Rising inequality, climate instability and ecological collapse are not separate crises but interacting threats that demand coordinated global action.

The recent publication by The Australia Institute of a group of 29 brief essays in a volume entitled _A Time for Bravery: What Happens When Australia Chooses Courage?_ is a valuable contribution in the face of the survival challenge facing our human world.

The chief message of the book is that we humans are living through a critical historical moment that is characterised by rising economic inequality, escalating fossil fuel production and climate instability and eroding confidence in democratic institutions. The editors argue that bravery is an essential response, not simply as a moral virtue but as a strategic tool for transformative change.

The contributors include politicians and policymakers, advocates and campaigners, academics and thinkers and creators whose collective contributions range very widely both across Australia and internationally.

In his essay entitled The Urgent Need to Ensure the Survival of a Habitable Planet this Century, former politician John Hewson who is chair of a Canberra-based Council for The Human Future (CHF), argues that with his government’s massive federal mandate, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, could take the idea of an “Earth System Treaty" to the world. Hewson points out that it could consolidate our standing as a significant middle ranking power, and that of course it was the initiative of a previous Labor government led by Dr Evatt, that led to the establishment of the United Nations in the first place.

Hewson refers in his essay to the work of science communicator Julian Cribb, who is also a member of the CHF and has published several books about 10 interacting existential challenges. These include biodiversity collapse, freshwater depletion, chemical pollution, soil degradation, ocean acidification, pandemics, food insecurity, nuclear and technological risk and widespread in misinformation and lack of understanding about the magnitude of the threats that now face us all.

The central problem is that we now have too many humans on the planet requiring too much food and resources and have failed to curb this demand and reduce the size of the human population. Cribb argues that without a unifying framework, capable of coordinating planetary scale risk reduction, the world will continue to treat symptoms and not their causes.

An Earth System Treaty, if it were established and supported in the United Nations, would:

• seek to establish binding and coordinated international commitments to reduce cumulative human pressures on the Earth system;
• integrate climate, environment, health, security and development policies into one sustainable framework;
• create institutional structures capable of monitoring, enforcing and adjusting global environmental limits; and
• mobilise nations, civil society, business, science and indigenous knowledge into a single governance platform.

So, what is standing in the way of us moving on this massive challenge to our future? Perhaps the biggest problem is that we are treating all these issues as single problems rather than as a combined interacting challenge. And we are not yet accepting that we are generating the extinction of our own species.

The science is now very clear, that without action that involves every nation on earth and human actors in it everywhere, our human descendants are facing a diabolical future.

A combination of bravery and courage is essential if we are to get Australia to take the lead on this vital matter. So, how courageous is our Prime Minister? What has he got to lose by leading the way on this matter. It seems to me that this kind of bravery could put Australia in a leaning role across the globe.

The editors of A Time for Bravery say that it is there hope that this collection of essays will be shared widely and that it will help to clear the path to change that his action. And that the time for action is now. I could not agree more.