𝐽’𝑎𝑖 𝑣𝑢 𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑣𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑎𝑖̂𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠 𝑑𝑢 𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑒.

𝐼𝑙𝑠 𝑣𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑐𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑒́𝑠,

𝑇𝑎𝑝𝑖𝑠 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑙𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑒̀𝑟𝑒,

𝐷𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑙 𝑑𝑒𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒̂𝑡𝑠.

𝑆𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑐𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑠,

𝑇𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑎𝑢𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑓𝑎𝑐̧𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑠,

𝑄𝑢’𝑖𝑛𝑓𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑔𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑓𝑓𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑠,

𝑅𝑖𝑒𝑛,

𝐷𝑒 𝑐𝑒 𝑞𝑢𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑝𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑣𝑟𝑎𝑖,

𝑁’𝑒𝑥𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑡.

𝑉𝑒́𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑚𝑎𝑖̂𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠 𝑑𝑢 𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑒,

𝐼𝑙𝑠 𝑒𝑛 𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑠𝑒𝑢𝑟𝑠,

𝑀𝑎𝑖𝑠 𝑒𝑛 𝑓𝑢𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑠 ℎ𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑢𝑟𝑠.

𝐿𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑢𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠 𝑛𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑡 𝑞𝑢’𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑢𝑟𝑠.

I have been free-flowing and writing my tarot aka taro readings and observations in here. I thought I was writing to no one, and that I’m writing for myself, but because this isn’t locked—that’s kind of bullshit. There is always still the chance of a random reader finding these words, and feeling enamored to read on and read me well. I have felt the allure and wonder about some of the writing I found on this platform.

Thanks, Matt, Creator of Write.as, for making this space for us.

The more I think about it, while I do write for myself. I also write for the random stranger who happens to find this today. Whomever you are, hello. I hope you stick around and start writing too.

When I scroll through my recent writings here, there is a part of me that wonders if I’m contributing to the ‘slop’ somehow. I trust that Creator Matt, does not secretly have a deal with LLM Lords or that he’s quietly building his own, and then feeding our words to it. The vibes of this platform feel very neutral and safe, which is why it’s one of the few places I’m paying to play and participate in.

I’m currently reading a compilation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog posts, and wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. She writes all forms so beautifully. Blogging itself became an art form, before SEO, BuzzFeed, content monetization, and clicks took over the Internet.

Remember when writers and creatives joined us on Livejournal? It was such a different world. Where does everyone write these days? The “celebrities” seem to like Substack. It would be very wild if someone among the whole list of supporters of Write.as, actually had more than 5,000 followers on a social media platform and are finding some fun with anonymity here.

I’m thinking of pulling a card before bed, but I’ve word-vomitted enough. I’ll try my best to dedicate time to write about a theme, and more coherently. Or maybe, at the very least, come up with a format if I am going to continue writing tarot-related posts here.

#writing #daily #focused

i & I ; I en i in de stripverhaal lees club

i en I zitten op een donderdagavond samen bij een beetje verdekt opgesteld tafeltje in een schimmige stripverhaal leesclub gevestigd in een oude verloederde woon, werk en industrie wijk, al daar verkeren zij in steeds grotere staat van opwinding, turend met grote ogen naar een hoger geletterde auteur die op het podium steeds meer de diepere kern van haar werken laat zien en zo langzaam maar zeker i en I daarin meesleept naar de climax van de vertelling.

i — I

---

i en I zitten samen bij een verdekt opgesteld tafeltje in een schimmige stripverhaal leesclub aldaar verkeren zij in steeds grotere staat van opwinding, turend met grote ogen naar een hoger geletterde auteur die op het podium steeds meer de diepe kern van haar werken laat zien en zo langzaam i en I daarin meesleept naar de climax van de vertelling.

i — I

---

i en I zitten samen bij een tafeltje in een schimmige stripverhaal club aldaar verkeren zij in steeds grotere staat van opwinding, turend naar een hoger geletterde auteur die op het podium de diepe kern van haar werken laat zien en i en I meesleept naar de climax van de vertelling.

i — I

---

i en I zitten bij een tafeltje in een stripverhaal club, turen naar een hoger geletterde auteur die de diepe kern van haar werk laat zien en i en I meesleept naar de climax.

i — I

---

i en I turen naar een hoger geletterde in een stripverhaal club die i en I meesleept naar de climax.

i — I

---

i en I turen naar een hoger geletterde in een stripverhaal club.

i — I

---

i en I turen naar een geletterde.

i — I

---

i en I turen.

i — I

---

De climax viel toch tegen i. \ I i

If you're doing your daily Bible reading from the ACNA Daily Lectionary—and I hope you are, because I think it's the best reading plan for most people—then you're getting ready during Advent to read through the Book of Revelation. Exciting times!

It's no secret that I disagree strongly with the Dispensationalist understanding of Scripture, as held by John MacArthur, Calvary Chapel, the Left Behind series, Dallas Theological Seminary, and much of contemporary Evangelicalism. This understanding is heterodox, at best, and contradicts nearly 1900 years of consistent biblical interpretation from the days of the Apostles through the 19th century. For some reason, that reality doesn't both people like it should.

Watching a Todd Friel video this morning on the Book of Revelation, he said the following:

“We need to understand the Book of Revelation the way the original audience would have understood it. If we come up with a different interpretation than they did then WE have it wrong.”

Bingo. Exactly. Couldn't agree more. And yet...coming up with a different interpretation is exactly what Dispensationalism does. Here's his entire video. It is certainly worth 20 minutes of your time. I wish I could speak like he does. I wish I was as exciting to listen to as he is. I wish I had his hair, too.

Seriously, watch it. He's fantastic.

#Evangelicalism #theology

Please feel free to use this copy, and adjust as necessary, for your book marketing efforts. Credit goes to copywriter Ben Settle, who got the idea from copywriter Richard Armstrong.

https://oregoneagle.com/what-in-the-world-is-wrong-with-me/

---

“Why Can’t I Finish Reading a Single Sci-Fi Novel?”

•  “I open a book, feel overwhelmed, and put it down.” •  “I sit down to read, but my family is always calling for me.” •  “I spent good money on books just to leave them gathering dust on my bookshelf.” •  “I bought all these e-books on sale and haven’t opened a single one.” •  “I try reading on my commute, but I get distracted by emails, YouTube, and TikTok.” •  “I bought dedicated e-readers, yet I still don’t read any more than I used to.”

As a busy reader, you often don’t have the uninterrupted time a 400-page novel demands.

Read novelettes instead (7,500 to 20,000 words). Their bite-sized, high-momentum format lets you experience complete, thrilling stories and reach the finish line at your own pace.

That’s why I wrote The Package Trilogy.

Follow Malcolm Diego as he attempts to deliver a mysterious package entrusted to him by his ex-girlfriend—while dodging everyone and everything in space trying to kill him.

•  Average Word Count: ~14,300 words per installment

•  Average Reading Time: ~55 minutes

Get each installment of The Package on Gumroad for just $1 each (instant access to both EPUB and PDF formats).

Scan below to grab your copies and start enjoying reading again:

Part 1	Part 2	Part 3
(Paste QR Code 1 Here)	(Paste QR Code 2 Here)	(Paste QR Code 3 Here)
$1.00 — EPUB + PDF	$1.00 — EPUB + PDF	$1.00 — EPUB + PDF

PS: If any of the problems don’t apply to you scan below to get the paperback version (all three novelettes in one package) on Lulu for $19.99. Or wait for the Christmas sale for the entire month of December for $3 off.

#books #copywriting #marketing

New Mexico St. Aggies at Sam Houston St. Bearkats.

From Conference USA, the Sam Houston Bearkats college football team will be hosting the New Mexico St. Aggies in a game tonight starting at 7:00 PM CT. My meds, prayers, and sleep schedule should allow me to catch the radio call of at least the 1st half of the game before putting head to pillow. At least, that's my plan.

And the adventure continues.

JOURNAL 21 octobre 2026

Mon frangin m'a téléphoné, il a trouvé quelqu'un pour me remplacer trois après-midi par semaine. Il m'a même dit que ça me plairait et il me laisse la surprise. Je crois que j'ai une petite idée 🤗😍 Le reste sera assuré par les deux K´ ( ils ont presque le même nom, j'avais jamais dit je crois ) pour un mois et demi ça ira. Et lui-même ira de temps en temps. Le vieux a eu son compte, il n'a pas bronché,il est cuit, sinon ça va nous faire bien rigoler ce soir je pense. Maintenant on va se faire un super thé avec gâteaux parce qu'on est passées par la pâtisserie. Une qui est à la fête je vous dis pas, de plus sa tante arrive demain...

#dojo

I played about 10 games or so of overwatch today with T and S, And we only won one of them. But surprisingly, I had a lot of fun, we were even rage beating each other and blaming each other for the losses.

The demand for convenient laundry pickup and delivery services is creating opportunities for businesses in Kuwait to build dedicated digital platforms. A well-designed laundry app can help customers schedule pickups, track orders, choose services, make payments, and receive delivery updates from their phones.

The cost of Laundry App Development in Kuwait typically ranges from KWD 7,500 to KWD 45,000+, depending on the application's features, platforms, integrations, backend requirements, and level of customization.

For businesses planning mobile app development in Kuwait, understanding these cost factors before starting development can help establish a realistic budget and avoid expensive changes later.

Laundry App Development Cost in Kuwait

There is no fixed cost for developing a laundry application because the required functionality varies between businesses.

A basic laundry booking MVP may cost around KWD 7,500–15,000. A mid-level platform with customer, driver, and laundry-partner functionality can range from KWD 15,000–30,000. A more advanced solution with automation, real-time tracking, multiple service providers, advanced analytics, and custom integrations may exceed KWD 30,000–45,000+.

App Type Estimated Cost

Basic Laundry App KWD 7,500–15,000

Mid-Level Laundry Platform KWD 15,000-30,000

Advanced Laundry Ecosystem KWD 30,000–45,000+

These are planning estimates. The final cost depends on the development scope and technical requirements.

What Factors Affect Laundry App Development Costs?

1. App Features and Complexity

Features directly influence development time and cost. A simple application may only allow customers to book a pickup and select laundry services. A larger platform may require separate interfaces for customers, drivers, laundry businesses, and administrators.

Common customer features include:

Registration and secure login

Laundry service selection

Pickup and delivery scheduling

Address management

Order tracking

Price calculation

Online payments

Order history

Push notifications

Ratings and reviews

Offers and promotional codes

Advanced platforms may also include subscriptions, recurring orders, loyalty programs, automated pricing, digital invoices, and personalized offers.

1. Number of Applications

A laundry delivery business may require more than one application.

The customer app manages bookings and payments, while a driver app can handle pickup assignments, navigation, delivery status, and order updates. Laundry partners may require a separate dashboard or application for managing orders, services, pricing, and availability.

An admin panel is also necessary for managing users, orders, payments, drivers, service providers, and reports.

Building multiple interfaces naturally increases development hours and testing requirements.

Payment and Location Integrations

Payment integration is an important consideration for a laundry platform operating in Kuwait. The application may need to support locally relevant payment options alongside cards and other digital payment methods.

Location and map integration is equally important for pickup and delivery operations. Customers should be able to save addresses, select pickup locations, and track order progress.

Additional integrations with SMS, email, CRM, analytics, accounting, or delivery management systems can further affect the project budget.

Native vs Cross-Platform Development

The choice between native and cross-platform development can influence both initial cost and long-term maintenance.

Developing separate native Android and iOS applications generally requires more development resources. Cross-platform development can reduce duplicated development work when the application does not require highly platform-specific functionality.

However, businesses should select the technology based on performance requirements, expected user volume, integrations, scalability, and future product plans rather than cost alone.

An experienced mobile app development company in Kuwait can assess these requirements and recommend an appropriate technology strategy.

How Long Does It Take to Build a Laundry App?

A basic laundry booking MVP may take approximately 3–5 months to develop. A mid-level platform with customer, driver, and admin functionality can take around 5–7 months, while a complex multi-vendor laundry ecosystem may require 7–10 months or longer.

The timeline depends on the number of platforms, feature complexity, third-party integrations, UI/UX requirements, testing, and deployment requirements.

Launching an MVP first can help businesses validate their service model before investing in advanced features.

How to Reduce Laundry App Development Costs

Businesses can control development costs by defining their core requirements before development begins.

Instead of launching every possible feature, prioritize functions that directly support bookings, payments, pickups, deliveries, and customer communication. Advanced features such as loyalty programs, subscriptions, AI-based recommendations, or sophisticated analytics can be added later.

A scalable backend architecture also helps reduce the need for expensive redevelopment when the number of users and orders increases.

Why Choose Techugo for Laundry App Development?

The success of a laundry application depends on more than its interface. The development team must understand booking workflows, delivery operations, payment processing, location services, backend architecture, and data security.

Techugo can help businesses plan and develop customized laundry applications based on their operating model and target customers. The development process can cover business analysis, UI/UX design, app development, API integrations, testing, deployment, and ongoing improvements.

Before requesting a final quotation, businesses should prepare their feature list, preferred platforms, delivery model, payment requirements, integrations, and expected user volume. This allows the development team to provide a more accurate cost and timeline.

FAQs

How much does it cost to develop a laundry app in Kuwait?

Laundry app development can cost approximately KWD 7,500 to KWD 45,000+, depending on features, platforms, integrations, and overall complexity.

What features should a laundry delivery app include?

Core features include service selection, pickup scheduling, delivery tracking, order management, payments, notifications, customer profiles, and order history.

Do I need separate apps for customers and delivery drivers?

For businesses offering pickup and delivery, separate customer and driver interfaces can provide better functionality and operational control.

Can a laundry app support multiple laundry businesses?

Yes. A multi-vendor model can allow several laundry providers to manage their services, pricing, orders, and availability through a shared platform.

How long does laundry app development take?

A basic MVP may take around 3–5 months, while a feature-rich laundry platform can require 7–10 months or longer.

Conclusion

The cost of Laundry App Development in Kuwait depends primarily on the application's features, number of user interfaces, integrations, technology stack, and backend complexity. Businesses should focus first on the features that directly support their laundry and delivery operations.

A clearly defined MVP can help control the initial investment while creating a foundation for future expansion. With the right development partner, businesses can build a scalable laundry platform designed around Kuwait's customer expectations and operational requirements.

Book launch for THE SOLAR GRID hardback tentatively locked in... in Denmark! Probably around early-summer next year.

Social media campaigning has been spreading me a little thin. You'd be surprised by the amount of time that goes into shooting and editing a 30 second reel. I'm gonna need to pull away and focus on finishing up writing, drawing, and designing TIMES NEW HUMAN, which—as per my agreement with EUNIC—will need to be launched, at least locally, before year's end.

Look at me excel-sheeting my journal to track progress for Christ's sake. Also got a couple of fantastic-looking advance-reader copies of things friends sent me that I need to read.

The thing with social media is you can't rely on having just the one “ad” and repost. You gotta vary your “content” for sustainable engagement. Traditional promotion has been flipped over its head. It's why film studios don't just give us the trailer anymore; no, they give us clips of Christopher Nolan talking about some of his latest filmmaking techniques and Tom Cruise joking about how much fun he had performing in a fat suit. Easier done of course when you're a juggernaut with immense resources, but it doesn't absolve everyone else from needing to use somewhat similar strategies to get noticed. And here's the thing; if a giant like Christopher Nolan—who is notoriously known for not even having a smartphone of his own—understands that being visible on social media is imperative to the success of his already-well-promoted film... what makes us little guys think we can get away with having no social media presence at all and still make a living?

It's hard though when you're doing everything yourself. The mental shift from creating to promoting and back again is, admittedly, a little too much for me to handle. So I'm gonna need to land on a system that won't fuck with my head too much. Maybe dedicate one single day a week to shooting and preparing material and scheduling it in advance, so the rest of the week is free to write and draw. Something like that.

I like systems. Systems are good.

#journal #work

Rimpelloos water Libelle’s dansen ritmisch In de najaarszon.

Something that keeps me up at night are the second and third order effects of runaway climate change. I don't think contemporary models account for the potential of systemic political/societal collapse and contagion that could occur from intense, consistent and ubiquitous climate shocks. So, let's do a little investigation into those threats.

---

The Climate Collapse Cascade

How Environmental Stress Could Trigger Regional State Failure, Mass Displacement, and the Breakdown of International Crisis Management by 2050

A geopolitical scenario analysis | October 2026

Abstract

Climate change is commonly understood as a threat to agricultural production, water availability, human habitability, and economic development. Its relationship with political instability is considerably more complicated. Although climate change does not independently determine whether governments survive, its consequences can interact with existing political fragility, armed conflict, weak institutions, demographic pressure, and international economic instability. This paper examines a scenario in which those interactions produce a self-reinforcing cascade of state failures across climate-vulnerable regions between 2026 and 2050. The central hypothesis is that the greatest geopolitical danger may arise not from environmental displacement alone, but from the inability of fragile governments to absorb recurring shocks. Agricultural disruption produces food insecurity and internal migration; these pressures weaken public institutions and create opportunities for armed groups to consolidate control over essential resources. As state authority fragments, declining agricultural production, interrupted commerce, and organized violence generate additional displacement, including across international borders. Neighboring states then confront similar pressures while facing their own climate-related challenges, potentially allowing instability to propagate across entire regions.

The contemporary Sahel, particularly Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, provides a useful illustration of several mechanisms underlying this scenario. Armed organizations already exploit economic insecurity, disrupted trade routes, and institutional weakness to challenge government authority. Climate change could intensify these conditions even where it is not the principal cause of existing conflict. Meanwhile, international food markets, humanitarian institutions, and foreign governments may face declining capacity to stabilize vulnerable states as climate-related emergencies become more numerous and geographically dispersed. The paper argues that conventional climate-migration projections, while scientifically valuable within their defined scope, do not fully quantify the potential effects of cascading political failures on international displacement. It concludes that a world containing large, interconnected zones of limited or collapsed state authority is a plausible high-impact scenario under sufficiently adverse climatic, political, and economic conditions, although neither its occurrence nor its magnitude can currently be predicted with confidence.

I. Introduction: From Environmental Crisis to Political Collapse

The relationship between climate change and political stability is often discussed in terms of direct environmental consequences. Rising temperatures reduce agricultural productivity, prolonged drought undermines water security, extreme weather destroys infrastructure, and rising seas threaten low-lying settlements. Populations respond by adapting their livelihoods, relocating within their countries, or, in some circumstances, migrating internationally. Governments are generally assumed to remain functioning institutions throughout this process, even as their resources become strained. Humanitarian organizations provide assistance, development banks finance adaptation, and international migration systems accommodate at least some portion of displaced populations. This framework is useful for analyzing manageable environmental disruption, but it becomes less reliable when climate-related stresses exceed the capacity of the institutions expected to manage them.

This paper explores a more disruptive possibility: that climate change could push already-fragile governments beyond their ability to maintain basic economic and social functions, setting off political failures whose consequences extend far beyond the original environmental event. Under this scenario, repeated agricultural losses, food insecurity, water scarcity, and internal displacement progressively undermine government authority. As public resources become insufficient to maintain essential services, armed organizations gain opportunities to control agricultural territory, transportation corridors, food distribution networks, and access to water. Competition over these resources intensifies conflict, which in turn makes agricultural production and civilian survival more difficult. This creates a dangerous feedback mechanism: environmental stress contributes to political instability, while political instability magnifies the consequences of environmental stress.

The resulting process need not remain confined within a single country. Refugees, displaced armed groups, interrupted trade, falling tax revenues, and regional food-price shocks can transmit instability across borders. Neighboring countries may already possess the same underlying vulnerabilities as the original state, making them poorly equipped to absorb additional pressures. If several countries experience similar crises simultaneously, the geographic scope of destabilization could expand considerably. Rather than a collection of isolated national disasters, the international community could confront a network of mutually reinforcing emergencies. The possibility of such cascading effects is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's finding that climatic and non-climatic risks increasingly interact across sectors and regions, although the IPCC does not conclude that widespread state collapse will necessarily follow. [1]

The central distinction is between the effects of climate change within a functioning political system and its effects after that system begins to fragment. In the first case, governments can attempt to distribute food, coordinate migration, maintain infrastructure, and organize adaptation. In the second, those functions become increasingly unreliable or disappear altogether. Climate change may initiate or intensify the crisis, but institutional collapse transforms a potentially recoverable environmental emergency into a prolonged political and humanitarian catastrophe. The ultimate danger is not simply that millions of people may be forced to leave their homes. It is that the institutions responsible for protecting those people may cease to function, creating additional crises that are no longer directly dependent on climate conditions.

II. The Climatic Foundations of Systemic Instability

The physical foundations of this scenario are well established. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report concludes that anthropogenic climate change has increased the frequency or severity of numerous climate hazards and that risks to human and natural systems rise with additional warming. Under intermediate emissions assumptions, assessed global warming for the 2041–2060 period is approximately 2°C above preindustrial temperatures; under high and very high emissions scenarios, central estimates are approximately 2.1°C and 2.4°C, respectively. These values are scenario-dependent, rather than predictions of one inevitable future. Regional warming can substantially exceed the global average, particularly over land. [2]

For much of sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural vulnerability is especially consequential because farming is highly dependent on rainfall and remains an important source of employment and household income. The IPCC reports that climate change has already reduced agricultural productivity growth across Africa and projects further adverse effects on growing seasons, crop yields, livestock productivity, and water availability. Its assessment identifies a median projected decline of approximately 9% in West African maize yields at 1.5°C global warming, relative to 2005 yield levels, without adaptation. At higher warming levels, losses become more severe, although estimates vary considerably by crop, location, and adaptation strategy. The report also identifies growing risks from simultaneous disruptions to crops, livestock, fisheries, and agricultural labor. [3]

Importantly, these projections do not imply that the Sahel will simply experience a uniform reduction in rainfall. Climate models indicate considerable geographic variation, with declining precipitation projected in some western areas and increasing rainfall in parts of the eastern Sahel. Nevertheless, higher temperatures increase evaporative demand, while changes in rainfall timing, heavier precipitation events, flooding, and agricultural drought can disrupt production even where total annual rainfall remains stable or increases. The IPCC projects that the western Sahel's rainy season could shorten through a delay in rainfall onset of approximately four to six days at global warming levels of 1.5°C to 2°C. For subsistence farmers operating with limited irrigation, little financial protection, and narrow planting windows, changes of this kind can be economically significant. [3]

The political consequences of these changes may be nonlinear. A modest agricultural loss in a wealthy country might be offset through imports, insurance, technological improvements, or government subsidies. The same loss in a low-income country could destroy household savings, increase food prices, reduce tax revenue, and accelerate internal migration. Successive failures may be especially destructive because each occurs before the population and government have recovered from the previous one. A farmer who loses one harvest might borrow money or sell livestock; after several unsuccessful seasons, that farmer may possess neither the capital nor the productive assets required to resume agriculture. The result is not merely a temporary decline in output but the permanent destruction of an economic livelihood.

This distinction becomes critical when environmental damage affects several sectors simultaneously. Heat exposure reduces labor productivity, water shortages undermine agricultural production and public health, flooding damages transportation infrastructure, and higher energy costs make irrigation and food distribution more expensive. Each problem reduces the resources available to address the others. Under adverse conditions, recurring climate shocks could leave governments confronting continually escalating obligations while their economic capacity to fulfill those obligations deteriorates.

III. The State-Failure Mechanism: When Scarcity Becomes a Source of Armed Power

The transition from environmental stress to state failure depends principally on institutions, rather than temperature alone. Governments rarely collapse simply because a harvest fails. Political breakdown becomes possible when recurring shortages interact with corruption, preexisting conflict, exclusionary governance, economic mismanagement, or declining public legitimacy. The decisive variable is whether the state can continue maintaining essential functions in the face of repeated emergencies.

An initial period of agricultural disruption may produce internal migration toward cities and areas with more reliable water or employment. These movements do not necessarily cause instability, and well-governed countries can benefit economically from migration. However, vulnerable states may lack the housing, sanitation, employment opportunities, healthcare facilities, and fiscal capacity necessary to integrate large displaced populations. Urban unemployment and food insecurity can worsen as public spending requirements increase and domestic agricultural output declines. Governments may respond by expanding food subsidies, increasing borrowing, or restricting exports, but these interventions become difficult to maintain when public revenues and foreign-exchange reserves are already strained.

A more dangerous stage begins when food scarcity becomes an opportunity for organized coercion. Armed groups can increase their influence by controlling agricultural regions, roads, grain warehouses, fuel supplies, and access to humanitarian assistance. Their power need not depend on producing food themselves. Control over transportation and distribution may be sufficient to extract payments, determine which communities receive supplies, and punish populations viewed as hostile. Civilians may become economically dependent on whichever organization controls their access to basic necessities. Under these conditions, access to food is no longer governed primarily by ordinary markets or public administration. It becomes an instrument of territorial control.

Violence then becomes a secondary cause of scarcity. Farmers abandon insecure land, merchants avoid dangerous roads, transport costs increase, livestock are stolen or lost, and irrigation systems deteriorate without maintenance. Government security operations may also disrupt local economies, particularly where military forces commit abuses or impose collective restrictions. Humanitarian organizations struggle to reach populations trapped in contested territory. The Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme have documented how conflict obstructs food production and assistance, identifying violence as the principal driver of hunger in 14 of 16 hunger hotspots assessed for November 2025 through May 2026. [4]

Once this process becomes entrenched, an environmental recovery may no longer be sufficient to restore political stability. Improved rainfall does little to revive agriculture if farmers cannot safely return to their land, markets remain inaccessible, and competing armed factions control transportation routes. The original climate shock may gradually recede while the conflict it helped intensify continues independently. At this stage, rebuilding the state requires not merely agricultural assistance but the restoration of security, political legitimacy, public administration, and commercial networks.

The resulting territory may not resemble a failed state in the conventional sense of a completely absent national government. A capital may remain under the control of a recognized administration, while rural regions are governed by insurgents, militias, local authorities, or criminal networks. Public authority becomes fragmented, with different organizations exercising different functions in different territories. In this scenario, the danger is not necessarily the disappearance of countries from the international system, but the emergence of expansive regions in which central governments are unable to enforce laws, guarantee access to essential goods, or protect significant portions of their populations.

IV. Mali and the Central Sahel: A Contemporary Illustration

The ongoing crisis in Mali provides an important illustration of how economic disruption, armed conflict, and institutional fragility can reinforce one another. Since the rebellion and insurgency that began in 2012, Mali has experienced persistent instability, military coups, separatist conflict, jihadist expansion, and repeated changes in foreign security partnerships. Neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger have experienced related forms of violence and political upheaval. These crises cannot credibly be attributed to climate change alone. Their immediate causes include political grievances, military failures, corruption, ethnic and communal tensions, regional insurgent networks, and the decisions of domestic and foreign political actors. Nevertheless, the region's exposure to climate variability and dependence on climate-sensitive livelihoods create conditions in which environmental stress can compound existing instability.

By late 2025, armed organizations in the central Sahel were increasingly targeting economic infrastructure and trade networks rather than relying exclusively on conventional territorial attacks. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, ACLED, documented a coordinated campaign by Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda-affiliated organization, to restrict fuel and transportation access in Mali. Its operations affected major economic corridors and contributed to fuel shortages, price increases, and disruptions to ordinary commercial activity. ACLED recorded more than 10,000 deaths associated with political violence across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger between January and late November 2025. [5]

The strategic significance of these developments extends beyond the immediate military balance. By interfering with commercial supply routes, armed groups can weaken the government's ability to maintain economic normality without necessarily capturing major cities. Fuel shortages affect transportation, electricity generation, food distribution, healthcare, and public administration. As the cost of basic necessities rises, the government's inability to guarantee access to essential supplies becomes increasingly visible. Armed groups exploit these conditions to undermine confidence in state institutions and expand their influence over surrounding communities.

The situation deteriorated further during 2026. Analyses by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies described increasingly coordinated attacks on strategic infrastructure, military installations, and urban access routes. Insurgent pressure on Bamako and other major population centers demonstrated how territorial insecurity could be converted into economic pressure. These developments also revealed the limits of the Malian government's security strategy, including the difficulties created by dependence on Russian military assistance and the breakdown of earlier regional and international security arrangements. [6]

Mali therefore illustrates a broader principle: a state may lose effective authority not simply by suffering military defeats, but by losing control of the economic systems on which its population depends. An armed movement capable of interrupting fuel imports, food deliveries, commercial transportation, and agricultural production can undermine state legitimacy without administering the entire territory itself. If intensified climate stress further reduces food availability or increases dependence on imports, the political value of controlling supply routes could increase substantially.

The regional character of the Sahel conflict also demonstrates that state fragility is not confined by national borders. Armed organizations operate across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and surrounding areas, while refugees, traders, pastoralists, and displaced communities move through interconnected economic and social networks. ACLED has documented the expansion of militant activity into border regions involving Benin and Nigeria, indicating that instability can spread into territories whose governments were not originally central participants in the conflict. UNHCR has similarly identified the interaction of violence, climate shocks, food insecurity, and economic fragility as an important driver of displacement across the Sahel. [5][7]

The hypothetical climate-collapse scenario examined here should not be confused with a prediction that Mali will necessarily fall, or that its current conflict was principally caused by global warming. Instead, Mali demonstrates the mechanisms through which an additional and persistent environmental burden could contribute to wider destabilization: armed control of essential supplies, weakened state legitimacy, disrupted commerce, involuntary population movement, and the cross-border expansion of violence.

V. From National Collapse to Regional Contagion

The most consequential element of the proposed scenario is its potential for geographic multiplication. The collapse of one government does not automatically cause its neighbors to collapse. However, it can generate pressures that make instability elsewhere more likely, particularly when neighboring countries share the same climatic and institutional vulnerabilities.

The first transmission mechanism is population displacement. When a state loses control over large areas of its territory, civilians may initially seek security in other regions of the country. If safe areas become overcrowded, basic services deteriorate, or armed conflict spreads toward major cities, increasing numbers may cross international borders. Neighboring governments must then provide or facilitate access to food, water, healthcare, shelter, sanitation, education, and employment. The costs can be considerable where public resources are already limited. Refugees themselves are not inherently destabilizing; they can contribute significantly to receiving economies. The risk arises when the scale and speed of displacement exceed the receiving country's capacity to integrate newcomers, especially where existing political conflict or economic insecurity is severe.

The second mechanism is the movement and expansion of armed organizations. Groups operating inside a collapsing state may establish supply bases, recruitment networks, financial operations, or territorial footholds across neighboring borders. Refugee flows can complicate security conditions, although refugees must not be conflated with militants. Border regions may become contested spaces in which already-weak governments struggle to maintain effective authority. These pressures can spread independently of further climatic deterioration.

The third mechanism is economic contagion. Neighboring countries often rely on shared trade corridors, ports, regional agricultural markets, energy infrastructure, and transportation networks. The disruption of one country can increase import costs, redirect commercial traffic, reduce export revenues, or force trade through less efficient routes. If armed organizations control important corridors, regional commerce can become vulnerable to extortion or interdiction. Economic weakness in one country may therefore contribute to inflation, food insecurity, and declining public revenue in another.

A fourth mechanism is the simultaneous deterioration of political legitimacy. Governments confronted by rising prices, agricultural failures, unemployment, and insecurity may struggle to maintain public confidence. If neighboring administrations have already fallen or lost extensive territory, domestic military factions and insurgent groups may perceive greater opportunities to challenge state authority. The successful expansion of one armed movement can also provide logistical experience, financial resources, and organizational connections for groups operating elsewhere.

The most severe outcome emerges when these mechanisms operate simultaneously. A government experiencing its own agricultural disruption must suddenly accommodate displaced populations from a neighboring conflict, secure increasingly dangerous commercial routes, purchase food at elevated international prices, and allocate additional resources to military operations. This new burden may weaken its ability to withstand the next climate shock. If the government subsequently fragments, another round of displacement and regional disruption follows.

The resulting cascade would not resemble a simple row of governments falling in sequence. Some states might maintain effective control over their capitals while losing rural regions; others might experience coups, insurgent expansion, economic paralysis, or prolonged humanitarian emergencies without formal regime change. Instability could spread through connected border regions while relatively capable neighboring states remain intact. Nevertheless, the cumulative result could be an extensive geographic zone of fragmented authority, severe food insecurity, recurrent displacement, and limited international access.

VI. A Plausible Scenario for 2026–2050

The following chronology is an illustrative adverse scenario, constructed from documented risk mechanisms. It is not a numerical forecast, and the dates represent hypothetical stages rather than scientifically estimated thresholds.

Phase One: Accumulating Vulnerabilities, 2026–2033

During the late 2020s and early 2030s, vulnerable states continue experiencing a combination of agricultural disruption, extreme heat, flooding, and repeated economic shocks. Some recover between events through foreign assistance, infrastructure improvements, and favorable harvests. Others enter subsequent crises without having restored their economic capacity. Rural households migrate toward cities, and governments devote growing proportions of their budgets to emergency food imports, infrastructure repairs, and security operations.

In the Sahel, continuing political violence prevents some communities from adapting effectively. Armed groups expand control over trade routes and agricultural areas, while local governments face competing pressures to finance security, subsidize food, and provide essential services. Conditions vary considerably by country, but repeated emergencies increase the number of communities dependent on assistance or vulnerable to sudden displacement.

Phase Two: Institutional Thresholds, 2033–2040

Under unfavorable climatic and economic conditions, several vulnerable states experience overlapping harvest failures and food-price shocks. Even where food remains available internationally, governments with depleted reserves or weakened currencies struggle to purchase sufficient imports. Households unable to afford food begin selling productive assets or abandoning livelihoods. Internal migration accelerates, while local governments become increasingly dependent on national and international assistance.

In some countries, armed organizations exploit shortages by controlling food distribution, agricultural territory, or commercial routes. Governments may lose administrative control over additional regions. Military spending expands while the domestic tax base contracts. A combination of civilian unrest, political fragmentation, and insurgent activity produces severe governance failures in a small number of already-fragile states.

Crucially, these failures need not coincide with the most severe climatic events. Their timing may depend instead on depleted government finances, leadership crises, external economic shocks, or military developments.

Phase Three: Cross-Border Propagation, 2040–2045

A series of major governance failures generates sustained international displacement. Neighboring states confront rising humanitarian expenditure, infrastructure demand, and trade disruption while experiencing their own climate-related problems. Some absorb these pressures successfully, but others lack sufficient resources or political cohesion. Armed organizations expand into weakly governed border regions, and existing conflicts become more geographically interconnected.

International food-market instability amplifies the crisis. If harvest failures occur simultaneously in several agricultural regions, exporting countries may impose restrictions to protect domestic consumers. Higher transport, energy, and fertilizer costs further increase food prices. Food-importing states with limited reserves face particular difficulties, while international relief agencies struggle to procure and distribute supplies at the required scale.

The largest danger at this stage is the erosion of recovery opportunities. Even countries that avoid immediate collapse may remain dependent on emergency support and vulnerable to subsequent shocks.

Phase Four: Regional Fragmentation, 2045–2050

In the most severe version of the scenario, accumulated instability creates one or more large, interconnected regions in which recognized governments no longer exercise effective authority over substantial portions of their territory. Military factions, insurgent organizations, local authorities, and criminal networks control different geographic areas. Trade continues but becomes unreliable, costly, and politically contested. Humanitarian assistance reaches some communities while others remain inaccessible.

Large populations are displaced repeatedly. Some remain in camps or informal settlements, others migrate to more stable neighboring countries, and a portion attempt longer international journeys. Countries that successfully maintain political stability may become centers of economic activity and migration, but must devote additional resources to border administration, integration, security, and humanitarian support.

In this scenario, parts of the Sahel and neighboring conflict-affected regions could experience a Libya-like fragmentation of territorial authority, although the causes and political structures would differ substantially from Libya's historical collapse. Comparable risks might emerge in other vulnerable regions, but their development would depend on distinct local conflicts and institutions rather than a uniform global pattern.

By 2050, the defining international security problem would no longer be individual episodes of climate displacement. It would be the persistence of interconnected political and humanitarian emergencies that exceed the capacity of existing national and international institutions to resolve.

VII. What Existing Climate-Migration Models Capture—and What They Do Not

One of the most widely cited estimates of future climate migration comes from the World Bank's 2021 Groundswell report, which projected that climate change could produce as many as 216 million internal migrants across six world regions by 2050 under a pessimistic reference scenario. Approximately 86 million of these migrants would be in sub-Saharan Africa, 49 million in East Asia and the Pacific, 40 million in South Asia, 19 million in North Africa, 17 million in Latin America, and 5 million in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The study focuses primarily on long-term changes in population distribution attributable to changing crop productivity, water availability, and sea-level rise. [8]

The critical limitation is not that these projections are scientifically unsound, but that they answer a narrower question than the one posed by a cascading-collapse scenario. The World Bank explicitly identifies cross-border migration, several forms of displacement, short-term migration, and immobility as outside the model's scope. Rapid-onset climate events are also largely excluded except where their cumulative effects appear over multiple years. Most high-income countries, the Middle East, and small island developing states are not included in the aggregate estimate. The study recognizes that conflicts, economic crises, and political fragility can influence migration and adaptation, but its headline figure does not represent a dynamic forecast of regional warfare or cascading state failure. [8]

Consequently, the 216-million estimate should not be interpreted as an upper limit on all forms of climate-related displacement. Nor does the fact that most directly climate-related migration is expected to occur internally resolve the question of what happens if receiving communities subsequently become insecure. A population initially displaced by agricultural decline may relocate within its country, experience additional economic hardship, and eventually cross an international border because of violence or institutional collapse. Such secondary movements may be classified primarily as conflict-related, even if climate stress contributed to the original economic deterioration.

This distinction highlights the difference between physical climate models and integrated geopolitical risk models. Climate models estimate variables such as temperature, precipitation, extreme weather, and related physical changes. They are not designed to predict individual coups, insurgent victories, or institutional collapse. Specialized impact models translate environmental projections into consequences for agriculture, water supplies, or migration. Conflict-risk assessments examine political and social vulnerabilities, often over shorter time horizons. The challenge is that these analytical systems are not always fully integrated into a common framework capable of simulating nonlinear interactions across countries and sectors.

It would nevertheless be incorrect to suggest that contemporary climate research ignores cascading risks. The IPCC explicitly identifies compound and cross-border consequences, including disruptions transmitted through food markets, supply chains, water systems, and infrastructure. The scientific gap lies principally in predicting the political consequences of those interactions with adequate specificity and accounting for the feedback effects of state fragility, organized violence, humanitarian intervention, and international displacement. [1]

A more comprehensive approach would integrate climate and agricultural projections with models of institutional capacity, food affordability, political legitimacy, armed-group activity, regional trade, and population movement. Such models would need to allow the condition of one country to alter the risks experienced by others, rather than treating national outcomes as independent. They would also need to recognize thresholds at which apparently manageable stresses produce abrupt changes in behavior, such as the loss of a major transportation corridor, the suspension of government salaries, or the breakdown of food distribution systems.

Even then, reliable numerical forecasts of state collapse would remain exceptionally difficult. The objective would be to identify plausible high-impact pathways and warning indicators, not to claim that future political events can be predicted from climate data alone.

VIII. The Declining Effectiveness of International Intervention

A central assumption underlying many humanitarian and development responses is that international institutions and relatively stable donor countries will retain sufficient resources to respond to crises in vulnerable regions. Historically, external food deliveries, financial assistance, diplomatic mediation, and security operations have sometimes prevented further deterioration or helped stabilize affected populations. The cascading-collapse scenario challenges the durability of that assumption under conditions of widespread and simultaneous climate stress.

The most immediate constraint is financial. Humanitarian organizations already face substantial shortfalls relative to assessed needs. UNHCR's June 2026 Global Report states that funding covered only 37% of its total requirements in 2025, compared with 48% in 2024. Available funding fell by approximately $1.25 billion, forcing significant reductions in staffing and operational capacity. Similarly, the FAO and WFP reported in November 2025 that only $10.5 billion of the $29 billion required for people facing severe hunger risks in designated hotspots had been received by the end of October. [4][9]

If the number of simultaneous emergencies grows, donor governments may become increasingly selective about where they intervene. Even economically developed countries will face domestic expenses associated with climate adaptation, infrastructure repair, agricultural disruption, public health, and emergency response. These costs would not eliminate their ability to provide international assistance, but they could increase political and budgetary competition over finite resources. Security commitments, economic downturns, and geopolitical rivalries could further restrict assistance.

A second difficulty involves international food markets. Humanitarian organizations frequently rely on agricultural production and transportation systems operating far beyond the region receiving aid. If climate shocks reduce harvests in several major producing regions simultaneously, food procurement may become more expensive precisely when more people require assistance. Export restrictions, higher energy prices, and disrupted shipping routes could amplify shortages. The IPCC identifies rising risks of concurrent agricultural losses across major producing regions, while the FAO and WFP already recognize the interaction of conflict, weather extremes, and economic shocks as important drivers of food crises. [1][4]

Third, intervention becomes progressively more difficult as political institutions fragment. Supplying food to a functioning government facing an agricultural emergency is fundamentally different from delivering aid across territory controlled by multiple hostile armed organizations. Humanitarian convoys may be attacked or obstructed, relief supplies diverted, and access conditioned on political concessions. Foreign military interventions can sometimes restore security in limited areas, but such operations frequently require sustained resources, local legitimacy, and effective domestic partners. Climate-related stress may simultaneously undermine all three.

Fourth, geopolitical competition can obstruct collective responses. Major powers may support rival political factions, condition assistance on strategic concessions, or disagree over international mandates. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and competing security interests can complicate economic reconstruction. In these circumstances, the availability of international resources does not necessarily translate into coordinated intervention.

Finally, international fatigue could become an important political constraint. A humanitarian emergency that lasts months may generate a substantial response; one that lasts decades, alongside numerous other emergencies, may attract progressively less attention. Governments may concentrate on protecting borders, securing strategically important areas, and preventing conflict from spreading rather than attempting comprehensive reconstruction. Such policies may contain some immediate risks without resolving the economic and political conditions sustaining instability.

The resulting danger is a widening gap between humanitarian requirements and international response capacity. When that gap becomes sufficiently large, a crisis that might previously have been stabilized through external assistance could instead deteriorate into prolonged institutional failure. Importantly, the FAO and WFP emphasize that famine is generally predictable and preventable; the scenario presented here is one in which the ability or willingness to implement preventive measures becomes increasingly constrained, not one in which famine is a physically unavoidable consequence of warming. [4]

IX. Implications for Europe, Turkey, and the International System

The geopolitical consequences of this scenario would extend well beyond the countries experiencing political collapse. Europe could face simultaneous challenges involving energy security, international food prices, migration, foreign assistance, military commitments, and domestic climate adaptation. Turkey would occupy an important position in this environment because of its proximity to the Middle East, connections to European markets, existing refugee-hosting infrastructure, and role within NATO.

However, international migration would not converge on a single destination. Displacement originating in the Sahel would initially place substantial pressure on nearby African countries and regional migration corridors. Instability in North Africa could affect Mediterranean routes, while crises in Syria, Iraq, Iran, or neighboring regions could have more direct consequences for Turkey. South Asian displacement would follow its own regional patterns, with most people remaining within their countries or moving to neighboring states. The scale and direction of onward migration would depend on security, transportation costs, legal access, employment opportunities, and the ability of receiving countries to accommodate newcomers.

A cascading-collapse scenario could nevertheless produce cross-border displacement substantially beyond what is captured by climate-only migration estimates. UNHCR's Global Trends report, published in June 2026, recorded approximately 41.6 million refugees worldwide at the end of 2025 and 68.7 million people internally displaced by conflict and violence. These figures demonstrate that very large international and internal movements are already occurring, although they cannot be used as direct estimates of future climate migration. [10]

Whether cumulative climate-related displacement ultimately reaches hundreds of millions of international migrants by 2050 remains deeply uncertain. The existing evidence does not justify assigning that outcome a specific probability or presenting it as an established projection. What the scenario demonstrates is that migration arising from political collapse may not scale proportionally with the original climate shock. Secondary conflict, economic breakdown, and regional contagion can create displacement that is geographically removed from, and temporally delayed relative to, the initiating environmental stress.

For Europe and Turkey, this would make early investment in resilient regional institutions, food security, conflict prevention, and managed migration arrangements strategically relevant. Policies centered exclusively on deterring border crossings would address only the final stage of a much longer causal process. If the underlying drivers continue to intensify, migration pressure could persist regardless of the enforcement measures employed at distant borders.

X. Conditions That Could Prevent the Cascade

The scenario must be evaluated alongside the mechanisms that could prevent it. Climate stress does not automatically produce famine, migration does not automatically produce conflict, and political fragility does not automatically end in state collapse. Countries facing severe environmental threats may successfully adapt through improved irrigation, drought-resistant crops, social protection, renewable energy, water management, infrastructure investment, and economic diversification. Institutions can become more resilient over time, and migration can increase household incomes and contribute to receiving economies.

The World Bank's Groundswell analysis illustrates the significance of policy intervention. Under more favorable assumptions involving climate action and inclusive development, its modeled total of internal climate migrants falls substantially relative to the pessimistic reference scenario, reaching as low as 44 million in the most favorable comparison presented. This does not establish that comparable reductions would occur in conflict-driven migration, but it demonstrates the importance of adaptation and development choices. [8]

Several developments could therefore interrupt the proposed cascade: sustained improvements in agricultural productivity, stronger regional food reserves, access to affordable imports, effective humanitarian financing, negotiated political settlements, more capable local institutions, and deliberate planning for internal and international migration. Countries with diversified economies and functioning public institutions may absorb climatic and demographic pressures that would overwhelm weaker neighbors.

A useful assessment of this scenario would also track measurable warning indicators. These include repeated harvest losses before household recovery, the depletion of livestock and productive assets, rapidly rising food-import costs, declining foreign-exchange reserves, prolonged urban food-price inflation, armed disruption of essential transportation routes, loss of administrative control over rural regions, large secondary population movements, and sustained reductions in international humanitarian access. The coincidence of several such indicators across neighboring countries would be more concerning than any individual climate event.

The most important analytical question is not whether a particular country is exposed to severe environmental hazards. It is whether its economy, institutions, and neighbors retain sufficient capacity to manage successive shocks. Understanding that capacity requires integrating physical climate projections with political, economic, and security analysis.

XI. Conclusion: The Possibility of a Climate-Driven Crisis of State Capacity

Climate change is unlikely to produce a uniform or mechanically predictable wave of state collapse. Its consequences will be mediated by geography, wealth, institutions, political decisions, international assistance, and the ability of societies to adapt. Nevertheless, the interaction of persistent environmental stress with existing political fragility creates a credible pathway toward cascading regional instability.

The central risk arises from positive feedback between scarcity and organized violence. Agricultural disruption can undermine livelihoods and increase food insecurity. When governments lack the capacity to manage these pressures, armed groups may exploit shortages and control access to essential resources. Violence then disrupts agricultural production, economic activity, and humanitarian assistance, worsening the scarcity that initially contributed to instability. As government authority fragments, displacement, conflict, and interrupted commerce can transmit pressures to neighboring countries. Where these countries possess similar vulnerabilities, the process may repeat.

The contemporary Sahel illustrates important components of this mechanism. Armed movements in Mali and neighboring countries already exploit institutional weakness, economic disruption, and contested commercial networks. Climate change is not the primary explanation for those conflicts, but increasing environmental stress could make them more difficult to resolve and expand their humanitarian consequences.

By 2050, the greatest geopolitical danger may not be a single catastrophic climate event or even the direct displacement of hundreds of millions of people. It may be the accumulation of stresses that gradually erode the capacity of multiple states to function, until those failures begin reinforcing one another across borders. International intervention could become less effective as humanitarian demands expand, economic resources become more contested, and external actors confront overlapping domestic and geopolitical crises.

In the most adverse scenario, the result would be extensive regions of fragmented state authority, persistent food insecurity, recurring displacement, and prolonged conflict—conditions that would pose serious challenges to regional stability and international governance.

This outcome is not inevitable, and the available science does not establish it as the expected future. It is, however, a scenario with sufficiently consequential mechanisms to merit explicit analysis, monitoring, and preparation.

The defining danger is not simply that climate change could overwhelm vulnerable populations. It is that climate change, armed conflict, and institutional failure could overwhelm one another's traditional remedies, transforming localized environmental emergencies into enduring regional crises.

References

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability — Summary for Policymakers. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/

IPCC. (2022). West Africa: Regional Factsheet for the Sixth Assessment Report. https://cdkn.org/sites/default/files/2022-03/IPCC%20Regional%20Factsheet%202_West%20Africa_web.pdf

IPCC. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability — Chapter 9: Africa. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/chapter/chapter-9/

Food and Agriculture Organization & World Food Programme. (2025). New FAO–WFP Report Warns of Shrinking Window to Prevent Millions More People Facing Acute Food Insecurity in 16 Hotspots. https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/new-fao-wfp-report-warns-of-shrinking-window-to-prevent-millions-more-people-facing-acute-food-insecurity-in-16-hotspots/en

Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED). (2025). Economic Warfare Escalates as Militants Expand Beyond the Sahel. https://acleddata.com/report/economic-warfare-escalates-militants-expand-beyond-sahel

Africa Center for Strategic Studies. (2026). Attacks in Mali Mark Long Trajectory of Worsening Security. https://africacenter.org/spotlight/attacks-in-mali-underscore-worsening-security-trajectory/

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2025). Sahel Emergency: Escalating Violence and Climate Shocks Drive Displacement. https://www.unhcr.org/emergencies/sahel-emergency

World Bank. (2021). Groundswell Part II: Acting on Internal Climate Migration. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/540941631203608570/pdf/Overview.pdf

UNHCR. (2026). Global Report 2025. https://www.unhcr.org/publications/global-report-2025

UNHCR. (2026). Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2025. https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends

World Meteorological Organization. (2026). State of the Climate in Africa 2025. https://public.wmo.int/resources/publication-series/state-of-climate-africa/state-of-climate-africa-2025

FAO, WFP & Global Network Against Food Crises. (2026). Global Report on Food Crises 2026. https://www.wfp.org/publications/global-report-food-crises-grfc

Inbetweeners 36- The Lost Titan

The Lost Titan was scheduled to challenge Arkanos for the title before the players defeated Arkanos in an exhibition max, triggering his retirement. The fact that the Lost Titan rated enough to warrant a fight with Arkanos is alone testament to his might.

The backstory of the Lost Titan is one of the curse of victory, not that different from Arkanos. Essentially, in a long forgotten timeline, possibly in a parallel multiverse, the Lost Titan was an exceptionally powerful warrior. The more he fought, the stronger he became. Not only was he a peak physical specimen, but he also had incredible magical abilities. However, these spells were reserved for when an opponent attempted to evade him, when he was heavily outnumbered, or in the most dire situations. For the most part, the Lost Titan preferred to trade melee blows with opponents whenever possible. My inspiration for his character was sort of a cross between Battle Beast in the Invincible universe and Thanos. Certainly Battle Beast in terms of temperament, he's obsessed with finding a worthy opponent, but his fighting style and large, imposing form are more like that of Thanos.

Anyway, during his timeline he served mostly as a warrior. He had little interest in leadership or political power. He simply wanted to fight and become better and continually challenge himself. The Lost Titan served a king that used him to grow his power and holdings exponentially. The Lost Titan was not just a fighter, he was a walking mass casualty event. He could single handedly turn the tide of massive battles and defeated every enemy champion who dared stand against him. Eventually, the king ran out of enemies to deploy the Lost Titan against. His rivals had all capitulated. All of the monsters, beasts, and abberations in the realm of any threat or note had been slaughtered. There were simply no more fights to be had. When the Lost Titan asked who he should fight next, the king told him it was time to rest and retire and that he would be called on again if needed. The Lost Titan did not take well to this. He knew only battle and had a pathological need for escalating threats and challenges. He turned on his king, and slaughtered his entire guard and the king himself. Even this proved to be a disappointment, a trivial victory. From there the Lost Titan wandered, desperate to find somemone who could quicken him once more by actually presenting danger. However, everyone he faced fell. The cruel irony was that the more he searched, the more he fought and won, the better he became, and further the gap between his skill level and the skill level of any possible rival became.

The Lost Titan became a terror in his realm. His frustration with the realms inability to produce viable opponents led him to extreme outbursts of rage and violence, where he would level entire cities. Finally, the Lost Titan decided that if this time had no worthy opponents for him, he would wait until one did emerge. However, while immortal, he was impatient. Forcibly gathered up all of the archmages he could find and asked them to create a spell to send him forward far enough in the future that he'd find a worthy opponent. He specifically wanted the spell to make it such that he would keep going forward until the exact moment this sort of challenger arose. The archmages, as well as millions of others, were eager to get rid of the Lost Titan so they agreed to the project. However, they not only sent him forward in time, they sent him to a different dimension entirely, so even if he went back in time he would not be able to torment this realm again. Hence, when he was sent into the future, the Lost Titan earned the “Lost” in his name. He went to a place where he had no connection, no kin, and no way to return home.

Ironically, at some point in the campaign one of the players wanted to connect the Lost Titan with the original titans so he could be with kin, only to discover that the titans had never heard of him and most certainly didn't want him in their Prescence as his personality is.... myopic and offputting.

So anyway, the Lost Titan was scheduled to fight Arkanos, who would have finally been a worthy adversary. However, the players disrupted that. Instead, he faced Garboda, who while intimidating and dangerous for a mortal, was absolutey destroyed by the Lost Titan unceremoniously, lasting two rounds. At this point I should share the Lost Titan's statblock so you can understand why he had so much trouble finding a worthy challenge:

The Lost Titan

Gargantuan Celestial (Unique), True Neutral

Armor Class 25 (divine resistance) Hit Points 666 (36d20 + 288) Speed 60 ft., fly 90 ft. (hover)

---

STR 30 (+10)
DEX 20 (+5)
CON 26 (+8)
INT 22 (+6)
WIS 24 (+7)
CHA 28 (+9)

---

Saving Throws Str +17, Con +15, Wis +14, Cha +16
Skills Athletics +17, Insight +14, Perception +14, History +13
Damage Resistances all except force and radiant
Damage Immunities necrotic, psychic, fire, thunder
Condition Immunities charmed, frightened, stunned, paralyzed
Senses truesight 120 ft., passive Perception 24
Languages All, Telepathy 500 ft.
Challenge 30 (155,000 XP)

---

Reality-Sheathed Form. The Titan exists partially outside the current multiversal state. He cannot be grappled, restrained, or banished. The first time each round he would take damage from a spell or magical effect, he takes none.

Reality-Tearing Form Can disable reality sheath and instead becomes wreathed in crackling red static from planar friction. Anyone in melee range takes 4d12 (26) force damage each turn they stay within melee range.

Multiversal Memory. The Titan has fought countless beings across iterations of reality. He has advantage on all saving throws against abilities or effects he has witnessed (at DM discretion, this includes almost all common magic or combat effects).

Legendary Resistance (5/day). If the Titan fails a saving throw, he can choose to succeed instead.

---

Innate Spellcasting. His spellcasting ability is Charisma (save DC 24). He can innately cast the following spells (no components required): – At will: True Seeing, Detect Magic, Telekinesis, Eldritch Blast (6d10 Damage, +17 to hit)
– 3/day each: * Disintegrate, Power Word Kill, Cloud Kill (9d8 dmg), Chain Lighting (up to 12 targets)*
– 1/day each: Wish (to restore a worthy opponent), Time Stop, Divine Word, Meteor Swarm

---

Actions

Multiattack. The Titan makes three attacks: two with Colossal Strike with a +5 Maul and then either one ability or one spell

Colossal Strike. Melee Weapon Attack: +23 to hit, reach 20 ft., one target.
Hit: 54 (6d12 + 15) bludgeoning damage. If the target is a creature, it must succeed on a DC 23 Strength saving throw or be knocked prone and stunned until the end of its next turn.

Devastating Criticals Critical hit (natural 20) deals 18d12 + 15 (132 damage)

Wrath Echo. Recharges on a 5–6. The Titan channels echoes of battles from previous worlds. All creatures of his choice within 60 ft. take 36 (8d8) psychic damage and must make a DC 24 Wisdom save or be frightened for 1 minute. Creatures frightened in this way are aware they cannot win.

Judgment of Worth (Recharge 6). The Titan targets one creature he has damaged this combat. The creature must make a DC 24 Charisma saving throw. On a failure, they are paralyzed as they relive all their failures in rapid succession (save ends at end of each of their turns). On a success, the Titan grants them advantage on all saving throws until the end of their next turn.

---

Legendary Actions (3/round)

Shift Pressure (1). The Titan shifts gravity, moving all enemies he chooses up to 15 feet in any direction.

Perfect Parry (1).** When the Titan is hit by a melee or ranged attack, he can reduce the damage by 40. If this reduces the damage to 0, he may make a Colossal Strike against the attacker.

Spell (1)– Casts a spell of his choice

Remembered Form (3). The Titan takes on the fighting style of a powerful warrior he once faced. Until the end of his next turn, he gains one of the following traits: – The Blade Infinite: Gains +2 attacks per round. – The Anchor of Stone: Cannot be moved or forced to save vs. anything. – The Mirror's Wrath: All creatures who target him with spells take 2d12 psychic damage.

---

First, lets talk about his melee attack. He deals on average 54 damage for a non critical hit, and attacks at least twice, more if he parries and 4 times if he uses The Blade Infinite remembered form. Each critical hit averages 132 damage. And with +23 melee he basically never misses. But, its not this absurd damage that is the issue. The issue is that if the target fails a DC 23 strength save, they are stunned and knocked prone. So let's take a level 20 fighter, they are essentially apex martial ability in 5e. They get +6 proficiency and +5 strength for a +11 bonus. That means they need to roll at least a 12 to not be knocked prone. So they have a 11/20 chance of being stunned for a turn per hit. If they get hit 4 times, that's only a 4% chance they don't get stunned. And once they are stunned, the Lost Titan can continue hitting them, stunning them again. So essentially once he starts landing, the fight is over. Now lets assume the player finds a way to negate this ability. They still have the catastrophic damage to deal with. So okay, let's say they kite him. Well, his fly speed is 90 feet so good luck with that. Also with spells like eldritch blast, power word kill and disintegrate, he can hit them from afar. Furthermore, he can use meteor swarm and time stop if things get really bad. He even can cast wish once per day.

And then there is the matter of hurting him. He's resistant to most types of damage, so cut any damage you deal in half unless it happens to be radiant or force. He gets advantage on most saving throws, and even if he fails he has 5 legendary resistances. Surviving long enough to burn through all five of those will be nearly impossible. Add in all his other listed abilities, and it makes sense that he couldn't find a worthy challenge in his home timeline.

So he crushes Garboda in under two turns, and then angrily confronts the propietor of the arena. The Lost Titan was livid, having been promised a challenge that was failed to deliver. To get the lost Titan off his back, the cowardly proprietor essentially points the Lost Titan at the Inbetweeners, saying they were the ones who brought down Arkanos so they will either fight him or find a worthy challenge.

Hence, a day after their arrival in Arkanos' villa, the Lost Titan shows up, demanding a challenge. The players mostly found him annoying. He repetitively asked for a challenge worthy. His goal is to die in combat by finally being bested by someone. The players essentially told him they'd get around to it. He threatened them and they promised they'd fight him if they didn't find a suitable opponent. They figured maybe Zariel or the Interloper or one of their other powerful allies would handle it. The Lost Titan then took up residence in the stables and simply meditated, waiting for the players to make good on their promise.

Around the same time, the Spider Lady showed up at Arkanos' Villa. She made a nest for herself in the pubic room on the first floor, essentially piling up furniture. When questioned about what she was doing, she simply replied “I live here now”. The players didn't really press her and let her hang out since she wasn't hurting anyone. The Spider Lady actually ended up befriending the Lost Titan, and it was the one time the players saw the Lost Titan laugh and discuss something other than his internal quest to find a challenge. He regailed the Spider Lady with tales of his exploits, and she told him of tales of the Far Realm. It was kind of sweet.

Ultimately, the Lost Titan would accompany the players to a party thrown by the Resplendant Six. Here, he would challenge Tharion to a fight and die within six seconds. Turns out despite all those stats... he's no match for a vorpal sword. I'll do a full post about that party later on.

But later, the Interloper would resurrect the Lost Titan... but resurrect him wrong. He was still has potent in combat, but his personality was broken. He was originally supposed to help in a trial by combat to save Lurian and Zariel, but since they won their court case, it wasn't needed. Lurian ended up recruiting him and the Lost Titan was his potent top enforcer until he competed in the Grand Tournament (which we will get to MUCH later). Here he was killed by the players and they finally let his soul permanently lay to rest, having finally been bested in an honest competition and meeting his match.

The Lost Titan ended up being a relatively major character, so you will see him pop up a lot in future posts, but I figured he deserved his own dedicated post here.

Je ne sais pas si vous connaissez cette tendance des réseaux : « En français on dit... en poésie on dit... »

Il y a quelque chose dans cette formule qui me dérange.

C’est l’idée, je crois, que la poésie serait une histoire à part. Quelque chose qui serait une manière de dire le monde autrement.

Il y a du vrai dans cela.

Mais j’aimerais que la poésie soit partout. Qu’elle soit le naturel de la langue et de l’expression. Alors bien sûr, je ne suis pas idiot. Ce n’est pas et ce ne sera jamais le cas.

Mais au fond, la poésie c’est regarder profondément le monde, nos sentiments, nos vies. Peu importe les belles formules que l’on utilise, si cette vision retranscrit ce que l’on a au fond de soi, c’est de la poésie. Non ?

Si ce que je partage touche une corde chez la personne qui m’écoute, c’est de la poésie. Non ?

The instructions said “chew 4 tablets 2 times per day”. The product was a tube of topical medication.

That exchange sits in a 2026 research report from the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), in the words of a survey participant who had pointed an AI visual description tool at a medication label and asked how to use it. “Luckily this was an obvious error,” the participant wrote, “but for now I will NOT be using AI for these tasks [and] will always confirm with a human.” Another participant in the same study used an AI tool to read tax forms that were not screen reader accessible, and reported that it “provided some very incorrect information that would have caused serious tax filing mistakes if I had not checked the information with a human.”

Neither story is a fringe horror. Phones now describe rooms in fluent paragraphs, apps read menus aloud and websites promise to fix themselves with a line of JavaScript. Underneath all that capability, a quieter question keeps surfacing from the people who depend on these tools: what happens when the thing that helps you is also the thing that makes things up?

The complaint has been circulating online for some time. One 2025 discussion on Reddit's r/ArtificialIntelligence forum is reported to have called the trend an “insidious form of ableism”, although that thread's exact wording could not be independently located for this article. The substance of the argument can, however, be tested against the record. As generative AI is positioned as a universal accessibility fix, the predictable tools that disabled and older people rely on risk being sidelined or replaced by systems that are more impressive and less trustworthy. If so, AI-first accessibility could widen the very gap it claims to close.

The evidence suggests that the worry is well founded, though not in the simple way a slogan implies. AI tools are delivering real independence to many blind and low vision people. The problem is not the tools. It is the temptation, among companies, website owners and even governments, to treat them as a substitute for the slow, unglamorous work of building things that are accessible in the first place.

Why a Mangled Word Beats a Fluent Fiction

A traditional screen reader is, at its core, a deterministic machine. It takes text that already exists in a document, an interface or a web page, and converts it into synthetic speech or braille. It can absolutely get things wrong. It may mispronounce a surname, stumble over an acronym or announce an unlabelled control as nothing more than “button”. But its errors have a particular shape. They are consistent: the same text produces the same mistake every time. And the underlying text is still there. A user who hears a garbled word can move through it character by character, check the spelling and work out what was meant. The error sits on top of a reliable source.

Generative AI does not work like that. A vision language model asked to describe a photograph or read a label is not converting existing text; it is producing a statistically plausible account of what it thinks it sees. When it fails, it does not usually fail with noise. It fails with fluency. A wrong instruction arrives in a grammatically perfect sentence, delivered with the same confidence as a right one. There is no underlying string to inspect, because the model's output is the only version of reality the user has been given.

Alex Katsarakes, a digital accessibility resident at AFB and a PhD student in human factors psychology, set this out in an October 2025 essay on alt text in the age of AI. Generative models, she wrote, “are prone to 'hallucination,' confidently asserting details that aren't actually present.” When a blind user cannot independently check an image, she argued, an inaccurate caption is not a cosmetic flaw. In her words, “it's a breakdown in trust.”

AFB's own survey data makes the point empirically. In its report The AI Quagmire, based on a survey of 1,735 US adults conducted between 1 July and 15 October 2025, 91 disabled users of AI visual description tools reported mistakes that harmed them or made their lives harder. When the researchers compared how disabled and nondisabled people rated the accuracy of AI output, they found a revealing asymmetry. Disabled users of visual description tools were more likely than nondisabled users to rate descriptions as “mostly accurate” (56.3 per cent against 46.4 per cent). With AI captions, the pattern flipped: disabled caption users, including deaf and hard of hearing people, were more sceptical than nondisabled users. AFB's interpretation is blunt: “This pattern suggests that disabled people are better able to detect captioning errors than visual description errors.”

Read that slowly. The people who most need image descriptions are, by definition, the people least able to verify them. A deaf user watching a speaker's lips and body language has some independent signal to check a caption against. A blind user listening to a description of a photograph often has none. Reliability is not one desirable feature among many in this context. It is the whole product.

What the Tools Genuinely Do Well

None of this means AI accessibility tools are a con. Pretending otherwise would be its own kind of disrespect to the many disabled people who use them every day and say they are better off.

Be My Eyes is the clearest example. The Danish company built its reputation on connecting blind and low vision people with sighted volunteers over live video. In 2023 it added Be My AI, an image description feature built on OpenAI's GPT-4 model. On 12 March 2026, the company announced that it had passed one million blind and low vision users and ten million volunteers across more than 150 countries. Its chief executive, Mike Buckley, called the milestone “a powerful reminder that accessibility is not a niche issue” and framed it as a global movement. Crucially, the human route has not been switched off: users can still tap a button and reach a sighted volunteer by live video.

Microsoft's Seeing AI, which began as a research project and launched on iPhone in 2017, made the jump to Android in December 2023. Saqib Shaikh, the founder and lead of the project, described it in Microsoft's announcement as “a free app that narrates the world for blind and low vision people”. The Android release brought generative features first tested on iOS, including richer scene descriptions and the ability to ask questions about a scanned document, such as the items on a menu or the total on a receipt.

Academic research confirms that the appeal is real. In a study presented at the ACM SIGACCESS ASSETS conference in 2024, Rudaiba Adnin and Maitraye Das of Northeastern University interviewed 19 blind people about their use of generative AI tools. The paper's title borrows one participant's description of the technology: “I look at it as the king of knowledge”. Participants used chatbots for writing emails and CVs, researching products and asking health questions, and they valued Be My AI's descriptions as more thorough than what sighted helpers usually offered.

AFB itself is not anti-AI. When it released its expert consensus report Empowering or Excluding in February 2025, Stephanie Enyart, the organisation's chief public policy and research officer, said the experts consulted had “shined a light on how AI can be a catalyst for access and inclusion.” Katsarakes, in the same essay that warns about hallucination, acknowledges that using tools such as Be My Eyes or Seeing AI “demonstrates clear potential for enhancing user autonomy.”

So the question is not whether these tools help. They do. The question is what happens when their help is treated as finished accessibility rather than as one layer within it.

The Verification Burden Falls on the User

What the research shows most consistently is that blind people who use AI description tools have become their own quality assurance department.

In a 2024 ASSETS paper titled Misfitting With AI, University of Michigan researchers Rahaf Alharbi, Pa Lor, Jaylin Herskovitz, Sarita Schoenebeck and Robin N. Brewer conducted a qualitative study with 26 blind people about how they verify and contest errors from AI visual assistance apps. They documented failures with complex document layouts, with languages other than English and with cultural artefacts. Participants had developed a repertoire of checks: testing the apps on familiar objects in low-stakes settings, drawing on non-visual knowledge, strategically involving sighted people and cross-referencing results between different apps and devices. The authors drew on the disability studies concept of “misfitting” to argue that these tools often carry assumptions that fail disabled users, and that disabled ways of knowing deserve recognition rather than replacement.

A diary study presented at CHI 2024 by Ricardo Gonzalez Penuela, Jazmin Collins, Shiri Azenkot and Cynthia Bennett tracked 16 blind and low vision participants using an AI scene description prototype for two weeks. The ratings were sobering. Average satisfaction came in at 2.76 out of 5. Average trust in the descriptions was 2.43 out of 4. The authors concluded that AI descriptions still needed significant improvement before they could deliver experiences that were both satisfying and trustworthy.

A 2025 CHI paper by Jingyi Xie, John M. Carroll and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, which interviewed 14 visually impaired Be My AI users, adds texture. Four of its participants reported that Be My AI had described objects that were not there; one was told about an object behind her that did not exist. Eight reported inaccurate labels for gender or age. Several disliked the tool's habit of interpreting emotions and offering opinions. “Maybe I don't want it to editorialize, you know, maybe I just literally only want the facts of it,” one participant told the researchers. For live navigation, participants preferred human help over static photo descriptions, and they stressed that orientation and mobility skills remained essential. The tool, in their view, should augment those skills rather than replace them.

Chancey Fleet, the assistive technology coordinator at the New York Public Library's Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, has described a subtler cost. Speaking on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's How to Fix the Internet podcast in May 2024, she catalogued the house style of machine descriptions: “Any scene that contains a child or a dog is heartwarming.” “Any sunset or sunrise is vibrant.” “Anything with a couch and a lamp is calm or cozy.” The flattening matters, she argued, because adequacy discourages improvement: “if you are presented with what seems on a quick read, like good enough alt text, you're unlikely to do much labor to make it better, more nuanced, or more complete.” She also put the stakes plainly. When she asks an AI a question about her own world, “I'm going to have to live with the consequences of trusting that answer”.

Put these studies together and a pattern emerges. The capability is shared with everyone; the risk is carried by the individual. Each time a developer, publisher or institution decides that AI description is good enough, the job of verification is quietly transferred from the organisation that produced the content to the disabled person consuming it.

Overlays and the Business of Automated Compliance

Accessibility overlays are third-party scripts that sit on top of a website and attempt to detect and repair barriers automatically, often marketed with the language of artificial intelligence. They promise compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international technical standard, without anyone having to rebuild the site. Disabled users and accessibility professionals have been sceptical for years. In a January 2021 survey of 758 web accessibility practitioners by WebAIM, a non-profit based at Utah State University, 67 per cent rated overlays, plugins and widgets as “not at all or not very effective”. Among respondents with disabilities, the figure rose to 72 per cent, with only 2.4 per cent rating them very effective.

In January 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission turned that scepticism into enforcement. On 3 January it announced a proposed order requiring accessiBe, a company selling an AI-powered accessibility plug-in called accessWidget, to pay $1 million. The FTC alleged that accessiBe had misrepresented the tool's ability to make any website WCAG-compliant, and that it had formatted third-party articles and reviews to look like independent opinions without disclosing its material connections to them. The Commission voted 5-0 to accept the proposed consent order. Samuel Levine, then director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said: “Overstating a product's AI or other capabilities without adequate evidence is deceptive, and the FTC will act to stop it.” TechCrunch, reporting the action, noted that customers had also brought class action suits claiming the products did not work. The order was approved as final in April 2025.

AFB's Alexis Hubbard, writing in May 2025 under the title Missing a Human Touch, summed up the problem with automated fixes: “AI-powered accessibility overlays are just a band-aid solution for a bigger problem.” Because they do not change the source code of a site, she argued, they leave the underlying barriers intact. Her conclusion is worth quoting in full: “The only way to achieve an accessible and usable experience for all people is through people.”

Overlays show what AI-first accessibility looks like when it is driven by procurement rather than by users. A website owner buys the promise of compliance; a disabled visitor inherits the consequences, handed an interpretation instead of the thing itself.

When Governments Lean on the Promise of AI

The most striking recent example of AI's shortcomings being cited as a reason to delay accessibility comes not from a start-up but from the US Department of Justice.

In April 2024, the DOJ finalised a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local governments to make their websites and mobile apps conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Larger public entities, those serving populations of 50,000 or more, were originally due to comply in April 2026. Four days before that deadline, on 20 April 2026, the department published an interim final rule pushing compliance back by a year, to 26 April 2027 for larger entities and to 26 April 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. It took effect immediately, with public comments accepted until 22 June 2026. The technical standard itself was left unchanged.

Among the department's stated reasons was a striking admission about technology. “Advanced technology, such as generative AI, does not yet reliably automate the remediation of inaccessible content at scale,” the interim final rule says, “and staff resources and availability continue to pose significant challenges.” The rule also summarised correspondence from a member of Congress who argued that current technology, “including generative AI,” cannot reliably automate the remediation of complex science, technology, engineering and mathematics material at scale, and that human oversight is required.

It is an honest admission that AI cannot do the job alone. It also shows how the promise of automation can reshape policy. When the expected technological help did not arrive, the cost of the shortfall fell on disabled residents, who now wait at least another year for accessible public services.

Disability organisations were furious. Maria Town, president and chief executive of the American Association of People with Disabilities, called the delay “a profound disappointment and a serious setback for the disability community”, adding that “Years of notice have not been enough” and that the department was “rewarding inaction with more time.”

AFB's formal comments, submitted on 22 June 2026 and signed by Enyart, tackled the AI argument directly. “The absence of a fully automated accessibility solution does not justify extending the rule,” AFB wrote. It pointed out that generative AI can itself produce inaccessible content “because it is based on training data that contains accessibility barriers,” and that “Entities should not over rely on AI to produce content.” It also argued, drawing on its own research, that “AI adoption and effective use of AI is dependent on the accessibility of the platform.” In plain terms: “It doesn't matter how useful an AI-enabled service or tool is if the platform is inaccessible to blind users.”

That last line is the hinge of the entire debate. An AI tool is not a ramp into an inaccessible building. It is another door, and it only works if the corridor behind it has been built properly. AFB's comments also offered a constructive model: AI “can generate a passable first attempt at creating captions that a human can then edit.” Used that way, AI speeds up accessible design rather than replacing it.

AFB's research quantifies what is at stake. In a 2024 study cited in those comments, participants spent 55 per cent of their total task time dealing with digital barriers, and only 45 per cent on the task itself.

Across the Atlantic, the direction of travel is different. The European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882, began applying on 28 June 2025 to products and services including computers, smartphones, ATMs, e-books, e-commerce and banking. As Fredericka Argent of the law firm Covington & Burling noted that month, it reaches companies trading in the EU wherever they are based. The EAA is not an AI law, but it reinforces a principle that AI-first thinking tends to erode: the obligation sits with whoever builds and sells the product, not with the disabled person left to find a workaround.

Older Adults and the Gap Between Awareness and Use

The same dynamics extend to older adults, a group that overlaps heavily with disabled people and is often presented as a natural market for AI-powered help.

The latest AARP research, Tech Use and Adoption Keeps Surging Among Older Adults, written by Brittne Kakulla and published in December 2025, surveyed 3,838 US adults aged 50 and over between 9 September and 6 October 2025. It found that AI use in that age group had risen from 18 per cent in 2024 to 30 per cent in 2025. About half used or were interested in voice assistants such as Siri or Alexa. Two-thirds agreed that technology enriches life and makes ageing easier. Among adults aged 80 and over, agreement that technology enables a healthy life rose from 39 per cent to 46 per cent.

The same report records friction. For AI platforms such as ChatGPT or Copilot, 19 per cent used them, 21 per cent were interested and 59 per cent had no interest. Data privacy was the top barrier to adoption. Trust, privacy and data security were the top concerns for roughly half of the older adults who hesitated to adopt new technology, especially AI. And, in a line that could serve as the epigraph for this entire debate: “Three in 5 adults 50-plus say technology is not designed with their age in mind.”

Work from the MIT AgeLab sharpens the picture. A national survey of 1,008 American adults by Lauren Cerino, Joseph Coughlin and colleagues, published as a preliminary abstract in Innovation in Aging in December 2025, found that 73.7 per cent of respondents aged 60 and over were at least “a little” familiar with AI-enabled technologies. Only 28.3 per cent had used them. Some 34.7 per cent said they did not trust AI tools at all to give good advice, and trust scores declined with age.

Awareness, then, is not the main problem. Older people have heard of AI. The gap lies between hearing about a tool and being able, willing and confident enough to rely on it.

Research at Carnegie Mellon University points to why. In work presented at the ACM CHI 2026 conference in Barcelona and reported by the university in May 2026, Jodi Forlizzi, the Herbert A. Simon Professor in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction, and her colleagues found that older adults who use AI want it to recognise when they need plain information and when they need reassurance. A separate study based on 22 interviews identified shared values among older adults, including independence, curiosity, connection and continuity, expressed differently depending on where people lived. Older adults were open to AI when its purpose was clearly explained, especially for reminders, alerts and support at home. “There's always a mismatch between people's perceived abilities and what they can actually do,” Forlizzi said. “AI technology can be used to close this gap.”

That is the optimistic reading, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But it has a mirror image. If AI tools must be carefully explained and set up to earn trust, the people most likely to benefit, including those living alone or without technically confident relatives, are also the least likely to receive that support. AFB found that almost all its participants had learned to use AI on their own; only 9 per cent learned through an employer or online course. More disabled than nondisabled participants reported barriers in learning, most commonly inaccessible videos, hard-to-understand material and training that required a mouse.

The Northeastern study found similar problems in the AI products themselves. Blind participants encountered unlabelled buttons, missing headings and landmarks, no notification when a chatbot had finished responding, and clutter from adverts and sample prompts. The tools being promoted as accessibility solutions were not consistently accessible.

The Quiet Retirement of Predictable Tools

The sharpest version of the complaint concerns replacement: established, predictable tools being retired in favour of generative ones. In 2026, the most visible example is the end of Google Assistant on Android.

Google had originally planned to replace Assistant with Gemini, its generative AI assistant, during 2025. According to reporting by Matthias Bastian at The Decoder in August 2026, Google told users it would begin shutting Assistant down on Android and Wear OS from 4 September 2026, covering phones, tablets, watches, headphones and Android Auto. Once the rollout reaches a device, there is no way to switch back. Bastian raised exactly the concern at the centre of this article: that a probability-based language model may not match the reliability of a deterministic assistant for simple tasks such as smart home control and basic phone commands.

By late September, Mark Jansen at Android Police reported that the option to switch from Gemini back to Assistant had disappeared on the devices he checked, including a Pixel 10 Pro, and that smart home control was an area where Assistant still beat its replacement.

For most users, that is an inconvenience. For someone who cannot easily use a touchscreen, whether because of sight loss, limited dexterity or tremor, a voice assistant is not a convenience feature. It is how they turn on the lights, set a medication reminder or call for help. AFB's survey speaks to the stakes. Among users of voice-activated AI, 121 disabled participants described harms from mistakes, including texts sent with the wrong words and calls placed to unintended contacts, among them emergency services. “For many users, particularly disabled users, features such as voice dictation for text messaging are essential accessibility supports,” the report observes. “Failures or changes in these systems can result in concrete, disruptive, and sometimes harmful consequences.”

There is no evidence that Google set out to disadvantage disabled users, and Gemini brings generative capabilities that Assistant never had. The issue is structural. When a company replaces a predictable tool with a more capable but less predictable one, and removes the option to go back, the people with the fewest alternatives absorb the most risk. Capability is a fair trade for those who can fall back on other methods. Reliability is the whole point for those who cannot.

Is AI-First Accessibility Widening the Gap?

So, to the central question: if the people who would benefit most cannot find, set up or trust these tools, is AI-first accessibility widening the gap it claims to close?

The honest answer is that it depends on what “AI-first” means in practice.

Where AI is added on top of accessible foundations, the gap narrows. A blind person on a properly coded website who also has Be My AI or Seeing AI in their pocket has more independence than ever before. A deaf student who receives AI-generated captions that a human has corrected gets faster access than one who waits for manual transcription. These are genuine gains, and the AFB data confirms that most AI users say AI makes their lives easier.

Where AI replaces accessible foundations, the gap widens, and it widens along a predictable gradient. The confident, well-supported, technically fluent disabled user can verify outputs, switch between apps, ask a sighted friend and route around errors, exactly as the participants in the Michigan study described. The isolated, older, less confident or cognitively disabled user often cannot. The more a system depends on verification skills, the more it rewards people who already have them.

The evidence points to four ways in which substitution widens the divide. It shifts responsibility, transferring the work of accessibility from organisations to users who must detect errors they may have no way of seeing. It erodes incentives: as Fleet observed, good-enough descriptions discourage better ones, and the DOJ's interim rule shows the institutional version. It removes fallbacks, as predictable tools are retired. And it presupposes access to the tools themselves, when AFB and the Northeastern researchers both found that AI interfaces and training are often inaccessible.

None of this makes AI the villain. It makes the substitution the problem.

What Reliable Accessibility Would Require

If AI is going to close the accessibility gap rather than reshape it, the evidence points towards a set of concrete commitments.

Treat AI as a layer, never a foundation. Accessible design, meaning semantic code, human-authored alt text for meaningful images, accessible documents and keyboard-operable interfaces, must remain the baseline. AI description and remediation should sit on top of it. Katsarakes put it in a single sentence: “Let AI suggest or assist, but don't let it replace human intent.”

Keep the deterministic path available. When companies introduce generative assistants, they should keep predictable modes for core tasks such as timers, calls, reminders and device control, and they should not remove the option to revert until the replacement has been shown to match the original's reliability for disabled users specifically. A one-way migration is a design choice, not a technical necessity.

Build verification into the product. The Michigan and Penn State studies show users building their own verification systems from scratch. Products should do it for them: signalling uncertainty, separating what the model read from what it inferred, offering a factual mode without editorial colour, and making escalation to a human easy. Be My Eyes shows that a live human route can sit alongside AI.

Draw hard lines around high-stakes tasks. Medication instructions, financial documents, legal forms and navigation are not areas where a probabilistic description should ever be the only source. AFB's recommendations call for developers to “Improve the accuracy of AI outputs and tell users how accurate those outputs are.” Where accuracy cannot be assured, the interface should say so plainly.

Hold vendors to their claims. The FTC's accessiBe order established that overstating AI accessibility capabilities without evidence is deceptive. Regulators elsewhere should apply the same standard, and procurement teams should demand evidence of real-world performance with disabled users, not marketing claims of automated compliance.

Do not let automation set the deadline. Legal accessibility obligations should be pegged to what disabled people need, not to the pace of AI development. The European Accessibility Act's focus on the duties of manufacturers and service providers is a better model than one that treats immature automation as grounds for delay.

Fund support, not just software. Older adults are aware of AI but hesitant to use it, and CMU's research suggests they engage when the purpose is clearly explained. That explanation has to come from libraries, disability organisations and accessible community training. AFB's finding that only 9 per cent of AI users learned through formal routes suggests a large and fixable gap.

Include disabled people in testing and design. AFB's expert consensus report called for AI to focus “on expanding access and inclusion, not just on avoiding harm.” That requires disabled people in the room when products are designed, tested and retired, not consulted after launch.

What Is Lost When Reliability Goes

So what is lost when reliability is sacrificed for capability?

Part of the answer is practical: time, money, safety, and the occasional tube of medication with the wrong instructions. Participants in AFB's 2024 study already spent more than half their task time fighting digital barriers.

But the deeper loss is harder to measure. Independence is not just the ability to do something without help. It is the ability to rely on what you are told. A screen reader that occasionally mispronounces a name still gives its user a stable relationship with the text. A description tool that sometimes invents an object behind you, or turns a cream into tablets, asks its user to hold every answer at a slight distance. That is a different kind of life: one in which assistance is always provisional and confidence always has to be earned again.

Generative AI has given many disabled people extraordinary new reach, and nobody should want to take that away. The challenge for the companies building these tools, and the governments regulating them, is to add that reach without removing the floor. AI can help the people who build accessible things work faster and reach further. It cannot be allowed to replace the obligation they carry.

---

References and Sources

1. American Foundation for the Blind. “The AI Quagmire: Benefits, Risks, and User Aspirations Through a Disability Lens.” AFB Artificial Intelligence Series, 2026. Sections “Executive Summary” and “Harms of AI in Various Contexts.” https://afb.org/research-and-initiatives/ai-series/ai-quagmire/executive-summary and https://afb.org/research-and-initiatives/ai-series/ai-quagmire/harms-ai-various-contexts
2. Katsarakes, Alex. “Beyond Alt Text: Rethinking Visual Description in the Age of AI.” American Foundation for the Blind blog, 16 October 2025. https://afb.org/blog/entry/alt-text-age-ai
3. Hubbard, Alexis. “Missing a Human Touch: Why Automated Testing and AI Don't 'Solve' Digital Accessibility… Yet.” American Foundation for the Blind blog, 13 May 2025. https://afb.org/blog/entry/missing-human-touch-1
4. Enyart, Stephanie, American Foundation for the Blind. “June 2026 Comments on DOJ Extension of Web Accessibility Compliance Dates” (RIN 1190-AA82, Docket CRT150). 22 June 2026. https://afb.org/research-and-initiatives/public-policy/advocacy-letters-comments-statements/comments/june-2026-doj-extension-web-compliance
5. American Foundation for the Blind. “AFB Report Spotlights Impact of AI for Disabled People” (press release on Empowering or Excluding: Expert Insights on Inclusive Artificial Intelligence for People with Disabilities). 6 February 2025. https://afb.org/news-publications/press-room/press-release-archive/press-release-2025/afb-report-spotlights-impact-AI-disabled-people
6. US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. “Extension of Compliance Dates for Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities.” Interim final rule, Federal Register Vol. 91, No. 75, 20 April 2026. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/20/2026-07663/extension-of-compliance-dates-for-nondiscrimination-on-the-basis-of-disability-accessibility-of-web (PDF: https://www.ada.gov/assets/pdfs/2026-ifr.pdf)
7. Duane Morris LLP. “DOJ Extends ADA Title II Digital Accessibility Deadlines by One Year.” Client alert, 23 April 2026. https://www.duanemorris.com/alerts/doj_extends_ada_title_ii_digital_accessibility_deadlines_one_year_0426.html
8. American Association of People with Disabilities. “AAPD Statement on DOJ Title II Web Rule Interim Final Rule.” 20 April 2026. https://www.aapd.com/aapd-statement-title-ii-doj-web-rule-ifr/
9. Kakulla, Brittne. “Tech Use and Adoption Keeps Surging Among Older Adults” (2026 Tech Trends). AARP Research, December 2025. https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/technology/internet-media-devices/2026-technology-trends-older-adults/
10. Cerino, Lauren; Felts, Adam; Balmuth, Alexa; Brennan, Taylor; Lee, Chaiwoo; Coughlin, Joseph. “Older Adults' Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence as a Source of Advice.” Innovation in Aging, 9 (Suppl 2), igaf122.1371, 31 December 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12761853/
11. Sapio, Amanda. “How Do Boomers Really Feel About AI?” Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science News, 28 May 2026. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2026/older-adults-ai
12. US Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Order Requires Online Marketer to Pay $1 Million for Deceptive Claims that its AI Product Could Make Websites Compliant with Accessibility Guidelines.” Press release, 3 January 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-order-requires-online-marketer-pay-1-million-deceptive-claims-its-ai-product-could-make-websites-compliant
13. Wiggers, Kyle. “FTC orders AI accessibility startup accessiBe to pay $1M for misleading advertising.” TechCrunch, 3 January 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/03/ftc-orders-ai-accessibility-startup-accessibe-to-pay-1m-for-misleading-advertising/
14. WebAIM. “Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners #3 Results.” January 2021. https://webaim.org/projects/practitionersurvey3/
15. Alharbi, Rahaf; Lor, Pa; Herskovitz, Jaylin; Schoenebeck, Sarita; Brewer, Robin N. “Misfitting With AI: How Blind People Verify and Contest AI Errors.” Proceedings of ASSETS '24, ACM, 2024. DOI: 10.1145/3663548.3675659. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06546
16. Gonzalez Penuela, Ricardo E.; Collins, Jazmin; Azenkot, Shiri; Bennett, Cynthia. “Investigating Use Cases of AI-Powered Scene Description Applications for Blind and Low Vision People.” Proceedings of CHI '24, ACM, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15604
17. Adnin, Rudaiba; Das, Maitraye. “'I look at it as the king of knowledge': How Blind People Use and Understand Generative AI Tools.” Proceedings of ASSETS '24, ACM, 2024. DOI: 10.1145/3663548.3675631. https://maitraye.github.io/files/papers/BLV_GenAI_ASSETS24.pdf
18. Xie, Jingyi; Yu, Rui; Zhang, He; Billah, Syed Masum; Lee, Sooyeon; Carroll, John M. “Beyond Visual Perception: Insights from Smartphone Interaction of Visually Impaired Users with Large Multimodal Models.” Proceedings of CHI '25, ACM, 25 April 2025. DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3714210. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12338113/
19. Cohn, Cindy; Kelley, Jason (hosts), with Chancey Fleet. “Podcast Episode: Building a Tactile Internet.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, How to Fix the Internet, 7 May 2024. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/podcast-episode-building-tactile-internet
20. Be My Eyes. “Be My Eyes Reaches 1 Million Blind and Low-Vision Users and 10 Million Volunteers.” 12 March 2026. https://www.bemyeyes.com/news/be-my-eyes-reaches-1-million-blind-and-low-vision-users-and-10-million-volunteers/
21. Shaikh, Saqib. “Seeing AI App Launches on Android, Including New and Updated Features and New Languages.” Microsoft Accessibility Blog, 4 December 2023. https://blogs.microsoft.com/accessibility/seeing-ai-app-launches-on-android-including-new-and-updated-features-and-new-languages/
22. Bastian, Matthias. “Google will shut down Google Assistant starting September 2026 as Gemini takes over on Android and Wear OS.” The Decoder, 5 August 2026. https://the-decoder.com/google-will-shut-down-google-assistant-starting-september-2026-as-gemini-takes-over-on-android-and-wear-os/
23. Jansen, Mark. “Google Assistant is officially gone, and people aren't happy about it.” Android Police, 29 September 2026. https://www.androidpolice.com/the-google-assistant-kill-off-has-arrived/
24. Argent, Fredericka. “European Accessibility Act: June 2025 Deadline Has Arrived.” Covington & Burling, Inside Global Tech, 10 June 2025. https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/06/10/european-accessibility-act-june-2025-deadline-has-arrived/ (see also European Commission, “European Accessibility Act,” https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/disability/union-equality-strategy-rights-persons-disabilities-2021-2030/european-accessibility-act_en)

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Support What We Do

If they truly cared about player safety, they would ban people for repeatedly leading with their head. It's truly that simple. How many times did I see a certain player do that last night with no penalties... and the one flag they did throw inexplicably got picked up? Please. It's dangerous, it's unsafe, and it's unprofessional. Things like this going on without being addressed is why it is time for a Brand New Shield.

This is another player safety rant. On top of the nonsense I saw last night, another genius team decided to let their starting quarterback play with blood clots. Blood clots can potentially be a fatal issue and are nothing to play around with and worst of all, let the guy fly back on the team plane! So, if they care so much about player safety, why did they play around with a blood clot issue and why is the league refusing to punish the team? If you're going to talk about player safety being a priority, act like it! Sheesh! Again, this is why it is time for a Brand New Shield.

If you don't have players, you don't have a game. If you don't have a game, you don't have fans. If you don't have fans, what do you actually have? Nothing! Player safety for any sports organization should be a primary concern, especially for a sport like football. If you have a group of people with competing interests chasing the almighty dollar, the last thing that group of people is going to care about is player safety. This is where a single ownership model comes in.

What does a single ownership model have to do with player safety? Well, everything. If you have one entity with a common goal that has a positive relationship with the players, there is no limit to what can be accomplished. The players should be treated well to the point that a player's union isn't even necessary. Unfortunately, as it pertains to the player safety crisis that exists in a certain league, the players are responsible for some of it as well.

The practice and training camp rules the players are responsible for putting in place have contributed to more serious injuries during games. The issue now is that the practices are easy which makes the games hard. If the games are hard and the body is not properly ramped up for that degree of physical activity, the body will get injured and injured severely. We are seeing that happen more and more with all these major injuries taking place.

So there is a balance to be had... Practice enough so the body gets ramped up for the game but also not overdo it to prevent other situations. One of the reasons I have long suggested the indoor game for this kind of venture is to eliminate the elements from the equation. Even if you did an entire 11 on 11 league in domed stadiums, you'd take the elements out of the equation and prevent injuries related to heat and/or cold. You also have 2 bye weeks per season instead of one during the season per team. The bye weeks could be staggered or universal depending on the situation.

I could go on and on about player safety and how it is a whole league thing from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top. However, I will stop this entry here. If we protect the players, we will protect the game.