Environment

Hope is active — it's a discipline. It would be such a profound disservice to give up: a disservice to young people, to the scientists who have spent decades working. There is no other option but to be hopeful. That is what activates me. There is simply no other option.

It is about talking to people in a language they understand. You need to be able to feel and connect with stories in order to act. The more stories we have, the more people we can reach — because everybody has different contexts, and different stories will speak to different people.

GDP mostly measures how money changes hands. War boosts GDP. Oil spills boost GDP. Cancer, bushfires, drug addiction, gambling addiction, health crises — these all boost GDP. It still rises when society is suffering immensely. We can put a carbon market on top of that, but we're still operating within an economic system built on a logic of destruction.

Nature is not the backdrop to our lives — it is our lives. We are nature and nature is us. There is no separation. We invented the ideology that we're exempt from nature's rules, that we're masters over nature, and that ideology is incorrect.

What we have isn't superior intelligence — it's superior destructive reach, enabled by technology. The story we've told ourselves that we are categorically separate from nature is the destabilising force, because every species is constrained by nature and is part of a system.

Climate change is a J-curve, not linear. Rates of change globally are occurring at a faster pace than the global population expects, and will impact food production.

Unknown.

Globally, we have neglected this topic [agriculture] for decades. We have, worldwide, over a billion undernourished people. Food prices have risen over the past few years, with our own research showing these should accelerate up from 2010. The world's demographics are also alarming: The world's population has quadrupled in the twentieth century, doubling between 1960 and 2007. For the first time in history, we have seen the global urban population exceed the rural one, and, over the past forty years, agricultural-land has increased by only 10%. Two words, food security, are central to our model.

Unknown.

Africa is an enormous continent, larger than the US, China and Europe combined. It represents 20% of the global land mass, and only 10% of the world's population. It offers an un-crowded space of opportunities including minerals, natural resources, water and agriculture.

Unknown.

This is a race to the future, a future powered by renewable energy sources and underpinned by efficient energy use. The winning nations, corporation and citizens will reap enormous benefits in terms of jobs, sustainable economic development, energy security and vastly improved local environments.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

During the twentieth century we saw consumption boom beyond the planets natural limits, beyond what the planet is capable of sustaining. Everything is connected, forest destruction is a major cause of global warming, climate change.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

We can cut our carbon emissions while achieving economic growth by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and energy efficiency. The technologies are already there, all we need is the political will.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

It is difficult to imagine a graver threat; or an area of human endeavour or global ecology in which the profound consequences of runaway climate change would not be disastrous. Already, it is estimated that around 300,000 people die every year as a direct result of climate change.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

This has been a heart-wrenching day, and I will never forget the destruction and suffering that I have witnessed. I have visited the scenes of many natural disasters around the world, but nothing like this. The scale is so large: so many people, in so many places, in so much need…

Former UN Secretary-General, served two five-year terms.

A regional war in say, South Asia, which involved as few as one hundred nuclear bombs would result in firestorms in their urban centres that would put so much smoke and particulate into the atmosphere that the earth would be covered in a cloud that would reflect sunlight back into space and reduce global temperatures but two to three degrees for several years. This would kill most food crops on the planet, resulting in massive famines and starvation.

Nuclear weapons expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund.

Every plant has to endlessly sense and monitor a number of environmental parameters; and is constantly called upon to make decisions. This is not the place to list numerous cases of intelligence behaviour in plants, a huge volume of such examples can be found in scientific literature.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.