Comment

John Hewson
A question for the United Nations

There are wars, and rumours of more wars, but almost total neglect of what should be the most significant global battle: keeping the planet habitable. It is now a most urgent challenge, with the coincident effect of multiple and converging risks that pose existential threats to humanity this century.

Julian Cribb, a former CSIRO science communicator, has scoured the available research in his various writings to summarise the main threats as follows – in no particular order:

Soaring populations that strain cities and their food and water supplies to their limits.

An upsurge in global pandemics as a result of human actions or manufactured viruses used as weapons of mass destruction.

Widespread poisoning by chemical products that are inadequately controlled.

The growing scarcities of water, forests, topsoil, fish and other life-sustaining resources.

The increasing likelihood of destructive impacts from technological change, including the unrestrained use of artificial intelligence, robots and untested chemical agents.

The evolution of ever-deadlier weapons of mass destruction and their widespread availability, as global efforts at nuclear disarmament run aground.

The sharpest rise in global temperatures in 120,000 years. Despite the attempt via the Paris Agreement to collaborate globally, we are now close to breaking those pledges, bringing more frequent damaging extreme weather events.

The breaching of six of the nine planetary boundaries that support life on Earth, as identified by international scientists.

These crises are vast, complex and interrelated, and will affect everyone on the planet for generations. There is no comprehensive agenda to resolve them, nor is there a concerted effort to develop one.

What is needed is an honest, mature, global rethink of where we are and how we got here – if only there were a forum in which such a thing might happen. A good starting point might be, though, a broader acceptance that the project of globalisation that has been such an international focus since World War II has in fact carried the seeds of its own destruction. There is widespread agreement that globalisation – in the sense of close integration across borders in trade in goods and services, technology, people, investment/capital and information – has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, helped drive global economic growth and delivered affordable goods and services worldwide.

However, this quest for growth has been irrespective of its environmental and social consequences. It has helped to compound inequality and led particularly to the hollowing out of the middle class in several high-income countries. Many developing countries have been left behind – unable to emulate the growth and development strategies of much of the rest of the world, they resorted to sweatshops and other exploitation of workers and of their natural resources to become globally competitive. They have been unable to avoid the emissions consequences, nor to afford the necessary climate adaptation and offset policies necessary for them to help meet the global climate challenge.

Beyond this, we have seen the global dominance of multinational companies, with their extensive share registers, massive payrolls of executives and global staff, and expanding power and influence in so many countries. The ability and willingness of these companies to move capital and know-how across borders, in ever more efficient supply chains, has been fundamental to globalisation. Although many still have a national character, especially those originating in the higher-income countries, they are decidedly global in terms of where they choose to pay tax – they have gained at the expense of workers. There has been a long-emerging sense across many populations, especially among young people around the world, that business has abandoned and exploited them, leading to the likes of Trump in pursuit of populism. The multinationals – the fossil-fuel giants, the tech giants – are increasingly seen as the biggest part of the problem.

This has been enabled by the rise and liberalisation of global finance, which has seen the abandonment of fixed exchange rates and stronger cross-border investment flows, leading to more tightly interconnected global markets. This evolution created the concept of global financial stability but it has also brought the mechanisms for global financial crises, such as we saw in the Asian crisis in the late 1990s, and then the GFC that emanated from the United States in 2008.

A few years ago I began working with Cribb and others to establish the Council for the Human Future (CHF) to increase global awareness of these existential risks and to consider plans to manage them.

The United Nations and the World Economic Forum have developed similar lists of catastrophic threats, outlined in their Global Risks reports. The UN focuses on mis/disinformation among the predominant threats – the tsunami of lies spread by politicians, corporations and other vested interests that serve at best to confuse and at worst to foment anger and social division. It is encouraging that despite the likes of US President Donald Trump promising the “golden age of America” and other leaders glossing up their prospects, there is an increasing global awareness that humans can’t survive unless they understand the risks they actually face and how to overcome them.

Cribb has also raised the concern that as a society we have “reached a point where our technology has outpaced our ability to comprehend what it delivers, let alone do anything purposeful to correct it”. In that sense it may be the extent and complexity of these man-made crises has grown beyond our capacity to address them. Many simply don’t want to admit this, hence the longstanding attempts to deny the human contribution to the climate crisis. We still see world leaders trying to sell the myth that our best means of survival is to further “extract and exploit”, to “drill, baby, drill”, as Trump has said. Most recently, plans have emerged to mine deep ocean seabeds for valuable mineral deposits such as copper, nickel and rare earth elements, raising the possibility of destroying species that are not yet even known. Here again the US president looks likely to play a dominant role, probably by undermining another global agency, the UN’s International Seabed Authority, via a US mining permit and even some finance, with some exploitation of island nations and communities thrown in.

The tragedy is that the confluence of crises has been self-induced, by human greed, by corruption, by a staggering indifference. It is the quest for endless economic growth and the consumption of scarcer and scarcer resources that is leading us to widespread destruction of ecosystems and species extinction.

For my generation, the words of David Attenborough should ring in every ear, namely: “How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew what was happening to the world and did nothing?” And all of us must contemplate Jane Goodall’s excellent question: “Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?” Cribb cited both in a recent piece published on the Pearls and Irritations website: “The great human brain fade”.

The ideal of the Council for the Human Future is for these threats to be dealt with together via an Earth System Treaty – a global accord negotiated, signed and ratified by all countries. It would include agreements to tackle the existential issues listed above, along with all 17 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Only one country would need to propose its addition to the agenda for the UN General Assembly to consider it.

Many of us are tired of having to move from one crisis to another but a sense of urgency is needed – we can no longer kick these problems down the road.

Yet our political systems are absorbed by far less important issues, while moving impossibly slowly on those that really matter. This comes down to a powerful capacity for distraction and diversion among governments, policy authorities and voters. Our destructive trajectory can’t be corrected unless we accept and recognise the importance of the errors of our past ways and accept that we have to change our behaviour to avoid extinction.

There seems to be significant global support for efforts to achieve peace in Ukraine and the Middle East, yet frustration at the slowness of realistic initiatives to do so. Trump has only so far served to prolong and intensify the conflicts. There have been meaningless “summits”, UN processes circumvented or undermined. Expectations declared then easily thwarted. Trump, the master of diversion, seems to come and go on dealing with these conflicts, seemingly warming to them only to deflect from domestic issues, such as his MAGA base’s obsession with the Epstein files or court challenges against his tariffs.

In Australia, our public discourse seems also to drift too easily off important topics, in favour of trivia. In recent weeks, ridiculous time and space was diverted to whether Defence Minister Richard Marles actually had a meeting with his US counterpart or whether it was just a “happenstance encounter”, as Pete Hegseth declared.

The 80th UN General Assembly meets this month, in New York. The theme, ironically for an organisation so deeply undermined and derided by the Trump administration, is “Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development and human rights”. I suggest that with his government’s massive electoral mandate Prime Minister Anthony Albanese could do worse than take the idea of an Earth System Treaty to the world. Who knows, it could consolidate our standing as a significant middle-ranking power. After all, it was the initiative of a previous Labor government that led to Doc Evatt’s assiduous work to establish the UN in the first place. Who knows what will come next.

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.