Facing our environmental crisis head on

In a recent article, Professor Rick Stafford and Dr Peter Jones, both working in marine conservation at Bournemouth University, questioned if the media, corporate and government attention on plastic pollution actually distracts attention from bigger environmental challenges.

We are changing our planet rapidly, substantially and irreversibly.

As a researcher working across multiple environmental problems, which include climate change and plastic pollution, it’s a question I often ask myself. Like a good doctor, I need to triage so I can prioritise urgent cases. I don’t have an answer, but Professor Stafford and Dr Jones made me think.

Report after report present increasing quantities and quality of evidence that we are changing our planet rapidly, substantially and irreversibly in order to meet human demands for resources – food, minerals, water, timber, fibre and fuel.

For decades, we have justified damage to the planet as the cost of economic development and human wellbeing, but we’ve now come to a point where we can no longer justify business-as-usual as it will disrupt our very civilisation.

Read the Pursuit story by Dr Ee Ling Ng from the University of Melbourne - “Facing our environmental crisis head on.”

If business leaders want to regain our trust, they must act on climate risk

Business leaders seem astonished that community trust in their activities is at an all-time low, trending toward the bottom of the barrel inhabited by politicians. To the corporate leader dedicated to the capitalist, market economy success story of the last 50 years, that attitude is no doubt incomprehensible and downright ungrateful.

 ‘Already one of the world’s largest carbon polluters when
 exports are included, Australia is complicit in destroying the
 conditions which make human life possible’

But it is hardly surprising given continuing scandals and declining ethics across the corporate and banking worlds, driven by the pernicious impact of short-termism, rising inequality and undue political influence; in large part the outcome of the oxymoron of “pay-for-performance” remuneration. So how is trust regained? The need for stronger leadership, ethics, greater transparency, open communications and improved culture feature prominently in current responses.

But a far more fundamental requirement is ignored, namely that business must lead on really critical issues, particularly the point raised long ago by economist Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who considers economic growth can continue indefinitely in a finite system is either a madman or an economist”. The constraints Boulding anticipated have now arrived, as burgeoning population and economic growth crash into global biophysical limits which cannot be circumvented.

Read the piece from The Guardian by Ian Dunlop  - “If business leaders want to regain our trust, they must act on climate risk.”