Warren Parker: With challenges come opportunities
The food and energy crisis presents big challenges and opportunities for business and government locally and globally. The pressure on natural resources – land, water, air, biodiversity (our natural capital) – has never been greater yet, paradoxically, to generate more food and energy we are going to have to draw on our natural systems even more than in the past.
Clearly we need to do this in a manner that is much different to what we have become accustomed to. As someone quipped, ‘The present system is perfectly designed to give the current results!’
So we need big ideas, alongside the immediate and sensible things we can all do, to achieve more rapid change in our businesses, public policy and capability development. We need to develop an excellent understanding of the way ecosystems work and therefore how they are likely to respond to management and other interventions.
While the present scarcity of natural resources, manifesting in higher food, electricity and fuel costs, evokes strong emotions for many, the scientific evidence supporting the need for radical innovation in the way we do things is robust and compelling. Here at Landcare Research we are committed to fresh thinking to find new solutions in the way we manage and value natural capital, design and conduct business and support policy development.
This demands transformative, not minor change. However, we are quickly learning, for example the emissions trading scheme (ETS) that the solutions to environmental problems frequently present tough political choices. While we would prefer to avoid these, the parlous state of some of our natural resources means inaction is not an option.
Transformative change also means we have to invest much more in research and development, and in a manner that strengthens end–user connections. Collaboration is a strong, consistent theme running through the initiatives to stimulate research and
development.
Collaboration appears simple to achieve, but our experience shows it is in fact sometimes quite a challenge. After more than a decade of highly contested, often adversarial bidding for science funding where relationships have often been under valued and dented, we are rediscovering how to make collaboration really work. That means clarity of purpose, choice of best partners with shared values, investing time in building relationships, mutual respect, a willingness to ‘give and take’, and shared rewards and
risks.
We think this approach is especially important for New Zealand’s small, geographically remote economy with modest, by world–leading standards, resources and capabilities, a predominance of small firms and fragmented local government. Landcare Research is committed to using collaboration to hasten the innovation needed to achieve a sustainable New Zealand (and planet).