10 chapter 1 1.1. INTRODUCTION Our time is plagued by global crises. As humans living in the 21st century, we face a seemingly unending succession of challenges, which are not limited to a few isolated incidents: from natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Katrina in 2005, earthquake in Haiti in 2010, earthquake in Turkey in 2023) and pandemics (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic), to financial crises (e.g., the real estate market collapse in 2008) and political upheavals (e.g., the Arab Spring in 2010). Some of these events are likely to become more frequent and severe in the years to come. For example, scientists predict that natural hazards will increase due to global warming (IPCC, 2014a; 2022), and, partially because of this, there is a high threat of more pandemics in the future (Kretzschmar et al., 2022). The fact that we are vulnerable to large-scale crises, and we will remain so in the future, highlights the urgency of understanding how humans can adapt to such crises, namely how they can protect themselves and their communities whilst maintaining good mental health and quality of life. While humanity has faced crises and risks throughout history, contemporary challenges are unprecedented in their scale, scope, and complexity (Lagadec, 2009; Lagadec & Topper, 2012). As an overarching feature, these large-scale crises are characterised by great uncertainty. First, the probability, magnitude, and geographic impact of natural disasters induced by climate change, as well as the timing and location of potential future pandemics, is highly uncertain. Second, many present-time crises are characterised by a lack of clear cause-and-effect relationships (e.g., the effect of global warming on specific weather patterns is ambiguous; Trenberth et al., 2015), and crises often are sudden and unexpected in nature, such as the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, contemporary crises have multiple environmental, social and economic causes and impacts, which makes them much harder to predict and manage. As such, the 21st century calls for a better understanding, not only of crisis and risk management (Lagadec & Topper, 2012), but also of how humans can adapt and maintain their well-being in the face of these unprecedented challenges. Importantly, large-scale crises may have another, less obvious, consequence: they may serve as catalysts for positive change and growth. Historically, there is some evidence for this claim. For example, studies have shown that people were able to not only persist, but also flexibly adapt, and even thrive in the face of climate change in the past (Degroot et al., 2021). For instance, during the Late Antique Little Ice Age (sixth century AD) and the Little Ice Age (thirteenth to nineteenth century AD), humans adapted to climate change by introducing novel agriculture activities and water management strategies which allowed for economic expansion (Izdebski et al., 2016). Also, people shifted to new sources of energy, developed new trading methods, and
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