All that we take for granted faces existential threat. Most people still struggle to accept that we must all live very differently and do so rapidly in order to ensure our very survival on this planet.
But there are flag bearers for new sustainable thinking and living. Here we headline the inspiring lessons from some.
They are brought together in a new book Standing up for a Sustainable World: Voices of Change. It is edited by three of the world’s leading analysts in sustainability and the climate emergency. Here they highlight the personal lessons that all leaders can learn from the stories.
The world has on some key dimensions made extraordinary progress since the end of World War II. Output per head has quadrupled. Poverty, in terms of incomes, has been dramatically reduced. Life expectancy has increased by around 30 years.
However, the extraordinary growth has come at colossal envi ronmental cost. So the world is now in a deeply dangerous position with a very narrow window for action.
Our biodiversity has been brutally damaged. Our oceans have been fundamentally altered and marine life is in great danger. Our forests have been ravaged. Our air and water have been profoundly polluted. And our climate is gravely threatened in ways that could cause immense harm to lives and livelihoods across the world, lasting for centuries.
Our last chance to save the planet as we know it
Time is short. If we fail to act decisively in this decade, the damage to our climate, oceans and biodiversity is likely to be irreversible. This is our last chance to save the planet as we know it.
Here we highlight those who have not only understood those threats but become witness to them. They have confronted them, often at great costs to themselves.
The forces against them are systemic. The individuals or organisations they have to take on are powerful, and often ruthless and malevolent. The most celebrated pronouncement in economics – Adam Smith on the “invisible hand” in 1776 – today sounds desperately outdated. He wrote that by ‘pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it’.
Pursuit of profit and power, not respect for nature
Instead of a competitive market where providers meet consumers’ demands, we have at the core of the economy a nexus of dominant firms. Private oligopolistic companies in Western countries. Or state-owned and state-controlled in China. Or cronyist corporates in Russia, Iran and other developing countries. They pursue their own goals of profit and power.
They do this mostly indifferent to the welfare of the people, particularly inimical to their health and the environment within which they live. They feed the exorbitant financial returns expected by shareholders, or by any sort of people in control. They do it by systematically destroying the natural capital – biodiversity, air, water, soil, climate – without which life on earth is doomed to collapse.
Our book brings together inspirational stories and experiences. It is about, and by, those who have seen ways forward to a much better development path for human well-being, security and dignity. They show how we can raise living standards and fight poverty across the world at the same time as creating a much safer and more attractive environment.
Old think is weakening, but not enough yet
Their momentum is building. The old polluting forces are somewhat weakening. But our future is in the balance. We share their voices, vision and hope in order to help to tilt the balance their way.
The evidence on the scale and urgency of the threats is overwhelming. There should be no doubt that we are facing global systems challenges across multiple dimensions that are crucial to our well-being.
There is a flood of scientific warnings illustrated in the following examples.
Scary data
The 2019 Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas published by the Water Resources Institute identifies 17 countries which are home to a quarter of the world’s population. They face ‘extremely high water stress which will be close to day zero conditions when the taps run dry’.
India and Pakistan are among them. Countries and regions like the Yellow River basin depend on dwindling Himalayan or Andean glaciers for their water. They are on the edge, as are the south west United States, Mexico and Central America, as well as countries around the Mediterranean Sea.
This severe water predicament is closely connected to global warming.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 compared 1.5°C and 2°C increases in global mean temperature above pre-industrial levels. It highlighted that the proportion of the global population exposed to severe heat at least once every five years is more than 2.5 times greater. Also, that the proportion of vertebrate and plant species that lose at least half of their bioclimatic range is double.
There is strong evidence that exceeding 2°C will result in large biomes on earth collapsing, such as coral reefs and tropical forests. Going even beyond implies that ‘warming could activate important tipping elements, raising the temperature further to activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth System to even higher temperatures’.
Why we must all contemplate the unbearable
This describes a road to unbearable conditions of life on Earth: “In the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a mean annual temperature greater than 29°C. This is currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.”
Giant redwoods in Sequoia National Park, California, are already having enough.
They were supposed to live for another 500 to 1,000 years. The combination of drought stress, fire damage and overall warming have made them vulnerable for the first time as far back as we can know to bark beetles infestations. “That’s not how giant sequoias die,” laments Dr Christy Brigham, chief biologist of Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks.
A stern health warning was recently formulated by the 2019 Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: “A business-as-usual trajectory will result in a fundamentally altered world. The life of every child born today will be profoundly affected by climate change.”
Claude Henry is a physicist turned economist who is currently Professor of Sustainable Development at Sciences Po in Paris and Columbia University.
Johan Rockström is joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Lord Nicholas Stern is IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government and Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
Visit Standing up for a Sustainable World: Voices of Change for their full analysis with the specific, inspiring examples.