After a freewheeling, decade-long “vacation from history” at the tail end of the 20th century, the opening decade of the 21st abruptly returned us to a world fraught with fragility and surprise. And this new context is here to stay.

Each week, it seems, brings some unforeseen disruption, blooming amid the thicket of overlapping social, political, economic, technological and environmental systems that govern our lives. They arrive at a quickening, yet erratic pace, from unexpected quarters, stubbornly resistant to prediction. The most significant become culture touchstones, referred to in staccato shorthand: Katrina. Haiti. BP. Fukushima. The Crash. The Great Recession. The London Mob. The Arab Spring. Other nameless disruptions swell their ranks, amplified by slowly creeping vulnerabilities: a Midwestern town is undone by economic dislocation; a company is obliterated by globalization; a way of life is rendered impossible by an ecological shift; a debt crisis emerges from political intractability. If it feels like the pace of these disruptions is increasing, it’s not just you: it took just six months for 2011 to become the costliest year on record for natural disasters*, a fact that insurance companies tie unambiguously to climate change. Yet nobody can be sure where the next disruption will come from: in our densely and globally interconnected world, the ‘black swans’ are baked in.

In the face of such unavoidable volatility, what factors cause some communities, individuals, ecosystems, institutions and economies to break down, and which enable them to bounce back?

That simple, and increasingly central question is at the heart of a new field, and an important new strategic conversation, centered on resilience. The answers uncovered come from many fields: economics, ecology, political science, systems and decision theory, information technology, cognitive science and social innovation among them. Like a developing Polaroid, they are slowly revealing a set of insights for building social, economic, technical and business systems that can anticipate disruption, heal themselves when breached, and reorganize themselves to maintain their core purpose, even under radically changed circumstances.

The shift to resilience is bringing with it a major refocusing, away from ‘sustainability’ and risk mitigation as they have been commonly understood, and toward greater risk adaptation – ensuring that we can survive disruptions when they inevitably occur.

This shift to resilience is so fundamental and strategic that PopTech is committing the next year - and beyond - to examining its many facets, disciplinary lenses and contexts. At conferences in Reykjavik, Iceland, and Camden, Maine, and in Labs in Nairobi, Kenya and elsewhere, we’ll be bringing together a global network of resilience practitioners, researchers and leaders. We’ll be asking questions about how to improve the resilience of our economy, our communities, our institutions, our ecosystem and ourselves. And in a political season, we’ll explore what policies and modes of civic engagement will yield a more resilient America.

We cannot imagine a more important or pressing conversation to have right now. And we invite you to be a part of it.

Dr. Raj Panjabi (left) and Dr. Yesero Kalisa (right) at Tubman Hospital in Zwedru, Liberia

The post-election crisis in Ivory Coast has been transformed from a political standoff to a humanitarian catastrophe. Ethnic groups loyal to strongman Laurent Gbagbo and those loyal to president-elect Alassane Ouattara have clashed with horrifying results: last week the Red Cross discovered 800 bodies in one village alone; on Friday the U.N. discovered another 118, many burned alive.

While Gbagbo's arrest on April 11 represents a turning point in the crisis, this shockwave of violence has created a refugee crisis in neighboring Liberia, as an estimated 100,000 Ivorians have poured over the border into the country in recent weeks. Their arrival has overwhelmed the already fragile and under-resourced rural public health system in southeastern Liberia.

2010 Social Innovation Fellow Dr. Raj Panjabi and his colleagues are on the front lines of this unfolding crisis. Their community-based health organization, Tiyatien Health, is working with the Liberian Ministry of Health and other partners at one Liberian district hospital and sixteen clinics in some of the areas most seriously affected. We spoke to Panjabi and Dr. Yesero Kalisa, Tiyatien Health's Clinical Director, who are heroically trying to provide care at the only hospital in the county, Tubman Hospital.

PopTech: What are you seeing on the ground right now?
Yesero Kalisa: There are now more than 30,000 Ivorian refugees in Grand Gedeh, the county where we operate on the border with Ivory Coast. We’ve been seeing a rapid increase in refugees since January. Our small rural hospital, with only 80 beds, has been overwhelmed. People have been arriving with all manner of problems: gunshot wounds, injuries suffered in the wilderness, severe malaria, diarrhea, and worst of all, malnutrition. We’re running dangerously out of food.

Ivorian refugee at Tubman Hospital

Raj Panjabi: We lost a two-week old child last night in the hospital from hunger because the mother could not afford food and her breast milk had ceased.

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A casual listener to the first thirty minutes of last night’s “Win the Future”-themed State of the Union speech could be forgiven for thinking it was written by Thomas Friedman. Amid references to South Korean broadband and Chinese cleantech, President Obama laid out a national strategy for America in the age of the flattening world, rooted in increased R&D investment, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, entrepreneurialism, and foreign talent retention.

Although he didn’t get a direct shout-out from the President, there was one very special guest in the room, sitting with the First Lady, who embodies many of these themes: Brandon Ford, a high school junior at West Philadelphia High School and a member of its Hybrid EVX Team, led by ‘mad scientist-meets-science-teacher’ Simon Hauger.

Together, Hauger and his students have created a one-of-a-kind program in which a team of twenty or so students and seven instructors design and build road-ready, next-generation hybrid electric automobiles. Last year, the team drew national attention in their quest to compete for and win the Automotive X Prize; although they didn’t ultimately win, they were serious competitors, besting several elite university programs and commercial teams backed by more money, age, and experience.
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Editor’s note: You can nominate candidates for the PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellows until April 1, 2010; more information on the nomination page.

This year, as PopTech is putting together its inaugural class of Science and Public Leadership Fellows, we’re spending a lot of time thinking about new ways to create public engagement around the sciences. Like everyone these days, science communicators have to fight to be heard amid a fractured and fractious media landscape. But they also carry another burden – to accurately convey nuanced, complex and occasionally politically charged truths, while working to prevent or debunk mischaracterization and oversimplification of those very same truths. It’s no easy feat, especially in country where more people believe in haunted houses than in global warming.

One strategy is to work with the media ecosystem itself – to embrace and leverage new platforms, rather than see them as part of the problem. That’s just what Australian solar physicist John Cook, of Skeptical Science, has recently done.

Image: Skeptical Science.

Cook exhaustively catalogued more than 90 climate-change criticisms, arguments and complaints, and then linked to what the science actually says on each of these topics. He has now made all of this material available in an extremely user-friendly iphone application (link opens in iTunes store), which is designed for use in conversation with someone on the opposite side of the debate.

Image: Skeptical Science.

The app allows you to quickly surf through the most common anti-climate-change arguments and get meticulously researched links to the underlying science. More interestingly, the app allows you to send in “field reports” of anti-global warming arguments appearing in the wild, providing important metadata about which anti-climate-change arguments are spiking in the public discourse.

Image: Skeptical Science.

There are hugely important lessons here for anyone interested in social engagement, namely:

1.) embrace the most relevant channels,
2.) make it useful, social and fun and
3.) provide social feedback loops so that the effects of each engagement can be measured in real time, and improved in the future.

As (somewhat hilariously) reported by the Guardian, the arrival of Skeptical Science has sent some activists in the anti-global-warming camp into paroxysms, calling for the creation of a anti-global-warming app to combat it. Whether we will see one or not is an open question, since the rhetorical style of the anti-global-warming activists, much like those of anti-Evolution activists, is to try to pick at the edges of arguments, rather than take them head on – which makes them less amenable to Skeptical Science’s approach. But either way, we certainly are entering an age where political activism of all stripes will be expressed as much in software code as much as in the content of messages.

Welcome to the Age of AppTivism.