Home truths and brighter futures

Big surf at Dunedin's St Clair beach. Photo: Gerard O'Brien
Big surf at Dunedin's St Clair beach. Photo: Gerard O'Brien

We had the bad news this week, Colin Campbell Hunt writes. The parliamentary commissioner for the environment reminded us that South Dunedin is going to be one of the first places in the country to fall foul of rising sea levels.

Colin Campbell-Hunt
Colin Campbell-Hunt

But here is the good news: it is places like Dunedin that will also be nurseries for the carbon-free cities, economies and lifestyles of the future.

Innovations come from the people and places that are slightly removed from the established structures of an industry, a society, a country, the world. And there are few places on earth that are more removed than Dunedin.

The fossil-fuel economy has been enormously powerful in lifting standards of living for billions of people over the past century.

In a hundred ways each day every one of us makes choices that assume a continuation of that super-charged economy.

And because it has delivered such benefits, it has also caught us in a web of investments in physical assets and accumulated knowledge that has relevance only to that fossil-fuelled way of life.

We now know that the century of unrestrained carbon-burning must end.

Our representatives in Paris know it.

What is not at all clear is how the world will work without fossil fuels.

There are some glimpses into that future: renewable sources of energy, and electric vehicles.

But there are many, many unanswered questions.

What will replace the global system of fossil-fuelled logistics that ties countries together in the most ubiquitous level of economic inter-dependence and trade the world has ever seen?

How will the world cope with the substantial disruptions to food production that will increasingly characterise this 21st century?

The answers to these really big questions will not emerge at once, and certainly not in Paris.

The first elements of a new carbon-free world will emerge in places such as Dunedin.

Because we are at the edge of the world, we have the freedom to experiment, to think of ways in which our city will work, and ways in which we will live our lives, that do not require pumping carbon into the atmosphere.

And there is another reason why the future will emerge here first.

Dunedin knows right now that a large part of the city is vulnerable to the changing climate.

We are among the first people in the world to really face that truth, and realise that we need to deal with it.

• Colin Campbell-Hunt is an emeritus professor in the Otago Business School.

 

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