Election 2016: Labor Pledges $500 Million Fund To Protect Great Barrier Reef

ABC News - Naomi Woodley

Both parties have promised to increase efforts to curb crown-of-thorns starfish. (Supplied: JCU Professor Mark McCormick)

Key points: Labor to spend $100m on research, $300m on environmental programs, $100m on reef management Government promised additional $171m over six years for reef in budget, Labor reprioritised five years Greens pledged seven-point plan reef plan, including $1b to help coal workers exit industry

The Federal Opposition has said if elected, it would create a $500 million fund to help protect the Great Barrier Reef, through better research, co-ordination and environmental programs.
"The reef is in peril," Labor leader Bill Shorten said during a visit to Cairns, as surveys revealed 35 per cent of coral in central and northern parts of the reef is dead.
"We see our reef under pressure from climate change, from acidification, from crown-of-thorns starfish, we see it under pressure from poor water quality.
"This reef needs our protection and it needs it now."
Labor would spend $100 million on research by the CSIRO, universities and other institutes, $300 million on environmental programs to reduce nitrogen and sediment run-off and up to $100 million on better management of the reef.
"Stakeholder after stakeholder, the Queensland Auditor General, and most recently the Water Science Taskforce have called for much greater coordination of the different bodies that have an impact, and the different programs that are seeking to restore the health of the Great Barrier Reef," shadow environment minister Mark Butler said.
But Environment Minister Greg Hunt has questioned whether that funding is worthwhile.
"How they can justify $100 million on more bureaucracy without even outlining or explaining where that will be spent is an extraordinary diversion of funds for the reef," Mr Hunt told ABC's The World Today.

Parties promise to curb crown-of-thons starfish outbreaks
Both parties are promising to increase efforts to curb outbreaks of the destructive crown-of-thorns starfish.
Labor would fund an additional two control vessels, while the Government is promising to spend $6 million from its $210 million Reef Trust on one additional vessel.
"I think you'll find that we'll have considerably more to say on the reef," Mr Hunt said.
In the federal budget, the Government promised an additional $171 million over six years for the Great Barrier Reef through its Reef 2050 Plan and the Reef Trust.
Labor would reprioritise five years' worth of that funding, which is $123 million, to help make up its total $500 million fund.

Labor's reef funding needs explanation, Hunt says
Mr Hunt said the Opposition must explain what it intends to do with the budget allocation.
"Which programs will they be cutting? I think it's extremely important that they are upfront," he told The World Today.]
But Labor said it was committed to the long-term strategy developed in response to recommendations from the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, and to targets to reduce nitrogen run-off by 80 per cent and sediment run-off by 50 per cent by 2025.
"We are committed to the Reef 2050 Plan," Mr Butler said.
"What we're really talking about now is how we get to those targets, how we achieve the sort of reduction or improvement in water quality that one of the seven natural wonders of the world requires for its long-term health."
The Federal Government said since it was elected in 2013, it had provided a total of $460 million in funding for the reef through a variety of programs.
"These are reductions of sediment and nitrogen and pesticides from on farm activities, so to reduce the impact on our waterways, to improve water quality," Mr Hunt said.
"Real work, recognised by the World Heritage Committee, as Australia being the global role model — whereas only a couple of years ago they were looking at declaring under Labor and the Greens, the reef in danger," Mr Hunt said.
"What we have just done, through the Emissions Reduction Fund, is allocate $150 million to reef catchments, and a further $50 million to catchments further down the Queensland coast.
"This has a direct, immediate, profound impact on water quality."
The World Heritage Committee decided against listing the Great Barrier Reef as "in danger" last year, but said it would be monitoring the situation over the next four years.
Last month, the Greens released a seven-point plan to "revitalise" the Great Barrier Reef, including a $1 billion fund to help coal workers exit the industry.
"The scientists are saying that global warming is the biggest threat to the reef and that 93 per cent of the reef has just experienced bleaching," Greens Senator Larissa Waters said.
"What more is it going to take before the Labor and Liberal parties realise that we can not take any new coal or we will lose the Great Barrier Reef?"

Links

• 35pc of coral killed by bleaching in parts of Great Barrier Reef
• Coral bleaching and that UNESCO list. What's been going on with the reef?
• Recent news on the Great Barrier Reef 

'Huge Wake Up Call': Third Of Central, Northern Great Barrier Reef Corals Dead

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

More than one-third of the coral reefs of the central and northern regions of the Great Barrier Reef have died in the huge bleaching event earlier this year, Queensland researchers said.
Corals to the north of Cairns – covering about two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef – were found to have an average mortality rate of 35 per cent, rising to more than half in areas around Cooktown.

Researchers inspected 84 reefs and found coral mortality rates of 50 per cent or more in the north of the Great Barrier Reef. Photo: James Cook University

The study, of 84 reefs along the reef, found corals south of Cairns had escaped the worst of the bleaching and were now largely recovering any colour that had been lost.

Professor Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said he was "gobsmacked" by the scale of the coral bleaching which far exceeded the two previous events in 1998 and 2002.

Dying corals in the Great Barrier Reef after the worst bleaching event on record. Photo: James Cook University

"It is fair to say we were all caught by surprise," Professor Hughes said. "It's a huge wake up call because we all thought that coral bleaching was something that happened in the Pacific or the Caribbean which are closer to the epicentre of El Nino events."
The El Nino of 2015-16 was among the three strongest on record but the starting point was about 0.5 degrees warmer than the previous monster of 1997-98 as rising greenhouse gas emissions lifted background temperatures. Reefs in many regions, such as Fiji and the Maldives, have also been hit hard.
Bleaching occurs when abnormal conditions, such as warm seas, cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae. Corals turn white without these algae and may die if the zooxanthellae do not recolonise them.
The northern end of the Great Barrier Reef was home to many 50- to 100-year-old corals that had died and may struggle to rebuild before future El Ninos push tolerance beyond thresholds.
"How likely is it that they will fully recover before we get a fourth or a fifth bleaching event?" Professor Hughes said.
(Use the slider image below to see how mature staghorn corals at one reef at Orpheus Island on the Great Barrier Reef looked at low tide in 1996 prior to the 1998 bleaching event, and 20 years later.)

The health of the reef has been a contentious political issue, with Environment Minister Greg Hunt pledging more funds in the May budget to improve water quality – one aspect affecting coral health.
But Mr Hunt has also had to explain why his department instructed the UN to cut out a section on Australia from a report that dealt with the threat of climate change to World Heritage sites including the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu.

'10 cyclones holding hands'
Professor Hughes said tropical cyclones can cut a 50km-wide swatch of destruction of corals, but this year's bleaching event was like "10 cyclones holding hands and marching across the northern third of the Great Barrier Reef".
But cyclones can also help. The category-five Cyclone Winston that slammed into Fiji in February, brought widespread rains over parts of Queensland as a tropical depression, helping to lower sea temperatures by two degrees and sparing much of the southern corals from severe bleaching, Professor Hughes said.
Even so, those southern reefs are still likely to have had their reproduction and growth rates slowed by the unusually warm seas. The scientists said the bleaching event showed how important it was to continue to bolster resilience of the reef, such as through programs to limit run-off from farms and towns bringing in excessive nutrients and pollution.
"The reef is no longer as resilient as it once was, and it's struggling to cope with three bleaching events in just 18 years," Professor John Pandolfi, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at The University of Queensland, said. "Many coastal reefs in particular are now severely degraded."
(Use the slider on image below to see mature staghorn coral at Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef. The corals bleached in February 2016 and were overgrown with algae by April.)
Professor Hughes said he did not advocate the reef being put on the "in danger" list by the World Heritage Committee, but it was time governments reconsidered their approval for massive new coal mines in Queensland's Galilee Basin and elsewhere.
"The key threat to the Great Barrier Reef is climate change – the government has recognised that many times," he said.
"[But] there is a disconnect in the policy round governments issuing permits for 60 years for new coal mines and how that might impact on the Great Barrier Reef and reefs more generally."

Links

• UN reef report censored by Australia
• UN report: Australia's behaviour 'disgusting'
• Labor pledges $380m to boost reef
• CSIRO dismantles 'integrated' climate science group as pressure mounts on Larry Marshall Australia cut from UN report on climate threat to avoid damaging reef tourism

Greg Hunt Plays The Long Game On His Glaringly Obvious Emissions Trading Scheme

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor

Minister keeps up attack on Labor's 'carbon tax' to placate Coalition climate change sceptics, all the while ensuring the machinery is in place for his own ETS

The Coalition is deferring until after the election its internal reckoning over climate policy. Photograph: David Crosling/AAP

For years Greg Hunt has been suggesting different things to different people about his climate policy. This week he was almost caught out.
Most people who understand how it works – environmentalists, business leaders, analysts – know the Coalition's Direct Action policy cannot meet Australia's promised long-term greenhouse gas reductions exactly as it stands. For years Hunt has reassured them – don't worry, the framework is there.
The so-called safeguards mechanism within the policy (which sets emissions "baselines", or limits, for big polluters) can be tightened so it becomes a type of emissions trading scheme. The baselines can be gradually reduced and then companies that can't meet them forced to buy pollution permits. But Hunt is keeping quiet about that, playing a long game, waiting for the cabinet, and his party, to catch up with the scientific and economic realities of climate change, biding his time until a scheduled "review" next year.

This has declined into a squabble over semantics

John Connor, the Climate Institute

To his party the minister has been reassuring in a different way, keeping up the attack on Labor's "carbon tax", insisting that any kind of emissions trading is dead and buried forever.
The fact that there is a potential trading scheme embedded inside his own legislation has been glaringly obvious for years. I wrote about it in 2014, and, after Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister last year, a couple of times.
I wrote about it again in May after Hunt released modelling saying his existing policy could meet his long-term targets, even though the author of the modelling told me it would almost certainly require either large funding top-ups to the emissions reduction fund (estimated by others to be at least $6bn) or – you guessed it – a strengthening of the safeguards mechanism so it turns into a baseline emissions trading scheme, and again after last week's National Press Club debate after I (unsuccessfully) sought an answer from Hunt on whether the safeguards policy needed to be strengthened to achieve the government's 2030 target.
In fact, in Paris last December the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, spoke openly about the "role a carbon market might play [in Australia] after 2020", and Lewis Tyndall, co-founder of GreenCollar – a firm that has been a big winner from Hunt's Direct Action auctions, told an event: "Greg Hunt has described the safeguards mechanism as a baseline and credit system."
And then last Monday, the Australian editor-at-large Alan Kohler wrote a column on the same subject, pointing out that the safeguards mechanism could quite quickly become a type of ETS and asserting that: "What hasn't been announced or included in the Coalition's legislation yet is that the caps will start to be reduced from next year."
Without making any assumptions or assertions about another journalist's sources, some of the column sounded familiar to those close to the minister and his advisers, and it certainly claimed to contain "inside" information.
Kohler pointed out that a type of emissions trading scheme had "been part of the Coalition's climate policy since well before Greg Hunt went from shadow minister to minister for the environment in 2013. He made it a condition of his appointment by Tony Abbott that the science of climate change would be accepted and the emissions reduction target would not change."
And he went further, asserting that "when Malcolm Turnbull became leader and prime minister last year, amazingly, he did not fully understand his party's climate policy, and in particular the inclusion of a cap and trade ETS, because Hunt had never discussed it in cabinet. Apparently, he was pleasantly surprised, but decided to maintain radio silence, as part of his broader efforts to keep the conservatives onside."
Unsurprisingly, the "conservatives" in both the Liberal and National parties were extremely displeased by these claims, or the fact that the allegedly "secret" ETS embedded in their policy started getting wider airplay – in a question on the ABC's Q&A, for example, and in stories in the Australian Financial Review.
Hunt wrote a carefully parsed letter to the Australian and distributed a chart rebutting some of the claims made. It was a case study in obfuscation.
He insisted the safeguards mechanism "is not a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme" (at the moment – with the baselines set at "historic highs" and with companies able to ask for them to be set even higher if needs be, this is true, because it will be almost impossible for any company to exceed its baseline or be forced to buy pollution permits, which of course also means the policy achieves almost nothing).
Hunt said the fact that the government has "budgeted to raise not a single dollar of revenue" proved it was not planning a carbon tax. And that is also true, but it does not prove the government is not planning a baseline and credit scheme, because under such a scheme businesses buy credits from other businesses or companies that create credits under the emissions reduction fund. The "trade" does not involve the government.
And he said that it was "incorrect" to say each firm's baselines would decline from 2017, when he is planning to review the policy. Which is also true. That's the whole point of this conversation.
For his policy to work, Hunt, as minister, has to decide to reduce them, and turn his policy into the trading scheme everyone has always believed he intended. If he doesn't do this as part of a range of measures, no modelling or analysis has found he can meet his long-term targets. So is he planning an ETS, or isn't he? Will his policy work, or won't it?
Some observers who have been going along with Hunt's two-tracked messaging for years seem to be losing patience.
"This has declined into a squabble over semantics," said John Connor, chief executive of the Climate Institute.
"The safeguard mechanism framework starting on 1 July clearly says companies that exceed their baselines can buy offsets from another company. That is a trade in emissions."
Connor said what mattered was not ruling out scaleable policies to meet either the government's "inadequate" 2030 target, or the tougher 2030 targets Australia needed.
"As we have said many times before, that definitely requires much tighter baselines – a much stronger safeguards mechanism, or, alternatively, at least another $6bn to buy the emissions reductions through the emissions reduction fund."
Many other experts make a similar point.
Tony Wood, energy program director at the Grattan Institute, has studied Hunt's rebuttals closely.
"He has the machinery in place. He's just not pre-empting what a re-elected Coalition government would do with it. He has very carefully not ruled out reducing the baselines, and in my view it would be very difficult for the Coalition to meet its target if he does not end up doing that," Wood says.
This week the debate finally focused on the great unanswered question of the Coalition's policy. The question that determines whether or not it can deliver even Australia's modest commitments to reducing greenhouse gases and combating global warming. But despite all the attention, and all his carefully worded responses, Hunt has still not answered and nor has Turnbull.
Hunt has given the conservatives in his party the impression that he ruled out reducing the baselines and setting up his own ETS, and there are many in both the Liberal and National parties who insist any type of ETS will happen over their political corpses.
But Hunt is pointing out to others that his carefully chosen words actually left the question open.
The Coalition is deferring until after the election its internal reckoning between entrenched climate change sceptics and those pushing for something like a workable climate policy, the final answer as to whether Turnbull will indeed continue to lead a party not committed to acting on climate change.
But in an election campaign during which the Cape Grim air quality monitoring station registered a count of 400 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere and 93% of the Great Barrier Reef is experiencing coral bleaching, the electorate has a right to know now.

Links

• Coalition climate plan 'assumes emissions trading', says government modeller
• Labor pledges $500m over five years to support Great Barrier Reef
• Most coral dead in central section of Great Barrier Reef, surveys reveal
• Australia covered up UN climate change fears for Tasmania forests and Kakadu
• Great Barrier Reef: who's profiting from the destruction and devastation?

Homeowners Kept In Dark About Climate Change Risk To Houses, Says Report

The Guardian - Melissa Davey

Climate Institute says risk data held by regulators, state and local governments, insurers and banks, but homebuyers and developers do not have access to it

Houses in some areas of Australia are likely to become uninsurable, dilapidated and uninhabitable due to climate change, says the Climate Institute. Photograph: Chris Hyde/Getty Images

Climate Institute Report Significant and increasing financial losses will continue to be incurred by owners and buyers of properties built in areas that are vulnerable to climate change unless the governments, regulators, insurers and, especially, the banks take greater responsibility, finds the Climate Institute's There goes the neighbourhood: Climate change, Australian housing and the financial sector report, released today. View Report (pdf)

The risk that houses in some areas of Australia are likely to become uninsurable, dilapidated and uninhabitable due to climate change is kept hidden from those building and buying property along Australia's coasts and in bushfire zones, a Climate Institute report says.
The report says there is untapped and unshared data held by regulators, state and local governments, insurers and banks on the level of risk, but that most homebuyers and developers are not told about the data and do not have access to it.

The full scale of risk may only be recognised through disaster or damage, or when insurance premiums become unaffordable
Climate Institute Report

"Even when public authorities, financial institutions and other stakeholders possess information about current and future risk levels, they are sometimes unwilling, and sometimes unable, to share it with all affected parties," the report released on Monday says."Thus, foreseeable risks are allowed to perpetuate, and even to grow via new housing builds. The full scale of the risk may only be recognised either through disaster or damage, or when insurance premiums become unaffordable. Any of these events can in turn affect housing values."
The economic costs are high and could ultimately represent a real risk to the financial sector itself, the report says. While insurers, regulators and governments have started to recognise this risk, banks who approve the mortgages for at-risk properties have not yet begun working towards a solution.
For example, the report says, banks could integrate the impact of climate into their risk assessment processes, work with other stakeholders in the public, private and civil society sectors to research and develop ways to minimise climate impact risk to housing, and address losses that will occur in an equitable way.
It also says that state, federal and local governments could do more to protect buyers, by including climate risk in planning, development and approval processes, mandating the disclosure of all available hazard mapping, and requiring that all dwellings be built or renovated as fit-for-purpose for the maximum projected impacts of climate change.
Extreme weather and climate change risks associated with a property should also be disclosed at the point of sale.
"Even if these 'uninsurable' and 'unadaptable' properties are only a tiny minority of the total housing stock, the eventual devaluation could be financially devastating to individuals," the report says.
"It could also be damaging to banks, other financial companies and public balance sheets at all levels of government."
An author of the report and the manager of investment and governance at the Climate Institute, Kate Mackenzie, said the sector had to be proactive before houses became damaged, otherwise there could be a costly and messy battle over who bore responsibility.
For example, she said, councils could be liable for not providing flood data and for permitting a vulnerable development to go ahead, the developer for building it, the home owners for not realising the risk, the building code authority, the banks for financing the development and the mortgages, or the insurers.
"There's definitely a big need for governments to show leadership on this," she said.
"There have been a few very good recommendations made in the past by public policy reviews which really haven't been followed up at the federal level or at the state level or through Coag, which would provide a mechanism for a national adaptation strategy."
These included the reports from an Australian Treasury taskforce, the natural disaster insurance review, and two Productivity Commission inquiries, she said.
Her report concludes: "A sense of exasperation is evident among those who have spent any length of time seeking to address the economic and policy challenges posed by extreme weather."
Some researchers are already taking the matter into their own hands and developing products to help buyers manage risk. Last month, the website Coastal Risk Australia was launched. It combines Google maps with detailed tide and elevation data, as well as future sea-level rise projections, to help people see whether their house or suburb is likely to be inundated.

Links

• Climate change: website reveals which homes will be swamped by rising sea levels
• Climate change: Australia's big banks urged to reject new loans for coal projects
• Saving Great Barrier Reef from climate change should be central election issue, says Tim Flannery
• Coalition climate plan 'assumes emissions trading', says government modeller
• Paris agreement is a strong signal that 'we will solve climate crisis', Al Gore says
• Great Barrier Reef bleaching made 175 times likelier by human-caused climate change, say scientists
• Unseasonably warm weather a clear sign of climate change, say scientists
• George Brandis says climate science not settled, but CSIRO should act as if it is