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Sustainability: adapt or die summit.

by Dave Armstrong 13 Mar 2016
Sustainability: adapt or die summit.

Keep up-to-date on the Economist's big event for this week in London. Talk is fine, but forming real policy for NGOs, governments and even local councils and your own home is the strategic end in mind, as we try to prevent further climate change and sustain all resources in as efficient a manner as possible.Summit image; Credit: © The Economist

Earth Times has been recently sustaining a small campaign of publicising our animal and resource sustainability. Maintaining a tiny area of habitat to conserve the orangutan in Wildlife Strategies and noting the sustainability of Uzbekistan's growing economy, where water conservation and diversification of agriculture has transformed the previously-slow privatisation process. The rapid growth of renewable energies in such naturally obvious sites for solar energy as well as coastal wind energy sites in many parts of the world has also aided growth. Even sustainable fishing has proved educational for the giant industrial fishing industry, when protecting relatively short migration routes, proves to improve fish stocks and whole ecosystems. But is the conservation of food webs like these comparable to the political battles on sustainability ahead?

This was small meat compared to the Paris-inspired Sustainability Summit next Tuesday in London. The speakers and other contributors aim to explore the role public and private sectors have to play in future-proofing society and examine how governments embed sustainability into their national policy. Many nations are represented, although more Environment Ministers would be welcome. The media and the environment are also well represented, with banks and business, oil and renewables facing off.

The best (and most hopeful) introduction I've yet read is that of Thomson Reuters Timothy Nixon. In The Economist itself, he berates the cynics, after our experience of those great (American and other) deniers. The shrinking world is one of his reasons for hope. The prevalence of transparency is one of the great positives, with CCTV governing our lives and whistleblowers drowning out the corruption. Instead of the usual hindrance, the media have participated in revealing the truth, and not only in more developed countries. We cannot expect those cowering under dictatorships to perform like that, but most of us have disposed of our national socialists!

The use of and unique cooperation between regulators, innovators, investors worried about their income and new media gives us a kind of science. Those at work contribute their knowledge and we all learn who is correct and what is clogging sensible sustainable action. In the field of conservation, it is the orangutans, the ivory, the small organism that produce the energy and the predators that control the system. The ocean habitat survives because predators like sharks maintain balance, the ecosystems still have a chance because we can see the basics of energy transformations. Perhaps our own vital energy transformations will see some cooperative effort in London. After all, Paris was just promises. London and other conferences could be a start of the processing, to ensure that policies are formalised for every area, just as the great food webs are built from smaller chains.


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