Sydney Homeowners Face Properties Being Reduced In Value Because Of Climate Change, Climate Risk Group Says

Fairfax - Lucy Cormack

Sydney's coastal homeowners face their property values being reduced, as the future risk of increasingly extreme weather events grows, a climate risk consultant says.
Dr Karl Mallon, director of science and systems for Sydney-based consultants Climate Risk, said Australia's quintessential problem is that "you can build a house which is insurable tomorrow, but is wholly unsuitable 30 years down the track".

What are east coast lows?
They bring wild storms that lash the east coast of Australia, but despite their destructive force we need them more than you may realise. Produced in association with UNSWTV.

The message follows the release by the independent Climate Council of its latest report, Super-charged storms in Australia, which argues that the nation is highly vulnerable to "storm surges associated with tropical cyclones and extra-tropical cyclones, including [more intense] east coast lows."
"The evidence for the link between climate change and extreme weather is already very strong for heatwaves and bushfire weather, and it is getting stronger for intense cyclones and heavy rainfall events," the report said.

After months of little rain, storm cells lashed the east coast of Australia, with rising waters inundating Sydney's northern Beaches. Photo: james Alcock

"Seven storms since 2010 in Australia have resulted in insured losses of more than $500 million each, and five of them resulted in over $1 billion in insured losses."
Dr Mallon said that many Australians do not realise that a change in a property's value does not occur when an extreme weather event takes place, but "when the market realises the event will occur and revalues the house...it's the homeowner which is the sitting duck in all this."
He pointed to a "disconnect," between banks, government planning and the insurance industry, which is leaving Australian homeowners vulnerable to "climate change foreclosure".
"There are potentially millions and millions of dollars of revaluation that has to happen in the property sector and it's not going to be pretty. We could end up with suburbs where there is a wholesale collapse in value," he said, highlighting "erosion, actions of the sea, landslip and ground contraction," as some of the main impacts which are still largely uninsurable.

Catastrophic failure of transmission towers in the wake of the South Australian storm. 

"It's the banks who probably need to lead the charge…to sit down with insurers and planners and say, 'Will you start providing insurance on this?'."
Storm damage, hail and flooding caused 70 per cent of all insurance losses in NSW between 1970 and 2013, a report by insurance giant IAG and consultancy firm SGS Economics and Planning showed last week. That report identified Hawkesbury as the most disaster-prone region of greater Sydney, ranking among the city's highest risk council areas for flood, storm and bushfire. It was among 10 council areas identified as having a "high" or "very high" risk of major flooding, including Camden, Fairfield, Rockdale and Woollahra.

At the start of next year, Climate Risk will launch an online valuation tool, in which users can type in an address and run an analysis on how climate change could impact on the property's value in future.
The system recalculates the value of a property at the end of a mortgage,  by analysing climate and coastal data; such as tide, tectonic and wave gauges.
"We are not building with climate change in mind....we need someone to start talking about the risks going forward. So we've been building these products to be able to do that."
This week the Insurance Council of Australia launched a national campaign, urging Australian home and business owners to prepare for a potentially severe disaster season.

A sewerage pipe is exposed in storms at South Narrabeen. Photo: Peter Braig

"An above-average cyclone season has been forecast by the weather bureau, while the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre predicts heightened risk across much of southern Australia, especially in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia," said ICA chief executive officer Rob Whelan.
Campbell Fuller, the Insurance Council's general manager of communications, said around "95 per cent of household insurance policies purchased now include cover for flooding but consumers can also buy policies where flood cover is optional, or which exclude flood damage.
For coastal dwellers, he said there was a small number of available policies that covered damage caused by actions of the sea.
"Australian governments could do more to prepare the community and reduce the impacts through mitigation, a process sometimes held back by a lack of understanding of the risks [and] budgetary pressures," he said, adding that governments at every level needed to lift their level of mitigation spending.
"This process is accelerating, as government's understanding of the impact of natural disasters grows, although insurers continue to deal with the consequences of historical decisions."
In March, the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience & Safer Communities revealed that the total cost of natural disasters in Australia in 2015 exceeded $9 billion, or 0.6 per cent of GDP, a figure expected to double by 2030 and reach an average of $33 billion by 2050.

Links

• Did Climate Change Play A Part In The Sydney Storm?
• Climate change impacts in New South Wales
• Adapting for Climate Change - A Long Term Strategy for the City of Sydney
• Energy management & climate change

One Looming Consequence Of Climate Change: Small Island Nations Will Cease To Exist

Los Angeles Times - Ann M. Simmons

Moroccan and international demonstrators shout slogans and hold placards against pollution during a demonstration in Marrakech, Morocco, on the sidelines of the climate conference on Nov. 13, 2016. (Fadel Senna / AFP/Getty Images)

As  United Nations climate change talks get set to wrap up on Friday in Marrakech, Morocco, negotiators representing the Alliance of Small Island Nations underscored the need to speed up efforts to combat global warming and adapt to its effects.
“I’m happy about the progress that we are making, but we have a lot more work to do,” said Hugh Sealy, a climate change consultant for the United Nations who helped negotiate last year’s Paris agreement, which committed the world’s nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and is attending the Morocco conference as the lead negotiator for small island countries.
“We are still on a trajectory for at least 3 degrees of warming even if all the countries in the world did what they promised to do,” he said. “So it’s absolutely essential that we increase our efforts and that we reduce our emissions as quickly as possible.”
Speaking from Marrakech, Sealy, a professor at St. George’s University in Grenada, shared his thoughts on the urgency of tackling climate change and the key concerns for the 44 low-lying coastal countries that are among the most vulnerable.
His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Hugh Sealy, a climate change consultant for the United Nations helped negotiate last year’s Paris Agreement, and is the lead negotiator for small island countries at the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Courtesy of Hugh Sealy)

What are small island nations hoping will come out of the conference?
Mitigation, adaptation and finance are the three key priorities for us.
The Paris agreement last year was historic because, for the first time, it locked in long-term temperature goals, like what we hope to achieve in terms of combating climate change. That’s what we call mitigation. In Paris, we agreed that we would limit global warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial times and pursue keeping it below 1.5 degrees of warming because the small islands have clearly indicated that even 2 degrees of warming will be too much. We see 1.5 degree of warming as essential to our survival.
So at this conference, we want to move toward keeping that 1.5 degrees of warming and raising our global ambition as far as mitigation goes, which is saying we have to reduce our emissions as quickly as possible.
A second priority for us is finance. Developed countries have promised that they would give us $100 billion a year. But right now the Green Climate Fund [established by the United Nations to help developing countries counter climate change] is only financed at $10 billion over a four-year period, which is $2.5 billion a year. So we’re very, very far away from that $100 billion a year that was promised to us.
So what’s terribly important to us at this conference is that the developed countries lay out a road map as to how we’re going to get to that $100 billion a year by 2020.
The third priority for us is adaptation. And adaptation to climate change is a realization that some of the effects of climate change are already occurring. For example, sea level rise. We know we are going to face at least 1 meter (3.3 feet) of sea level rise by the end of the century. Last year was the hottest year on record. This year is headed toward breaking that record. If it does, it will of course push 2015 to second place and 2014 into third place. So we’ve had the three hottest years in a row. We are in the middle of climate change now, so being able to adapt is a huge priority for small islands as well.

View of a palm field suffering from desertification near Morocco's eastern oasis town of Erfoud in the Sahara desert. (Fadel Senna / AFP/Getty Images)

What is the greatest climate change threat to small island states?
Rising sea levels, because we have the majority of our infrastructure on the coastlines — our seaports, our airports, our tourism resorts. A number of islands rely on tourism. But also, ocean acidification [is a threat]. As more carbon dioxide is absorbed into the ocean the water becomes more acidic. And as it becomes more acidic it will start to dissolve our coral reefs, and that’s disaster for us. If we lose our coral reefs, we lose our beaches. If we lose our beaches, we lose our tourism and therefore we lose our economy.
So I think most of our perils will come from the sea side of things and our coast being affected. That’s why small island nations are perhaps the most vulnerable to climate change. I would call ourselves the canaries in the coal mine. In other words, what happens to small islands will eventually occur to even larger countries. That is why for us climate change is not only an economic issue. For a lot of us, climate change is an existential issue. We will cease to exist as viable human settlements if climate change is allowed to continue in the way it is occurring now.

A man walks through knee-deep water to reach his home during a king tide event in 2015 on Kili in the Marshall Islands, where climate change poses an existential threat. (Bikini Atoll Local Government via Associated Press)

With the election of Donald Trump, is there concern that the U.S. might renege on its commitment to tackle climate change?
I think there are valid concerns because of what President-elect Trump said before the election. But we’re optimistic that he will realize that climate change is a global issue that America cannot divorce itself from. And we hope that the United States will continue to show the leadership that it has in the past.

What is a carbon market and how would creating a carbon market help small island nations?
It was the United States that originally used the force of markets to bring down pollution. It was President George H.W. Bush who used markets to combat acid rain. He invented a system called “cap and trade,” where he put a cap on sulfur dioxide emissions. Utility companies that were able to reduce their emissions by a significant amount got these credits and were able to sell these credits to other power companies that were not as efficient in reducing their emissions. And everyone stayed below this cap.

A heating factory spews smoke in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province. Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels have decreased, but scientists say it’s not enough to stave off dangerous global warming. (AFP/Getty Images)

We are applying the same principle to carbon dioxide. You have states within the U.S., like California and some of the Eastern Seaboard states, that have created their own carbon market. Quebec in Canada has created one and it has linked itself to California. Australia is looking to join the market that the European Union has created. So we in the Caribbean … see there is a possibility under Article 6 of the Paris agreement to create our own carbon market within the Caribbean.

What are small island nations doing to combat the effect of climate change?
We are lobbying for the financing to do so. In a lot of cases our capacity to adapt is constrained. Even without this issue of climate change, we are poor developing countries that have not yet recovered from the Great Recession of 2008. We’re cash-strapped. We have sustainable development issues that we have to deal with over and above the threat of climate change.

So does the answer lie in financing?
Primarily yes. If we get enough finance then we can adapt. Of course, small islands reducing their emissions will do absolutely nothing in the global fight against climate change. You could add up all the emissions of small islands and we would probably still be less than half a percent of what the global emissions are.

Links

• Climate change is real: Just ask the Pentagon
• Will Paris climate accord and other environmental pacts survive a Trump presidency?
• Gov. Jerry Brown warns Trump that California won't back down on climate change
• Species may be listed as threatened based on climate change projections, court says
• With Trump’s election, science — and the global environment — will lose

Trumping Trump

MAHB - Julian Cribb

People’s Climate March at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, New York City. Beyond My Ken Wikimedia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Contrary to appearances, Donald Trump might just be the best thing that ever happened to climate action.
The presence of a climate denier in the White House and his obtuse, fossil-funded minions in key government posts is liable to ignite such fury among sensible people across America and around the world as to accelerate the demise of coal, oil and gas (’the fossils’) and the adoption of climate-saving policies at every level from home to city to industry, to nation, to the world itself.
Trump might be just the bitter medicine we needed to jerk us out of our complacency about what a +4 or +5-degree world will really be like: approaching uninhabitable.
Depending on the rate at which Arctic methane is released, the world has somewhere between 15-20 years to do away with fossil fuels completely. After that, a hot world of +4 or +5 degrees, with all the food, water, conflict and migration crises for billions that entails, becomes almost unavoidable.
The US election result has gifted the sedate pace of climate action from Paris COP22 with a fresh urgency as, round the world, people wake up to the brutal fact that if they wait for government action then Hell will, not freeze over exactly, rather, engulf the planet in a conflagration which may consume their children and grandchildren.
Waiting for governments to agree on the necessity of saving civilization is, in the Australian vernacular, a mug’s game. Their hearts aren’t in it, and there are far too many juicy bribes and sinecures for individual politicians not to mention political parties paid off by the coal lobby to posture and then sit on their hands. In Australia, for example, a recent survey tagged more than 40 retired Ministers, MPs, their staffers and former public servants as working for the dark side – that’s the side that doesn’t care if your grandkids fry.
If Trump and his ilk are to be stopped from their headlong, selfish pursuit of planetary devastation, it will be by the people of the planet – not the institutions or politicians. Here’s how:

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Go Green:
Not even Trump can defy world market reality. The one thing that can undermine the price and profitability of coal, oil and gas is low-cost renewable energy. As they well know –hence all the campaigns against wind turbines and solar farms. Put solar on your home, support your city or local government in taking your community off-grid. Invest in tidal, wave, geothermal and the new energies to balance the power supply. Resources companies have the option to go green themselves – they just don’t want to. They will end up with stranded assets and bankrupt, like many US coal majors already are.

Divest Now:
Don’t put your life savings into anything that might destroy your grandkids. It’s not a formula for human survival. Ethical and green investment services are mushrooming. Concerned citizens can compel their bank, super fund, university, local government, etc. to invest ethically by demanding accountability, including divestment in fossil fuels – and by shifting their accounts. In the Trump years, there will be massive global divestment by hundreds of millions in the source of the greatest hazard facing humanity.

Sue the Bastards:
Though they may look like pinpricks for now, there is a rolling wave of lawsuits around the world against their governments for failing in their duty of care, and against the fossils for risking human lives and destroying the environment. Every lawsuit adds to the sovereign risk of investing in fossil fuels – and unnerves other, less ethical, investors. Shrewd investment analysts are already advising their clients to bail out of fossils, and there’s not a darn thing Trump and his acolytes can do to stop it.

Protest:
Many people still underestimate the power, in a social media age, of peaceful citizens’ protests to change minds, values and perceptions within communities and countries. The way the world, especially its indigenous communities, has rallied behind the Sioux nation to oppose the Dakota Access tar sands pipeline is a case in point. As are the Australian citizens’ protests over the Liverpool Plains and Adani and similar protests in the UK and Europe. Local protests over just causes now reverberate worldwide. There is a global movement building that responds at lightspeed.

Trust the Youth:

Following the US election the following electoral map of how 18-24 year olds voted, gained currency. Young Americans, at any rate, are not willing to be pawned to the interests of the fossils. Globally, many of the lawsuits against government or the fossils are led by youngsters, even teenagers – and for similar reasons. This is a demographic that can only grow and, aided by social media, can do so rapidly and universally.

Electoral Map for Millennials (age 18-34) | Source: SurveyMonkey

Change Your Habits:
The food industry contributes roughly 30% of global climate change drivers, and wastes around 40% of all food. So stop wasting food, and buy it from farmers who care, not from supermarkets who don’t. Don’t buy your kids plastic toys – you are only funding the very petrochemical industry that threatens their future. Likewise look for organic food, clothing and household products, which are produced without petrochemicals (pesticides, dyes, preservatives, etc.). Again, there’s nothing the Trumpists can do to stop you eating and shopping more safely and sustainably – and contributing your dollar signals to a burgeoning global marketplace.

Electrify:
Electric cars are only a climate solution if the electricity they run on is renewable not fossil –but some stunning technologies are just around the corner, including using vehicles themselves as generators of green energy into the local grid. The worldwide spread of high voltage DC (HVDC) cables over thousands of kilometres is the genesis of an international grid for moving energy efficiently around the planet: one day your home may help run a factory in China. Sunlight in the Sahara will help power Europe, etc.

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In the face of universal threats like climate change, people often feel powerless to influence the future. This is no longer the case, as these seven examples show. You can have quite a big impact simply by choosing how and where you shop, bank, mortgage your home and save your money. Aligned with hundreds of millions of others, equally concerned, equally empowered, you can change the world.
If humanity itself forms a consensus to prevent and mitigate climate change it will be a political act like none other in history. No nation, corporate, religious order, political party or belief system can stop it, because they will have no power over it. It will unleash the next great phase of global economic growth and development, the new industries, jobs and opportunities that transition us into a sustainable, prosperous world.

So, thanks Donald, for supplying the wake-up call.

Links

• COP 22 | Marrakech, Morocco, 7-18 November
• Paris Climate Change Agreement to Enter into Force!
• Create a new narrative on economic reform and climate policy
• Economic Growth is a meme – a learned idea that we can change and mature