Alliance for Global Resilience and Regeneration (AGRR)

Organizational Overview

The Alliance for Global Resilience and Regeneration (AGRR) is organized as a complex adaptive consortium to play a role in assisting community and societal transformations toward health, human security, resilience and regeneration during the challenging decades of the 21st century. The AGRR consortium, as a multi-organizational enterprise, is modeled after and is evolving from the Epoch B Group in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Environmental Science and Policy Institute in the 1990s, the US National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII) consortium and the NHII R&D Advanced Technology Programs in the mid-1990s, the Race to Resilience in the first decade of the 21st century, and the Global Health Response and Resilience Alliance in the second decade of the 21st century. The AGRR human resource base is growing rapidly and is being composed of the equivalent of centuries of aggregated collective experience and talent focused on the future evolution of humanity living in harmony as part of and in balance with Earth’s planetary nature.

The Alliance’s 100&Change Initiative has been brought together by Health Initiatives Foundation, Inc. (a Washington, D.C. 501C3 non-profit), which was founded by Dr. C. Everett Koop (former U.S. Surgeon General), Lieutenant General Alexander Sloan (former Surgeon General of the US Air Force) and Dr. Michael D. McDonald (HIFI’s CEO). One aspect of the Alliance for Global Resilience and Regeneration is the AGRR 110&Change Initiative. The members of the AGRR 100&Change Consortium, include the HIFI AGRR team as the managing coordinator of the Alliance, the Common Earth program associated with the Commonwealth of Nations, Inhabit Earth, Clean-Start Eco-Economic Development PBC, Kalinago Institute for Global Resilience and Regeneration, Bacchus Global Consulting, and Heron Bridge Education, along with Eve Anderson Recruitment, Limited, and ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability acting as initial fiscal agents for various projects around the world.

Problem

Many of Planet Earth’s ecosystems, bioregions and human social ecologies are rapidly trending toward extreme vulnerability and collapse over the next three decades. It took all of hominid existence over millions of years to reach 1 billion homo sapiens sapiens on Earth around 1800. According to UN projections based upon current trends, 2 billion more humans will be living and drawing on Earth's natural resources and socioeconomic systems during the next three decades assuming no significant collapses. Unfortunately, world models are showing high probabilities of far more collapses in health and human security — beyond the extreme conditions already seen now in Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Haiti, Detroit, Charm City Baltimore, Puerto Rico, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Northeast Nigeria, DRC, Palestine and in the camps all over the planet of the tens of millions of homeless and stateless migrants.

Significant rapid transformation must be made in current political economies that are blindly driving exponential growth of human populations and mass consumption creating overwhelming (i.e., "wicked") challenges associated with overextending environmental, social, and economic carrying capacities around the world. The good news is that a major shift in consciousness and socio-ecological systems is taking place globally to regenerate balance in human settlements and their impacts around the globe. This emerging Regenerative Development movement understands the tenuousness and viability of our dwindling ecosystem services per capita and the amassing waste overflowing our environmental sinks (e.g., greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and plastics in our oceans) potentially leading to global catastrophic outcomes. Even our greatest aspirations for a continuation of the positive future evolution of our humanity are coming into question as some of our strongest democracies and other forms of good governance are coming under siege and are falling short of addressing compounding wicked problems and existential challenges.

Science and Technology Base

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Epoch B group of world leaders in science, governance, philanthropy, humanitarian affairs, and commerce convened by Jonas Salk (inventor of the polio vaccine, founder of the Salk Institute, and author of the UN publication World Population and Human Values) established study groups focused on the development of an anticipatory science base looking at world models and the future evolution of humanity transitioning toward living sustainably within the carrying capacities of Earth’s ecosystems and political economic systems. The Club of Rome, the field of climate science, UN bodies, the advancement of computing, communications, and machine intelligence, and other scientific endeavors related to complex adaptive systems and predictive analytics are coming to similar conclusions in many different parts of the world. Over the past two decades, a Resilience System initiative has emerged from almost four decades of data collection, modeling, and work on and within global intelligent networks associated with community and social pilots focused on the challenges to health and human security in the early to mid 21st century. Out of these scientific, technical, policy and humanitarian endeavors, testbeds of multi-generational resilient and sustainable complex adaptive systems are now emerging at the community, bioregion, and societal levels to provide hope of human communities and societies achieving resilience and regeneration during these times of massive transformation and existential challenges.

Global Resilience Systems

Resilience Systems, and their nested subsystems (extending from the global level down to the neighborhood Resilience Capacity Zones through Resilience Networks) are beginning to provide the essential agile intelligent infrastructures for communities and societies to monitor the status of their mission critical functions. Twenty-six mission critical functions are being monitored in high risk and vulnerable environments now in many places around the planet (e.g., New York, California, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Florida, Japan, Vietnam, Dominica, London, Gulf Coast, West Africa, The Bahamas, …). Resilience Systems now have nascent capacities to determine whether these human populations are trending toward extreme vulnerability and collapse or toward resilience and sustainability under the pressures of climate change and ecosystem destruction. Knowledge management systems with easy-to-understand frontend dashboards help participating communities and societies to anticipate, prevent and respond as complex adaptive systems to emerging crises and opportunities within Resilience Systems. When possible, predictive analytics and serious games are used to enable proactive engagements to reduce the probability of otherwise likely negative trends.

The Emergence of Blue Green Economy

These Resilience Systems are now being coupled with efforts to create model Blue Green political economies and trade networks that establish communities and societies that are climate resilient and regenerative in the face of climate change and catastrophic damage to ecosystems globally. Climate resilient and regenerative societies are engaged in drawing down their use of all activities associated with petroleum, petrochemicals, and nuclear risks, while also adopting new materials, infrastructures and economic practices that can achieve multi-generational resilience under the challenging conditions humanity will face during the rest of the 21st century, especially leading up to the mid-21st century. A model Blue Green political economy is emerging in the Kalinago Territory of Dominica, for example, through the Kalinago Institute of Global Resilience and Regeneration. The Kalinago model has been recognized as one of the four best nascent initiatives globally in 2019 for establishing replicable and scalable climate resilient and regenerative practices by the Common Earth program associated with the Commonwealth of Nations (53 countries, $10 trillion in annual trade).

Blue Green Trade

An emerging Blue Green trade working group within the Commonwealth of Nations is focusing on how the Kalinago model of climate resilience and regeneration can be scaled up rapidly in association with government, private sector commercial activities, and social sector initiatives. An emerging unity of effort by 13 Caribbean Commonwealth nations that are already experiencing existential threats from climate change and new geopolitical pressures are beginning the processes of committing to climate resilient and regenerative initiatives. In early October 2019, many of the Commonwealth nations convened with Common Earth, these lead societies, and the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. Leading up to, during, and following these meetings in 2020, activities associated with climate resilience, regenerative development, and Blue Green trade, plans will be established to rapidly build viable Resilience Systems combined with Blue Green economic and trade rules and practices in key areas of the world now at risk, such as in the Caribbean, Central America, and Asia Pacific.

The rules and best practices emerging from Climate Clubs will be used to successfully guide communities and societies in their economic and trade policies and practices to achieve climate resilience and regeneration. Throughout the upcoming critically important decades of the 21st century, these emerging climate resilient complex adaptive systems will be improving their abilities to create and exchange Regenerative Development tools and methods of great value capable of creating social ecologies in balance with ecosystems, biomes, and bioregions that can survive our deepening climate crisis and other mounting existential threats to thrive under emerging conditions.

Driving Transformations in Political Economy

During the next five years, models, tools, methods, system elements, infrastructures, and forms of management and governance will be tested and exchanged as part of the expansion of the Caribbean Resilience System and Blue Green Trade working group of the Commonwealth of Nations. Other nascent regenerative development projects are also being kickstarted by AGGR teams in Asia, Oceania, Africa, North America, South America, and Europe. The impact of social sector grants will be further advanced by investment grade opportunities in the Caribbean Blue Green economy and its global trade networks to capture a significant portion of the $30 trillion wave of investments that are expected to flee stranded assets in the petroleum and petrochemical political economy that are no longer viable under climate change. This massive divestment and reinvestment of financial resources to the Commonwealth nations and other nations in the Caribbean and beyond will drive an epochal political economic shift globally toward transformative climate resilient and regenerative societies piloted during the next 5 years and expanding globally during the next three decades. This will lead to rapid shifts toward reduction in greenhouse gas production and increases in carbon sequestering along with other improvements in biodiversity preservation, health, human security, and sustainable regenerative development.

Core Competencies

Below is a short list of core competencies that have been developed during the past 40 years infused into Health Initiatives Foundation, Inc. (HIFI) and the Alliance for Global Resilience and Regeneration, as one of HIFI’s initiatives focused on health and human security:

- Work with the highest levels of government and international organizations on some of the world’s largest and most serious crises during the past several decades

- Building multi-organizational enterprises with proven consortium governance and management capacities enabling large-scale, multi-project management systems within a consortium model

- Development and management of IT systems (including communications, computing, data management, network services, knowledge management, groupware, collaboratories, and strategic decision-making capacities to communities and societies that lag behind on technical issues

- Development and execution of over 160 Resilience Systems and Resilience Networks often in the most vulnerable communities and societies facing dire circumstances

- Development and integration of technologies and related policies associated with the growth of Distributed Collectively Intelligent Grids

- Engagement of systems transformation initiatives for nation-states and many other elements of social organizations, including corporations on one extreme and indigenous resurgence on another.

- Application of sciences of complexity to resolve highly complex challenges (e.g., cholera epidemic in Haiti, Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Anthrax attack on the U.S. Senate, large-scale natural and man-made disasters in many places around the world)

- Evaluating and building health systems and human security in advanced societies

- High-level negotiations, such as between heads of state and their legislative branches, and economic and trade relationships - Application of anticipatory science, including predictive analytics and serious game exercises

- Provision of resilience training and toolkits for community leadership development and participatory democracy

- Facilitation of governance in participatory democracy and multi-organizational enterprise

- Work with improving climate resilience and regeneration in some of the worlds most vulnerable communities and societies

- Development of regional systems for inter-governmental collaboration, preparedness, response, and recovery in crisis conditions