Ian Chubb

My office is located in the building which houses the Department of Industry and Science. Staff in that department are encouraged to sign up for a course entitled ‘Economics for Non-Economists’. There is no comparable course in science for the non-scientists – or mathematics for non-mathematicians, or technologies for the non-technologically literate.

It is not so much a reflection on the department as a mark of the way our society prepares itself to understand and address its problems. It is quite acceptable to mount an argument against acting to stave off catastrophic climate change because of inevitable uncertainties in the scientific models, and possible impacts on our economy (models of which most certainly influence our behaviour, notwithstanding their looseness). Why should that be? We can’t tell people what or how to think. But we can agree that we need people with the capacity to understand and harness science in government: intelligently, rigorously, and, above all, constantly.

Climate science is a good example of the need: a complex matter with multiple variables pulling in many directions. Policy-makers must have the wherewithal to know the difference between rigorous scientific expertise and snake oil. We must see to it that they know where and to whom to turn.

(Australia’s Chief Scientist)

Danielle Clode

We have always regarded the Earth’s environmental resources as something free for the taking. But nothing comes for free – someone always has to pay in the end. The long-term costs of environmental exploitation need to be attached to those who directly benefit – producers, investors, and consumers. We need to pay a fair price for sustainable production systems, whether for food, fuel, construction materials, or consumer goods. One of the great benefits of our capitalist economy is its remarkable capacity to adapt to new selection pressures and to recover from perturbations and catastrophes. Unlike living ecosystems, our economies adapt in milliseconds not millennia. Markets have always needed regulation to avoid exploitation and to make them fair. Governments have a duty to act as effective market regulators and to defend their right to do so free from the insidious constraints of ill-named free trade agreements. The risks of economic damage in paying a fair price are slight and passing; the increasing risks of environmental damage are irreparable and irreversible. Carbon pricing, mining levies, fuel taxes – these strategies are easy, effective, and immediate. A small price to pay for a cleaner, safer future.

(2014 Australian Book Review Bjarne K. Dahl Trust Fellow)

An open-cut coal mine and power station, Anglesea, Victoria (photograph by John Englart via Wikimedia Commons)

Jimmy Cocking

The most important environmental issue is the growing disconnection between people and nature. As our suburbs are concreted and an increasing proportion of us spend most of our lives storeys above the ground, the love and appreciation of nature is diminishing. The impacts of rapid urbanisation coupled with the design of fossil-fuel dependent cities and towns is leading us to both an unstable climate and risking critical groundwater supplies. The remoteness of big cities to the ecological degradation from clear-felling, mining, hydraulic fracturing, over-grazing, feral animals, weeds, and other processes means that a growing proportion of the population do not see what is going on in the wider world and thus do not feel the need to act on it.

Climate adaptation provides an opportunity for all of us to reconnect with nature. Renewable energy, water efficient design and conservation behaviours, native habitat planting, growing your own vegetables, getting out of the city limits and immersing yourself in nature while connecting with your local community – all of this is possible.

(Director, Arid Lands Environment Centre)

Tim Entwisle

Give every child a microscope (or a telescope). That will change the way they see the world, literally and allegorically. In every drop of water examined there is the possibility of finding algae or ‘animalcules’ (or in every sky, stars, and stardust). Armed with this new knowledge and curiosity, they can make better and better-informed decisions. Future generations and children’s children are frequently cited as beneficiaries, or victims, of our actions. Let’s start with the here and now and reveal to our children how complicated and fascinating the world is.

Better still, train the young to be scientists so that when they eventually become circus performers, politicians, lawyers, or whatever, they understand the difference between a star and stardust (both of which are fine, unlike astrology). While we need more scientists, we also need a more scientifically literate community. Knowing more about our world, and making decisions based on evidence, is the best way to tackle climate change, vegetation clearing, and unrestrained human-population growth – the big environmental problems of our time.

(Director and Chief Executive, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria)

Tim Flannery

Without doubt the most urgent action required for environmental reform at the global, national, and local levels is to strengthen our democracies. I have great faith in human nature, and know that enduring environmental reforms and outcomes must have the support of the people. This is especially true in developing countries where the malign influence of ‘special interests’ all too often corrupts the will of the people. Better representation (why can’t, for example, ordinary Australians, chosen at random for a limited period do the job of the Senate?) and more accountability are the foundation stones of good environmental policy.

(2007 Australian of the Year and former Chief Commissioner of the Climate Commission)

Jenny Gray

If we are to address the current and impending environmental challenges, we need to frame the discussion away from politics and point-scoring, towards a moral imperative for our community to protect, preserve, and pass on a healthy environment to future generations. The actions required to address threats to species and the degradation of habitats may seem daunting, but with the efforts of passionate individuals significant gains can be achieved. Zoos attract millions of people each year. People visit because they love animals. Through building a love of our native species, particularly those on the brink, we are able to prevent extinctions in the future. At our zoos, families and school classes learn about threatened species; then they take actions, from revegetating landscapes to changing their purchasing behaviours to raising funds. Every day we see and share in the efforts of individuals committed to change the future for threatened species.

As a community we need to come together to inspire and develop the conservationists of the future, while supporting and celebrating the amazing people and organisations that do incredible work in the fields of fighting wildlife extinction, and addressing sustainability and climate change.

(CEO, Zoos Victoria)

Tom Griffiths

The greatest challenge in environmental understanding is often cultural – as in bushfire policy, where the neglected question is not how fire behaves but how people do. Investment in art, history, and science will help us to know ourselves as well as the country. Education is a priority, because inspirational teachers can change lives, and stories determine how we live.We urgently need to improve and protect funding for independent institutions that generate the evidence and critical analysis on which practical policy can be based. Long-term public research is essential: for example, a strengthened, independent CSIRO, Australian Antarctic Division, and Australian Institute of Marine Science are crucial. Non-government conservation initiatives such as Bush Heritage and Australian Wildlife Conservancy deserve encouragement and support, as does the public body that drives much of our cultural life: the ABC.

We need to combine planetary consciousness with a deep historical and ecological knowledge of our own place – to be world citizens as well as champions of local culture and biodiversity. Empower communities to discover where – and with what creatures – they live. And, of course, leave coal in the ground, invest in renewables, and put a price on carbon.

(William Keith Hancock Professor of History, ANU)

Clear felled eucalypt forest, Tullah, Tasmania (courtesy of CSIRO via Wikimedia Commons)

Lesley Head

If human survival is the goal, our most urgent issue is to decarbonise the global economy. Most of the world’s fossil fuels (including nearly all Australian coal) must be left in the ground if we are not to exceed the carbon budget for dangerous climate change. This challenge is entwined with and exacerbates all other environmental problems.

Most of the affluent world is in denial about the socio-economic transformation necessary. There is no easy way; it requires mobilisation of society-wide resources, including time and ideas. Some of us have known the scale of this effort in war. We delude ourselves if we think it can be done without hardship or sacrifice. Cultural resources of shared sacrifice, frugality, and care should be fostered. Nor is there a straightforward way. Complex problems do not have simple solutions, but they offer many points of intervention. Diverse processes, practices, and politics must work in the same direction to achieve transformation. Individuals, communities, and the state should focus on actions that enhance traction with others. These actions will be economic, cultural, political, artistic, agricultural.

(Director, Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research)

Pauline Ladiges

The two outstanding environmental issues are climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Global average surface temperatures have risen over the last century and the climate has changed. Evidence implies that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are a major cause. Climate change threatens species biodiversity and ecosystem functions upon which we depend – impacting, for example, on agriculture, food production, water quality, human health, and nations’ wealth. We owe it to future generations to take serious action, globally and locally, on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and loss of habitats and species.

(Professorial Fellow, The University of Melbourne)

Tim Low

The modern conservation movement that arose in the 1960s came under the influence of the New Age notion that our relationships to nature should be based fundamentally on feeling (the wilderness experience). Promoting knowledge about species, habitats, and processes was not a high priority. The result today is a society ill-equipped to understand all the environmental harms it is causing. Even within conservation groups, understanding is often limited. Children today are suffering nature deficit disorder (to quote Richard Louv); most of them can identify more brand logos than local plants and animals. The need to increase ecological literacy is urgent and most likely to be met if people are offered information packaged in meaningful, enticing ways – natural history presented as an antidote to stress and an avenue to eco-understanding. A society whose sense of community is broadened to include multiple species will be more mindful of how it affects them. A nature-based society can best be achieved if environmental scientists work closely with psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and communicators.

(Biologist and author)

Ian Lowe

The fundamental problem is that our leaders still see environmental protection as an optional extra, to be considered only as long as it doesn’t interfere with their top priority of economic growth. We don’t have a bright future even as a species, and we have no future as a civilisation, unless we recognise that we critically depend on the integrity of natural systems. Those systems provide the air we breathe, the water we drink, and our capacity to produce food, as well as less tangible benefits like our sense of place and the spiritual sustenance we derive from our environment. As we are now losing species at a rate comparable with the past great extinction episodes, our highest priority should be to stem the loss of biodiversity. Slowing climate change is part of the solution, but only part; we urgently need to stabilise our population and reduce our per capita demands for resources, to get back in balance with the natural world.

(former President of the Australian Conservation Foundation)

Iain McCalman

The environmental elephant in the room, or more aptly the blue whale in the fishpond, is the habitually overlooked threat to our survival posed by the acidification of our oceans. In the aftermath of my recent book, The Reef: A Passionate History, I was interviewed by scores of journalists about threats to our Great Barrier Reef. Only one, a scientist from a BBC TV program, mentioned ocean acidification. The most frequent question concerned the plague of coral-eating ‘Crown of Thorns’ starfish that has been damaging our Barrier Reef corals since the 1970s. I suspect this creature is singled out because it seems tangible, a freakish-looking creature worthy of an Alien movie, which we humans can surely eradicate by inventing some toxic technology like DDT.

The acidification of all the oceans on our planet is, by contrast, a classic example of what Princeton Professor Rob Nixon calls the ‘slow violence’ that typifies contemporary environmental threats. Acidification is a slow, insidious process that is changing the chemistry of life on our planet, but because we can neither see it, nor predict its exact rate of progression, it is easy to overlook. Our governments operate on time scales bounded by a single term of office, concentrating on obvious and peripheral issues that can be used to convey the appearance of remedial action.

What we do know, thanks to fossil records, is that four out of the five previous mass extinction events on our planet have involved a process of oceanic chemical transformation akin to what is now taking place. Our oceans act as massive buffers, absorbing the rampant levels of CO₂ and methane that we are wilfully spewing into our atmosphere. But there comes a point when the waters can absorb no more without turning into carbonic acid. Just as we need to take an antacid tablet when afflicted with indigestion, the oceans seek to balance their ph by dissolving the calcium on which much ocean biota is based. As a result, calcium skeletons become afflicted with a fatal form of osteoporosis, causing them to slow in growth and then become brittle, deformed, and defunct. Corals, the canaries of climate change, will be among the earliest casualties.

Gradually, implacably, acidification has begun its stealthy work within our oceans. The myriad zooplankton that make up the base of the oceanic food chain are already registering these chemical changes. The food chain leads upwards in scale from tiny krill to the largest, most wondrous, creature that has ever lived on our planet: the blue whale, thirty metres long and two hundred tons in weight. The death of the blue whale from starvation will be matched by that of the largest living organism on our planet, the Great Barrier Reef, from osteoporosis. But why should we care? After all, it only took two and a half million years for the corals to grow back after the last mass extinction.

(Professorial Research Fellow, The University of Sydney)

A variety of corals form an outcrop on Flynn Reef, Great Barrier Reef, Queensland (photograph by Toby Hudson via Wikimedia Commons)

Kelly O’Shanassy

The continued burning of coal and gas is affecting our lives and our future in profound ways. Without urgent action to cut pollution, the atmosphere is expected to warm by at least 4°C by the end of the century. Australians are living with the adverse impacts of the confirmed 0.8°C of warming. Heatwaves already kill more Australians than any other type of natural disaster. Longer droughts, catastrophic bushfires, and other extreme weather already affect our communities, environment, and economy. Australia is one of the world’s worst climate polluters, per capita. We must urgently transform our energy system. We need to prepare for the phased closure of coal-fired power plants and to help workers and communities with the transition. The good news is there are massive benefits – for health, jobs, and Australia’s international reputation – in switching over to clean renewable energy. If politicians are going to stand in the way of this transition, the people of Australia need to exercise their democratic right to remove them from office. As Al Gore says, political will is a renewable resource.

(CEO, Australian Conservation Foundation)

David Ritter

In beautiful and blessed Australia, it is our most urgent task to shake off the dead hands of the coal industry. Australian export coal is by far our nation’s single largest contribution to global warming and directly threatens the existence of the Great Barrier Reef. Coal menaces our national prosperity and the futures of all our wonderful kids. Yet the recently deposed prime minister devoutly believes coal is ‘good for humanity’ and his government acts obediently on this article of faith. Coal dead hands are strangling the decent functioning of our Australian democracy.

The world’s most famous climate scientist, Dr James Hansen, has said ‘[k]icking Australia’s coal habit is the greatest gift Australians could give to everybody’s children’. In calling for a global moratorium on new coal mines, President Anote Tong of Kiribati singled out Australia as ‘selfish’. Recently, Prime Minister Josaia Bainimarama of Fiji told Tony Abbott that ‘it is time to put the welfare and survival of your Pacific Island neighbours before the expansion of your existing coal industry’. What is right for the world is right for the Reef and for the future of our children: it is time to decisively end the age of coal.

(CEO, Greenpeace)

Brian Schmidt

I see humanity’s greatest challenge as learning how to get the more than 7.1 billion people that currently inhabit the Earth to live sustainably. The Earth’s resources are finite, but technological developments have allowed humanity to grow both in number and in appetite for resources, such that we are on a collision course over the next century between what humans want to consume and what the Earth can give. Technology, too, can stop this collision, but only if it is shared amongst all people of the world, and if it is used for the benefit of future generations. However, spending current wealth for the benefit of future generations and sharing these benefits evenly across the world is at odds with the political processes that have ruled the world for millennia. Our ability to solve this global-scaled prisoner’s dilemma will dictate the future of human prosperity for better or worse.

(2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics)

Kate Smolski

Every country has its icons. For us, the koala holds a special place in our culture. Yet if current trends continue, koalas may vanish from much of New South Wales. Their numbers have reduced forty per cent over the last twenty years. And it is not just the koala: almost 1,000 species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction in New South Wales. Land clearing and habitat loss are the single biggest causes of biodiversity loss in the state. Protecting habitat is therefore essential if further losses of biodiversity and the services that healthy ecosystems provide are to be avoided. Climate change is already placing further pressure on species and ecosystems.

The New South Wales government is proposing significant changes to the state’s biodiversity laws.These changes could be an opportunity for improved protections for our beloved native animals. However, the main driver behind the reforms is demands by farming, mining, and developer groups for less regulation and greater freedom to clear native landscapes. Our current legislation has played a crucial role in the protection of biodiversity, but the continuing decline in populations demonstrates that much more needs to be done. The review of biodiversity laws is timely because there is an urgent need to strengthen them to help stop the loss of our native plants and animals.

(CEO, Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales)

Will Steffen

The challenge of environmental reform is a deep-rooted problem that is beyond individual action on its own. The challenge is exemplified by the concept of global change, in which human activities have become so profound and pervasive that they have led to a proposed new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. This development calls for a new perspective on the environment that is almost completely missing from contemporary society, and only remains in indigenous societies scattered around the world. The challenge operates at a political and philosophical level at a whole-of-society scale, increasingly at the international scale given the rate of globalisation.

Simply put, the fundamental issue is one of values – what we value and how we live. The current model based on economic growth driven by a lightly regulated capitalist economic system is now leading to destabilisation of the global environment, as well as to a striking growth in wealth and income inequality. The solution lies in a transformation of fundamental values – towards quality economic activity distributed in a more equitable way, underpinned by a reattachment to the biosphere that guides our relationship with the planet.

(Emeritus Professor, ANU, and Senior Fellow, Stockholm Resilience Centre)

Robyn Williams

Peter Medawar, 1960 (photograph courtesy of Xtreambar via Wikimedia Commons)

One of my science writing heroes when I was young was Peter Medawar, who combined pellucid clarity of expression with an almost mischievous boldness. He got away with it for two reasons. First, he was utterly brilliant. Second, he came from Brazil and had that Latino flair to get him past the establishment. Medawar spoke about ‘the art of the soluble’ (it was the title of one of his books).

What we need now is a firm belief that we have the means to tackle the awful environmental challenges we face. There are thousands of excellent ways through the turbulence, but they depend on our firmly believing it can be done. I have broadcast countless programs about energy systems, cures, transport ideas that are ten times more efficient, miracle materials, 3D-printed everything. None of this will work if we continue to believe the naysayers who claim that it is all impossible and that we should instead blunder on in the same old way.

Peter Medawar had a dreadful stroke as he was making an important speech: it nearly killed him. When I went to interview him nearly forty years ago he grinned at me and said, ‘Look what I can do!’ He stood up in his wheelchair and gave a cheer. The interview he then gave me was magnificent. The Art of the Soluble. ‘Yes we can.’ For once I agree.

(Presenter of The Science Show, Radio National)