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Factories in Beijing are repeatedly being ordered to slow down production to mitigate the thick poisonous smog blanketing the city.
The equation is a simple one: Protecting the environment alongside economic and social development is critical for our well-being and it also makes business sense. Increasingly companies are expected to address, not to worsen, environmental degradation — it is becoming part of their social licence to operate.
For companies the risks and the opportunities are significant. Businesses can lead the way with a long-term responsible approach that values natural capital and helps avoid the cost implications of resource scarcity and environmental damage. A good example would be the palm oil industry. Every year, illegal forest clearing practices cause devastating fires and haze that make headlines around the world and have an impact on forest ecosystems, as well as the lives and welfare of millions across South-East Asia.
Right now the state of the planet is getting worse and the pressures on natural systems are deepening but, for the first time perhaps, we are also seeing an increase in response.
We have undoubtedly begun a great transition towards sustainable living. Now, we need to focus on the scale and speed of this transition if we are going to decouple economic development from environmental degradation. The momentum is building and businesses must be at the forefront of change.
More than ever the planet needs responsive and responsible leadership with a deep commitment to inclusive development and equitable growth, both nationally and globally. There is no time to waste.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. The 10 best countries to be a woman Kate Whiting 18 Dec More on the agenda. Accelerating climate action Our impact. Explore the latest strategic trends, research and analysis. It would be more a matter of managing how we made the move, and what kind of arrangement we left behind.
The Global Footprint Network estimates that we use up our annual supply of renewable resources by August every year, after which we are cutting into non-renewable supplies — in effect stealing from future generations. We cannot see the noosphere. The imaginal discs are linking up, becoming imaginal cells, and are beginning to proliferate throughout the social body. Thousands of transformational workshops, trainings, and teachings are appearing in mainstream businesses, churches, and organizations. But since people are leaving the land anyway and streaming into cities, the Half Earth concept can help us to orient that process, and dodge the sixth great mass extinction event that we are now starting, and which will hammer humans too. For companies the risks and the opportunities are significant.
One important factor here would be to avoid extremes and absolutes of definition and practice, and any sense of idealistic purity. We are mongrel creatures on a mongrel planet, and we have to be flexible to survive. So these emptied landscapes should not be called wilderness. Wilderness is a good idea in certain contexts, but these emptied lands would be working landscapes, commons perhaps, where pasturage and agriculture might still have a place.
All those people in cities still need to eat, and food production requires land. Even if we start growing food in vats, the feedstocks for those vats will come from the land.
These mostly depopulated landscapes would be given over to new kinds of agriculture and pasturage, kinds that include habitat corridors where our fellow creatures can get around without being stopped by fences or killed by trains. This vision is one possible format for our survival on this planet. They will have to be green cities , sure.
We will have to have decarbonised transport and energy production, white roofs , gardens in every empty lot, full-capture recycling, and all the rest of the technologies of sustainability we are already developing.
That includes technologies we call law and justice — the system software, so to speak. Income adequacy and progressive taxation keep the poorest and richest from damaging the biosphere in the ways that extreme poverty or wealth do. Peace, justice, equality and the rule of law are all necessary survival strategies. Meanwhile, cities will always rely on landscapes much vaster than their own footprints.
Those areas will be working for us in their own way, as part of the health-giving context of any sustainable civilisation.
And all the land has to be surrounded by oceans that, similarly, are left partly unfished. All this can be done. All this needs to be done if we are to make it through the emergency centuries we face and create a civilised permaculture, something we can pass along to the future generations as a good home. There is no alternative way; there is no planet B.
We have only this planet, and have to fit our species into the energy flows of its biosphere. This week, the Overstretched Cities series examines the impact of the rush to urbanisation, which has seen cities around the world explode in size. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, and explore our archive here. Topics Cities Overstretched cities. Population Food Farming Agriculture comment. Order by newest oldest recommendations.