South-East Australia Highlighted In Global Map Of Vegetation Sensitive To Climate Change

Fairfax - Peter Spinks

Our crop lands, grasslands and woodlands, especially on the Great Dividing Range's inland slopes, are in for tough times.

Hottest year on record: 2015
The UN World Meteorological Organisation confirms that 2015 was the hottest year on record.

Victoria and New South Wales feature prominently in a global map revealing areas of vegetation most sensitive to some of the ravages of climate change.
The map, produced by Norwegian and British scientists from 14 years of satellite observations, and published in the journal Nature, shows most parts of south-eastern Australia are least able to cope with the changes in air temperature, water availability and cloud cover wrought by global warming.

It will be critical to monitor long-term changes in vegetation response to climate.
Professor Roger Jones, Victoria University

The crop lands, grasslands and woodlands of eastern Australia on the inland slopes of the Great Dividing Range will be most affected. These areas receive between 700 and 1000 millimetres of annual rainfall.

A global snapshot of vegetation sensitivity to climate variability. Areas in green (red) have comparatively lower (higher) vegetation sensitivity. Grey areas are barren land or ice covered. Inland water bodies are mapped in blue. Photo: Seddon et al

"They are among our most productive areas for agriculture," said Professor Roger Jones of Victoria University's Institute of Strategic Economic Studies. "If conditions worsened, they could be among those areas most at risk."
Appropriate management responses could limit potential losses. "But it's an indication of the potential for widespread loss of productivity that could happen fairly fast," Professor Jones cautioned.
Vegetated regions of the Murray Darling Basin are wildly shifting between drought and wet cycles. "The dry-wet swings seem to be intensifying," said climate scientist Dr Alfredo Huete​ of the University of Technology Sydney.

The hills around Mansfield in North Victoria. How might they be affected by some of the ravages of climate change? Photo: Rodger Cummins

"This will present major challenges for water and crop management in the future." By contrast, Victorian vegetation will not experience exceptional levels of eco-stress, he added.

Near Australia, areas of key tropical forest such as those in Indonesia also show high sensitivity.
Other regions of the world sensitive to variations in climate include the Arctic tundra, vast swaths of the boreal forest belt, the tropical rainforests, alpine regions worldwide, specific steppe and prairie regions and the Caatinga forest in eastern South America.
Grassland regions, in general, were found to be most sensitive to variations in water availability, while alpine regions displayed strong reactions to temperature. High-latitude tundra areas, meanwhile, were sensitive to shifts in both temperature and cloud cover.
Climate variability, as well as the related increase in extreme events in a warmer world, exerts significant influence on the structure and function of ecosystems. "But identifying ecologically sensitive areas has been difficult up to now," Dr Huete said.
Questions unanswered by the latest research include how much of the sensitivity observed in farmland areas is being managed through farming as compared to natural areas with less intensive management, Professor Jones added.
"It will be critical to monitor long-term changes in vegetation response to climate - especially to detect potential thresholds where land cover could change significantly due to external factors," he said.

Link

• Hottest year on record: 2015

Europe's Climate Change Goals 'Need Profound Lifestyle Changes'

The Guardian - Arthur Neslen

Leaked European commission document calls for wide-ranging debate on how to keep global warming to 1.5C

The power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire. 'CO2 removal' could suck emissions out of the air. Photograph: David Davies/PA

European countries should prepare for a far-reaching debate on the "profound lifestyle changes" required to limit climate change, according to a leaked European commission document.
The commission will tell foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday that a Europe-wide debate is needed on how to limit global warming to 1.5C, according to a staff working document for ministers seen by the Guardian.
It was written in response to last December's Paris climate summit, which agreed a plan for cutting emissions to net zero after mid-century, and an intent to peg global warming to 1.5C.
Temperatures have already risen by 1C since pre-industrial times and slamming the brakes on climate change "is by no means an easy undertaking", the document says.
"It will require exploring possibilities for realising 'negative' emissions as well as profound lifestyle changes of current generations."Negative emissions can refer to carbon capture and storage technology powered by biomass, geo-engineering of the atmosphere and oceans, or CO2 removal that sucks emissions out of the air.
A review of the ambition of the bloc's pledge to cut CO2 emissions by at least 40% from 1990 levels by 2030 will be crucial, the paper adds. This will take place after a report is published by the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, in 2018.
"There is no requirement that the EU updates its 2030 headline target as a result of this process in 2020, but the timeframe presents the EU with an opportunity to do so," it says.
The decade's end will be "the only significant political moment before 2030 to leverage more ambition from other major economies like China and India," as well as the US and Brazil, the document states.
However, the European commission is known to already be developing scenarios for increased emissions cuts through energy savings and a new renewable energy directive. In that context, green groups said they were disappointed that action on the hard-won 1.5C target was being delayed.
"The EU has to redo its homework and set out a pathway to meet stricter energy efficiency and renewables targets," said Greenpeace EU's climate policy adviser, Bram Claeys. "We can't have confidence in a plan that plays fast and loose with global warming and fails to accelerate Europe's shift to 100% renewable energy."
Wendel Trio, the director of Climate Action Network-Europe, said: "Like all other countries, the EU needs to ensure its policies are coherent with what was agreed in Paris, and needs to substantially increase its targets for 2020, 2030 and 2050. This discussion needs to take place now, and not be postponed for another three to five years as the European commission is proposing."
EU leaders are expected to discuss the possibility of raising the EU's 2030 target at a summit on 17-18 March. But powerful figures in the commission will try to ensure this happens through a revision of the bloc's carbon market rules in 2023.
The EU's climate chief, Miguel Arias Cañete, has already signalled that he would like the union to ratify the Paris climate agreement at a conference in New York on 22 April.
"It is in the EU's interest to join early, alongside major economies such as the US and China, and alongside other 'high ambition' countries," the paper says. Other legal scenarios could also allow the agreement to enter into force without the EU's participation.
Decisions to increase climate ambition will be hard fought, with coal-dependent countries such as Poland likely to dig their heels in.
"The potential scale of such a deep transformation will require a wide societal debate in Europe," says the document, which was jointly prepared by the European commission and its foreign office, the European external action service.
A 2C rise in global temperatures could have consequences including the migration of 20% of the world's population from cities flooded by sea level rise, such as New York, London and Cairo, according to a study published this month.

Links

• Paris climate deal is an 'opportunity to change the world'
• Paris climate talks: biggest polluters back tougher warming target
• EU puts recycling on the agenda at Paris climate talks
• Paris climate deal must be legally binding, EU tells John Kerry

This Battery Storage Revolution Could Happen Quicker Than We Thought

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

The battery storage revolution is taking hold in Australia, and may even occur quicker than most pundits thought – despite lingering uncertainty about whether consumers will actually be saving any money in the short term.
Debate rages about the ability of battery storage – when added to rooftop solar installations – will deliver an attractive return on investment. For some it already does, as this farmer discovered.
But it seems that many consumers don't particularly care – installers say they are being flooded with enquiries, and customers want them even if they are told they won't save money.
According to Nigel Morris, the head of solar and battery storage installer Roof Juice, battery storage installations are running at about 200 a month.
Origin Energy, one of the big retailers that has signed up for the Tesla Powerwall and other battery storage technologies, says it has installed a few, but has interest from 2,000 consumers – demand which it hopes to satisfy within the next few months.
Stefan Jarnason, the CEO of software developer and systems integrator Solar Analytics, agrees with those assessments. He estimates that installation rates will run at about 4,000 to 5,000 in 2015 – before surging ten-fold in 2016 to around 40,000. That is when the industry takes hold.
There are many reasons why battery storage is popular – the ability to exercise consumer choice, to have greater independence, to stick it up the big corporations, to capture the benefits of their solar systems (as feed in tariffs decline), and to do their bit for emissions abatement, particularly as the federal government policies cause a rise in national emissions.
NSW is expected to be the biggest market initially, particularly when 140,000 households lose their premium feed in tariff at the end of this year. Steve Blume, from the Australian Energy Council, says 60,000 households may choose battery storage in the first year after losing the premium tariffs.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla.

And two other things have captured the imagination of consumers. One is this man, Elon Musk (pictured right) the founder and CEO of Tesla, who has managed to reduce the complexity of battery storage to a brand name, and a choice of colours.
As Jarnason told a solar conference last weekend, Musk has managed to sell $1 billion of battery storage devices, the Powerwall and the Powerpack, even before he had a product, and before he had even built a factory.
The second event is publicity. According to Glen Morris, one of the country's leading experts in battery storage, and a vice president of the Australian Storage Council, the recent Catalyst program on ABC TV, which featured battery storage, has sparked huge interest in the technology.
"The Catalyst program generated an immediate response – batteries are here now, and the industry is trying to respond to this demand," Morris told One Step Off The Grid.
Jarnason agrees. "Tesla sold a billion dollars of product with no marketing, no actual product, and no factory, but he did it because of demand."
He notes that it is not just Tesla that is targeting Australia as the world's first big market for household and commercial battery storage, but a veritable who's who of international technology companies, including Panasonic, LG, Samsung and Enphase, and inverter manufacturers Solar Edge and SMA, and local products such as Redflow and Ecoult, and software companies and integrators such as Sunverge, Reposit and Redback.
"The battery boom is coming," Jarnason says. "All these companies believe it is coming. They don't spend billions of dollars (on technology development and marketing costs) for altruistic reasons."
"They want to make a lot of money. And they will make them cheaper and better because that is the only way to sell more batteries. And they will get cheaper and better."
He says every solar system will have battery storage eventually, and Australian homes are still adding 150,000 systems a year, and more than 1.5 million homes already have solar PV. The industry will grow into smart technologies and link with electric vehicles, as Tesla, Mercedes, BMW, Nissan and others lead push into EVs.
John Grimes, the chief executive of the Energy Storage Council, says  Australia is at the leading edge of the biggest transformation in the global energy industry. He estimates that two thirds of solar installers are being asked about battery storage.
"Australia can learn a lot and take these learnings to the world," Grimes told the Queensland Energy Storage Summit on Wednesday. "A coronation is under way. Technology is giving power to the people and customers are no longer the voiceless observor of energy technology."
The CSIRO recently updated its study which shows that up to half of all electricity will be generated on site – in homes, businesses and within communities, within a few decades. Depending on how the incumbent industry adapts, this will create a new integrated grid, or one third of all consumers will leave the grid.
"This transformation is already under way," said Mark Patterson, the head of grid and renewable energy systems at CSIRO Energy. "We will be the first low carbon economy in the world if we can manage this."
Glenn Walden, the head of emerging markets and technologies for Ergon Energy,  the biggest network by land area in the country, agreed: "The future is closer than we think."

Links

• How big can wind turbines get?
• Aurizon write downs signal end for Hancock's Galilee Basin coal projects
• What the death of US Supreme Court Judge means for climate change
• Energy industry needs to focus on consumers, it may need them