DEPARTMENT UPDATES
Supply chains and adversity
F
ormer British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said: “there is no education like adversity”. Life at its essence is as unpredictable as nature is variegated in decoration. Humans innately find comfort in normalcy until calamity thwarts the contemporality of life. Faced with calamity, humans strive to liberate Mohamad El Daouk themselves from restraint Third Year Land Economy PhD Student only to find new normalcy; somewhat like the past but better adapted to the future. In any case, life is ever changing, and it behoves humans to find solace in interim normalcies, until being compelled to find forthcoming ones. It is this very yearning for liberation during adversity in which education is conceived. All of this sounds dandy. The aforesaid may very well be true in the case of COVID-19, but perhaps less true in the case of climate change. Covid-19 has resulted in a world better adapted to global pandemics and has transformed the rate at which medicine advances. Climate change, on the other
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LAND SOCIETY 2022
Supply chains fall in the nexus of the global pandemic and climate change, two adversities that humanity is currently facing. Supply chain resilience to disruptions caused by COVID-19 and climate change is the equivalent of the “education” being conceived from “adversity”. Although global supply chains have been impacted differently by both adversities, they have ended up in the same back door. In the aftermath of COVID-19, supply chains seem to have adapted despite there being no attributable signs of the pandemic before November 2019. In the case of climate change, there was pre-emptive awareness of both climate change, and supply chain vulnerability to environmental threats, such as the 2011 tsunami in Japan and other natural disasters.1 However, the adversities posed by such preordained disasters were of no profound effect in driving greater supply chain resilience. Supply chains were as disrupted as they would have been ten
Fiksel, J. et al. (2015). “From Risk to Resilience: Learning to Deal with Disruption”, MIT Sloan Management Review, 56(2), pp. 79-86. 2 Martin, R. et al. (2016). How regions react to recessions: Resilience and the role of economic structure. Regional Studies, 50(4), pp. 561–585. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2015.1136410. 1
96
hand, has long loomed ahead of humanity. Many adversities it has created, but to no avail. Humans have been unable to effectively respond to the impacts of climate change, rendering education impervious to adversity. Irrespective of these two outcomes, overall, humans continuously adapt. Adversity cannot be confined to specific happenings and calamities; they are part of life as much as education is part of adversity. This article is by no means intended to be academic, but rather, an interlink between Disraeli’s quote, the author’s personal opinions, and the subtheme of this year’s Cambridge University Land Society Magazine… supply chains!