Jem Bendell

Jem Bendell is a professor of sustainability leadership and founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria. He has written about monetary economics and the need for 'Deep Adaptation' in response to environmental crises. He regularly comments on current affairs and approaches that may help humanity face climate-induced disruption.

Bendell graduated from Cambridge University in 1993, beginning his career at the World Wide Fund for Nature. There, he helped to create the Forest Stewardship Council. He specialised on relationships between NGOs and business, pointing out the power inequities and the way in which business agendas tend to prevail over those of the non-profit sector.

Changing strategy, he became involved in direct action and the anti-globalisation movement, later writing a United Nations report on the conflict between business and civil society. After his time consulting for the United Nations, Bendell joined Cumbria University and founded IFLAS, soon expanding his focus to monetary reform and complementary currencies.

In the 2017 United Kingdom general election, he provided strategic communication advice to the Labour Party.

In July 2018, he published as paper entitled Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Deep Adaptation is the concept purporting that humanity needs to prepare for fundamental disruption of its current civilisation paradigms, due to climate change, with a likelihood of complete societal collapse. Unlike climate change adaptation, which aims to adapt societies gradually to the effects of climate change, Deep Adaptation is premised on accepting abrupt transformation of the environment as a consideration for making decisions today. Vice noted that for an academic paper it had a large readership, having been downloaded more than 100,000 times (and more than 600,000 times as of November 2019). In March 2019 Bendell founded the Deep Adaption Forum to support practitioners and concerned citizens involved in preparing for what he considers as a very likely collapse of industrial civilisation.

Deep Adaptation was not published in an official scientific journal, and was rejected from the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal for failing the peer-review process. Climate scientists Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt have criticized the paper. Mann has claimed Bendell is "wrong on the science and impacts: There is no credible evidence that we face ‘inevitable near-term collapse,’” while Schmidt pointed out inaccuracies: "Model projections have not underestimated temperature changes, not everything that is non-linear is therefore ‘out of control.' Blaming ‘increased volatility from more energy in the atmosphere’ for anything is silly. The evidence for ‘inevitable societal collapse’ is very weak to non-existent.".

Bendell has published several academic papers and contributed chapters to books. He also occasionally contributes to Open Democracy and The Guardian blog.

• McIntosh, Malcolm; Bendell, Jem (2013). "Chapter 14: Currencies of transition". The Necessary Transition: The Journey Towards the Sustainable Enterprise Economy. Greenleaf. ISBN 978-1-906093-89-1.
• Bendell, Jem (2017-09-01). "Currency innovation for sustainable financing of SMEs: context, case study and scalability". Journal of Corporate Citizenship. 2017: 39–62. ISSN 2051-4700.
• Bendell, Jem (2018-07-27). "Deep adaptation: a map for navigating climate tragedy" (PDF). Ambleside, UK. pp. 1–31.
• Bendell, Jem (2019). "Chapter 11: Doom and bloom: adapting to collapse".In Extinction Rebellion (ed.). This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. Penguin. pp. 73–80. ISBN 9780141991443.