01/04/2017

How Australia’s Animals And Plants Are Changing To Keep Up With The Climate

The Conversation - 

Flora and fauna can adapt to climate change, but some are more successful than others. allstars/shutterstock
Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing Australia’s wildlife, plants and ecosystems, a point driven home by two consecutive years of mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.
Yet among this growing destruction there is a degree of resilience to climate change, as Australian animals and plants evolve and adapt.
Some of this resilience is genetic, at the DNA level. Natural selection favours forms of genes that help organisms withstand hotter and drier conditions more effectively.
Over time, the environmental selection for certain forms of genes over others leads to genetic changes. These genetic changes can be complex, involving many genes interacting together, but they are sufficient to make organisms highly tolerant to extreme conditions.
Some of this resilience is unrelated to DNA. These are “plastic” changes – temporary changes in organisms’ physical and biochemical functions that help them deal with adverse conditions or shifts in the timing of environmental events.
Plastic changes occur more quickly than genetic changes but are not permanent – the organisms return to their previous state once the environment shifts back. These changes also may not be enough to protect organisms from even more extreme climates.

What about Australia?
In Australia there is evidence of both genetic and plastic adaptation.
Some of the first evidence of genetic adaptation under climate change have been in vinegar flies on the east coast of Australia. These flies have a gene that encodes the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase. This gene has two major forms: the tropical form and the temperate form. Over the past 30 years, the tropical form of the gene has become more common at the expense of the temperate one.
Plastic adaptation due to climate change has been demonstrated in common brown butterflies in southern Australia. Female butterflies are emerging from their cocoons earlier as higher temperatures have been speeding up their growth and development by 1.6 days every decade. According to overseas research, this faster development allows butterfly caterpillars to take advantage of earlier plant growth.
Higher temperatures are causing the common brown butterflies in southern Australia to come out of their cocoons earlier. John Tann/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
In many cases, it is not clear if the adaptation is genetic or plastic.
The average body size of Australian birds has changed over the the past 100 years. Usually, when comparing birds of the same species, birds from the tropics are smaller than those from temperate areas. In several widespread species, however, the birds from temperate areas have recently become smaller. This might be the direct result of environmental changes or a consequence of natural selection on the genes that affect size.
In the case of long-lived species like eucalypts, it is hard to see any adaptive changes. However, there is evidence from experimental plots that eucalypts have the potential to adapt.
Different eucalypt species from across Australia were planted together in experimental forestry plots located in various environments. These plots have unwittingly become climate change adaptation experiments. By monitoring the plots, we can identify species that are better at growing and surviving in extreme climatic conditions.
Plot results together with other forms of DNA-based evidence indicate that some trees unexpectedly grow and survive much better, and are therefore likely to survive into the future.

What’s next?
We still have much to learn about the resilience of our flora and fauna.
There will always be species with low resilience or slow adaptive ability. Nevertheless, plastic and genetic changes can provide some resilience, which will change the predictions of likely losses in biodiversity.
Much like how our worst weeds and pests adapted to local climate conditions, as demonstrated many years ago, our local plants and animals will also adapt.
Species with short generation times – a short time between one generation (the parent) and the next (the offspring) – are able to adapt more quickly than species with longer lifespans and generation times.
For species with short generation times, recent models suggest that the ability to adapt may help reduce the impacts of climate change and decrease local extinction rates.
However, species with long generation times and species that cannot easily move to more habitable environments continue to have a high risk of extinction under climate change.
In those cases, management strategies, such as increasing the prevalence of gene forms helpful for surviving extreme conditions and moving species to locations to which they are better adapted, can help species survive.
Unfortunately, this means doing more than simply protecting nature, the hallmark of our biodiversity strategy to date. We need to act quickly to help our animals and plants adapt and survive.

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Courts Now At Front Line In Battles Over Climate Change

Christian Science Monitor - Tamara Micner

As governments make commitments on emissions – or fail to do so – questions of follow-through increasingly lands in court. Vienna's airport is a case in point.
Heinz-Peter Bader/Reuters/File
In what some experts call a “landmark ruling,” Austria’s Federal Administrative Court took an unusual step last month: It became one of the first in the world to block a new infrastructure project on the basis of climate change.
The judges interpreted regional and national laws, and Austria’s commitments within the European Union and the UN Paris Agreement, to mean that the “public interest” in limiting the impact of climate change outweighs shorter term economic growth from adding a proposed third runway to Vienna’s airport.
“[C]limate change is already taking place in Austria, and will have far reaching impacts on humans, animals, plants and the environment,” the court wrote in its decision, as translated by Global 2000, citing impacts on agriculture, tourism, weather, biodiversity, and human health from airport expansion.
The decision comes amid a wave of court cases over government environmental obligations, collectively signalling that the legal system may play a rising role as arbiter of climate action, and raising the stakes in a debate over what role for courts is appropriate, when it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions.
To some degree, the stepped-up legal action surrounding climate change is simply the natural result of governments making more legal commitments to mitigate the effects of global warming, legal experts say.
“Governments have said lots of things about what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to do it,” says Justin Gundlach, at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, in New York. “And if they don’t – or people think they haven’t, even if they had – the role of the court is to provide everyone the answer.”

Cases extend to Global South
Examples include the Urgenda case, where Dutch citizens argued that the government is insufficiently protecting them from climate change (it’s now being appealed); a South African ruling blocking construction of a coal-fired power plant; and a Norwegian lawsuit launched by Greenpeace and Nature & Youth over new government licenses for offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. In the US, a federal judge has allowed a case to move forward in which children are arguing that government actions, by causing climate change, are an unconstitutional violation of their rights to life, liberty, and property.
Mr. Gundlach notes that the South African case is significant (along with rulings in India and Colombia) in extending climate litigation beyond high-income countries to the Global South, which is home to about 85 percent of the human population and 30 of the world’s 36 “biodiversity hotspots.”
In the face of powerful fossil-fuel industries, these cases enable citizen and environmental groups to push politicians to make their commitments more than symbolic. And sometimes, as in Vienna, they are taking governments and the public by surprise.
“The case shows that the commitments that policymakers make to protect climate, to fight climate change, can make a difference on the ground,” says Verena Madner, professor of public and environmental law at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She hopes politicians will realize that they can’t “have it all,” signing laws and treaties and then avoiding the follow-through.
“I hope that it’s also a wake-up call for the government and parliament to take action, and to really do climate policy – rather than the courts – in the long run,” Ms. Madner adds.
Johannes Wahlmüller, climate campaigner at Global 2000, a nongovernmental organization in Vienna, agrees. The Austrian judges “said it cannot be that politicians sign those treaties, have the commitments, have the targets, and then we do an approach that’s totally against it.”

Could lawsuits backfire?
The distribution of power between legislators and judges is a delicate balance, and one argument against the court strategy, says Gundlach, is that “you’re avoiding the democratic aspects of the process.”
Some Austrians have accused the judges of acting as policymakers. (One counter-argument is that mainstream politicians and media have overwhelmingly favored the third runway, skewing public debates around the issue.)
In the long run, the power of courts will be circumscribed by politics. Judges’ ability to block infrastructure projects will depend on a country’s legal framework and climate commitments, as set by public officials.
In Norway, too, some are concerned that “a legal elite is going to decide about environmental policies,” says Truls Gulowsen, head of Greenpeace Norway, who helped launch the lawsuit there.
He disagrees with that view, noting that the judges are considering laws made by elected politicians, “and normally the Norwegian population trusts the courts in ruling between right and wrong.”
He also says climate litigation can inspire more people to participate in environmental action than in the past, as legal professionals or as donors for legal expenses, which can be significant.
Magdalena Heuwieser, of System Change Not Climate Change in Vienna, says court cases are valuable in raising awareness of the need for climate policies.
“Finally, there is a discussion going on around the topic: Can climate mitigation, or the need of reducing our emissions, lead to decisions which are actually limiting economic growth in dirty sectors?” she says.
But she also thinks public discussion and pressure on politicians are crucial tactics.

Aviation and climate
Though nonmilitary air travel accounts for only 5 percent of global greenhouse emissions, that looks set to rise as more people become financially able to take plane trips (today only 7 percent of people fly). Aviation is now the fastest-growing economic sector in emissions – with a tripling expected by 2050.
And with electric planes not expected anytime soon, technological advances don’t hold the same pollution-cutting potential that they do for ground-based transport.
Another problem, policy experts say, is a lack of environmental regulation around aviation. The industry is effectively self-regulating. (It was excluded from both the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol.)
Most countries exempt aviation emissions from their national inventories, especially for international flights, which either come from or go to another country. (Global 2000 estimates that, if the Austrian government included air travel in its accounting system, it would add 9 percent to the country’s annual carbon emissions.)
The industry also has a competitive advantage over other modes of transport through government subsidies for airport expansion and exemptions on airport property tax, fuel tax and sales tax on tickets. These benefits make flying artificially cheaper compared to driving or taking trains, for example.

Calls for 'behavioral change'
In last year’s first International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) climate agreement, which is opt-in until 2027, the industry pledged only to offset rather than reduce its emissions – mainly through controversial carbon offset projects in the Global South (which costs less than reducing emissions in richer countries).
Critics say the agreement represents “greenwashing” more than substantive progress on emissions.
“It in no way is consistent with the headline goals of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change,” says Leo Murray, campaigner with British activist group AFreeRide.org.
For Roland Jöbstl, Policy Officer for Climate and Energy at the European Environmental Bureau in Brussels, air travel as we know it cannot continue if countries intend to meet the Paris targets.
“We’re going to have to have a behavioral change” when it comes to travel, he says.
Though the Vienna decision is being appealed, that process is likely to take about a year or longer. For now, the decision is keeping one case of expansion from getting off the ground.

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Environmental Groups Sue Trump Administration For Approving Keystone Pipeline

Reuters - Valerie Volcovici

U.S. President Donald Trump smiles after announcing a permit for TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL oil pipeline while TransCanada Chief Executive Officer Russell Girling (L), U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (C) and U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry (R) stand beside him.  REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Several environmental groups filed lawsuits against the Trump administration on Thursday to challenge its decision to approve construction of TransCanada Corp's controversial Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.
In two separate filings to a federal court in Montana, environmental groups argued that the U.S. State Department, which granted the permit needed for the pipeline to cross the Canadian border, relied on an "outdated and incomplete environmental impact statement" when making its decision earlier this month.
By approving the pipeline without public input and an up-to-date environmental assessment, the administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act, groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and the Northern Plains Resource Council said in their legal filing.
"They have relied on an arbitrary, stale, and incomplete environmental review completed over three years ago, for a process that ended with the State Department’s denial of a cross-border permit," the court filing says.
In the other filing, the Indigenous Environmental Network and North Coast Rivers Alliance sought injunctive relief, restraining Transcanada from taking any action that would harm the "physical environment in connection with the project pending a full hearing on the merits."
U.S. President Donald Trump announced the presidential permit for the Keystone XL at the White House last week. TransCanada's Chief Executive Officer Russ Girling and Sean McGarvey, president of North America's Building Trades Unions, stood nearby.
Trump, a Republican, said the project would lower consumer fuel prices, create jobs and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
His Democratic predecessor, former president Barack Obama, rejected the pipeline, saying it would lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and do nothing to reduce fuel prices for U.S. motorists.
"This tar sands pipeline poses a direct threat to our climate, our clean water, wildlife, and thousands of landowners and communities along the route of this dirty and dangerous project, and it must and will be stopped," said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.
The lawsuits came on the heels of a lawsuit filed on Wednesday challenging other recent moves to undo Obama's climate change regulations.
Conservation groups and the Northern Cheyenne Native American tribe of Montana sued the administration on Wednesday for violating the National Environmental Policy Act when it lifted a moratorium on coal leases on federal land.
All lawsuits have been filed in U.S. District Court in Montana’s Great Falls Division.

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