Australian Insurance Companies Slow On Climate Change As Pacific Braces For Infrastructure Damage

New Matilda - Thom Mitchell

Labor’s top brass are touring the Pacific to hear about how climate change will affect the region, but closer to home Australian insurance companies have been found to be unprepared for the coming crisis. Thom Mitchell reports.

Typhoon Champi. Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr 

A new report has found that Australian insurers are lagging behind in recognising the financial risks created by climate change, and that they don’t appear to be on-board with the globally agreed goal of limiting the rise in average temperatures to less than two degrees.
The release of the World Wildlife Fund report this morning comes as Labor heavyweights, including Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and his Deputy Tanya Plibersek, tour the Pacific to investigate how climate change will impact the vulnerable region.
They’re likely to come under renewed pressure to side with Pacific leaders in arguing for a global goal of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees rather than 2, with forecasts indicating Pacific nations will be left acutely at risk from climate change.
Closer to home it appears Australian insurance companies are not factoring in the implications of commitments made by 195 governments to work towards the two degree goal.
“No discussion was found by the Australian insurers about the importance of a 2 degree target in their primary disclosure documents and no self-contained public policies or statements have been identified,” the WWF report said.
The report analysed publicly available statements and policies for mentions of climate change from Australian insurers — IAG, QBE and Suncorp — and compared them with those of three international firms, Allianz, Prudential Financial and AXA.
Four Australian banks — Westpac, ANZ, CBA, and NAB — were also analysed, and were found to be more vocal and transparent about their position on climate risk and the two-degree target.
“Given the insurance industry’s expertise in risk management, weather-related impacts and prominent position in the business community, insurance companies have a responsibility to reduce risks and costs to consumers,” the report said.
In spite of this, WWF found, “None of the Australian insurance companies seem to have self-contained public climate change statement in their annual reviews or sustainability reports.”
The environmental NGO compared this stance to the international insurance companies, finding that foreign firms had warned more explicitly, more publicly, and more often about the risks that hostile weather and the diminishing value of fossil fuel stocks are creating.
This morning Labor leader Bill Shorten touched on similar themes, noting in Port Moresby that “rising sea levels are threatening the livelihoods and homes of our [Pacific] neighbours”.
As New Matilda reported in June, one study in Nature has already projected that the clean-up bill for under-developed South Pacific island nations alone could be as high as $21.9 billion, given their “acute vulnerability to climate change”.
Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu were deemed particularly at-risk, with researchers from the University of New England finding that more than 95 per cent of their built infrastructure, by value, is located within 500 metres of the typically low-lying coast.
This morning WWF sought to highlight the unholy confluence between the increasing need for insurance, and the expected difficulty in securing it in a climate-changed world.
“The insurance industry will be affected through increased claims, reputational damage, decline in insurance affordability, and an increase in uninsurable sectors or geographies,” the WWF study notes.
The Pacific will be among the ‘geographies’ hardest hit, and Shorten is visiting both Kiribati and the Marshal Islands as part of his tour.
The ABC reports that this morning Shorten said “the message [I am] already getting loud and clear is that climate change is a first-order issue for our neighbours and we need … Australia to have serious policies, credible policies, which will help to contribute to mitigating the effects of climate change in our region”.
The WWF stressed that the policies of Australian insurance companies are also integral to efforts to limit the extent and impact of climate change and help in adaptation efforts.
“The private sector has a key role to play” in driving action toward the internationally agreed two degree target, the report said. “Communicating this target helps do that and also draws attention to whatever specific actions are in place to support it.”
“It is hoped that corporate discussion of a 2 degree Celsius threshold would lead to commitments and specific targets and actions.”

How Climate Change Disproportionately Affects Women

Fairfax - Mehreen Faruqi *

Tackling climate change is crucial for women, writes Mehreen Faruqi. Photo: Brad Newman

In a few weeks' time, world leaders, policy-makers, scientists and lobbyists will converge on Paris for the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, and hopefully agree to a universal and binding agreement on climate to serve as the successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The outcome of the conference will be crucial for everyone, but especially for the world's women.
As with all complex and wicked problems, gender inequality and climate change are inextricably linked. Like gender inequality, climate change is an issue of deep injustice. Poorer countries such as the Pacific islands, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka already are and will continue to bear much higher burdens of the effects of sea level rise, extreme heat, water scarcity and catastrophic weather events.
This injustice not only exists between nations but also impacts women disproportionately. The gendered impacts of climate change are numerous and are further magnified for women living in poorer countries where, for example, women and girls bear the burden of collecting water and fuel to meet their families' needs. As the United Nations has noted, the impacts of climate change take hold, collecting water and firewood is getting harder and they are having to search further and further to access these essential resources. As a result of these responsibilities, women have less time to earn money, engage in politics or public activities, learn to read or acquire other skills, which further perpetuates the cycle of disempowerment and social injustice.
About 70 per cent of the world's poor are women and gender differences in deaths due to natural disasters correlate with women's social and economic rights. The 1991 the Bangladesh cyclone killed 150,000 people, 90 per cent of whom were women. Women are often not taught survival skills such as swimming or climbing. They have restricted mobility and cultural constraints that decrease their access to escape, shelter and health care. Post-disaster, women are usually at higher risk of being placed in unsafe, overcrowded shelters, which is mainly due to the lack of economic capacity, property or land ownership.
Even in richer countries, many more women than men live in poverty. The number of women in the bottom 10 per cent of income earners in New South Wales is almost double that of men. The increasing severity and frequency of droughts as a result of climate change will contribute to higher prices for food and water, which will disproportionately disadvantage these women even further.
It is somewhat revealing that while climate change is much worse news for women, they are the ones who are more cognisant of environmental change and are more likely to support environmental protection. Yet they also face the historical disadvantage of having limited access to the decision-making process.
Last year, a Climate Institute poll found a growing number of Australians want the nation to lead on finding solutions to climate change and 64 per cent of women want Australia to be a leader. The NSW Office of Environment and Heritage survey entitled "Who Cares About the Environment?" also suggests women are more likely than men to be concerned about environmental problems. On average, women undertake more environmental activities than men.
Women are uniquely positioned to be extremely effective creative agents to influence change, but empowerment, gender equality and equal participation in decision-making are key to unlocking climate change solutions. In Bangladesh, women farmers reported that their profitable chickens were drowning because of frequent flooding. When they were involved in planning for climate change, their solution was to raise ducks.
Addressing climate change will of course not only require global and collective political leadership in Paris, but also national and local leadership in individual countries to get the policy settings right and drive change. For our own part, Australia must invest heavily in renewable energy, phase out coal and bypass the dangerous lure of coal seam gas development. We must also do our fair share of assisting other countries - particularly in our own region - with climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Bringing women to the forefront of political decision-making will help in securing a safe climate future. It is notable that last week Nepal elected its first female president, making it the latest in a long line of South Asian and so-called "third world" countries to elect women leaders. The new Nepalese constitution requires one-third of legislators to be women. Meanwhile, in NSW parliament, I sit in a chamber with only 10 women out of 42 MPs. We should be doing a lot better.
The NSW Government recently objected to my motion calling on the government to "heed the advice and warnings of the world's leading scientists and ramp up efforts to address climate change in our state", and it continually refuses to make the necessary shift towards 100 per cent renewable energy in NSW, which is possible, affordable, and essential.
All governments have a responsibility not only to tackle climate change, but also to involve those who will be most affected by it. This is the 'strong moral imperative' for Australia, not digging up and shipping out more coal. In India, for example, 120,000 people die every year from health complication related to coal. No doubt a heavy burden falls particularly on women. Instead of exporting coal, we should be working with countries around the world to jointly transition to a clean and green renewable energy future.

* Dr Mehreen Faruqi is a Greens MP in the NSW Upper House. She is an engineer, academic, and activist, working for social and environmental justice.

Pacific Islands Make Last-Ditch Plea To World Before Paris Climate Change Talks

The Guardian - Oliver Milman

‘Unless the world acts decisively in coming weeks, the Pacific as we know it is doomed,’ says Fijian prime minister Frank Bainimarama

For low-lying Pacific islands the likely sea-level rise of a metre by the end of the century means coastal erosion, saltwater seeping into precious rainwater catchments and ruined crops. Photograph: Giora Dan/AAP

Amid the rustling palm trees, blissed newlyweds and colourful attire of a tropical island resort, Pacific leaders have been getting blunt with wealthy nations about the unfolding calamity of climate change that is gradually gnawing away their remote idylls.
At a summit in Fiji last week, the last major gathering of Pacific island nations before crunch UN climate talks in Paris next month, islanders thrashed out their collective plea to the world to help address the health impacts of climate change, particularly upon women, infants and adolescents.
Ratu Inoke Kubuabola, Fiji’s foreign minister, said the country was dealing with the re-emergence of climate-influenced diseases such as typhoid, dengue fever, leptospirosis and diarrhoeal illnesses. Last year, a dengue outbreak in Fiji infected 20,000 people.
But the meeting also showed that Fiji, for one, is not pulling any more punches with large, industrialised nations it sees as culpable for climate change.
“We in the Pacific are innocent bystanders in the greatest act of folly of any age,” said Fijian prime minister Frank Bainimarama.
“Unless the world acts decisively in the coming weeks to begin addressing the greatest challenge of our age, then the Pacific, as we know it, is doomed.
“The industrialised nations putting the welfare of the entire planet at risk so that their economic growth is assured and their citizens can continue to enjoy lives of comparative ease. All at the expense of those of us in low-lying areas of the Pacific and the rest of the world.”
Bainimarama added that he has yet to see the “necessary political will” amongst wealthy nations to head off the worst impacts of climate change at the Paris talks.
These gloomy warnings are becoming grimly regular fodder for Pacific islanders to digest and, increasingly, experience first-hand.
“It’s an everyday issue here,” said Dr Karen Allen, Unicef’s representative in 14 Pacific nations. “Children here in the Pacific talk about climate change like children elsewhere talk about school or TV. It’s so routine.”
Media coverage of climate change in Fiji doesn’t have the luxury of wallowing in the sort of cosseted denialism seen in the US, Britain or Australia.
The lead story in the Fiji Times ​one day last week featured the tale of a seven-year-old child who drowned in an unprecedented high tide in the Namena district. A new FIJI$670,000 ($436,000) sea wall has been approved but the area’s commissioner, Meleti Bainimarama, conceded: “What we are doing is remedial action. I think the best thing to do is relocate the village, but it will come at a cost.”
The other front-page tale featured a man in the same village complaining how his house is regularly swamped by seawater that once lapped 20 metres from his front door. While wealthy nations mull over climate projections and agonise over potential dips in GDP, the stereotypically ebullient Pacific islanders aim to bring some steely reality to Paris.
“I won’t be going to Paris wearing the usual friendly, compliant Pacific smile,” warned Bainimarama. “In fact, I won’t be going to Paris in a Pacific frame of mind at all. I fear that our interests are about to be sacrificed.”
Previous UN climate change forums, where dreary jargon often pours treacle over any sense of urgency, have been enlivened by entreaties from Pacific island leaders. But Paris will see an escalation. Pacific islanders will be turning up in numbers – almost all leaders are expected to attend, unlike in Copenhagen in 2009 – and with a string of demands.
The latest, the Suva Declaration, calls for an end to new coalmines and a more ambitious limit to global warming. The language has sharpened beyond Fiji – Kiribati president Anote Tong recently called Australia, previously venerated as a benevolent protector in the Pacific, “selfish” for its continued enthusiasm for burning vast amounts of fossil fuels.
The cause for concern is clear – Nasa recently reported the world’s sea level has risen nearly 8cm since 1992, with the Pacific experiencing a more rapid increase than other oceans.
A rise of around a metre by the end of the century now looks likely. For low-lying islands in the Pacific, this means coastal erosion, saltwater seeping into precious rainwater catchments and ruined crops.
Meanwhile, rising temperatures will heighten the risk of diseases, including those carried by mosquitos. Cyclones are expected to become more severe. The World Health Organisation estimates climate change will cause around 250,000 deaths globally between 2030 and 2050.
At the Fiji summit, delegates wearing Sulu va Taga, a type of traditional kilt, and floral shirts spell out the problems and what must be done. Jarringly, the gathering is being held at a luxury resort on Denarau island, a manmade construction featuring manicured lawns, fountains and an 18-hole golf course, created through seabed dredging and reshaping of the coastline.
But the Pacific islands mean business. A lack of regional leadership from Australia – where senior government ministers apparently consider seawater inundation hilarious – is forcing Pacific islanders to set aside their reputation for gentle amiability in order to make themselves heard internationally.
“We don’t want to change the way we are but we need to change our approach so that when we say enough is enough, we are heard,” said Satini Tulaga Manuella, health minister of Tuvalu, which is comprised of nine scattered islands, none of which peak higher than 4.5m above sea level.
In March, Tuvalu was pummelled by Cyclone Pam, which washed huge waves over the atolls and ripped apart buildings with 350kmph winds. The dead were upturned from their resting place in cemeteries, crops were ruined, islands reshaped. Tuvalu, the fourth-smallest nation in the world at just 26 sqkm, caught a glimpse of what may cause its demise. But the government is determined the population will not migrate.
“People are worried but they want to stay, our priority is to save our country,” Manuella said. “We say if you save Tuvalu you save the world, because if you bring down emissions enough to save us, the rest of the world will be OK.
“Science is telling politicians in other countries what is happening. So why aren’t they listening? They have to look after their own people but they also have an obligation to the world. Imagine if a whole race, Tuvaluans, we have our own culture, our own ways, is made extinct overnight because we are hit by a cyclone.”
There’s recognition that the smaller of the Pacific islands face the brunt of climate change, even among those in Fiji who have had to move due to its impact.
In January last year, the Fijian village of Vunidogoloa had to relocate several kilometres inland because of the merciless advance of the sea. Saline intrusion was causing crops such as barley and cabbage to fail. The leaves on the trees were turning yellow from the salt. Children were no longer left to play unsupervised after a king tide washed away a young boy.
“We were most vulnerable at night because we didn’t know what was happening with the sea,” said Sailosi Ramatu, leader of the village. “Now people are happy, they can sleep at night. We have land that is higher up in Fiji but other countries don’t have that.”
The unfairness of islanders suffering the consequences of greenhouse gases they mostly didn’t emit is mirrored by the raw deal suffered by the women who form the cornerstone of family life in the Pacific.
The Fiji summit, hosted by the government and the UNFPA, focused on how to deal with the health and gender equity problems thrown up by climate change.
According to figures cited to delegates by Princess Sarah Zeid of Jordan, ambassador for the Every Woman Every Child program, women and children are 14 times more likely to die in a natural disaster than men.
“Cooking food, taking care of children, fetching water, taking care of livestock – climate change disrupts every element of a woman’s life,” said Zeid, who is the latest royal to lend stardust to the Pacific islands’ cause after Prince Albert of Monaco provided his backing, reportedly sinking a few cans of XXXX with aid workers at a recent call to arms in Kiribati.
“When climate impacts are rapid, the consequences for women and children are also severe,” said Zeid. “The greater the gender inequality, the greater the difference.”
As women in developing countries do the bulk of caring for children and elderly relatives, they are less likely to escape floods and cyclones. This was demonstrated by 2008’s cyclone Nargis in India, where most of the fatalities were women who held onto children while the men clung to coconut trees.
In the Pacific, there are a myriad of problems to work through – many health clinics are at risk from inundation and are inaccessible to those in remote areas. Delivery of maternal and reproductive health is patchy and the risk of sexual assault and abuse is heightened following disaster.
“In the Pacific, men surround their thatched homes and hold the poles together to keep their women and children safe inside during a cyclone,” said Unicef’s Allen. “The Pacific has the most incredible strong community spirit of anywhere in the world I’ve been.
“That makes it all the harder to face the reality of abuse. Because when your whole culture is built around how much you love and care for each other, it may be difficult to face the fact abuse is increasing.”
These challenges require money and Pacific islands are eying the $100bn in climate finance that has been repeatedly promised by wealthy nations. The Paris talks have left open the possibility of major help for adaptation, such as sea walls, new types of crops and relocated facilities, as well as a 1.5C, rather than 2C limit on warming.
But proposals for a facility to deal with people displaced by climate change, required because they do not fall under the UN refugee convention, have been dropped, to the dismay of Kiribati, which has purchased land in Fiji and has a “migration with dignity” policy, and the Marshall Islands, where residents of the famous Bikini atoll are currently looking to relocate to the US.
It’s a mixed picture that leaves Pacific leaders far from confident that this will finally be the year where their existential crisis triggers a response.
“We will see,” said Jone Usamate, Fiji’s health minister. “The world is a system – you do something at one end of the world and it has an impact at the other end.
“So we all need to be responsible but this is not our fault. Unfortunately, we are paying the price for it.”

Climate Change Treaty Will Be The Flop Of The Year

Australian Financial Review - Christopher Booker

After failures at Kyoto in 1997, and Copenhagen in 2009, climate change activists face the same obstacles in Paris next month.

Political leaders, officials and green activists from all over the world will converge on Paris later this month, hoping for a treaty to save us all from further global warming. Photo: Reuters

At the end of this month 40,000 politicians, officials, green activists, lobbyists and journalists from 195 nations will converge outside Paris – at Europe's largest airport reserved only for private jets – for a conference they hope will change the world.
Their declared aim is to agree on a treaty that commits to such a massive cut in greenhouse gas emissions that the earth's temperature is prevented from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius higher than when the climate began naturally warming again two centuries ago.
The chief obstacle to such an agreement is exactly the same as it was at Kyoto in 1997, and at that last mammoth conference at Copenhagen in 2009, which so signally failed to get Kyoto renewed. The vast majority of countries have argued all along that, if man-made CO₂ is causing a problem, the fault lies with those "developed" nations that became rich before everyone else by burning fossil fuels to power their industrial revolution.
It is therefore up to the developed countries of the West to make the most drastic cuts, leaving the still "developing" nations to catch up. They say they are prepared to make some contribution to reducing CO₂, but only if they are paid to do so out of a $100 billion a year "Green Climate Fund", financed by the rich countries that originally created the problem.
Now, as Paris approaches – although scarcely noticed by the Western media – we can see just what the 20 countries responsible for 81 per cent of global CO₂ emissions are proposing as their "Intended Nationally Determined Contributions" to cutting emissions by 2030. These have been meticulously analysed on the Notalotofpeopleknowthat website, with further reporting on that site of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
China, now easily the world's largest emitter, contributing 24 per cent of the total, plans by 2030 to double its CO₂ emissions, not least by building 363 more coal-fired power stations. India, now the third-largest emitter, plans by 2030 to treble its emissions. The fourth-largest emitter, Russia, despite slashing its emissions after 1990 by closing down much of its old Soviet industry, now proposes to increase them from their 2012 level by up to 38 per cent.
Japan, the fifth-largest emitter, does claim that it will cut its emissions by some 15 per cent, but is still planning to build more coal-fired power plants. Although South Korea, the world's seventh-largest emitter, claims that it will cut emissions by 23 per cent (not least by buying "carbon credits" that will allow it to "offset" its continuing production of CO₂ for cash), even its proposed target will still be 100 per cent higher than it was 25 years ago.
As for the Middle East, the oil states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran (the eighth and ninth-largest emitters) have not yet submitted any proposals. But the United Arab Emirates, which have more than doubled their emissions since 2002, show no sign of slowing that increase, apart from a promise to invest in more "carbon-free" solar and nuclear power. As for Brazil, which as the 11th largest emitter has been rapidly increasing its dependence on fossil fuels, it sees its main contribution as being to slow the felling and burning of the Amazon rainforest.
So which countries are obviously missing from this list? President Obama may talk the talk about his ambitious plans for the United States, the world's second-largest emitter. But there is no more chance of Congress agreeing to the proposed treaty than there was in 1997, when the Senate unanimously voted no to Kyoto.
Which leaves the European Union as the only part of the world committed to cutting its emissions by 40 per cent within 15 years. However, Poland is already refusing to sign the treaty, as it builds more fossil-fuel power stations to keep its lights on, while Germany, the sixth-largest emitter does the same.
The only government in the world wholly committed to meeting that 40 per cent target by 2030 is Britain, the 14th-largest emitter, responsible for just 1.3 per cent of global emissions. This is less than China or India are now adding every year, as we shut down those fossil-fuel power plants that still manage to provide 70 per cent of our electricity.
And what about that Green Climate Fund, supposed by 2020 to be dishing out $100 billion every year to help developing countries to "adapt to climate change"? Firm pledges received so far total just $700 million, leaving $99.3 billion still to go.
The only real question that will remain after the failure of this bid for a binding treaty in Paris is how much longer it can be before the most expensive and foolish scare story in history finally falls apart.