When we rebuild a house, we are rebuilding a home. When we recover from disaster, we are rebuilding lives and livelihoods.

We need more food, more forests, better livelihoods for smallholder farmers, and lower emissions. If we want any of them, we must have all of them.

Climate change, if unchecked, is an urgent threat to health, food supplies, biodiversity, and livelihoods across the globe.

If we tackle deforestation in the right way, the benefits will be far-reaching - greater food security, improved livelihoods for millions of small farmers and indigenous people, more prosperous rural economies, and above all, a more stable climate.

Livelihoods and whole communities throughout the Murray-Darling Basin have been imperilled by the workings of drought, fire, flood, acid mud and human action over many decades. In the rescues and the cleanups and the long hauls, I see the same attitude over and again. People just rally and get on with it.

With success came an ever-growing burden of responsibility. I lived with a near-constant low-level anxiety that I would make a mistake that would not only threaten my career but also my brothers' - not to mention the livelihoods of many people who work with us or for us.