What is one of the biggest threat to Earths survival?
The electric current pandemic may accept shifted our focus, but we cannot ignore ten "catastrophic and existential" threats to human survival, a new report warns.
The call for global, united action to accost this crisis is published by the Commission for the Human Future, a body of concerned citizens and experts chaired by John Hewson from the Australian National University.
They list the threats as extinction and eco-plummet, resource scarcity, nuclear artillery race, climate change, global poisoning, food system failure, pandemic diseases, uncontrolled technologies, overpopulation/megacity collapse, and denial and delusion.
To be clear that the description of these threats is not arbitrary, they ascertain a catastrophic risk as "i that menaces human civilisation in full general" and an existential risk as "one that may potentially extinguish the man species."
The complex risks highlighted by the report accept been long germinating.
"The human being species' power to crusade mass harm to itself has been accelerating since the mid-20th Century," it says.
"Global trends in demographics, information, politics, warfare, climate, environmental damage and engineering science have culminated in an entirely new level of risk."
The warnings have been escalating too, from wildfires, floods and droughts to mass extinction, food insecurity, wars and pandemic diseases – "a wake-up telephone call that our very way of life is at risk".
The threats posed by climate change, ecosystem plummet, biodiversity loss and dwindling h2o supplies – no surprise to scientists who have long tried to sound the alarm – have gained increased traction in public sensation.
Pandemic risk has at present hit the world phase with a bang – although the warnings accept been around ii decades, says Julian Cribb, a science writer who has been investigating the planet's growing crises for fifteen years.
Pollution and chemicals are some other major trouble, poisoning land, water, animals and humans.
Agricultural practices do more than their share of devastation, and ignorance of soil loss, declining water supplies, ecosystem refuse and poor nutrition is threatening food security, which is on a "knife-edge".
Food insecurity is the binding threat that connects all the others, the report notes, quoting a Spanish maxim, "There are only seven meals between civilization and chaos."
Cribb notes that overhauling the food system provides an opportunity for earth peace: "When people have a full tum, they don't fight."
Indeed, the report notes that ii thirds of wars over the past century arose from disputes most food, country and water.
The nuclear arms race is possibly the greatest impending threat, with 2000 of the 13,890 nuclear weapons on high warning for pushing the button and a "capacity to destroy the man time to come in an afternoon".
"Detonating less than one% of this arsenal would crusade an precipitous ice age and a global famine affecting everyone."
Other emerging threats are posed by unsafe new technologies – such as robot killing machines, biotechnology, nanotechnology and electromagnetic radiation – and widespread denial of scientific evidence.
Underpinning much of this is the dinosaur in the room: unsustainable population growth leading to ballooning demand for precious resource and environmental deposition, fed by an insatiable appetite for consumerism.
Yet, no government has a policy in place to address these man-made bug, says Cribb, with efforts piecemeal at best.
Solutions do exist, but the report stresses they must all exist solved together because the threats are interconnected. Addressing them thus needs to ensure that none of the solutions worsen any of the other threats.
"The ten catastrophic risks are all part of a system that humans accept, generally without intention, created.
"This ways that the risks must be understood and analysed as a complex, interconnected arrangement – not equally standalone threats, to exist dealt with one by one."
All the systems we have for granted – economic, food, energy, product, waste matter and governance systems – and the way we relate to the Earth's natural systems "must all undergo searching examination and reformation".
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how a ending tin can strike out of the blue, highlighting our vulnerability and lack of preparedness.
Information technology has also demonstrated that radical action is possible, presenting an "unprecedented opportunity" to reconsider humanity and its impact on the planet.
"Afterwards the tempest, the global and societal landscape will have changed," the report says. "We cannot resume business as usual and would exist wise to prepare for sweeping change."
Reforms that are called for include greater disinterestedness, science informing policy, cooperation, participation, renewed social norms, more effective democracies and commitment to long-term solutions.
And it needs people from all walks of life – from scientists and leading thinkers to indigenous communities, young people and female leaders – to come to the table, share views and solutions and take private and collective action.
"We recognise that solutions to these cracking risks depend non just on government policy and corporate activity, only also on the actions of billions of individual people in their daily lives," the report says.
This includes our electric current behaviour, as well as applying pressure level to governments and corporate bodies, "to achieve the kinds of changes that are really necessary to defuse the catastrophic threats.
"What we lack at present, is whatever kind of analogous, unifying spark."
The report marks the get-go of a serial of circular tables that volition be shared globally, exploring each of the ten catastrophic threats and identifying solutions that anybody interested in a safer, healthier hereafter can embrace.
Source: https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/sustainability/ten-catastrophic-threats-to-our-survival/
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