health: 8 take-aways from community-based responses. The Geneva Learning Foundation; 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/fxxec-dxj41
\n\n\n\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation. Lessons in resilience: what health workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America know and do in response to worsening climate change impacts on their communities. 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/bc869-5z763
\n\n\n\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation. New insights report: health workers are leading community responses to climate change impacts on health. The Geneva Learning Foundation; 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/v01fe-myj60
\n\n\n\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation. Talk to the evidence: a chat interface to explore what health workers know and do about climate change and health. 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/7gdaj-f8588
\n\n\n\nJones I, Njua Mbuh C, Steed I, Sadki R. Teach to Reach 11: Local action to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis on health. Listening and Learning report 20. Geneva: The Geneva Learning Foundation; 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18246203
\n\n\n\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation. What you can do if climate change is harming your community's health: a practical guide to the Certificate peer learning programme for leadership in climate change and health. 2026. https://doi.org/10.59350/c05zy-caf92
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/yamtp-9dw88","guid":"https://redasadki.me/?p=24043","image":"https://redasadki.me/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/nexa_flood_to_funder.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783209600,"rid":"kz2kk-er764","summary":"The London Climate Week launch on 21 June 2026 of a new call from global partners turned three years of listening to community-based health workers into money on the table. What the room did not decide is whether the money will reach them the same way the listening did.","tags":["The Geneva Learning Foundation","Climate And Health","Climate Change","Frontline Health Workers","Grand Challenges"],"title":"Climate change and health: from flood to funder","updated_at":1783335903,"url":"https://redasadki.me/2026/07/05/climate-change-and-health-from-flood-to-funder-and-from-rhetoric-to-action/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"The Geneva Learning Foundation"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"7e26491f-41c6-4665-9088-5aa6643a1ba8","created":1731196800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Learning to make a difference","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/7e26491f-41c6-4665-9088-5aa6643a1ba8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://redasadki.me/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://redasadki.me/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"redasadki","status":"active","subfield":"3304","title":"Reda Sadki","updated":1783331789,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Reda Sadki","blog_slug":"redasadki","content_html":"Climate change is harming the health of the communities you serve.
\n\n\n\nNexa is a new funding programme that aims to invest money in local solutions to that harm.
\n\n\n\nThis guide helps you decide, quickly, whether to apply, what Nexa wants to fund, and how the process works.
\n\n\n\nIt is written for a community-based leader who is short on time.
\n\n\n\nThe deadline is soon. All applications must be submitted through the Fluxx portal by 22 July 2026, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (6:00 p.m. UTC).
\n\n\n\nRead this guide, then go straight to the official documents.
\n\n\n\nLearn more:
\n\n\n\nNexa is a climate and health initiative co-led by Grand Challenges Canada and the Science for Africa Foundation, working with a group of global partners and funders.
\n\n\n\nIt aims to mobilise more than 50 million U.S. dollars to support locally led solutions in low- and middle-income countries.
\n\n\n\nNexa was shaped by the largest climate and health survey ever done, which gathered the voices of 6,400 health and humanitarian workers.
\n\n\n\nThe Teach to Reach network contributed over 60% of the responses to this survey, with over 100 locally-led organizations becoming survey partners reaching 15 million people in the most climate-vulnerable parts of the world.
\n\n\n\nIn other words, the programme was designed around what frontline workers, perhaps including you, already reported.
\n\n\n\nIts leaders are clear about why this matters.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\"Those closest to these challenges are often closest to the solutions. Nexa demonstrates what is possible when African priorities, local innovation, and global collaboration come together around a shared goal.\" \u2013 Dr Tom Kariuki, CEO, Science for Africa Foundation
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"Nexa is about supporting bold, locally led innovation to transform how people stay healthy in the face of climate change.\" \u2013 Dr Karlee Silver, CEO, Grand Challenges Canada
\n
Your application is more than a request for money.
\n\n\n\nIt is a chance to put what you know, and what your community has already built, in front of the people who fund global health.
\n\n\n\nEvery strong, community-rooted application also strengthens the case that local solutions deserve investment, which helps every leader who applies after you.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\"We found not dozens but hundreds of local solutions, self-funded by the communities themselves. There needs to be a commensurate investment in local action.\" \u2013 Reda Sadki, The Geneva Learning Foundation
\n
You do not have to build your idea alone.
\n\n\n\nThrough Teach to Reach, you can meet peers who face the same climate and health challenges, and learn from what they have tried.
\n\n\n\nBefore you spend time on an application, check three things.
\n\n\n\nIf you cannot meet all three, this call is not the right fit for you today.
\n\n\n\nTip: if you can name the community you serve, show that your team is rooted there, and point to the country on the eligible list, you have passed this step.
\n\n\n\nNexa does not fund every good idea.
\n\n\n\nIt funds one specific thing: a solution that helps local health actors turn climate warning signals into fast health action.
\n\n\n\nThe health problem you address must be caused, or made much worse, by climate change.
\n\n\n\nNexa focuses on three climate hazards:
\n\n\n\nYour project must fit at least one of these two areas of focus:
\n\n\n\nThe people Nexa most wants to protect are pregnant women, children, older people, and those living with certain long-term illnesses (heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease, and chronic kidney disease). Your project should aim to improve their health access or outcomes.
\n\n\n\nAsk yourself one question. \"Would my solution still be needed if climate change stopped?\" If the honest answer is no, your idea is a strong fit, because climate is at its core.
\n\n\n\nThere are two tracks.
\n\n\n\nChoose the one that matches how far along your idea already is.
\n\n\n\nThis is your choice to make, based on your own honest reading of your work.
\n\n\n\nIf you do not yet have evidence that your idea works, choose Proof of Concept.
\n\n\n\nApplying to Transition to Scale without proof is strongly discouraged, because it will not be considered.
\n\n\n\nYou apply online, through one portal only.
\n\n\n\nThe review panel looks for four things \u2013 a bold innovation, real potential for impact, a workable plan, and a team with a genuine connection to the community. Read your draft as if you were the reviewer, and make sure each one is easy to find.
\n\n\n\nGive yourself time, because you cannot edit after you submit.
\n\n\n\nFeatured image: Screen shot of the Nexa launch video, 21 June 2026.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/a64wv-rzc23","guid":"https://redasadki.me/?p=24082","image":"https://redasadki.me/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/nexa-communities-featured.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783296000,"rid":"8za18-dsr76","summary":"Climate change is harming the health of the communities you serve. Nexa is a new funding programme that aims to invest money in local solutions to that harm. This guide helps you decide, quickly, whether to apply, what Nexa wants to fund, and how the process works.","tags":["The Geneva Learning Foundation","Africa","Climate And Health","Climate Change","Community Health"],"title":"Climate change and health: how to apply for Nexa's funding","updated_at":1783327996,"url":"https://redasadki.me/2026/07/06/climate-change-and-health-how-to-apply-for-nexas-funding/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Rutz","given":"Adriano","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0443-9902"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Adriano Rutz","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0443-9902"}],"community_id":"9d85a476-b411-4d80-89d5-500bb0f3750d","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Personal website of Adriano Rutz","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/9d85a476-b411-4d80-89d5-500bb0f3750d/logo","feed_format":"application/feed+json","feed_url":"https://adafede.github.io/posts.json","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://adafede.github.io","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":null,"slug":"adafede","status":"active","subfield":"1312","title":"Adriano Rutz","updated":1783280271,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Adriano Rutz","blog_slug":"adafede","content_html":"I have finally opened a Posts section on my website! Every post should now automatically get a DOI.
This is something I have wanted to do for a long time, largely inspired by the tireless and consistent example set by Egon Willighagen (Willighagen 2024b, 2024a, 2025).
\nIt was today's post of (Fenner 2025) that finally motivated me to look into it again. That led me down a productive rabbit hole to set up Rogue Scholar: first landing on (Csefalvay 2023)'s excellent guide, and then (Fruehwald 2025)'s clear write-up, both of which made the process of integrating Rogue Scholar into a Quarto-based site surprisingly smooth.
\nAll the changes are documented in the following commit:
\nhttps://github.com/Adafede/adafede.github.io/commit/bc2dfe6f
\nIf you care about attribution, long-term archiving, DOIs and metadata, I highly recommend looking into Rogue Scholar.
\nEdit (1): I realized that integrating CiTO could be a significant enhancement. With some effort (and thanks again to Egon), I managed to implement a working solution for the HTML and PDF outputs, see (Willighagen 2023). However, the solution for the XML feed still feels suboptimal.
\nEdit (2): After some help from Egon and Martin, I could improve my feed with correct CiTO annotations and their cool custom json feed, see: https://adafede.github.io/posts.json!
\n@online{rutz2025,\n author = {{Adriano Rutz}},\n title = {Open {Science} {Upgrade:} {Adding} {Blog} {Posts} to My\n {Website} and {Linking} to {Rogue} {Scholar}},\n date = {2025-08-04},\n url = {https://adafede.github.io/posts/2025-08-04_rogue_scholar.html},\n doi = {10.59350/yckwd-9vm79},\n langid = {en}\n}\nThe Geneva Learning Foundation's Reda Sadki spoke on the expert panel at the launch of the Nexa funding announcement in London on 21 June 2026, in conversation with panelists Dr Devotha Nyambo of the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology in Tanzania, Dr Claude Pirmez of Fiocruz in Brazil. The panel was moderated by the Science for Africa Foundation's Doris Wangari.
\n\n\n\nDoris Wangari: Many global conversations about climate and health happen very far away from the communities that experience these impacts. Why is it important to reach out to local actors and amplify their voices?
\n\n\n\nThank you for the great question, and hello to everyone here.
\n\n\n\nAt The Geneva Learning Foundation, we believe it is critical to make that conjunction between local action and global actors.
\n\n\n\nThere is a big gap, and there is a risk of falling into that gap from both sides of the fence.
\n\n\n\nThere is a backstory to this survey.
\n\n\n\nIn 2023, we were working with the communities we nurture \u2013 a network of local actors across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with about 70% of the network in West and Central Africa.
\n\n\n\nWe kept hearing some pretty worrying things from them about the impacts of climate change on health.
\n\n\n\nSo we said: why don't we ask the community? 4,700 people showed up to that event in 2023.
\n\n\n\nThat is when we felt we had a responsibility to go further.
\n\n\n\nWe did the first part of our mission: to ask the community, to listen, and then to give back to the community what we had learned.
\n\n\n\nBut we realised that at a time when there was real mobilisation by global actors, with a lot of interest and goodwill from international partners, we were not going to be able to carry those voices alone, to elevate them where they needed to be heard.
\n\n\n\nThat is where we connected with Grand Challenges Canada and the network of innovators around it.
\n\n\n\nThat was three years ago.
\n\n\n\nWhat I am even more excited about now is the opportunity in front of us, and what we have learned about local action so far.
\n\n\n\nDoris Wangari: You've done several surveys. Why should people care about this one? Why should policymakers and funders care?
\n\n\n\nThere is a very significant learning in this survey, a very significant risk we should all consider, and a fascinating opportunity we should not miss.
\n\n\n\nThe learning first.
\n\n\n\nThere were three qualitative questions in the survey.
\n\n\n\nOne was very simple: do you have a lesson learned, a challenge, or a success story you would like to share?
\n\n\n\nIt was optional. People could skip it, because our focus was on barriers and threats.
\n\n\n\nAnd yet more than 2,400 respondents chose to take their time, on their own dime, with no compensation offered, to answer it.
\n\n\n\nWe have dug into that data and just published an insights report \u2013 what we call a listening and learning report.
\n\n\n\nWhat we found is fascinating, but also frightening.
\n\n\n\nIt is a real double-edged sword.
\n\n\n\nOn one side, we found not dozens but hundreds of local solutions and innovations being implemented by local actors, and usually self-funded by the communities themselves.
\n\n\n\nFor example, in response to the increasing frequency of floods, there are women who self-fund the transport to take other women who are about to give birth around the flooding to reach the clinic.
\n\n\n\nThat is just one example.
\n\n\n\nBecause of the scale we were able to reach with Grand Challenges, we now have hundreds of such documented examples.
\n\n\n\nBut here is the other edge.
\n\n\n\nWe all want sustainability.
\n\n\n\nAnd what could be more sustainable than local actors who are not asking government for assistance, not asking international donors?
\n\n\n\nThen, what is our responsibility, and what is our role in response to that?
\n\n\n\nThat brings me to the risk.
\n\n\n\nThis kind of self-organised action can only go so far.
\n\n\n\nThere has to be a match between the resources available and the actions that are actually working on the ground.
\n\n\n\nWe are seeing significant and very necessary investment in improving policy, in building the evidence base, in mapping the landscape of climate change and health.
\n\n\n\nBut if there is no commensurate investment in communities and in local action, we will end up with better policy and better science. And, 5, 10, or 15 years down the line, communities will reject both.
\n\n\n\nThat is the risk I believe we face.
\n\n\n\nAnd the opportunity is simply to figure out \u2013 maybe to invent \u2013 new ways of working together.
\n\n\n\nThere is an amazing group of people in this room who are constantly inventing, so this is the right group to take hold of this message.
\n\n\n\nFor that group of women in the DRC who are self-organising and self-funding a way for pregnant women to give birth safely. What is our role?
\n\n\n\nWhat is our responsibility?
\n\n\n\nWhat can we do, and how should we do it?
\n\n\n\nThat is the question before us.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/30wjb-w3d40","guid":"https://redasadki.me/?p=24039","image":"https://redasadki.me/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/nexa_remarks.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783209600,"rid":"ep0j2-4p159","summary":"The Geneva Learning Foundation's Reda Sadki spoke on the expert panel at the launch of the Nexa funding announcement in London on 21 June 2026, in conversation with panelists Dr Devotha Nyambo of the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology in Tanzania, Dr Claude Pirmez of Fiocruz in Brazil.","tags":["The Geneva Learning Foundation","Climate And Health","Climate Change","Global Climate Change And Health Survey","Grand Challenges"],"title":"Climate and health: Reda Sadki's remarks at the Nexa funding announcement in support of local community responses","updated_at":1783285189,"url":"https://redasadki.me/2026/07/05/climate-and-health-reda-sadkis-remarks-at-the-nexa-funding-announcement-in-support-of-local-community-responses/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"The Geneva Learning Foundation"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"7e26491f-41c6-4665-9088-5aa6643a1ba8","created":1731196800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Learning to make a difference","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/7e26491f-41c6-4665-9088-5aa6643a1ba8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://redasadki.me/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://redasadki.me/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"redasadki","status":"active","subfield":"3304","title":"Reda Sadki","updated":1783331789,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Reda Sadki","blog_slug":"redasadki","content_html":"On 21 June 2026, Grand Challenges Canada and Science for Africa Foundation convened a global consortium of partners to London. Together, they announced a new call to \"invest in bold, locally led solutions that help health systems anticipate and respond to climate-driven health threats\". Here are seven notable quotes we wrote down during the event.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\"It's a model that is locally led, locally and globally connected. Solutions are most effective when they are rooted in the realities and priorities of the people they intend to serve. For Africa, climate resilience and health resilience are now inseparable. Solutions are most effective when they are rooted in the realities and priorities of the people they intend to serve\u2026 Countries have made that commitment to join Nexa at the outset \u2013 not in the middle when things have already rolled out, but at the very beginning. They want to be part and parcel of this.\" \u2013 Dr Tom Kariuki, CEO, Science for Africa Foundation
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"You call it a heat wave. In Botswana we're talking about 45 or 49 degrees Celsius. Right now, if you don't involve the communities, we're going to get a shock of our life.\" \u2013 H.E. Shimane Lawrence Kelaotswe, High Commissioner of Botswana to the United Kingdom
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"We found not dozens but hundreds of local solutions, self-funded by the communities themselves. There needs to be a commensurate investment in local action. Otherwise, the risk is that we may find ourselves with better policy, better science\u2026\u00a0and 5, 10, or 15 years down the line, communities could reject both.\" \u2013 Reda Sadki, The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF)
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price.\" \u2013 Wangari Maathai, quoted by Dr Tom Kariuki, Science for Africa Foundation
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"Half a million people in London will never ever be able to breathe the full capacity of their lungs because of a crisis that they didn't cause in the first place. It always seems impossible until it's done. Cities are cutting carbon emissions five times faster than the national average, because we know our residents much closer in a way that governments don't.\" \u2013 Mete Coban MBE, Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy
\n
\n\n\n\n\n\"Local knowledge is not simply complementary. It's essential. We have to understand it and integrate it.\" \u2013 Doris Wangari, Africa Science Foundation, panel moderator
\n
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/1d1zz-wmk49","guid":"https://redasadki.me/?p=24041","image":"https://redasadki.me/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/nexa_best_quotes.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1783209600,"rid":"skbqe-35b03","summary":"On 21 June 2026, Grand Challenges Canada and Science for Africa Foundation convened a global consortium of partners to London. Together, they announced a new call to \"invest in bold, locally led solutions that help health systems anticipate and respond to climate-driven health threats\". Here are seven notable quotes we wrote down during the event.","tags":["The Geneva Learning Foundation","Climate And Health","Climate Change","Grand Challenges","Health Workers"],"title":"Climate and health: seven quotes from global leaders putting money on the table for local communities","updated_at":1783285186,"url":"https://redasadki.me/2026/07/05/climate-and-health-seven-quotes-from-global-leaders-putting-money-on-the-table-for-local-communities/","version":"v1"}],"out_of":50773,"page":1,"per_page":10,"total-results":50773}\"That's how we can move the needle on the climate crisis: by connecting the global and the local, and meeting our most urgent needs.\" \u2013 Dr Karlee Silver, CEO, Grand Challenges Canada
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