Decision-making

• Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm.
• Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South.
• Those efforts centered on India and other Asian countries; today, advocates focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the original Green Revolution regime never took hold.

A triumphal narrative

• Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” famously predicted that nothing could stop “hundreds of millions” from starving in the 1970s.
• Borlaug received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is still widely credited with “saving a billion lives.” Indian agricultural scientist M.S.
• Swaminathan, who worked with Borlaug to promote the Green Revolution, received the inaugural World Food Prize in 1987.

Debunking the legend

• The standard legend of India’s Green Revolution centers on two propositions.
• India was importing wheat in the 1960s because of policy decisions, not overpopulation.
• After the nation achieved independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru prioritized developing heavy industry.
• U.S. advisers encouraged this strategy and offered to provide India with surplus grain, which India accepted as cheap food for urban workers.
• They switched millions of acres from rice to jute production, and by the mid-1960s India was exporting agricultural products.

The toll of ‘green’ pollution

• Globally, only 17% of what is applied is taken up by plants and ultimately consumed as food.
• Most of the rest washes into waterways, where it creates algae blooms and dead zones that smother aquatic life.
• In my view, African countries where the Green Revolution has not made inroads should consider themselves lucky.
• In my view, there are many ways to pursue less input-intensive agriculture that will be more sustainable in a world with an increasingly erratic climate.

• They are arguably our most maligned, misunderstood, and mismanaged native species.
• Since colonisation, Australian governments and land managers have trapped, shot, poisoned and excluded dingoes from large parts of their Country.
• By collaborating and drawing from both Indigenous and Western knowledge, we can find ways to live in harmony with our apex predator.

How are dingoes currently treated?

• In the Northern Territory, Queensland and Victoria, dingoes are managed as protected wildlife in National Parks and conservation areas but they’re unprotected on private land.
• In Western Australia, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales, dingoes are unprotected wildlife.
• This is based on the mistaken belief that interbreeding between dingoes and dogs was widespread across Australia.
• Read more:
  New DNA testing shatters 'wild dog' myth: most dingoes are pure

Stark contrasts in dingo management

• Stretching more than 5,600km across Australia, the dingo barrier fence is the longest continuous artificial environmental barrier in the world.
• In South Australia, dingoes south of the “dingo fence” are declared “wild dogs” and subject to an eradication policy.
• The existence of an isolated and threatened “Big Desert” wilkerr (dingo) population on the border between these two states highlights their differing approaches.

What do dingoes mean to First Nations peoples?

• Despite the harms of colonisation on dingoes and First Nations, Indigenous people continue to feel and nurture this connection to dingoes.
• Maintaining their culture means fulfilling the general cultural obligation and rights of First Nations peoples to protect this sacred animal.
• The national dingo declaration is clear: First Nations peoples want an immediate end to the “genocide” (deliberate killing) of dingoes on Country.
• The recent Victorian decision to maintain lethal control of dingo populations against the wishes of First Nations peoples is extremely disappointing.

Non-lethal ways to protect livestock

• While lethal methods have historically been used to protect livestock from dingoes, there is growing awareness of their limitations.
• Firstly, these methods have not been consistently effective in eliminating livestock losses.
• It may also alter how successful they are at hunting kangaroos, causing more attacks on livestock.
• These guardian animals establish protective bonds with livestock and effectively deter dingoes from approaching, reducing livestock losses for graziers.

Working and walking together

• We would like to acknowledge retired graziers Angus and Karen Emmott and family from far North Queensland.
• Bradley Smith is an unpaid director of the Australian Dingo Foundation, a non-profit environmental charity that advocates for dingo conservation.
• He also serves as a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) dingo working group, which is part of their Species Survival Commission (Canids Specialist Group).

• These tragic incidents not only resulted in the loss of innocent lives but were also immensely challenging for emergency response teams.
• Each of these events required coordination between several different emergency services: the police, fire services and medical teams.
• Therefore, decision making by emergency response teams is a high stakes game that can influence the outcomes of different crises.
• We have been part of a team from the universities of Portsmouth and Winchester investigating how virtual reality (VR) can help prepare responders for these scenarios.

VR and decision making

• This makes it an invaluable tool for studying decision making under high stress.
• For emergency responders, there are many benefits to working with VR.
• Firstly, it can act as a training simulator, allowing first responders to practice critical decision making during a crisis scenario played out in a simulated environment and with a VR headset.
• By harnessing 360-degree cameras to create immersive simulations based around simulated terrorist events, desktop VR can closely mirror real world emergency scenarios.

Outperforming older methods

• They show that desktop VR can be a particularly valuable tool in training.
• For example, VR-based training, especially the interactive kind that responds to a user’s input, has been shown to outperform traditional video-based training methods.
• This opens up possibilities for the wider adoption of VR in emergency response training, making it more accessible for agencies and organisations with different budgets.