In the original Jurassic Park movie that premiered in 1993, park owner and founder John Hammond invited three experts to provide scientific legitimacy on the safety and security of Jurassic Park. Among the three experts were two paleontologists and a mathematician, or as Dr Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, liked to call himself — a “Chaos-tician”. Dr Malcolm specialised in “Chaos Theory”, which is essentially the study of how even seemingly simple, deterministic (where equations have been specified) systems can display unpredictable or complex behaviour, due to sensitivity to initial starting conditions.
In the Jurassic Park book, Dr Malcolm predicted through Chaos Theory that the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park will behave in “unpredictable fashion” and that Jurassic Park was “an accident waiting to happen”. In retrospect, the dinosaurs did not exactly behave in an unpredictable fashion. A tyrannosaurus rex devouring humans and other dinosaurs is not exactly unlikely behaviour. Furthermore, given that there were also velociraptors and dilophosauruses on the island, saying that Jurassic Park was “an accident waiting to happen” is not exactly a difficult prediction.
But in any case, the point on Chaos Theory still stands. Well-understood systems can quickly devolve into completely unpredictable situations based on small changes in their initial condition. It is precisely for this reason that even the most powerful computers cannot tell the weather for more than a few days in the future. Another example is of the three-body problem in physics, where despite knowing the initial positions and velocities of three objects that were being attracted by each other’s gravity, a formula to predict their future movements or orbits was essentially impossible and, thus, practically unsolvable. On a side note, there is an amazing science fiction trilogy called The Three-Body Trilogy, which is based on the three-body problem, which I highly recommend.
I think we need to really pay more attention to the implications of Chaos Theory, particularly given the weather patterns we are seeing globally. Apart from the heat waves that are currently across the globe, the global sea surface temperature anomaly — a measure of how much temperatures depart for what is normal for that time of year — has broken new records and we are not even yet in the middle of summer. The global average sea surface temperature is tracking higher above all prior years, even including the El Niño years of 1997 and 2015.
Beyond the point on global warming, which is evident, I think these heat conditions, viewed via the prism of Chaos Theory, are cause for serious alarm. As mentioned, we are already in unprecedented territory. But now, if we plug these unprecedented initial conditions into Chaos Theory, where weather patterns can fluctuate immensely, the logical inference is that we will see ever more variable and unpredictable weather conditions even in seemingly “stable” zones.
It is a matter of fact that we are under-prepared for the climate crisis at hand. But Chaos Theory and unprecedented initial conditions should make us realise that we do not even have a good understanding of exactly how under-prepared we are. More volatile weather conditions may mean, for instance, weirder flooding and storm patterns, more extreme forest fires (New York, welcome to Southeast Asian haze!), stranger fauna behaviour and more volatile airplane turbulence, among others.
That being said, in terms of what we need to do, we still know that, globally, we still need way more investments in both climate change mitigation and adaptation. Briefly, climate change mitigation means a reduction of carbon emissions in hopes of preventing further increases in global temperatures. Climate change adaptation, on the other hand, means figuring out how to survive in the event that we fail to prevent those increases. I would argue that we missed the boat for the former; we now really have to focus on the latter. This is not to say climate mitigation is not important; we still need to do all we can, but just as a form of climate policy, we really need to prepare for more volatile weather conditions.
But here’s the problem. Financing is still underwhelming. The Climate Policy Initiative estimates that a conservative amount of US$4.5 trillion (RM21 trillion) to US$5 trillion is required annually for climate finance. Let’s be real. It is extremely unlikely to happen, and even more so in developing countries that are less affluent in the first place and have other pressing issues such as poverty eradication, job creation and social protection for subsidy removals to handle simultaneously. But even within financing, climate mitigation is still receiving investments, primarily because it is more commercially feasible. Climate adaptation, on the other hand, is typically seen as the domain of state or public financing and this is where we hit a snag.
Globally, many governments just do not have the fiscal bullets necessary for climate adaptation. These may include projects such as early flood prevention warning systems, restoration of coastal and river systems and reinstatement of natural fire regimes to reduce the risk of severe wildfires, among others. These fall more in the domain of public goods; it is difficult to imagine private sector firms investing in these projects as there may not be any financial returns to achieve, at least not directly.
However, I do think that if we just slightly shift our perspectives on financing, we might just be able to come up with an alternative solution that can generate greater funding for such projects. The typical perspective on financing is that the private sector does mitigation and the state funds adaptation. It is a very siloed view. The reality is capital is capital and, yes, different types of entities — private and public — have different risk-return profiles and different mandates. Public-private partnership is not a new idea but even with such partnerships, I think there is still one more leg we can turn to.
Last month, the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) held its Global Conference 2023 in Kuala Lumpur, in partnership with the Hasanah Forum. As per their website, the AVPN Global Conference is the largest “social investing” convening in Asia that gathers funders and resource providers from across the world. One of the organisers mentioned to me that about 1,300 people from all around the world came for this event. (As a side note, it is wonderful that international conferences come to Malaysia just for whom they may attract; the same could be said of folks like Coldplay and Taylor Swift).
I attended the conference and was really struck by how passionate and well-intentioned these attendees were. The bulk of the attendees were providers of philanthropic capital, typically from corporate foundations, non-governmental Organisations or family offices. But philanthropic capital is also a form of capital, with a high-risk, low-to-no-returns profile. And this is the third leg that needs to partner with the private and public sectors — think of it as a public-private-philanthropic partnership — to “blend” their capital together to finance projects. This “blended finance” allows each entity to invest according to their risk-return mandates in social projects such as climate adaptation, which they may have not if they invested on their own.
Complex chaotic problems require us to break out of silos. And instead of the private sector, the public sector and philanthropies providing capital for projects of interest on their own, we need to see greater collaboration and “blending” of such finance to address complex challenges. The government alone, or the private sector alone, or philanthropies alone will not cut it. And just like the old Captain Planet cartoon, this climate crisis which, viewed from the lens of Chaos Theory, will likely become ever more volatile and unpredictable will need all our powers combined.