Identify and facilitate opportunities to improve system interactions to optimally utilise present local resourcefulness and potential.This applies to different types of work at any level: Opportunities: whether you aspire to intersectoral, intersectional, holistic or participatory work – actively push the boundaries and break existing barriers. I hereby baptise them as the three O’s or “Oh!’s”.
Once emitted, we cannot eliminate greenhouse gases, but there are immediate things we can do to prevent further colonisation of our atmosphere. “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” For global justice, we need to choose fair partnerships that aim to stop the colonisation of the atmosphere in both the literal and figurative sense. We have to take responsibility for previous and future generations. What is good for our health is good for our planet. It is now more urgent than ever to reimagine how we think, act, and change systems.
We can find power in our shared vulnerabilities and turn our interconnectedness into a strength. A comforting thought, perhaps, is that we are all in this together and we can tackle this together. Change is inevitable, but whoever said it is comfortable? Changing climates are surely not. Will our priority be short-term economic growth that will benefit a small proportion of us a little while longer? Or will we wholeheartedly commit to promoting a healthy life on Earth that could last for generations to come? Though the temptation is to stick our heads in the sand, hard conversations need to be had, hard decisions have to be made and actions need to be aligned. Though time is running out, and despite feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness, humanity – and each one of us – is still in a position to make radical choices. Individuals across the planet feel stuck by their (perceived) limited capacity to drive organisational change and the need to meet immediate personal necessities (most of which are luxuries to others). Simultaneously, global companies use sustainability narratives as profit-generating avenues to compensate for their painstakingly flawed internal sustainability practices. This forms an additional risk to the livelihoods of rural communities, who depend on healthy ecosystems to thrive. For example, monoculture farming, a popular method to secure income, decreases the biodiversity of the soil, subsequently lowering the nutritional and economic value of harvests. Moreover, a healthy environment seems to become increasingly inaccessible to those fuelling the engines of other economies.
Such events, becoming increasingly frequent with climate change or “breakdown”, exacerbate current inequalities determined by differences in accessibility of services and resources. Increasing temperatures, successive droughts, and extreme weather events have affected, and continue to threaten entire livelihoods. Yet it is those living in low- and middle-income countries who are the first to bear the brunt of the consequences. There is no doubt that affluent, mostly Western, societies have significantly contributed to greenhouse gas emissions since the First Industrial Revolution.
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