2. The scale and pace of environmental change is unprecedented


Business leaders know that their success depends on healthy people, resilient societies, productive natural systems and a stable climate, yet all of these are now under threat. Energy systems predominantly burn fossil fuels, and the negative impact on our climate is clearly evident. The production and consumption of energy must change because:


— The carbon dioxide emitted over the last 150 years has already increased global average temperature to 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels. Global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions have grown almost 60 per cent since 1990. [3]


— The impacts of climate change, including lengthy droughts, floods and devastating fires, more intense hurricanes and tropical storms, damage to infrastructure because of changing freeze/thaw patterns, and rising sea-levels are already affecting commerce and daily life. Poorer countries are likely to be more severely impacted than rich ones. [2]


— To avoid the most dramatic of these impacts, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will need to fall by half by 2030 and reach ‘net-zero’, about an 80 per cent reduction in energy- related emissions, by mid-century. [2]


That is


roughly equivalent to achieving each year to 2050 the approximately 8 per cent emission reductions caused by the global ‘lock down’ during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. [4]


Business will be affected by the dramatic reductions of fossil fuels used for power and heat generation, transport and industrial processes that are necessary in the next few years. Rapid penetration of renewable energy, electrification of transport and industrial processes, and decarbonisation of energy and resource intensive economic sectors are required to meet these reduction targets of 50 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050. [5]


The global food system also needs to change radically to provide more and healthier food for a growing global population. The world will need 50 per cent more food in 2050 to feed the nearly


10 billion people who will be on the planet then. [2]


environmental impact of food production by about two-thirds. [6]


At the same time, it will need to reduce the Estimates show that this can be


10


achieved, in part, by reducing the nearly one-third of food that is wasted each year and by increasing


Adapt to Survive: Business transformation in a time of uncertainty


regenerative agriculture and plant-based diets by 30 – 50 per cent. [7],[8] such as:


— Half of habitable land and 70 per cent of extracted freshwater are currently used to produce food, and 77 per cent of farmland is used for meat production. [2]


— Food production is responsible for 70 per cent of biodiversity loss through land-use change, habitat fragmentation, overexploitation, illegal wildlife trade and invasive species. [9]


— Desertification and land degradation are shrinking land resources with impacts on human health, well-being and food security, especially for those populations in poorer rural areas that are most dependent on land for their livelihoods and food. [2]


— Pollution and climate change, driven in part by food production, are also driving a mass extinction of species, including a decline in species vital to food production, such as bees and other pollinators. [2]


— Recent assessments describe a ‘lost decade for nature’ [8],[9]


where almost all of the global


biodiversity targets set in 2010 have been missed, putting US$44 trillion of economic value generation at risk. [10]


Businesses involved in food production, transport or provision will likely need to change to accommodate new regenerative agricultural techniques, reductions in the use of pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers, technologies to reduce food waste and changing dietary habits that rely less on the consumption of meat.


Finally, the linear ‘take, make, waste’ economic system extracts natural resources and produces waste at rates that are not sustainable:


— Global extraction of natural resources increased from 27.1 to 92.1 billion tons between 1970 and 2017, [11]


while the most


recent data from the mining and metals sector shows that 90 billion tons of mine waste was generated by their activities in 2014. [12]


— 8 million tons of plastic are added to the oceans each year. [2]


— Globally between 7–10 billion tons of urban waste is generated each year, despite many cities in low-income countries lacking safe and environmentally sound waste management systems. [2]


. This would reduce impacts


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