Pillar Details
SUMMARY Description of IISCCIW's Four Pillars (including examples)
As outlined elsewhere, the IISCCIW is composed, inter-relatedly and inter-disciplinarily (as appropriate) of 4 BASIC PILLARS and 4 BASIC COMPONENTS. The PILLARS are WHAT the project intends to do, while the following 4 SCIENTIFIC COMPONENTS are the HOW through which the project's WHAT would be pursued:
a) Physical and Atmospheric Sciences
b) Environmental, Natural Resources, and Agricultural Sciences
c) Economic, Legal, and Management Sciences
d) Social, Theological, Behavioral, and Health Sciences.
In the context of these four scientific components, this section presents a SUMMARY description of our initiative's 4 pillars. These pillars would be informed by systematic consultations, helping the project arrive at an OVERALL EXPERT CONSENSUS about its basic directions and processes, giving concrete shape to its 4 basic pillars, and thus, guiding and shaping the extensive theoretical and applied research project (in all 4 scientific components of the initiative) that the IISCCIW would conduct or would be a partner with.
Now, let us look at each pillar, in summary form:
PILLAR I (Education/Informing):
Educating and informing the populations living in what is called "the Islamic world" on our globe (concentrated in Islamic countries or living as minorities elsewhere) about the nature, characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of global warming and climate change.
This pillar would involve the proper understanding and the needed research, as well as the appropriate application policies that would hopefully result in such populations becoming effectively educated and informed, about the following realms, for example:
a) What is human-caused global warming and climate change, what causes such processes, and what characterizes them when they occur naturally?
b) What are the short-term, mid-term, and long-term consequences of these processes, and how they may affect the Islamic world inhabitants of the various regions of our globe?
c) We need to properly understand all obstacles that may inhibit or limit the education, informing, and awareness-raising of such populations about these human-caused destructive processes. Examples of such obstacles include: institutional, individual (psychological or intra-personal), collective (societal or communal), religious/spiritual, cultural, and other kinds of obstacles and limiting factors.
d) We need to properly understand and utilize all the means and vehicles through which such education and information could effectively reach target populations.
Clearly, such exposing, informing, and educating (leading hopefully to effective learning) of individuals and groups across the Islamic world, would require the culturally and spiritually appropriate use of the following means and delivery vehicles, for example:
- The various forms of media
- Educational institutions
- Public and private policy-implementation organizations, national, regional, and international
- Religious/spiritual institutions and personalities
- Private or publicly organized activity-based interest groups, such as neighborhood and sports/arts gatherings, etc., and
- Other appropriate vehicles and means of educating and informing, conducted by individuals and groups.
PILLAR II (Mitigation/Combating):
Developing or augmenting the needed intellectual, organizational, and physical infrastructures and the required policies and actions, enabling these populations to participate effectively in mitigating/combating such human-caused processes, thus preventing the consequences of global warming and climate change from worsening even further.
This pillar would involve developing, locally, nationally, regionally, and internationally, ways to enable the Islamic world populations of our planet to participate in struggling against, mitigating, combating, or even possibly helping to solve the calamity called global warming/climate change, toward preventing the further worsening of its unfolding consequences, and how such populations could even adopt a leadership role in the “world-rising” that is needed, if a solution for this tragedy is to be found.
This pillar’s activities and challenges would include, for example:
a) Conducting extensive research in all of the project's 4 scientific components, in order to develop, present, and implement theoretical and practical methods that could hopefully cause effective and sustained BEHAVIOR CHANGE, individually and collectively, as well as CHANGING POLICIES (and developing new ones), locally, nationally, regionally, and internationally.
b) The identification, proper utilization, management, and preservation of all the resources (human, financial, physical, cultural, religious/spiritual, psycho-social, etc.) that are available for this monumental struggle to preserve life on our crisis-afflicted planet.
c) Contributing to the development and management of the sustainable NEW HUMAN CULTURE that is required for this absolutely necessary “world-rising,” for the sake of the sacred cause of preserving life on our planet.
PILLAR III (Adaptation/Coping):
Developing appropriate and effective adaptation and coping mechanisms and strategies for such populations, regions, and habitats, as they begin to actually face the increasingly horrible consequences of global warming and climate change
The activities of this pillar would include developing the proper understandings, the needed plans, and the appropriate implementation policies that would hopefully enable the Islamic populations of all regions of our planet to have effective mechanisms of adaptation to and coping with the short-term, mid-term, and long-term consequences of global warming and climate change.
This pillar would involve the following realms of activity, for example:
Developing the proper understanding of the culturally and spiritually appropriate situation-specific mechanisms of effective adaptation to and coping with the effects and consequences of global warming/climate change, and how such destructive processes and the mechanisms of dealing and coping with them may affect, specifically, the Earth’s Islamic populations, physically, environmentally, psycho-socially, religiously, culturally, etc.
Presenting examples of the kinds of issues that would be among the responsibilities of this pillar, may help shed light on the subject matter:
a) Faced with the increasingly horrible consequences of global warming and climate change in the years and decades to come, we will need new national and international immigration policies, as large populations (in the Islamic world, in the case of our project) would lose their very homes or shelters, due to the fact that the regions of our planet that are near open sees and oceans, will become submerged under water, as the permanent ice in the polar (and other) regions continues to melt. For example, in Bangladesh a sea level rise of only 100 centimeters (approximately 3 feet) would reduce the country’s land mass at least by 20%, potentially affecting the livelihood (food, shelter, jobs, etc.) of over 100 million people.
b) With the dramatically adverse unfolding changes in the Earth’s climate, our planet (and its Islamic populations) will be faced with shortages, unprecedented so far in recorded human history, of even food and water, for example. Hence, dramatically new and painful policies to deal with global thirst and hunger will become necessary. For example, in the already food-stressed Senegal and Mauritania in Africa, an already on-going decline in rainfall of just 20% (resulting from global warming/climate change) would further stifle agricultural and food production by as much as 50%.
PILLAR IV (Evaluation and Conflict Management):
Developing proper evaluation, consultation, course-correction, and conflict management processes for the initiative itself, and for the processes/policies that it would try to actualize with regard to the Islamic world.
The task of this pillar is to develop appropriate and objective evaluation, consultation, course-correction, and conflict management processes for the IISCCIW's internal organizational discourses and interactions, as well as for the processes that would likely result from the activities of the initiative's primary pillars (1, 2, and 3), toward the goal of hopefully helping to heal our imperiled planet.
For example, this pillar would need to deal with:
a) The relatively simple to the very complex challenges inherent in the management of policy innovation, development, and change,
b) The very difficult struggles involved in the implementation of climate-friendly policies, locally and globally, and
c) Mitigation-related conflict prevention, management, and resolution.
Adaptation and coping mechanisms and strategies would inevitably involve having to live with and managing local and/or international conflicts that will inevitably arise. Hence, a part of the activities of this pillar includes developing effective theoretical and applied innovative and situation-appropriate methods of conflict prevention and management in such contexts.
As mentioned above, while the activities of the pillars 1, 2, and 3 will have their own built-in self-evaluation, consultation, course-correction, and conflict management processes, to be effective an organized activity of the IISCCIW's magnitude, sensitivity, and complexity would also need mechanisms to provide its operations with independent and objective feedback and evaluation. So, this pillar would perform these kinds of functions for the project internally, as well as providing them, as appropriate and possible (in collaboration with other persons or organizations) for the persons and societies involved in or affected by the processes caused or influenced by the activities of our initiative, always with the goal of hopefully healing our imperiled planet in an integrated and authentic manner.
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