It’s all happening faster than the most extreme predictions. “It’s not just a wake-up call, it’s a wake-up scream,” Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, reportedly said of Hurricane Sandy.

As a consequence, New York City and other at-risk metropolises are preparing a more robust response to the next super storm. But just as important is how to effectively engage all citizens in the kinds of behaviours that will help them reduce and adapt to the certain impacts of climate change. What methods are most likely to work?

The answer may surprise you: rewards and incentives; social contagion, and gamification – bringing gaming concepts of motivation and engagement into daily life.

Individually or in combination, these approaches tap into our human desire to play games, compete, cooperate – and be infected by other people’s pro-social behaviour. From spurring energy conservation to waste reduction and more, these tactics may yield meaningful opportunities to respond to climate change, especially as international negotiations to reduce atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels betray many people’s hopes for a better future.

And best of all, they’re practical. At a cash-strapped time, for relatively low cost, consumers can be motivated to adapt to shifting realities through incremental changes to awareness and behaviour.

This was Andreas Souvaliotis’ goal in 2007, when he started Green Rewards, the loyalty program that later became Air Miles for Social Change (AMSC) after being acquired by LoyaltyOne, operator of the popular Air Miles program in Canada.

AMSC works with utilities, public transit providers and assorted government agencies seeking cost-effective ways to “incentivize” energy conservation, greater use of public transit, and healthier lifestyle choices.

Its secret weapon is a combination of reach and reward. Air Miles, which through an extensive network of partners provides loyalty points for certain retail purchases, has direct access to more than 70 per cent of Canadian households, making it the largest loyalty program of its kind in North America. Its points are redeemable for an array of sustainable products.

By piggybacking on that reach and using much sought after Air Miles points as the carrot, AMSC has educated and engaged a significant portion of the population. One successful energy-conservation campaign attracted 120,000 more participants than a traditional advertising-and-rebate approach, representing an increase of 600 per cent. At the same time, it saved the government agency behind it 66 per cent in taxpayer dollars.

“If we’re looking for solutions with a true and measurable impact on the human species’ overall footprint, then we must realize that all seven billion of us are consumers,” says Souvaliotis. For the beasts of consumption that we are, incentives work – whether the goal is to get people to drive less and use more transit, or recycle more and conserve electricity.

Souvaliotis is now evolving the approach in “a number of other markets beyond Canada” through newly founded Social Change Rewards, which states on its website that it can “consistently demonstrate dramatic improvements in marketing efficiency, effectiveness, and overall program cost.”

Meanwhile, Friendefi, a start-up based in Montreal, Quebec, is on track to bring the rewards-and-incentives concept to the world’s social networks. The idea is to plug existing loyalty programs into social networks such as Facebook, then use the lure of rewards to stimulate online competition and cooperation through customized games. Friendefi’s co-founder Aaron Carr concedes it’s difficult to get people to break old habits and adopt new ones. “People are so busy that taking a few steps off the day-to-day path is really challenging.”

To ease the load, Friendefi aims to break down big problems into a menu of “gamified” day-to-day actions that translate to a larger impact on the whole. “We need immediate, bite-sized programs that prevent people from getting scared and tuning out,” says Carr. “For example, we could put value on specific actions, such as not idling your car. People would measure and track their actions, gain 50 points here and 100 points there, and see a cumulative impact (over time).”

Rewarding healthy and environmentally beneficial behaviours, of course, is just one approach. Some companies, such as Arlington, Virginia-based Opower and Quinzee of Toronto, Ontario, are harnessing our innate desire to compete with and emulate neighbours and friends. Their goal: to make energy conservation contagious. Faizal Karmali, co-founder of Quinzee, wants smart energy use to spread among “people like you or near you” – that is, within social networks and among neighbours.

Opower, which recently integrated social-comparison features into its service, works with 75 utilities on three continents to educate consumers about their energy use. Partnerships with Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council have helped expand Opower’s reach to 15 million homes, which so far have reduced electricity consumption by 1.7 terawatt-hours – roughly what a small coal-fired power plant generates in a year.

A key challenge, according to Karmali, is that there’s been no way for individuals and communities to know what’s normal in terms of energy consumption, and whether their personal energy usage would be viewed as excessive or, conversely, super-efficient. “Socializing consumption provides people with points of reference,” he says. As consumers gain insight into their own energy-consumption patterns, “Quinzee alerts customers when they’re beating their peers, or falling behind them, which seems to motivate sustained, better behaviour.”

Using Quinzee, individuals and their peers can influence the social network contagiously – and save money. “People seem to really care how they’re doing compared to others and we use this social dynamic for environmental good,” Karmali says. “One of our friends in the suburbs was using as much energy as a couple in our peer group with two kids. He was really embarrassed when we mentioned it over dinner one night, and has since reduced his energy use by about 25 per cent.”

The social-contagion aspect of Opower and Quinzee may be especially significant. As reported in Science Daily, a joint study by Yale University and New York University found that “people are more likely to install a solar panel on their home if their neighbours have one.” The study found that with just 10 installations in a given zip code, the probability of adoption rises by 7.8 per cent. A solar panel that’s visible to neighbours, combined with a homeowner who expresses enthusiasm about saving money, may lead to additional installations. A social contagion “bump” could apply equally to other low-carbon, energy-saving goods such as electric cars.

But let’s not forget the power of fun. Asi Burak, co-president of not-for-profit Games for Change, based in New York City, is convinced that positive social and environmental impacts can come through digital games. Burak believes there are solid reasons why games and gamification hold long-term promise for helping spur the kinds of progressive behaviours that can help us, for example, adapt to or mitigate climate change.

The digital games industry has heft, and games are a proven way to engage people. “Call of Duty on a console can sell 20 million units. There are 100 million players for some Facebook games,” he says. “Americans spend 407 million hours every month playing online games, which offer continuous daily engagement.

Americans spend the most time on social networks. Number two is online games.”

In his view, it makes no sense to leave such a dominant, interactive medium just for shoot-’em-up, thrill-seeking entertainment. Burak says his daughter spends more hours playing games in her life than many other activities. “But if 100 per cent of her play is going to be entertainment, it won’t teach her how to prepare for this world in a meaningful way.”

Admittedly, online games that do just that are niche offerings. They include ElectroCity, which teaches young players in New Zealand about managing urban energy, sustainability and the environment; and computer-based strategy game Fate of the World: Tipping Point, which challenges players to “solve” the climate crisis. Such games, as designed and available today, seem a long way from holding the attention of the masses.

“There will be a tipping point when a game for social change is a blockbuster game,” says Burak. “It took movies time to develop the independent documentary voice, for example, and games will take longer because they’re more complex, are evolving so fast, and look so different.”

Jesper Juul, a New York University games researcher at the NYU Game Center, weighs in. “I haven’t seen many good climate change-related games. One problem we have in that category is there’s a green button or a red button, something that’s bad or good [which is inherently uninteresting].”

One missing ingredient in the creation of good interactive experiences – the kind that will reach large-enough audiences to effect positive change – may be a lack of widespread, open and accessible data on everything from individuals’ travel patterns and energy consumption to social behaviours.

Norman White, clinical professor of information sciences at the NYU Stern School of Business, says big data clusters are needed to bring together large data sets across silos, so that interesting patterns can emerge about, say, how taxi rides and climate data intersect. “There’s a whole new group called data scientists,” he says. “These are specialized computer scientists who apply statistics to computer data, and we need them to find better ways to put together climate data, social network data, financial data, and so on.”

All this, White muses, may yield interesting, scalable opportunities for game development or gamification on top of open, rich and compelling data. Until then, catch a positive social contagion, seek out rewards for your good behaviour, and look ahead to the 2013 launch of SimCity 5, which promises to feature greenest-city competitions among other climate change-related themes.

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In the workplace, there is a compelling case to be made that this confluence of economic, environmental and climate volatility may increasingly add up to a decline in employee mental health and, by association, worker productivity. A smoke signal of note: a 2012 report sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation and co-authored by Lise van Susteren, a psychiatrist and trauma expert, stated: “The economic costs of climate change will be high by any measure. But its specific effect on U.S. mental health, societal well-being and productivity will increase current U.S. expenditures on mental health services, adding to our current $300 billion annual burden.”

Rensia Melles is the manager of global solutions at Shepell.fgi, where she develops employee assistance and health and wellness programs used by thousands of organizations around the world. She said company employees are affected directly and indirectly by environmental and climate change. “Direct experience can cause distress. So, too, can indirect experience through media and conversations with people, which may lead to anxiety about the future. There’s also the psychosocial impact related to the conflict between those who see that climatic change is happening and ‘deniers’ who say it’s not happening,” explained Melles.

And if a company is directly contributing, or perceived to be contributing, to the problem?

Take energy giant Enbridge, ranked by Corporate Knights as one of the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations. The company recently took a big hit to its reputation because of toxic oil spills in Alberta, Michigan and now Wisconsin. For example, a British Columbia newspaper reported that a movie audience in the provincial capital of Victoria booed when shown an Enbridge promotional video for its planned 1,000-kilometre Northern Gateway pipeline project. Could reactions like these affect the morale of Enbridge employees, who are witnessing more negative reports about the company in the news media? Do stress and anxiety afflict its workers more than those of an oil company like Cenovus, now seen as an up-and-coming corporate social responsibility leader? Similarly, did morale plunge at BP – and mental health claims rise – after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, or at Exxon Mobil after the company was regularly cited for funding organizations whose raison d’être was to discredit state-of-the-art, peer-reviewed climate science?

“There is no research available at this time that shows a negative correlation between a lack of corporate social responsibility and employee stress,” said Melles. However, research has shown that: “Companies that have a good reputation for corporate social responsibility, including employee care, are more likely to have employees who stay [and] are committed to productivity and to company objectives.”

Much depends on whether or not an employee views her job as a career, rather than as a paycheque, said University of Toronto professor Carolyn Dewa, head of the occupational health program at Ontario’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. “If the worker views her company as a place that is tied to her career, and that she contributes to the success of that company, she is at risk of experiencing more stress when the company is not successful,” said Dewa, noting that negative publicity could fuel this stress, particularly if the employer’s financial viability is at stake, and thus job security.

Keeping employees committed is why some organizations provide what could be termed “guilt offsets” – a way to counter how workers may feel about a given employer, its products and services, or its contributions to economic, environmental or climate crises. Such offsets might include allowing workers to volunteer time for “feel good” programs such as Habitat for Humanity, or community charities.

“Corporate social responsibility has increasingly become a topic in social media and marketing, so it is hard for employees and consumers to … see what a company is really doing,” said Melles. “Habitat for Humanity days have been co-opted into this external marketing and do have a positive effect for individual employees.”

Climate change’s visible environmental impacts include raging wildfires in Colorado and fast-melting ice in the Arctic or Greenland, as witnessed in 2012. But perhaps the most debilitating stressor will be its broader economic impacts – increased food prices, higher insurance premiums, more expensive energy and high adaptation costs. One need only look to Europe to observe how an economic breakdown in the eurozone – marked by high unemployment and austerity programs that target cuts in health and social services – is contributing to a wide range of mental health issues. These include rising suicide rates among the unemployed and a growth in chronic stress owing to job insecurity.

The World Health Organization estimates that since the European economic crisis began in 2007, mental health problems have led to a 3 to 4 per cent drop in the gross national product of EU countries. In Greece, suicide rates rose by 40 per cent in the first half of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. Today, the need for mental health services has grown so pressing that some medical facilities cannot provide adequate treatment, referral or follow up.

There’s no reason to think North America is immune. In the United States, prior to the 2008 financial crisis, a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health estimated that depression affected 1.3 million adults and cost 86 million days and tens of billions of dollars in lost productivity each year. As the past four years have unfolded – and job insecurity has become a source of constant worry for working Americans – the number of U.S. workers affected by depression and a whole array of mental health issues can only have trended upwards.

Dewa has been watching the trend closely. “I work with a lot of different organizations and companies looking at their disability data,” she said. “There has been a rise in disability-related mental illness over the past 10 years, which is why there’s an interest in programs for improving mental health among the working population.”

A paper co-authored by Doug Smeall, assistant vice-president of health management services at Toronto-based health insurer Sun Life Financial, found that it isn’t uncommon these days to find that mental health issues account for 30 to 40 per cent of a company’s short-term disability claims. “For most companies, the prevalence of mental health conditions is approaching 30 per cent of all long-term disability cases and has been increasing at a rate of approximately 0.5 to 1 per cent per year over the past several years.”

Significant numbers like these explain why many countries are beginning to set occupational health standards for “psychological safety” in the workplace. The question is whether those numbers are poised to rise even faster. An emerging expert consensus points to climate change as an added mental health burden that could multiply the debilitating mental health impacts associated with economic crises. Climate change could end up being the “mother of all stress multipliers,” given its ability to waylay agriculture, drive up food prices, contribute to job insecurity, and spur nations and organizations to compete ruthlessly for scarce resources. But more research is clearly needed.

In the meantime, some organizations are taking pre-emptive actions. Joel Levey and Michelle Levey are clinical psychologists based in Seattle, Washington, who have worked with Intel, NASA, the U.S. Army Green Berets, the Clinton Global Initiative and many others to help leaders and employees develop the psychological skills required to adapt to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – the four telltale fingerprints of the 21st century. Today, they collaborate with the Google Mindfulness Laboratory, where they teach meditation techniques to help Google employees manage stress, improve working relationships and create breakthrough innovation.

“For leaders, developing employees’ ability to work effectively under the more chaotic and overwhelming circumstances [of economic and climate crisis] is a worthy and noble endeavour,” Joel Levey said. “These people will be the innovators for the new systems, organizations and communities that have the most long-term viability.”

As the toll of the economic crisis on mental health continues to grimly unfold – and the impacts of climate change inexorably weaken societal resilience – the stakes for human civilization grow higher each day.

Leaders who feel in their guts that the mental health of workers may grow worse as jobs become less secure and the climate becomes more unpredictable and inhospitable should address employees’ well-placed concerns and prepare for potential organizational impacts. The C-suite must convince their boards that the adaptability and flexibility needed to sustain business success requires ambitious, innovative, and scalable mental health and wellness programs. And, last but not least, a strong commitment to clean capitalism.

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Then came Hansen’s kicker.

“That may not sound like much,” he remarked, “but when added up over the whole world… it’s the equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year. That’s how much extra energy earth is gaining each day.”

According to Hansen, this may be an unfortunate precursor to what could amount to global sea-level rise of between one and five metres during this century.

Welcome to the new normal.

The new normal is a period of human history when natural disasters tied to climate change and political uncertainties related to economic and financial distress are all too common. Yet, it’s mainly the economic and financial crises we face that dominate the concerns of businesses, governments and citizens. After all, there are bond haircuts, eurozone panics, morally dubious investment banks, unmanageable consumer debts, employment uncertainties, and popular protests surrounding the “one per cent” to contend with.

But organizations and people tend to adjust in a reactive fashion to our predictably unpredictable business climate – what some experts describe as one of “permanent volatility” – and the deteriorating condition of our planet. To be proactive in this unstable operating environment would require that companies, as well as local, regional and national governments, prioritize resilience. Put another way, they need to build and retain the capacity to cope with various shocks in the system, including those related to energy, sovereign debt, currency markets, supply chains, consumer sentiment, employee concerns, as well as that contentious wild card, climate change.

Embedded in the concept of permanent volatility is the underlying risk of being blindsided by unexpected circumstances not just once, but again and again. Permanent volatility requires that organizations develop the capacity to be knocked down, to get up, and to take steps to re-stabilize. This is the rationale for why resilience is central to adaptation amid the 21st century’s “uncharted waters,” an era future historians may judge to have endured the greatest public loss of political, economic and financial flexibility in modern history.

Between 2007 and 2010, for example, funds allocated by the United States, European Union and other G8 nations to promote macroeconomic stabilization amounted to roughly $17 trillion, according to political economists Stephen Gill and Isabella Bakker at York University in Toronto. A significant percentage of these monies was dedicated to private-sector bailouts. These funds are unlikely to be recouped and thus may contribute to the public sector’s lack of financial flexibility in countering long-term risks, including the potential need to restructure long-term debt, as well as find additional funding for civil preparedness and infrastructure hardening related to climate adaptation.

Permanent volatility and resilience are two sides of the same coin. Heads is about potentially dramatic spikes in input costs and debt financing affecting social, economic and institutional spheres – the stuff of daily life. Tails represents the capacity of citizens, communities, institutions, businesses and governments to adapt to abrupt shifts in normalcy. A reduction of political, economic and financial flexibility caused by rising sovereign and consumer debt is one area that could negatively impact societal resilience. The other enemy of resilience is a lack of preparedness, where credible warnings from climate science, for example, are disconnected from political consensus and thus fail to elicit institutional commitment.

Gordon Price is director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. As a six-time city councillor he’s acutely aware of the municipal planning process and how aligning long-term risk assessment with immediate political and economic reality is an increasingly tough challenge. About two years ago, Price started hearing about resilience in planning circles. “There was recognition that with climate change we won’t be able to stop or mitigate it,” he said. “So how do cities respond to circumstances that are locked in?”

One conceptual approach is the resilient city. According to Price, “a resilient city is probably more compact, with infrastructure that is newer and well maintained, thus more able to respond to emerging threats such as sea-level rise.” Price has also explored adaptation to change through methods such as scenario planning. “I’ve been to some scenario casting, looking at implications of the opening of the Northwest Passage (due to accelerated melting of Arctic ice),” he said. “You run into problems because there’s a trade-off around what you’ll do today for an unknown risk tomorrow. “Certain actions have been taken (to counter risk), but does it match up to the scale of the threat? Probably not.”

Indeed, the scale of the threat is staggering: the most credible recent estimate of climate change impacts between now and 2200 – globally, across water, health, infrastructure, coastal zones and ecosystems – equates financially to a stunning $1,240 trillion, according to estimates from a 2009 study by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, both based in London, England. The study estimated that spending $6 trillion on adaptation during that period would reduce impacts by $350 trillion. Clearly, adaptation pays off.

Like public institutions and government, corporations must manage trade-offs between market reality and long-term strategic planning. Based on my work in corporate futurism, some business strategists do understand the long-term threats posed by permanent volatility. Yet, they’re hamstrung because organizational resources are taken up in addressing today’s challenges surrounding volatility – not tomorrow’s. Thus, as one would predict, adapting to today trumps adapting to tomorrow.

Rob Abbott is a consultant based in Victoria who has worked with clients such as Walmart Canada on corporate sustainability initiatives. “The resilience discussion is dominated by the sectors you’d expect: academia, some non-governmental organizations and governments,” said Abbott. “The question when people talk about resilience is what they mean by it. At present, just as with sustainability, the concept risks being balkanized into economic resilience, social resilience, environmental resilience, and so on, just when we’re entering a period of long-term disequilibrium and should see the bigger picture.”

The challenge of addressing permanent volatility through resilience must not remain at the margins of business operations, but should extend to the core. For the past decade, Fortune 500 organizations, such as FedEx, UPS and Walmart, have emphasized adapting global supply chains to contingencies such as natural disasters, sea-level rise and regional political disturbances. Disasters such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdown last year in Japan, for example, have raised fundamental doubts about the practicality of just-in-time manufacturing among both businesses and governments. This is in part because such a masterfully choreographed approach to manufacturing and delivering products to market isn’t resilient enough, even when unexpected events may limit disruption to only a few days.

“Have we put in the necessary investments that will allow us to adapt to the change and seize the opportunity for transformation?” asked Abbott. With regard to crisis and opportunity, he added, “It’s only an opportunity if we are prepared.” And that, truly, is the key to resilience. Are we – as individuals, communities, corporations, and municipal, regional and national governments – prepared for the contingencies for which we have solid evidence?

It appears we are not. The commitment isn’t there, and neither are the investments. Resilience is de rigueur in some quarters precisely because it indicates we’re facing dire conditions for which we’re not adequately prepared. The language of resilience is a warning sign that civil society must get ready to absorb large-scale setbacks to business – and to life – as usual.

A time of permanent volatility is, in essence, a time of constant readiness, of tapping into the deepest well of strength and wherewithal that would empower highly intelligent and humane responses to catastrophic disruptions.

“Few I talk with in the corporate movement understand resilience in the long term,” said Gregory Greene, a documentary filmmaker and resilience commentator who worked on a project called “Confronting Comfort” for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a think tank and mobile laboratory aimed at stimulating discussion and ideas around environmental and social responsibility. “You have to lay out the ideas and the context, so when an oil or financial shock comes, you have the people with the ideas and the answers. In that moment, you can implement some of those ideas.”

Greene may be right. The wise only speak when people will listen. And many of us, individuals and organizations alike, aren’t ready to listen. Those who are up for listening may not be in a position to act. Either way, little progress will be made until a serious strategic conversation about resilience takes place and is acted upon.

The new normal, after all, is here.

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