Lethal Heating: 05/27/17

27/05/2017

Great Barrier Reef 2050 Plan No Longer Achievable Due To Climate Change, Experts Say

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Environmental lawyers say advice means reef might finally be listed as a ‘world heritage site in danger’

Coral bleaching: ‘We need to tell the truth without scaring reef tourists away’

The central aim of the government’s plan to protect the Great Barrier Reef is no longer achievable due to the dramatic impacts of climate change, experts have told the government’s advisory committees for the plan.
Environmental lawyers said the revelation could mean the Great Barrier Reef might finally be listed as a “world heritage site in danger”, a move the federal and Queensland governments have strenuously fought.
The federal and Queensland government’s Reef 2050 Long Term Sustainability Plan was released in 2015, with it’s central vision to “ensure the Great Barrier Reef continues to improve on its outstanding universal values”. The plan was created to satisfy the Unesco World Heritage Centre, which was considering adding the Great Barrier Reef to its list of world heritage sites in danger, that its condition could be improved.
But in a meeting of the Reef 2050 advisory committee, whose role is to provide advice to state and federal environment ministers on implementing the plan, two experts from government science agencies said improving the natural heritage values of the reef was no longer possible.
With climate change causing unprecedented back-to-back mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, killing almost half of the coral, and with the risk of those events set to increase in the coming years, loss of coral cover and biodiversity was virtually assured.

The experts told the meeting the plan should be revised to aim for something more achievable, suggesting it could aim to “maintain the ecological function” of the reef, while accepting that its overall health would inevitably decline.
The Great Barrier Reef serves many “ecological functions”. For example, the coral provides shelter and food for fish, it provides fish for humans, the various ecosystems provide experiences for tourists, and the reef structure itself provides protection to the coast from waves.
A spokeswoman for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, where one of the presenters was based, said: “The concept of ‘maintaining ecological function’ refers to the balance of ecological processes necessary for the reef ecosystem as a whole to persist, but perhaps in a different form, noting the composition and structure may differ from what is currently seen today.”
Members of the advisory committee would only speak on the condition of anonymity, but several told the Guardian about the details of the discussion.
The view presented reflects that previously expressed by a group of scientists who called themselves the Great Barrier Reef Independent Review Group, some of whom sit on Reef 2050 advisory committees. In their review of the plan’s implementation, published in February, they said improving the heritage values of the reef, as it aimed to, was “no longer attainable for at least the next two decades”. That assessment was made before the latest mass bleaching.
The language was echoed in a communique from the Independent Expert Panel – another body advising on the implementation of the Reef 2050 plan – dated 5 May. The communique said: “There is great concern about the future of the reef, and the communities and businesses that depend on it, but hope still remains for maintaining ecological function over the coming decades.”
It continued: “Members agreed that in our lifetime and on our watch, substantial areas of the Great Barrier Reef and the surrounding ecosystems are experiencing major long-term damage which may be irreversible unless action is taken now.”
Both advisory bodies have recommended that the Reef 2050 plan must address climate change, the biggest threat to the reef, which it does not.
Brendan Sydes, a lawyer and CEO at Environmental Justice Australia, said the news should be a wake-up call, and could result in the reef being considered again by Unesco for inclusion on the in-danger list.
“There’s a real risk that this new information will cause a renewed scrutiny for what Australia is or is not doing to protect the reef – particularly around climate change,” Sydes said, adding that if the outstanding universal values continued to degrade, the very listing of the reef as a world heritage site at all could come into question. “That would be a tragic situation.”
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who sits on the Independent Expert Panel, declined to comment on discussions in the meetings. But he said the shock of what had happened in the past two years had made people reassess what was possible.
“We’re managing reefs in a rapidly changing world,” Hoegh-Guldberg said. “So managing to restore the reefs of the past – the way they were prior to the big insults of the 80s, 90s and 2000s ... maybe we need to be looking at this in a different sense. What are the key ecological functions? Essentially, what roles do they play that are important to humans?”

Decline of coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef

The decline of coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef due to crown-of- thorns starfish, cyclones, and bleaching

Guardian graphic | Source: De’ath et al. 2012

He said that idea had a similar “cold hard light of day” feel to his own “50 reefs” project, which aims to identify 50 reefs around the world that have the best chance of being saved – and which could one day potentially help repopulate other reefs.
Despite the advice, the federal environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, and the Queensland environment minister, Steven Miles, told the Guardian they remained committed to the aims of the Reef 2050 plan.
Frydenberg said: “The Turnbull government is firmly committed to protecting the Great Barrier Reef for future generations and delivering the Reef 2050 plan.
“The government has been clear from the outset that the Paris Climate Agreement is the place to deal with climate change.”
Miles said the purpose of the Reef 2050 plan was to “boost the health and resilience of the Great Barrier Reef, including in the face of climate change”.
Miles said the plan was intended to be reviewed, and the opportunity to do that would come in 2018.
But he also criticised the lack of action from the federal action on climate change. “Australia doesn’t currently have a policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and we need one,” he said. “For the sake of our reef, it’s time Malcolm Turnbull took his commitments from Paris seriously and introduced a real plan that will cap and reduce carbon pollution.”
Imogen Zethoven from the Australian Marine Conservation Society said: “Two years after the World Heritage Committee endorsed the Reef 2050 plan, the federal government appears to have conceded that the plan’s vision is unachievable.
“Climate change is the single biggest threat to our reef. Yet the government is aggressively backing the reef-wrecking Adani coalmine and its climate policies are shameful.”
Richard Leck, a campaigner at WWF, said the recent bleaching events, as well as Cyclone Debbie, showed that “the Great Barrier Reef is a system in crisis”.
“And the elephant in the room, that is not included in the plan, and Australia is not performing well on, is climate change,” Leck said. “Until Australia gets serious about playing its part in limiting emissions to 1.5C temperature rise, we are not taking saving the reef seriously.”

How did the Great Barrier Reef reach ‘terminal stage’?

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India Cancels Plans For Huge Coal Power Stations As Solar Energy Prices Hit Record Low

The Independent - Ian Johnston

'India’s solar tariffs have literally been free falling in recent months'

A field of solar panels at Cochin International Airport in southern India CIAL

India has cancelled plans to build nearly 14 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations – about the same as the total amount in the UK – with the price for solar electricity “free falling” to levels once considered impossible.
Analyst Tim Buckley said the shift away from the dirtiest fossil fuel and towards solar in India would have “profound” implications on global energy markets.
According to his article on the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis’s website, 13.7GW of planned coal power projects have been cancelled so far this month – in a stark indication of the pace of change.
In January last year, Finnish company Fortum agreed to generate electricity in Rajasthan with a record low tariff, or guaranteed price, of 4.34 rupees per kilowatt-hour (about 5p).
Mr Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the IEEFA, said that at the time analysts said this price was so low would never be repeated.
But, 16 months later, an auction for a 500-megawatt solar facility resulted in a tariff of just 2.44 rupees – compared to the wholesale price charged by a major coal-power utility of 3.2 rupees (about 31 per cent higher).
“For the first time solar is cheaper than coal in India and the implications this has for transforming global energy markets is profound,” Mr Buckley said.
“Measures taken by the Indian Government to improve energy efficiency coupled with ambitious renewable energy targets and the plummeting cost of solar has had an impact on existing as well as proposed coal fired power plants, rendering an increasing number as financially unviable.''
“India’s solar tariffs have literally been free falling in recent months.”
He said about it has been accepted that some £6.9bn-worth of existing coal power plants at Mundra in Gujarat were “no longer viable because of the prohibitively high cost of imported coal relative to the long-term electricity supply contracts”.
This, Mr Buckley added, was a further indication of the “rise of stranded assets across the Indian power generation sector”.
Investors from all over the world were showing an interest in India’s burgeoning solar sector.
“The caliber of the global financial institutions who are bidding into India’s solar power infrastructure tenders is a strong endorsement of India’s leadership in this energy transformation and will have significant ripple effects into other transforming markets, as is already seen in the UAE, South Africa, Australia, Chile and Mexico,” Mr Buckley said.

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We Can't Leave Climate Policy To Our Short-Sighted Politicians

Fairfax - John Hewson

There is an urgent need to set up an independent climate body, writes John Hewson.

We have Australian technologies to be a world leader in response to the climate challenge. Photo: Jonathan Carroll

Some issues are too important to be left to governments and politics.
Three times in my life I have felt this to be the case, and advocated that responsibility for them be passed to an independent authority, and process.
The first was back in 1980, when I advocated an independent Reserve Bank, an initiative that grew out of my frustration from sitting as an adviser on the monetary policy committee of cabinet on the Fraser government, watching ministers struggle to set interest rates and our exchange rate – prices that were clearly too important to be left to politicians. The system and its management needed to be depoliticised – in this case, market-based and independently supervised.
The second was in the '90s, when I advocated the independent and professional management of the government's "unfunded liabilities", initially government employee and military superannuation entitlements, in a structure that became, initially, the Future Fund. This grew out of my concern that such liabilities would progressively hit the annual budgets. I felt this, too, could be depoliticised and better managed by setting money aside in a separate fund for professional management.
Most recently, I have been advocating a separation of the budget into its recurrent and capital components, with the latter, essentially infrastructure projects, to be separately funded using a long-term "infrastructure bond". The proceeds would be kept in a separate – professionally governed and managed – fund to be allocated as debt and/or equity to nationally significant projects, which would be financially assessed and ranked by an upgraded and more transparent institution such as Infrastructure Australia.
The recent budget's acknowledgment of "good" and "bad" debt was an important first step towards such a structure.
In all three cases, the policy challenges were longer-term and structural, and most unlikely to be dealt with effectively if left to short-term, day-to-day politics, which has become increasingly self-absorbed, adversarial, opportunistic, populist and mostly negative.
Today, it is now essential to address climate change – the most significant and urgent policy (and moral) challenge of this century – in a similar vein. This issue has been ignored and demeaned by short-term politics for the last several decades. The result has been that we don't have an effective national energy policy, and power costs are now almost prohibitive for both business and consumers, at a time when the globe is probably past any hope of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.
It is yet to be demonstrated effectively how we will achieve a mere 5 per cent reduction in emissions, off a 2000 base by 2020 (getting over the line only because of a Kyoto accounting wheeze), let alone meet our Paris commitments of a 26 to 28 per cent reduction by 2030, off a 2005 base, which was about half what the Climate Change Authority had recommended the target be.
In the absence of bipartisan support, it is now essential to establish, say, a Climate Commission, as a genuinely independent and well-funded authority. It would have an independent board and management, and take full responsibility for delivering the most immediate, cost-effective and fair transition to net zero national emissions by mid-century.
The tragedy is that we have an abundance of natural assets in sunshine and wind. We also have the Australian technologies for cost effective base-load, solar thermal and battery storage for both solar PV and wind projects to be the world leader in the response to the climate challenge. These would deliver both significant domestic "jobs and growth", as well as new export potential.
People now stop me in the street completely perplexed as to how our governments seem content to let the successive closures of coal-fired power stations, most recently at Port Augusta and Hazelwood, just "hit us", costing many hundreds, probably thousands, of jobs, and disrupting households, businesses and communities with absolutely no strategy moving forward. Further, there has been little planning for the inevitability that two-thirds of our power generation capacity will need to be replaced over the next few decades, let alone the essential transformation of our transport industries.
Unfortunately, the short-term "game" of politics has become an end in itself to the detriment of our national interests. It has left what is probably an insurmountable legacy to the detriment of our children and their children.

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