This week the Australian Government released its long awaited State of the Environment Report. This is a follow up report to the previous one which was published in 2016 and is stark in its detailing of the dire circumstances for our environment.

The report found that Australia’s environment is in “a poor and deteriorating state”. It found that across all but one of the nine environment categories, the situation is deteriorating. These cover climate, extreme events, land and soil, inland water, coasts, marine, air and Antarctica. The only exception was the urban environment which was designated as stable.

One of the report’s authors, Professor Emma Johnson, noted that a key difference between this and previous reports is the impact climate change is having on our environment. She writes: “In previous reports, we’ve been largely talking about the impacts of climate in the future tense… In this report there’s a stark contrast, because we are now documenting widespread impacts of climate change.”

The report highlights the great challenge that Australia faces to maintain an environment that supports the way of life that we are accustomed to. It suggests that due to habitat destruction, a large number of species face extinction and there are significant threats to the resources that we require to sustain us.

The report does not mince its words, it suggests that “Environmental degradation is now considered a threat to humanity, which could bring about societal collapses with long-lasting and severe consequences.”

However, the report does stipulate that the trend can be reversed. It states that “Immediate action with innovative management and collaboration can turn things around.”

The challenges of climate change have also made headlines this week as the United Kingdom swelters through the hottest temperatures on record.

Despite the fact that we have time and again read news articles and commentary about such alarming reports, I believe we are entrenched in a collective cognitive dissonance where we cannot help but think of climate change as a future problem – even in the face of all the evidence that we are already living with its impacts.

It seems clear that Australians care enormously about climate – this has been evidenced in myriad surveys, and was stipulated by analysts as a major factor in our recent Federal election outcomes. However, moving from appreciating that there is a problem or listing it as a major concern to actually taking significant steps towards solutions is the challenge for many of us.

I think that this is because, despite our best intentions, many of us either feel a sense of hopelessness or uncertainty about the best steps to take to reduce our emissions footprint.

The reality is that education is a key to overcoming both these issues. In our 2021 King David School community surveys, each stakeholder group nominated reducing King Davd’s emissions footprint as vitally important.

At King David we are committed to doing this but also to empowering our students with the requisite desire to take action about the issues they care about and the knowledge and understanding of how to make significant impact.

Shabbat Shalom,

Marc Light