08/05/2016

Coastal Communities, Including 24 Federal Seats At Risk, Demand Action On Climate Threats

The Conversation - 

Coastal communities around Australia are facing the rising threat of coastal erosion. AAP/Dave Hunt
Representatives of Australian coastal communities have gathered this week to discuss the major challenges they face. Delegates at the conference in Rockingham, Western Australia, represent 40 councils around Australia, some falling within the 24 federal electorates held by a margin of 5% or less. In contrast to the federal budget, climate change is at the top of their agenda.
At the coming federal election, 24 coastal electorates are held by a margin of 5% or less. Compiled with NATSEM, University of Canberra and the Australian Coastal Councils. Author provided

Sea-level rise, floods, storms and bushfire were common concerns. The Australian Coastal Councils Conference's May 6 communique demands national action:
Coastal councils and their communities call on the Australian Government to play a leadership role in developing a co-ordinated national approach to coastal management by adopting a set of policy initiatives based on the recommendations of the bipartisan Australian Parliamentary Coastal Inquiry.
Challenges of growth and change
Australia's population is set to grow from 24 million to 40 million people by 2050. On present trends, this growth is likely to be concentrated in coastal regions, mostly along the eastern seaboard.
Australian Coastal Councils Association chair Barry Sammels, the mayor of Rockingham, observed:
Coastal seats are among the most vulnerable at the forthcoming election. Some of them are growing very rapidly, and others are changing demographically as 'sea-changers' migrate to coastal areas and people with young families are relocating from the cities in search of a better quality of life. This invariably means these regional coastal electorates, which have traditionally elected conservative political candidates, are becoming politically more volatile.
These communities are "at the forefront of climate vulnerability", Sammels said. They are already dealing with coastal erosion and the prospect of rising sea levels and more frequent and extreme weather events.
Coastal communities, in particular those which are changing in character, are demanding these risks be taken seriously. … They currently feel there is a lack of commitment from both major parties to deal with these threats.
Lack of urgency at the top
While bipartisan interest in cities policies is growing, this needs to be extended to coastal regions experiencing big changes on several fronts – demographic, economic and environmental.
Population growth is concentrated in coastal centres vulnerable to climate change. p.16 State of Australian Cities 2014-15, Australian Government
The lack of long-term strategic coastal planning puts both communities and environments at risk. The bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef illustrates the impacts of environmental change on tourism, jobs and long-term economic security.
We need a national plan to support local councils to better manage coastal urban development, climate change and the consequences for their communities. We have had over 25 national reports leading to largely no action.
In the communique, coastal councils reasonably call for action on key recommendations of the comprehensive 2009 parliamentary inquiry:
We propose that the following recommendations of the coastal inquiry be adopted: That the Australian Government, in co-operation with state, territory and local governments, and in consultation with coastal stakeholders, develop an Intergovernmental Agreement on the Coastal Zone to be endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments.
And that:
The Australian Government ensure that [the agreement] forms the basis for a National Coastal Zone Policy and Strategy, which should set out the principles, objectives and actions that must be taken to address the challenges of integrated coastal zone management for Australia.
Despite much-reduced federal funding, the National Climate Change Adaptation Facility continues to help inform action by local government. Clearly, however, better long-term planning is required. This requires deeper institutional support, including a national perspective on urban growth in the context of climate change.
Mandurah, WA, epitomises both the pace of growth of coastal communities and their vulnerability to climate change. Rexness/flickr, CC BY-SA
Action has begun locally
Finally, not all coastal planning and management is achieved through law and policy. A great deal of activity occurs locally through goodwill and collaboration. To highlight three examples:
Such collaboration and innovation deserves long-term funding from higher levels of government.
We may have got this far without an integrated approach to coastal planning and management, but without it there is no way we will be able to manage coastal growth with the projected demographic, economic and climate changes.
That's why local councils are demanding immediate action on a national coastal policy to meet the needs of our coastal communities and environment. To ignore their call is a very significant political risk indeed.

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Great Barrier Reef: New Report Slams Government's 'Weak' Recovery Plan

The Guardian - 

Experts call for greater action on climate change, and warn that opening up huge new coalmines in Queensland could cause permanent damage to the reef
Lady Musgrave Island in the Unesco-listed Great Barrier Reef marine park. Unesco will decide in June whether to list the reef as 'in danger'. Photograph: Parer-Cook/Auscape/Minden Pictures/Corbis
The federal government's plan to reverse the decline of the Great Barrier Reef is "weak" and requires greater action in six key areas, including climate change, according to a new report.
The set of recommendations, compiled by three of the reef's most experienced scientists, warn that opening up huge new coalmines in Queensland is "too risky" for the Great Barrier Reef. They also say that it "will not be possible to develop and operate the largest coal ports in the world along the edge of the Great Barrier Reef world heritage area over the next 60 years without causing permanent damage to the region".
The report, published in Nature Climate Change, calls for a shift towards better conservation values, Australia playing a "more active role in transitioning away from fossil fuels" and advocates a bans on the dredging and dumping of seabed spoil within the world heritage area.
It also recommends a revamp of the environmental assessment process for new developments, greater powers for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority over fishing and ports and a 50-year plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slash chemical run-off.
The federal and Queensland governments have devised a long-term plan to arrest the decline of the reef, which is considered to be in poor and worsening health having lost half of its coral cover over the past 30 years.
However, scientists have attacked the plan for failing to confront the issue of climate change, which is the leading long-term threat to the reef. The opening up of the Galilee Basin coalfields, to export resources via the reef, could result in the release of an additional 705m tonnes of greenhouse gases – more than Australia's annual total.
Unesco's world heritage committee will decide in June whether to list the reef as "in danger." The Nature Climate Change report notes that more than half of the 41 outstanding universal values ascribed to the reef by Unesco are in decline due to pollution, coastal development, dredging, overfishing and climate change.
"We know what we need to do to help the reef, the problem is that the government's plan is pretty weak," said Jon Brodie, a marine scientist at James Cook University. Brodie authored the paper alongside Jon Day, a fellow former director at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and Terry Hughes, director of coral reef studies at James Cook University.
"The plan doesn't address climate change at all, the water quality improvement part is better but it isn't funded properly and the plan doesn't set out good governance around ports, which is something Unesco wants.
"We can't really stop exporting coking coal because we need to make steel. But we need to stop the expansion of thermal coal exports from the Galilee Basin."
Brodie said the expansion of the Abbot Point coal port near Bowen, which has seen a lengthy battle over where to dump seabed excavated for the development, has been "a farce."
"They had five options to expand the port and they picked the cheapest, dirtiest one," he said. "And when enough people complained about dumping it at sea, they picked the next worst option, which was putting it in the wetlands. We are now on to another option."
Day said that while ports could continue to operate next to the reef, all development needed to occur at a more sustainable level.
"If that means less dredging, less coalmining and more sustainable fishing, then that's what Australia has to do," he said. "Business as usual is not an option because the values for which the reef was listed as world heritage are already deteriorating, and will only get worse unless a change in policy occurs."
Between them, the Australian and Queensland governments have pledged to ban the dumping of dredged spoil within the world heritage area and have set targets to reduce the amount of nitrogen and other chemicals flowing on to the reef from farming.
However, conservationists have said the funding for pollution reduction is insufficient and that even if the world keeps to an internationally agreed limit of a 2C increase in temperatures from pre-industrial times, ocean warming and acidification will further reduce coral cover to perilously low levels.

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Deep Sea Microbes May Be Key To Oceans’ Climate Change Feedback

The Guardian - Howard Lee*

Microbe populations make up 11-31% of living matter in the ocean seabed, but decline significantly as oceans warm
A giant scale worm is seen on the Antarctic seabed at 645 meters (2116 feet) below the surface in Antarctic waters in January 2008. Photograph: Martin Riddle/AP
Microbes are hardly the poster-children of climate change, but they have far more impact than polar bears on Earth's carbon cycle – and therefore on our climate. A new study published Friday in Science Advances finds that seabed bacteria and archaea (which look like bacteria but have very different genetics and biochemistry) are sensitive to climate. Because their habitat covers 65% of the entire globe, they form a huge part of the biosphere and are important in the regulation of carbon in the deep ocean, which affects long-term climate change.
The microbes in question are packed together in the top 15 centimeters of the deep ocean seabed, like rush hour commuters in a city metro, up to a million times more abundant than in the sunless ocean water, or buried in deeper layers of seabed sediments. Their city-like crowding is fueled by a sparse sordid snow of excrement and microscopic dead bodies from life in the upper ocean, far above them.
The scientists, led by Professor Roberto Danovaro of Polytechnic University of Marche in Ancona, Italy, collected 228 samples from various locations in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean, from a range of ocean depths (400 to 5570 meters deep) and a wide variety of ocean bottom temperatures. They measured the microbe populations using two independent DNA profiling techniques: "catalyzed reporter deposition fluorescence in situ hybridization" (thankfully abbreviated to "CARD-FISH") and "quantitative polymerase chain reaction" (qPCR).
They discovered that the seabed microbes thrive where water temperatures are cold, but their populations decline significantly as deep ocean waters warm. Professor Antonio Dell'Anno, one of the paper's authors, told me:
That is also linked to the fact that warmer deep-sea ecosystems have a low input of organic carbon supplied from the surface waters.
In other words, their population is limited because their food is limited. Moreover, as the microbes warm so does their metabolic rate, requiring more food to survive, so the meagre food supports fewer individual microbes.
The study also discovered that archaea make up a far larger proportion (11% to 31%) of the living matter in the ocean seabed than previously thought (less than 6%), and most of that population is made up of a temperature-sensitive group known as "Marine Group I Thaumarchaeota."
Professor David Archer of the University of Chicago calculated some years ago that there was an unexplained temperature-sensitive CO2 feedback that amplified the warm and cold cycles of the ice ages. He narrowed it down to the oceans, but it remains unsolved. I asked Professor Dell'Anno if deep seabed archaea might be the answer, but It's too early to say:
We do not know yet how temperature shifts can influence the biological interactions within food webs. We cannot yet predict whether prokaryotes will exacerbate or attenuate the magnitude of climate change on marine ecosystems, but they are expected to be a key component that is able to influence the oceans' feedback on climate change.
To move closer to an answer, the team is now looking to incorporate their results into new climate models, but it may be years before we fully appreciate the global impact of these tiniest of creatures.

*Howard Lee is a geologist and science writer who focuses on past climate changes.

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Climate Change: Five Islands In The South Pacific 'Completely Lost To Rising Seas'

The Independent - Will Worley

'The sea has started to come inland, it forced us to move up to the hilltop and rebuild our village there away from the sea'
The rising sea levels seen in the Solomon Islands are expected to eventually be replicated across the Pacific TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP/Getty Images
Rising sea levels and erosion have caused five islands in the South Pacific to completely disappear, researchers have said.
A further six islands have been partially destroyed by erosion and the phenomenon is already causing human displacement, pushing people out of their coastal communities and further inland.
Researchers, writing in The Conversation, said that while rumours and speculation have abounded about problem for some time, their study had now produced the first scientific evidence for land being lost to the seas.
The lost islands ranged in size from one to five hectares and supported dense tropical vegetation that was at least 300 years old.
"They were not just little sand islands," lead study author Simon Albert told AFP news agency.
In addition, Nuatambu Island, home to 25 families, has lost more than half of its habitable area, with 11 houses washed into the sea since 2011, according to the study, which was published in Environmental Research Letters.

The researchers believe similar problems are expected across much of the Pacific after 2050 as a result of human-induced sea-level rises. In all but the most optimistic scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, many Pacific islands will experience long-term rates of sea-level rise similar to those already experienced in the Solomon Islands.
Numerous communities have been displaced and fragmented by the threat from rising seas, and generations-old settlements have been abandoned in favour of moving further inland.
Sirilo Sutaroti, the 94-year-old chief of the Paurata tribe, recently abandoned his village in the Solomons.
“The sea has started to come inland, it forced us to move up to the hilltop and rebuild our village there away from the sea,” he told the researchers.
In addition, the 1,000-strong town of Taro, the capital of Choiseul Province, is set to become the first become the first provincial capital in the world to relocate the entirety of its population and services in response to the impact of sea-level rise.
The study comprised of analysis of the coastlines of 33 reef islands, using aerial and satellite imagery dating from 1947 to 2015. This was used in conjunction with radiocarbon dating of trees, sea-level records, wave models, and local knowledge.
Sea levels rising twice as fast as predicted. AFP/Getty

Waves were found to play a significant role in the coastal erosion which contributed the disappearance and threatens other islands in the Pacific. Islands which were more exposed and subject to ‘wave energy’ deteriorated faster than more sheltered islands, information which may be useful in the future, according to the researchers. The lost islands were among those studied which were subject to more powerful wave energy.

Chair of the Solomon Islands' National Disaster Council, Melchior Mataki, said: “This ultimately calls for support from development partners and international financial mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund.
"This support should include nationally driven scientific studies to inform adaptation planning to address the impacts of climate change in Solomon Islands.”

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