As the world heads into an unknown climate world, we need to be planning for a different future than the globalized one we imagined we would continue to live in.
In my little country of New Zealand, tucked away deep in the South Pacific ocean, rapidly warming surrounding oceans are creating a new climate world for us of sudden intense rainfall with increasingly damaging floods and higher temperatures.
More intense and more frequent weather events are allowing us the opportunity to see how completely dependent the living world is, including us humans, on the weather.
Where once we could rely on relatively stable weather patterns, the reality has dawned on us that our weather will become increasingly more unstable, intense, erratic and more damaging; not just for a few years, but for many many centuries to come.
But nowhere do we seem to be planning for this inevitable future. A globalised world of long supply chains of ocean going behemoths, cargo jets and steel rails are becoming rapidly increasingly vulnerable to weather events and ever-increasing insurer’s costs. (even if we ignore the impact of the massive CO2 injections to the atmosphere those long supply lines make!)
We must therefore rapidly plan for vastly localised food, energy and other necessity production and distribution; with short supply lines which are less impacted by climate extremes.
The result of localised production will be a smaller range of products, often less sophisticated, an immense reduction in exports to far-flung places which will be offset by localised production employment, cheaper local food and products produced on a smaller scale which require far less local resources and exploitation of the environment, and ultimately a political realisation that each economic /state entity can be largely independent of its bigger and more powerful neighbours and just needs to simply be accountable to its local population.
This does not mean a return to feudal times or the loss of many of the gains in communication and shared knowledge humans have acquired in the past 200 years. But it does mean an end to the big international corporations whose only motivation for existence is greed rather than also serving their local populations.
It also means a gradual decline in consumerism and international tourism as populations re-learn to connect to their local environments and draw strength and joy from their local communities without further destroying their own natural environments.
In the case of building a sustainable world for humans other species- less is most definitely more!
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Links
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ocean-temperatures-heating-up
New Antarctica 