Sustainable future requires total culture change
Wednesday, 27 June 2007
The challenges facing humanity were about sustainable living on a planet with limited resources and burgeoning population growth, said the Government's Chief Scientific Advisor Sir David King in the Royal Society of Health Lecture. That burgeoning population had created a series of issues for the earth's atmosphere.
There had been tremendous public health successes in the 20th century, he said, with an increase in lifespan from 45 to 80 for much of humanity. But people living longer meant that population growth was accelerating, he said, and the earth's population would be 8 billion by 2028.
The excess deaths across Europe caused by the heatwave of 2003 had taken people by surprise, as there had been no broadcast information about what people should do or how to behave. So it was essential for those in public health to take the information around climate change and say what it will mean for the health of the people of this country, he stressed. Summers like this would be the norm by 2050.
‘If we're going to manage a sustainable future we need nothing less than a total cultural change, in which we first and foremost take care of our environment.'
Whatever we did now regarding carbon monoxide emissions, the next 30 years of increasing temperatures would be with us anyway, he said, because of natural inertia in the climate system. Therein lay the huge challenge. ‘The return on action from reducing carbon emissions is huge by 2080, but hardly anything at all by 2030. So the challenge is to take action now that will only benefit future generations.'
It was therefore essential to adapt and mitigate the risks country by country, he said. There would be much more intensive rainfall in the UK than in the past. This would mean more flash flooding as the Victorian drainage systems had been designed for a different kind of rainfall that was spread more evenly through the year.
We could, however, substantially reduce carbon dioxide emission from the built environment with little cost to the economy, he said, stressing that tackling climate change was a UK government priority.
It was essential to make sure that there was technology transfer and an adaptation strategy for developing countries, he added. ‘Darfur is the first climate change-driven conflict, and there will be many more. That will be the big issue of the 21st century – the forced movement of people looking for places to live, coupled with increased population.
‘If we're going to manage a sustainable future we need nothing less than a total cultural change, in which we first and foremost take care of our environment.'