Carpe diem, Jersey!

Tuesday 25 August 2020

Have you wandered the green lanes, cliff paths and many beaches here in Jersey? Have you marveled at the beauty and variety of your natural surroundings?

Have they helped to ease some of the anxiety and improve your mindset as we continue to be challenged by the uncertainties brought about by the onset and continued efforts to control the pandemic here and elsewhere?

How would you feel if you were living through this pandemic without any access to such a beautiful environment?

One of the things that has been expressed very clearly in the Jersey Policy Forum’s recent ‘Looking to the Future’ survey is that people have a refreshed appreciation for the natural attributes of the island and would like to ensure that they are protected.  

This seems to reflect the growing sentiment and recognition around the world of the importance of putting nature first as countries seek paths to recover from the current challenges and figure out how and what to prioritise for the future.

Pictured: How would you have found lockdown without access to sites such as this?

“Sustainability” and “green” labels are used widely to signal virtuous intent but they are not rigorously defined terms and it is often difficult to understand what is actually being done and whether the activity is really meaningful. 

 Perhaps another way to think about this broad area in Jersey is to think about an endowment fund where the capital needs to be protected and not depleted over time to ensure that a continuous stream of beneficiaries can benefit from the endowment going into the future. 

Jersey is fortunate to have an abundance of such natural endowments (think varied terrain – mostly arable, a diverse mix of marine environments that includes one of the largest tidal ranges in the world, most sunshine hours of the British Isles, temperate climate, good rainfall, island and marine biodiversity – just to name a few).

Many observers have also noted that the current COIVD-19 pandemic crisis is really nature’s way of delivering a wake-up call to all of us, a massive market correction as an analogy, to indicate that the ‘system’ is ‘out-of-whack’ and needs to be re-balanced – the ‘system’ in this case referring to our collective home on this planet.  

The United Nations recognized this years ago with the articulation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that more than 190 countries have endorsed.  Looking at natural assets from an endowment fund perspective and understanding that people are just one cog in a massive interconnected natural system opens up a new way of thinking about how things exist in relation to each other and mainstream thinking appears to be shifting as shown simply below:

The World Economic Forum has recently launched a stream of work – the Nature Action Agenda – that has established a working group of leaders across different sectors from business, government, academia and civil society to educate, develop and present policy options that would disrupt ‘business as usual’ to enable nature-based action.

"We are heading to a new world and a new normal, where sustainability, nature-based solutions, social inclusion and mutual care must be the norm of coexistence"

—Carlos Alvarado, President of the Republic of Costa Rica

This group of ‘champions’ has established working committees in three areas where the impact of change could be dramatic as summarised in the charts below:

What opportunities might there be for Jersey with the approaches described?

Surely there are at least a few that a small island nation that has regularly punched above its weight throughout history could embrace and pursue?

Carpe diem!

This article first appeared in Connect Magazine, which you can read by clicking HERE.