Some plausible scenarios Australian governments may face in, say, 2030

When the state and commonwealth governments signed the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development in 1992, they consented to a farsighted clause that seems to have been continually overlooked in the nearly three decades since then.

The second guiding principle, widely known as the ‘Precautionary principle’, reads “where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation”.

It means that from the year that governments were given notice of an emerging challenge to the planet’s life-support systems, policy should have been framed to head off the challenge.