Jem Bendell

Jem Bendell is an emeritus professor of sustainability leadership with the University of Cumbria in the UK. He is best known for originating in 2018 the concept of "deep adaptation" for individuals and communities anticipating (or already coping with) the consequences of ongoing climate change.

Career Bendell graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1995 with a degree in Geography, beginning his career at the World Wide Fund for Nature UK. There, he helped to develop the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council. He specialised on relationships between NGOs and business, pointing out their potential, despite warning about the power inequities and the way in which business agendas tend to prevail over those of the non-profit sector.

He earned a PhD from the University of Bristol.

He also became involved in the anti-globalisation movement, later writing a United Nations report on the conflict between business and civil society. He founded Lifeworth, a progressive professional services company mostly working with UN agencies and worked part time as an associate professor of management at Griffith Business School. As of 2008, he had published over fifty publications, two books, and four United Nations reports.

After his time consulting for the United Nations, in 2012 Bendell joined Cumbria University and founded the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS). On account of this work, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader, a network he has subsequently criticized as elitist and neoliberal. In a 2011 TEDx talk he expanded his focus to monetary reform and complementary currencies, mentioning Bitcoin, and predicting that Facebook would launch their own currency.

In his 2014 book Healing Capitalism, Bendell proposes a new way of respecting private property whereby ownership rights would place a duty on owners (and their fiduciaries) to maintain demonstrable accountability to anyone directly affected by their property. This need for "capital accountability" would compel shareholders to be as interested in how corporations are accountable to stakeholders as they would be in either share price or dividends.

In 2017 he took a year out from university to independently study the research publications on climate change.

In 2022, Bendell attended the climate conference COP27 in Egypt, giving two speeches with warnings for the delegates. First, that there will be a spike in global temperatures due to the reductions in aerosols. Second, that there will be a rise in a new kind of climate skepticism that regards any action as motivated by authoritarianism. Bendell offers both deep adaptation and ecolibertarianism as a response to both of these trends, amongst others.

In 2023 Bendell relocated to Bali, Indonesia, where he is developing a school for regenerative farming.

Deep Adaptation

The initial controversy Jem Bendell's career took a turn in 2018, following his publication of an essay in July 2018 titled, "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy." "The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of what I believe to be an inevitable near-term societal collapse due to climate change." Elsewhere in the paper he explains,

With each of these framings — collapse, catastrophe, extinction – people describe different degrees of certainty. Different people speak of a scenario being possible, probable or inevitable. In my conversations with both professionals in sustainability or climate, and others not directly involved, I have found that people choose a scenario and a probability depending not on what the data and its analysis might suggest, but what they are choosing to live with as a story about this topic. That parallels findings in psychology that none of us are purely logic machines but relate information into stories about how things relate and why (Marshall, 2014). None of us are immune to that process. Currently, I have chosen to interpret the information as indicating inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction. Some reviewers dismissed deep adaptation as a poorly substantiated, doomist framing that could reduce activism and efforts to implement systemic changes to thwart climate change. The author focused on the "Deep Adaptation" paper and its growing influence in ways that he considers favorable. Pointing to the "4 Rs" that Bendell advocates, he concludes that these "resonate strongly for Christians." Well-known Christian proponents are pointed to: Michael Dowd and the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. Quoting directly from Bendell's paper,

In the light of the seriousness of the situation, Professor Bendell calls for "a commitment to working together to do what's helpful during the disruption and collapse of societies," and to adopt "an ethos of being engaged, open-hearted, and open-minded about how to be and how to respond." and it provided the nucleus for online communities with thousands of members. It carries forward and elaborates his personal vision of deep adaptation, utilizing new and traditional scholarship in the field of collapsology, as distinguished from the prevailing worldview of progressivism. Titled Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse, he clarifies that he now sees societal collapse not only as "inevitable" but as a process "already underway," especially in less privileged parts of the world. "Doomster" is the label he accepts for himself, while also pointing favorably to colleagues who call their perspective "post-doom." By 2025, the book had been translated into French, Spanish, and Portuguese editions.

An April 2026 article published in the magazine Grist explores the ongoing impact of Bendell's 2018 Deep Adaptation paper and his 2023 book. There, Maya Frost (founder of "Collapse Forward") portrays him as "the modern-day forefather of collapse understanding and awareness." Reflecting on the changes since both his viral paper and book, the Grist journalist wrote, "It's no longer taboo to talk about the breakdown of society. But most people resist truly letting the idea in, and letting it change them the way it changed Bendell."

Selected bibliography

Bendell, Jem (2018-07-27). "Deep adaptation: a map for navigating climate tragedy".

Bendell, Jem (2025). S'effondrer Ensemble : Vers l'écoliberté. Dandelion (ed.).