Last month, we called attention to slow progress or even retrogressive steps with the Sustainable Development Goals. At half point it looks like we’ll be missing most of the 169 targets underpinning the 17 goals. This is despite of 7,777 actions registered in their pursuit on the UN website. In September, the UN General Assembly endorsed the SDGs again at the end of the week dedicated to the mid-term progress review. We should track whether governments and large companies change tack and accelerate structural change with the capacity to keep us out of harm’s way. That is an invitation to citizens and organisations to hold the people in power accountable, seriously.

Even if more policies are changed, less public subsidies spent on fossil fuels and harmful fisheries practices, things will not improve overnight. This means it is imperative to relentlessly pushing for such structural change, for the ratification and entry into force of major international agreements achieved at the negotiation tables so that implementation gets centre stage, from biodiversity protection, stopping harmful fishery subsidies, climate agreements and international cooperation.

This also means that meanwhile, the multiple overlapping crises we are facing around the globe, will provoke more and more disasters. In every country we got a taste of that recently, whether it’s villages washed away in more frequent flash floods, whether it’s very young and elderly people dying in heat waves, or despaired people setting off on perilous ocean voyages towards Europe because their coastal waters have been emptied, the agricultural lands are drying up and their home regions are becoming unlivable.

World Food Day, 16 October, was an occasion to pay particular attention to the up to 783 million fellow-humans around the world are facing hunger according to the World Food Program (WFP), more than ever before. It would not have to be that way. Globally, we produce enough food. But the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warn about losses amounting to 13 per cent of the world’s food in the supply chain before products even hit the shelves, and a further 17 per cent lost in households and retail. In addition, research into famines in several parts of the globe at different epochs show that it is often not the absolute absence of food, but the political invisibility of vulnerable and marginalised populations provoking the disaster.

Research into productivity of the land and the sea over long periods also provides insights into how unsustainable methods undermine food production. Our report last month about sequential collapses of foremost productive fisheries illustrates how this happened particularly after WWII, part of a broader picture of modern humans appropriating an ever growing part of the Earth’s resources. On the land, geologists and agronomists suggest that in the long run intensive agricultural practices have accelerated erosion of fertile soils beyond natural replenishment. They submit that ensuing food shortages of formerly burgeoning populations eventually brought down societies and empires in the past and will again, unless unsustainable practices are checked.

As climate disruption must be expected to exasperate these trends, it is high time to invest more into disaster preparedness. Time and again it has been shown that such preparedness can save lives and reduce damage, even if concrete events pan out somewhat differently than expected. We can not predict the details, but with more disasters, expect the capacity for international relief to shrink, whether it’s rich countries compensating shortfalls from elsewhere or delivering help to those affected in other countries. It thus makes sense to plan, e.g. connect global observations to national and local warning systems, to decentralised stores of food, shelter, and medical supplies. So long as we collectively do not bring down climate gas emissions and help nature to recover through other means, we better get prepared for larger and more frequent disasters.

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Cornelia E. Nauen and the entire Mundus maris team

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