War, whether civil war or illegal occupation by one country of another's sovereign territory, is never a recipe for a prosperous future. Wars have been going on continuously since GRSB's founding; the occupation of Palestine by Israel, the war that Saudi Arabia has been waging against Yemen, the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
All of them catastrophic for the people caught up in them. All based on the idea that one group sees the domination of others as their right. The human suffering brought about by war is enormous, and something that most of us in high income countries have not known in our lifetimes.
As our standard of living has risen over the past decades, I think that many in wealthy countries started to believe that we were immune to war; that it could not happen to us.
As wealth and consumption of resources has increased rapidly, so has the importance of connections between supplier and consumer countries. Dependencies have been created without which this standard of living could not be maintained, and have also created enormous disparities in standards of living.
In some ways, the concept of sustainability as a means of enabling continued high levels of consumption has contributed to those dependencies, but has failed to recognise the inherent vulnerabilities that came with them.
So, it has come as a great shock to those, particularly in Europe, that war can come very close and that it can threaten the lifestyle people have become accustomed to. That relying on a hostile neighbour for fuel and fertiliser is not a sustainable strategy, and that outsourcing food production as a means to reduce emissions is perhaps not so much about sustainability as about allowing other sector emissions to continue and increase.
A huge shift in the availability of wheat, barley and sunflower (oil and meal), a huge increase in the price of fertiliser, and a huge increase in the price of energy should be enough to cause many in the sustainability arena to ask whether they have been thinking holistically enough.
The fundamental issues of food security and sovereignty have largely been ignored in a rush to promote yet more new products, which means that significant parts of both social and economic sustainability have failed to be considered. For some, of course, price swings and supply disruptions will bring windfall profits, but for most increased volatility is not positive, even if it comes with increased value for exports. The complicated web of global politics means that whichever corner is being pulled, the whole web moves.
Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change continue to be felt worldwide. Southern Queensland and parts of NSW on the east coast of Australia have seen unprecedented rainfall that has caused flooding, loss of life and huge damage in some communities. These have been referred to as one in a thousand year events, but I expect we will see more in the years to come. It's probably better to be realistic about what the future holds than to refer to a past that is no longer relevant to today's environment.
On a different note, there is increasing interest in carbon neutral beef. There are now examples from around the world that can demonstrate carbon neutrality, including amongst GRSB members.
As interest increases, so do questions about how farmers, ranchers and land managers should handle soil carbon credits. You may recall that we touched briefly on this in our Valuing Sustainability Webinar last year.
The subject is getting increased interest, with some saying that farmers should not sell these credits. A bit of common sense from Louisa Kiely suggests that as it takes years to get soil sequestration projects running and reliable measurements, there are a number of possible futures. The important thing is to ensure that producers can make some money out of getting more carbon into the soil.
What matters for the climate, and for resilience, is that the carbon is sequestered, and what matters to producers is that they can make a profit, in the meantime.
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