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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

This chapter is contextual in nature. It provides an overview of the impact of COVID-19, highlighting both the significant number of deaths caused by the pandemic as well as the economic disruption that occurred. Particular attention is paid to the role of digital technologies during the pandemic, which enabled a wide range of activities (e.g. work, education and shopping) to go online. The disruptive impact of COVID-19 is widespread and far-reaching, with the pandemic acting as a ‘change agent’ expanding and encouraging the greater use of digital technologies. The second half of the chapter presents summaries of the other chapters in the book. In doing so, it illustrates the scope and scale of the impact of COVID-19, the multitude of different challenges it has caused, and how these varied across different regions and contexts, as well as the diversity of reactions to the pandemic. Some of these reactions are technical in nature, while others are commercial and political. The summaries also draw attention to ongoing policy debates, the significance of which has been heightened by the pandemic.

Systems thinking is a comprehensive approach to analysis and problem solving that examines the relationship between different parts of a system and the environment in which the system operates. Climate change and environmental issues directly affect humanitarian activities, and the impacts can threaten people’s lives and livelihoods. This chapter provides an overview of how the systems thinking approach can integrate with impact assessment techniques to determine the effects of climate change on organisations. An illustrated case of the internal and external interactions of a small vegetable farm is presented, along with an exercise of assessing the impact of climate change on organisations.

This chapter reviews Colombia's unique environmental and social features and Colombia's realities in the third decade of the twenty-first century. It is crucial to understand the country's recent past and to take its structural and historic struggles into account when building sustainable futures.

This chapter also reports the findings of a primary data research study using futures scenario methodologies. The study participants represent different stakeholders' visions of four alternative futures regarding the climate crisis and massive biodiversity loss and social and economic crises.

This chapter's empirical study identifies Colombia's constraints to building a future that is just, inclusive and centred on nature. In addition, we describe in detail the structural changes needed for Colombia to achieve the best possible future scenario (socioeconomic prosperity and resilience to climate change). Finally, this chapter offers conclusions and recommendations.

This chapter explores the ways in which border imperialism, a concept widely attributed to Harsha Walia (2013), interacts with international postsecondary remote learning contexts to open opportunities to both extend and resist border imperialism. Historical and present contexts of border imperialism centered on Canada are consulted, uncovering a connection between technologies of labor and colonial power dynamics. Both temporal contexts serve to highlight the ways in which technologies of labor create a colonial power dynamic enacted through the usage of borders as imperialist tools. The body of literature concerning border imperialism is then reviewed to discern how remote learning contexts facilitate both resistance to and expansion of border imperialism. It is found that these contexts do support narratives of resistance to bodily racism and temporo-economic imperialism, however, in so doing also support neo-racism and unjust soft power dynamics within internationalization. The opportunities for resistance and expansion of border imperialism are then consolidated in pursuit of an ethical path forward with respect to the usage of new remote learning technologies in the context of internationalization.

One of the principal tools in analyzing climate change control policies is integrated assessment modeling. While indispensable for asking logical “what if” questions, such as the cost-effectiveness of alternative policies or the economic efficiency of carbon taxes versus R&D subsidies, integrated assessment models (IAMs) can only produce “answers” that are as good as their underlying assumptions and structural fidelity to a very complex multi-component system. However, due to the complexity of the models, the assumptions underlying the models are often obscured. It is especially important to identify how IAMs treat uncertainty and the value-laden assumptions underlying the analysis.In particular, IAMs have difficulty adequately addressing the issue of uncertainty inherent to the study of climate change, its impacts, and appropriate policy responses. In this chapter, we discuss how uncertainty about climate damages influences the conclusions from IAMs and the policy implications. Specifically, estimating climate damages using information from extreme events, contemporary spatial climate analogs and subjective probability assessments, transients, “imaginable” surprises, adaptation, market distortions and technological change are given as examples of problematic areas that IA modelers need to explicitly address and make transparent of IAMs are to enlighten more than they conceal.

Following Lakatos' strategy of a rational reconstruction of science, I present a concrete example of the rise and decline of a research program from the history of the social sciences: the authoritarian character studies of the Frankfurt School. The first version of the authoritarian character studies of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research was based on a Marxist social and psychoanalytic theory, and included an initial empirical survey. The preliminary results of this survey motivated the Institute's just-in-time emigration from Germany in 1932, and at the same time do not fit into the later theory of the authoritarian character (1936). The second version of the authoritarian character studies (1950) gained the status of a social psychological paradigm, but soon turned into a declining research program, which came to a complete stop around 1968 as far as the Institute of Social Research was concerned. Internal and external factors combined to bring about the sudden end of the authoritarian character studies.