Let 2024 be the year we rediscover our compassion and humanity

Across 2023, the awareness of a rising global multicrisis has led to ever more talk of a polycrisis, where the sum of parallel crises is adding up to more than their parts. Yet, only now, as this tough year ends, is attention turning to where we find hope in all these afflictions, and what we do to stop things from getting even worse.

At base, we face the tail of public debt, economic damage and systems breakdown caused by the world’s ’lockdown response’ to Covid-19. And, beside that row of hits, sits climate change, with our poles and glaciers melting, our sea levels rising and warming, and our productive land heating up and drying out against the backdrop of erratic seasons and storms.

Together, these two big pressures have strained almost every one of us, all over the world. Food, power and shelter are costing more. Health, education and social support systems have deteriorated. And the impact of all these troubles has been bad for the human psyche. We are fighting more, starting wars, hitting harder, becoming more aggressive.

If you doubt what that means you too, only review your 2023, and the people and endeavours you ended with, or prices and transactions you changed — and ask yourself, how would a softer and more compromising approach have played out instead?

For, according to the thinkers of our world, that is where our salvation lies. In his recent book, Commanding Hope, Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that from hope and actions borne of hope we can still yet create virtuous cascades of positive change.

What that means, in such a volatile, pressured and endangered environment, is that instead of moving into political brinksmanship as we seek to defend ourselves and our interests, the need is greater than ever for talks and compromise.

In our climate issues, we need to embed adaptation into everything we do: making cooler buildings, cooler cities, and cooler crops, making soils that better retain their moisture, and creating greater water supplies. All of these changes will create their own virtuous cycles of reduced climate pressure.

In society, this is the era for compassion, and in economics, the hour for insights. Landlords who create a horde of homeless, think now about the tomorrow you are creating for your own young: and, instead, ask less, and accept less. By the same count, soaring poverty will help no listed company nor private trader with long-term profits.

At the community level, we have always known how to help those in need. As globalisation now reverses, and local resilience becomes our top need, let 2024 be the year we rediscover our giving, our compassion, compromise, and our humanity. Then, we will make it.

The writer is a development communication specialist.