Sydney, Sep 11 (Inditop.com) Scientists have sounded the alarm bells over impending global catastrophe as existing governments and institutions are too powerless to head it off.
The world faces a compounding series of crises – from energy, food shortages, to climate change, to new diseases and increasing anti-biotic resistance – all driven by human activity, which is beyond the capacity of existing institutions to cope with, warns a group of eminent environmental scientists and economists.
There are few institutional structures to achieve co-operation globally on the sort of scales now essential to avoid very serious consequences, warns lead author Brian Walker of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), on the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 in the US.
“Energy, food and water crises, climate disruption, declining fisheries, ocean acidification, emerging diseases and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity,” say researchers from Australia, Sweden, the US, India, Greece and The Netherlands.
While there are signs of emerging global action on issues such as climate change, there is widespread inaction on others, such as the destruction of the world’s forests to grow biofuels or the emergence of pandemic flu through lack of appropriate animal husbandry protocols where people, pigs and birds co-mingle.
“Knowing what to do is not enough,” says Walker. “Institutional reforms are needed to bring about changes in human behaviour, to increase local appreciation of shared global concerns and to correct the sort of failures of collective action that cause global-scale problems.”
“We are not advocating that countries give up their sovereignty,” adds co-author Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University.
“We are instead proposing a much stronger focus on regional and worldwide cooperation, helped by better-designed multi-national institutions. The threat of climate change to coral reefs, for example, has to be tackled at a global scale. Local and national efforts are already failing.”
The scientists acknowledge that the main challenge is getting countries to agree to take part in global institutions designed to prevent destructive human practices. Plainly, agreements must be designed such that countries are better off participating than not participating, they say.
This would involve all countries in drawing up standards designed to protect the earth’s resources and systems, to which they would then feel obligated to adhere, says a CSIRO release.
The study was published in the Friday issue of Science.
