Time for a moonshot

July 31, 2025

Jennifer Goldie has highlighted one of the major security risks that we and other countries face from the consequences of our changing climate, bringing an immediacy to last year’s call from the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group. This risk of mass movement of people is also recognised in the UN’s 2025 Global Risks Report.

Currently, there are some 123,200,000 forcibly displaced people worldwide. This means 1 person in every 67 is displaced as the result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and more. Floods, droughts and rising sea levels are expected to increase the number of displaced people dramatically.

With our global population above eight billion and increasing by 70 million each year, this way of life is unsustainable in a world where rising seas and over-production are shrinking farmable land and where natural ecologies are being ever sacrificed for agricultural production.

There is speculation about no-growth economies, and renewable foods, and sustainable soil management. These could help, but seem unlikely to make substantial change to global sustainability in our immediate future.

As Goldie has noted, we may reach 2 degrees of warming in 10 years’ time. A global crisis may be imminent. We need moonshot ambition to transform.