Living scenarios for Australia to

221 Pages·2015·7.92 MB·English

Negotiating our future:
Living scenarios
for Australia to
2050
www.science.org.au
Australia 2050 Vol 2 COVER 2014.indd 2 28/03/15 10:25 AM
Negotiating our future: Living scenarios for Australia to 2050 Volume 2
Negotiating our future:
Living scenarios
for Australia to
2050
Michael R. Raupach, Anthony J. McMichael,
John J. Finnigan, Lenore Manderson,
Brian H. Walker (editors)
© A ustralian Academy of Science 2012
Digitally published 2012
Printed 2015
GPO Box 783, Canberra, ACT 2601
This work is copyright. The Copyright Act 1968 permits fair dealing for study, research, news reporting,
criticism or review. Selected passages, tables or diagrams may be reproduced for such purposes provided
acknowledgement of the source is included. Major extracts of the entire document may not be reproduced
by any process without written permission of the publisher.
This publication is also available online at: science.org.au/australia-2050
ISBN: 978 0 85847 343 0
Cover image: istockphoto.com
Printed and bound by CanPrint Communications
Design and layout by Wordup! Websites and Graphic Design.
Preface
This volume is a companion to Volume 1 of Negotiating our future: living
scenarios for Australia to 2050, a book arising from a three-year national research
project by a consortium led by the Australian Academy of Science, with funding
from the Australian Research Council. The title and statement of intent for the
project is Australia 2050: toward more environmentally sustainable and socially
equitable ways of living.
The frst phase of the project was structured around a four-day workshop in late
July 2011 at Bowral, NSW, involving 35 participants and leading to the present
two-volume book. The workshop was based on the Dahlem model, a formula
that has proved to be effective in facilitating interdisciplinary communication and
cooperation. As applied here, this model centred on four interdisciplinary working
groups that intensively examined the challenges of environmental sustainability
and social equity, using four different foci: i) system resilience; ii) social and
cultural perspectives; iii) scenarios for Australian futures; and iv) quantitative
models. Volume 1 includes chapters reporting the fndings of these four working
groups together with an overall synthesis.
The present volume contains 14 background papers prepared before the workshop
to review current knowledge, assess knowledge gaps and provide initial opinions
in a range of key areas. Early drafts of these papers were circulated to all
participants in advance in lieu of formal presentations of prepared papers at the
workshop. The papers form a signifcant body of resource material supporting the
fndings presented in Volume 1.
The 14 chapters in this volume cover a wide range of topics relevant to the
overall theme of the workshop and the project. Chapters 1–7 describe aspects
of Australia’s present state and trajectory, including health, population, social
dimensions, food security and biophysical sustainability. Chapters 8–11 deal with
the challenges of modelling the Australian system. Chapters 12–14 deal with
scenarios and narratives and the tussle between objective realities and subjective
aspirations in navigating the future.
All contributions (as with Volume 1) have been peer-reviewed under the guidance
of the Workshop Steering Committee. In addition to responding to review
comments some authors took the opportunity for major rewriting of material after
the workshop to take account of feedback at the workshop itself and to provide
better support for the overviews in Volume 1.
Michael Raupach, Tony McMichael, John Finnigan, Lenore Manderson,
Brian Walker (Project Steering Committee)
III
Acknowledgments
The Project Steering Committee expresses its deep thanks to all participants in
the Bowral Workshop, who provided the enthusiasm and inspiration that have
made this book possible. We thank the Australian Academy of Science (AAS),
particularly Fiona Leves, for facilitation and support throughout this project.
We also thank Professor Kurt Lambeck, former president of the AAS, for his
role in initiating the project. We gratefully acknowledge the fnancial support
of the Australian Research Council, through a Learned Academies Special
Projects grant.
IV
Contents
Volume 1: Syntheses
1 Living scenarios for Australia as an adaptive system
Raupach MR, McMichael AJ, Alford K, Cork S, Finnigan JJ,
Fulton EA, Grigg N, Jones R, Leves F, Manderson L, Walker BH
2 System-resilience perspectives on
sustainability and equity in Australia
Grigg N, Walker BH, Capon A, Foran B,
Parker R, Stewart J, Stirzaker R, Young W
3 Social perspectives on sustainability
and equity in Australia
Alford K, Manderson L, Boschetti F, Davies J,
Hatfield Dodds S, Lowe I, Perez P
4 Towards scenarios for a sustainable
and equitable future Australia
Cork S, Jones R, Butler CD, Cocks D, Dunlop I, Howe P
5 Exploring futures with quantitative models
Fulton EA, Finnigan JJ, Adams P, Bradbury R,
Pearman GI, Sewell R, Steffen WL, Syme G
6 A survey of projections of futures for Australia
Fulton, EA, Finnigan JJ, Pearman GI, Raupach MR
V
Volume 2: Background papers
1 Australia’s health: integrator and criterion
of environmental and social conditions
McMichael AJ ........................................................................................................................................................1
2 Health, population and climate change Butler CD .........................................................26
3 Australian population futures Hugo G ....................................................................................38
4 Settlement and the social dimensions of change
Manderson L and Alford K ............................................................................................................................51
5 Physical realities and the sustainability transition Foran B ..................................64
6 Feeding Australia Stirzaker R ............................................................................................................80
7 Towards a resilience assessment for Australia
Grigg N, Walker BH .........................................................................................................................................90
8 What is a model, why people don’t
trust them, and why they should
Boschetti F, Fulton EA, Bradbury RH, Symons J .............................................................................107
9 Quantitative modelling of the human–earth system:
a new kind of science?
Finnigan JJ, Brede M, Grigg N .................................................................................................................119
10 Science to inform and models to engage Perez P .........................................................147
11 Economic approaches to modelling Adams P ..................................................................160
12 Applying scenarios to complex issues Jones R ...............................................................173
13 Alternative normative scenarios: economic growth,
conservative development and post-materialism Cocks D ..................................191
14 The evolutionary nature of narratives about
expansion and sustenance Raupach MR.................................................................................201
VI
Chapter 1
Australia’s health: integrator and criterion
of environmental and social conditions
Anthony J. McMichael
National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, Australian National University
Australians have good health and life expectancy by international standards.
Nevertheless, a variety of ongoing and emerging trends pose future risks such as
the well-recognised rises in obesity, depression and stress, particularly in younger
Australians. Socioeconomic differences in health persist, most starkly between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Meanwhile, on an ever-closer time
horizon, various large-scale sociodemographic and environmental changes, including
human-induced climate change, pose other risks to Australia’s future health. Within
the wider Asian region, some of these great changes contribute to risks of novel
infectious disease emergence and their more distant, regional and global spread.
We have not yet, however, properly understood the main determinants of human
wellbeing, health and longer-term survival—especially within the frame of
environmental sustainability and social equity. Those sources reside mostly in the
environmental and social conditions that maintain the essentials of life and vitality,
the cohesion of communities and the opportunities for equitably-shared personal
fulflment. Instead, we persist with a predominantly individual-focused perspective
in our thinking about health and responsibility for health in Australia. Much modern
biomedical science is seeking to personalise health care. The lure of genetic bar-
coding persists; as does misplaced reliance on personalised behaviour modifcation.
Inappropriately, the prevailing currency refers to individual lifestyles, not the
community’s way of living. Yet it is shifts in human ecology, in ways of living and
relating that are the main determinants of rates and trends in health and disease
in populations.
The challenge is to optimise the population/community-level health determinants via
coordinated social, economic and infrastructural policies. The achievement of good
and equitable population health is both a key objective of any enlightened society
and, over time, a key criterion of whether that society is living in environmentally
sustainable and socially equitable fashion.
1
1 Introduction
Australia’s overall level of health is high by international standards. The health
profles of populations change over time, however, in response to altered social
and material conditions, food and water supplies, environmental exposures,
hygiene levels, consumer behaviours and health-care resources. Indeed,
population health indices serve as a bellwether of long-term environmental
sustainability and of social fairness and as the measure of the vitality and vigour
that are key contributors to social progress.
The recent gains in life expectancy enjoyed by Australians and other populations
will not necessarily continue. Indeed, life expectancies may yet fall—at least in
some countries—because of the large-scale and escalating environmental imposts
of the growing global population, the health-impairing behaviours associated with
rising consumerism and the social tensions of persistent material disadvantage
[1]. Is ‘peak health’ pending? (See also CD Butler chapter [2].
Health indices typically averaged across the population mask internal health
disparities, including the persistent gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
health. As the wealth differential between Australia’s rich and poor has widened
over recent decades, differences in death rates and life expectancy have widened.
The forward momentum from various current trends, such as rising obesity levels
in young Australians, points to a likely future widening of health disparities.
The next several decades are a critical time for resetting Australia’s compass
to a course that can both sustain our natural environmental resource base and
achieve greater social equity, cohesion and a sense of shared purpose. Note, too,
that ‘sustainability’ refers to the long term (well beyond 2050), not merely the
needs of immediate generations; and ‘equity’ refers to fairness and justice, not
merely descriptive measures of inequality. Those two goals are prerequisite to
creating a more resilient Australia that can respond fexibly to this century’s great
environmental and social-demographic challenges and are supportive of improved
and more equally shared health.
2 Population health: signifcance and function
As a society we rarely discuss the fundamental signifcance of population health
in relation to broader sustainability issues. Australia has a high-quality health-care
system by world standards, and our taxation-based social insurance for healthcare,
Medicare, is an important national asset. Nevertheless, the popular understanding
about health and disease is essentially myopic, individual-oriented and largely
2
oblivious to the fundamental determinants of population health.
We rely primarily on remedial (reactive) responses to individuals’ health
problems, rather than on community-wide longer-term strategies to facilitate
health. Yet many such strategies would be integral to changes (e.g. energy
generation and urban planning) that are sought in other sectors of infrastructure
and practice.
The recent prominence of neoliberal values has reinforced the assigning of
responsibility for health to individuals, while discounting (often as nanny statism)
the potential community-wide and enduring health gains from well-chosen
intersectoral changes to physical, social and cultural conditions. While public
discussion in Australia about the sort of future society we wish to live in gathers
momentum, the role and signifcance of population health continues to receive
little attention [3].
Why this blind spot? Health can be viewed as both a means and an end. Many
economists prefer the former perspective and therefore view poor health as a
drain on economic productivity and social stability. Indeed, this utilitarian view
of health, prominent in 19th century industrialising Western countries helped
stimulate early investments in sanitation, sewerage, housing standards, factory
emissions, food safety etc. These investments were made largely to enhance
people’s health, constrain welfare-support costs, increase work capacity and thus
maximise economic growth. A modernised utilitarian view of gains in population
health as prerequisite to economic growth in low-income countries was
emphasised by the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics
and Health [4]).
Health, at the population level, can be viewed in different ways. For example:
• as economic burden: rates of diseases, injuries and premature deaths are a
major determinant of society’s running costs
• as economic asset: population health underpins economic productivity and
wealth creation and shores up the morale, vigour and resilience of society
• as an index of inequity: since both good health and access to healthcare are
deemed basic rights, disparities in either index provide a measure of inequity
• as a criterion of a successful and sustainable way of life: persisting good
health in a population provides one key measure of the environmental
sustainability of the population’s way of life and of its social-structural
conditions.
3