Sustainability: creating a more sustainable world

Emily Shuckburgh:

We are now living on a planet where the environment, ecosystems and even the geology have been substantially impacted by human activities. Over the past one hundred and fifty years, the global population has grown six-fold and society has been transformed in many countries with a one-hundred-fold increase in global GDP. Much of that transformation has arisen through industrialisation, powered primarily through the use of fossil fuels for energy. That has led to a 45% increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and through the greenhouse effect to an increase in global-average surface temperature of 1 degree Celsius. These lectures will describe the broader impact of this in terms of rising seas, melting ice, increased risk of extreme weather and the impacts on human society and the natural world. They will discuss the dangers of catastrophic changes, for example from collapse of the vast ice sheets covering Greenland and West Antarctica, as the world warms further. Finally, the lectures will examine the need to reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases to limit climate change and what is required to achieve this.

Tony Juniper:

Environmental change is now occurring at global scale and is taking place very rapidly. A range of connected trends are now causing the climate to change, a mass extinction of species and ecosystem degradation. While these consequences of our economic system were once dismissed as ‘the price of progress’, it is now clear that the ecological damage that is being caused by our patterns of production and consumption are in turn causing feedbacks into the human world. These feedbacks include impacts on food and water security and threats to our wider economic system, which, it will be revealed, in the end is entirely built on foundations of Nature. These lectures will examine the broad set of pressures that are contributing to environmental change, examine the manner in which human societies are both dependent on natural systems and are being affected by changes to them and will conclude with an examination of what is happening to the tropical forests, and what that means not only for wildlife and indigenous people’s, but also the rest of the world.