Listen to ACFP’s Founder Bronwyn Kelly’s interview with one of Australia’s most prominent political scientists, Professor Mark Beeson, about our prospects for getting world leaders and our own leaders to cooperate seriously to achieve international peace and environmental sustainability in the age of climate change.
Is the world running out of time?
With the evidence of climate change all around us, it’s apparent that the world is running out of time to prevent full-scale environmental disaster. We have already breached seven of the nine safe planetary boundaries and have less than a decade to rein in planetary heating and overconsumption sufficiently to prevent our breaching the remaining boundaries. Humanity is living beyond the limits of the planet.
Our only chance to reverse this trend is through cooperation and that has to start with leaders of nations. They need a change of consciousness about collective realities. We need leaders who can admit that we are facing a peril that can only be solved by collective action and unprecedented cooperation.
How difficult will it be to achieve this? Very difficult. How difficult will it be to achieve it before time runs out? Extremely difficult but not impossible. And in any case there is no alternative.
How can we fix this?
Success will depend quite heavily on whether ordinary people across the world can organise themselves to influence their governments more effectively and to outweigh the influence of multinational corporations. On the positive side, things are happening at the United Nations and in other international forums, driven by growing pressure from grass roots groups in civil society.
Listen to this interview to understand the size of the shift needed by both leaders and individuals and how we might bring that change about. The collective action we need requires ongoing integrated planning and reporting at both national and international levels. Australia can show how this can work to increase the influence of ordinary people in local and world governance.
What’s going on in international forums?
There are things going on in international forums that can help reverse the planetary crisis. The peoples of the world need to swing their support behind these initiatives.
Find out about the Roundtable on the Human Future which includes a proposal to strengthen global governance by creating a People’s Assembly within the United Nations and an Earth System Treaty at the United Nations.
Find out about how the United Nations Summit of the Future has resulted in development of a Pact for the Future in which all 193 member nations have re-affirmed their commitment to international cooperation and increased action for a safe future for humans on the planet.
Australians need to press their governments to follow up their commitment to the Pact with all actions necessary at home to reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the targets of the Paris Agreement and other vital UN Treaties including the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Australia can lead the world in community-driven strategic planning for democratic nation states.
National Integrated Planning & Reporting offers Australians a process by which they can design a plan to safely achieve a future of wellbeing and security for their nation. That plan is already being designed. It’s called Australia Together. Any Australian can make suggestions about this plan at any time here and here.
If Australians build this safe plan using the democratic process of National Integrated Planning & Reporting, they can inspire the rest of the world. They can provide a blueprint for the democratic process that can be used by citizens’ assemblies everywhere and change the world for the better overnight.
The whole project of Australia Together is to help a people’s assembly be established and be run in an orderly way - because there is only one way that can be done. And it’s to get people into an assembly where they concentrate solely on the future that they want to make a reality.
We might be depressed, thinking about how enormous the challenge is – we might think it’s too late and impossible to change quickly enough. But on the other hand, with some minor adjustments in the way we organise ourselves to build a plan for a better future and deliver that to our leaders as an agenda for our survival, it could so easily go the other way. We could restore our chances of a safe future overnight.
Bronwyn Kelly
Want to know more about Australia Together?
Australia Together is the nation’s first community designed and driven long term, integrated plan for a better future. It’s designed to help Australians make the best future we can imagine in the 2020s a reality by 2050 or sooner.
Browse the last Issue of Australia Together - Issue No. 8 - here.
Up next on the Australia Together Podcast:
The rights we need: Interviewing Julian Cribb from the Council for the Human Future on the need for human rights, especially the right to a safe and healthy environment and the right to a voice in our own governance.
Episode 52: Planning to secure our future before time runs out.