Julian Cribb

Among the worlds many pressing needs, the most urgent of all is a plan for human survival. And Australia should be the country to lead its creation. At present no country or international body has one. What we currently have is a chaotic road to avoidable disaster, driven by ten vast, interconnected threats which are all the result of human activity. The existential emergency in which all humanity now stands has been building steadily for over half a century.

_The good news is that the Anthropocene is almost over. It will have been the shortest geological epoch in all of Earth history. _ The bad news is that the Catastrophocene is just beginning. This is a period marked by the interaction of ten catastrophic risks which many scientists are now warning could precipitate the end of human civilisation - and potentially bring about the departure of our species from an uninhabitable Earth.

Life on Earth is under siege. A chain of tipping points with catastrophic consequences for everyone are being unleashed. Yet governments worldwide remain indifferent to the danger. Indeed, many continue avidly to stoke the very furnaces that will consume our civilisation. The first two statements above are from two new scientific reports, issued this week one from the United Nations and another from the same group of 15,000 scientists who gave us the world climate warning in 2020.