The environment and sustainability

4Change believes:

• The economy is a subset of the environment. The economy cannot exist without a healthy environment. Australians are used to having easy access to water for industry and agriculture, the ability to dump waste at little or no cost – despite significant pollution and negative health impacts in many cases, the ready availability of diverse and out of season food at an affordable price, diverse resources, including oil, to enable the manufacture of products that have become a part of every day life. What would be the impact on our economy if the environment started to fail our expectations?
• We need to protect and defend scarce and valuable resources including water, soil, flora, fauna and the atmosphere by using renewable resources to minimise the impact of increasing consumption and expanding populations.
• We need to invest in the environment, increasing our natural assets through better management and a different appreciation of the costs involved without this strategy, both for today’s health and happiness as well as that of future generations.
• Climate change is a growing threat to our way of life, and the major cause of global warming is our society’s carbon dioxide emissions from excessive use of fossil fuels. The expert group established by the United Nations – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (http://www.ipcc.ch/) re-confirmed this most recently in their 2007 report. Urgent action is needed now due to the long life of fossil fuel emissions in the atmosphere and the fact that emissions are still rising rapidly.

By changing government policies and working together to lower emissions and to change other unsustainable practices, we can reduce people’s impact on the planet. This is essential in order to achieve a successful equitable future for all people.