Timely Insights

“A platform for participatory innovation that aims to create initiatives driving a more circular economy”. The Copenhagen Circularity Lab has delivered a unique program that invites citizens to create value out of disposed of materials from a local recycling station. The program helped make innovating towards a circular economy more approachable and democratic, by openly inviting citizens to experiment with innovation resources. Because a circular city is built, above all, by and for citizens.

In this episode, we go on a stroll through Copenhagen and gather Timely Insights from the people we meet. We talk about the relationships people have with their environments and the responsibility the modern consumer bears on his shoulders. Tune in and take a walk with us, we are meeting the heroes in the park.

In this episode, Janna JI reads out an article she wrote for cirka cph in May, describing how the responses to the pandemic can be used to expand crisis literacy. We discuss how the article survives to this day and share our reflections on the two crisises.

We have now introduced the format of podcasts to bring you our Timely Insights. We invite you to reflect back on some of the thoughts passing through society in the early days of the pandemic, and think about what has changed and what we have learned by taking on the challenge.

The reaction to a pandemic can help us deal with other crises that are characterized by invisible uncertainty. We can learn to distinguish between the invisible issue and the visible symptoms – building more crisis literacy.

If all this – empty airports, vacant roads, and closed stores – are not enough to provoke the emission cuts necessary for this year, then we must be missing something. Today, we take a look at a bigger picture.

Amongst other effects of the outbreak, emissions levels have plunged due to decreased production intensity. If you are a climate activist, or even simply have come to terms with that human activity is causing dangerous climate change, this might intuitively seem like the good in the bad, but is this really the case?

“(…) the still-unfolding COVID-19 crisis is already remaking our sense of the possible.” – “In times of crisis, the seemingly impossible ideas become possible. But whose ideas?”

“We’ve seen that governments can act, and people can change their behavior, in a very short amount of time” (…) If the world was responding to climate change like it’s responding to the coronavirus—the level of urgency that the science says is necessary—things would look dramatically different. “We would see a lot of different things happening all at the same time.”

The measures currently being taken to circumvent the worst possible consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, are inadvertently saving lives from air pollution plunge. These measures appear ever more radical than those taken in the face of any other climate and environmental challenge.

“Nature poses threats, it is true, but it’s human activities that do the real damage. The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it.”

Redesigning how humans interact with our environment could help us address two global crises at once. Today, we’re learning about how increasing global temperatures causes animal migration and possible outbreaks of animal-borne vira.