While Australia fears either an environment or economic doomsday, other countries get on with making a cleaner future.
Detail of Hieronymus Bosch's The Last Judgment, from Flickr/profzucker
I sometimes wonder what planet this country of ours is on. The environmental debate we are having seems to be in a parallel universe to the rest of the world. Having spent the last four years running one…
Australia’s unique manufacturing DNA - comprised of tens of thousands of small-to-medium enterprises - means that we must forge our own path to innovation.
DNA Art Online
As the manufacturing landscape shifts in response to new economic and social pressures, Australia is looking for an answer to the question: What does the future look like for Australian manufacturing…
No simple matter: logging and conservation are not polar opposites, and controlled harvesting can fund the protection of forests.
AAP/Greenpeace/Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
Is there a role for logging in ensuring the future of the world’s tropical forests and their rich diversity of plants and animals? For many this idea is absurd, because timber production achieving conservation…
The jury is still out over the environmental impacts of eReaders versus paper books.
Julie Falk
Bookshelves towering floor to ceiling filled with weighty tomes, or one book-sized device holding hundreds of “books” in electronic form: which one of these options for the voracious reader creates the…
Double the normal number of overseas visitors will hit Heathrow this year.
Department for Culture, Media & Sport
The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games are just around the corner, and promise to be a great global spectacle. At the same time, the organising committee are promising the most sustainable Olympics…
Green innovation: the upper compression ring of the Olympic Stadium main roof truss is made from 2,600 tonnes of surplus gas pipes.
London 2012
For seven years, the London Olympics Organising Committee has been striving to live up to the sustainability vision it set itself. It’s been a long, honest fight. On the eve of the Games, how well have…
More pressing matters: people can be “concerned’ about many things, but what really matters to them are problems close to daily life.
AAP/April Fonti
New polls frequently announce that a significant proportion of the population is concerned about an issue or willing to sacrifice for a cause, from environmental sustainability to Third World debt. These…
Obesity can be seen as a carbon store on our waistlines originally sourced from coal mines and oil wells.
Bobcatnorth/Flickr
OBESE NATION: It’s time to admit it - Australia is becoming an obese nation. This series looks at how this has happened and more importantly, what we can do to stop the obesity epidemic. Today Anthony…
To solve sustainability problems, governments need to know what the people are thinking. Elections aren’t quick enough.
John Ager
Australia is currently unsustainable in many respects. Change is coming. Will that change be wisely managed? Or will it be forced upon us in potentially catastrophic ways? Wise management will require…
Giant fish made with plastic bottles emerge from the sands of Rio during the sustainability conference.
AAP/EPA/Antonio Lacerda
On the wall along the massive entrance hall to the Rio+20 Sustainable Development conference venue, there was a painting of an African landscape with the simple words “Keep the oil in the soil and the…
Liquid politics: fights over water will heat up unless its management is democratised.
Flickr/Kyle Horner
Welcome to the State of the Future series. This series addresses 15 global challenges posed by the Millennium Project, an international non-profit think-tank collecting responses for 40 nodes worldwide…
Darkness visible: we’re driving animals to extinction, burning through resources, and throwing out natural balances, yet consumption still reigns.
Flickr/NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
State of the Future 2012, a quick introduction What is the “state of the future”? How successfully are we tackling global challenges threatening our collective future? These questions are asked annually…
Serious, interconnected risks are closing in on the globalised community, from climate change to anarchy. Are we heeding the warnings?
AAP/EPA/Daniel Deme
In that world of peripheral vision, essential for business, social and political leaders, it is surprising that the World Economic Forum’s report, Global Risks 2012 has not received greater publicity or…
Stuck in Botany Bay: Greenpeace activists celebrate the Danish government’s decision to halt Orica’s plans to ship toxic waste to Denmark.
AAP
Are sustainability-dependent executive bonuses the answer to saving the planet? Research recently conducted by the Centre for Corporate Governance at the University of Technology, Sydney, examined whether…
Perpetually seduced by the coolest, most “efficient” conveniences, we prefer not to see the heat and waste we leave in our wake.
AAP/EPA/STR
The idea that improving efficiency makes sustainability problems worse seems counter-intuitive. But what if aiming to do more with less is actually doing the wrong thing right? If sustainability is our…
How do we get beyond talking about sustainability to actually being sustainable?
Natural Step Online
Everyone loves sustainable development. While we’re building and planning to improve our quality of life, why not balance and integrate the social, economic, and environmental issues? Hard to imagine that…
Difficult austerity: Bangladesh, where on average it takes 130 women to match the carbon footprint of one American woman.
AAP/EPA/Mufty Fire
In any discussion of the world’s environmental problems, someone will always argue that the core problem is that the world has too many people. Cliff Hooker has recently named it “the elephant in the room…
Take the offer: sharing cuts waste and builds communities but we have our reasons for not always being comfortable with it.
Flickr/Zervas
Sharing is a good thing right? We are told it is good for the environment by cutting waste and needless consumption; we encourage it in our children for their moral growth; we see it used in advertising…
A simple step towards saving the environment may lead to more environment action … or not.
Department of Energy Solar Decathalon
Many environmental organisations, governments and businesses rely on “positive spillover strategies” to drive pro-environmental behaviour change. These strategies rest on the assumption once someone has…
Questions of planetary power: a mere 0.3% of transnational corporations control 40% of global revenue.
Flickr/paul (dex)
The Planet Under Pressure 2012 Conference was held in London a fortnight back and released the first State of the Planet Declaration. The conference aim was to set out the science (in a broad sense) in…