The Three Rs - Jonathon Porritt

Three fundamental principles should underpin any approach to food security: resilience, resolarisation and relocalisation.

More than two years after the 2007 floods in the West of England, more than 150 families are still homeless – many of them in Tewkesbury. The anniversary of the floods prompted a number of moving interviews with these environmental refugees – driven from their homes by the kind of climate-induced disaster that we are going to see so much more of over the next few years.
I just happened to be listening to some of those interviews on the radio the day that I was getting to grips with the latest extraordinary report from the Global Humanitarian Forum: The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis. The findings of this report are stark: “Every year, climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead, 325 million seriously affected, and economic losses of $125 billion. Four billion people are vulnerable, and 500 million people are at extreme risk.”

And the title tells it all.

Understandably, there is little coverage here in the UK devoted to those 325 million “seriously affected”. We would be drowned by the unceasing flood of personal testimonies; our capacity for empathy would be overwhelmed. But as Kofi Annan puts it in his introduction to the report: “Where does a fisherman go when warmer sea temperatures deplete coral reefs and fish stocks? How can a small farmer keep animals or sow crops when the water dries up? Will families be provided for when fertile soils and fresh water are contaminated with salt from rising seas? The first hit and worst affected by climate change are the world’s poorest groups. 99% of all casualties occur in developing countries.

Resilience - Our production systems here in the UK, as well as our supply chains globally, are seriously vulnerable in the face of the radical discontinuities. The Sustainable Development Commission first drew attention to this in its report in 2007, $100 a Barrel of Oil: Impacts on the Sustainability of Food Supply in the UK.

Resolarisation - Let’s just spell this out: the only way to avert a sequence of food crises resulting from supply disruptions and price spikes in oil and gas over the next twenty years is to systematically reduce our dependency on stored solar energy (fossil fuels) in favour of real-time solar energy.

Relocalisation - The combination of high oil prices, high input prices, growing demand for food, an additional 70 million or so people every year, and growing pressure on soil, water and biodiversity, compounded by accelerating climate change and the kind of high carbon prices that are inevitably on their way, leads to only one rational conclusion: increased resilience by reducing the length (and vulnerability) of our supply chains.

Article Supplied by The Resurgence Trust www.resurgence.org/membership/

Jonathon Porritt is a Founder Director of Forum for the Future.
www.forumforthefuture.org