23/02/2018

Bill Shorten Says There's A 'Role For Coal' And Adani Mine Just 'Another Project'

The Guardian - 

Labor leader’s comments come during visit to Queensland and follow CFMEU’s warning that ALP’s blocking of Carmichael mine would open divisive debate
Protesters gather in front of Parliament House on 5 February to campaign against the Adani coalmine. Labor has shown public signals it intends to toughen its position on the project. Photograph: Michael Masters/Getty Images 
Bill Shorten has declared there is a role for coal in Australia, and characterised the controversial Adani coalmine as just “another project” as he digs in for several days visiting marginal coastal electorates in Queensland, trumpeting local infrastructure commitments.
The positive public signal from the Labor leader on the future of coal followed a warning last week by the CFMEU’s national president, Tony Maher, that any move by Labor to block Adani’s controversial Carmichael coalmine would expose Labor politically in Queensland, and open a divisive debate within the ALP about the future of coalmines in Australia.
Maher told Guardian Australia last week that promising to block the Adani project would raise questions, like “what do you do with the next [coalmine], and the next one, and the one after that?”
Shorten has sent a number of clear public signals since the end of January that Labor intends to toughen its position on the Adani project, and policy work has been under way internally since before Christmas.
But despite all the signalling – which started just before the resignation of the Labor MP David Feeney, a development triggering a byelection in the inner-Melbourne electorate of Batman, where local anti-Adani sentiment is a significant issue – thus far the federal ALP has not revealed any detail about how it might move to stop the project.
In Townsville on Monday, Shorten told local reporters there was a role for mining in Australia, and “there is a role for coal in Australia” and he echoed Maher’s description of Adani as just “another project”.
Last week, Maher told Guardian Australia: “I see no reason for Labor to toughen its position. Why win Batman and lose in central Queensland?”
“The environment groups have worked themselves up into a passion about [Adani]. I don’t know why. Adani is just another project and it should be judged on its merits.”
In Adelaide the shadow infrastructure minister, Anthony Albanese, told 5AA that Labor had not taken any decision to oppose the mine.
“That’s not the decision that we have made,” Albanese said. “We have certainly been very questioning about the project, about its financial viability, whether it will go ahead.
“We’ve been quite rightly questioning about the impact on water and some of the environmental consequences of the project,” he said.
“But Labor has to stand up for Labor values and one of the things about Labor values is about jobs and making sure the economy can function.”
Shorten said in Townsville, while unveiling an expansion of the local port, that Labor would stand up for “real blue-collar jobs” and the next “pipeline of work”.
He said of the Adani project that it was highly unlikely to get finance, and the promised jobs associated with the project had not materialised. The Labor leader said his party’s position on Adani was it “has to stack up commercially and environmentally”.
There are a range of views within federal Labor about what to do about Adani. Labor sources have told Guardian Australia that internal consideration on legal mechanisms to potentially stop Adani remains ongoing, but the party is also focused on sending a clear message to Queensland that Labor will produce a regional industry policy that blue-collar workers can believe in.
The ALP and the Greens will go head to head in Batman, and anti-Adani activist groups are already active in the contest. Melbourne voters go to the polls on 17 March.

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Panacea for the Pacific? Evaluating Community-Based Climate Change Adaptation

Environmental Change and Security Program -  |  |  | 

The Australian government’s recent Foreign Policy White Paper has been criticized for its underwhelming climate change section.
Penny Wong, the current opposition leader in the Australian Senate, said that its acknowledgement of the need to support a more resilient Pacific region “rings hollow in light of the Abbott/Turnbull Government’s massive aid cuts.”
But despite these criticisms, the Australian government continues to support a range of climate change initiatives in the Pacific.
Increasingly, Australian Aid and its fellow donors, including USAID, JICA and GIZ, take a community-based approach to climate adaptation.
Germany’s GIZ, for example, carries out community-level adaptation activities for all beneficiaries in the Pacific; and USAID has highlighted its community-level projects as important models.
Our recent evaluation of some of these community-level adaptation programs in Vanuatu and Kiribati found that they provide some development benefits, including increased awareness, empowerment, cooperation, and self-esteem, but that it is too soon to tell whether this approach can reduce long-term vulnerability to climate change.

As the Climate Changes, So Does the Way We Respond
Even if global emissions stopped today, the IPCC predicts that we would continue to feel the impacts of climate change for centuries, so adapting to unavoidable impacts is a key component of aid programs in the Pacific.
How we will adapt, however, has evolved, with donors and practitioners shifting from ineffective “top-down” approaches driven by experts, to “bottom-up” interventions like community-based programs that involve greater participation by local stakeholders.
Researchers theorize that community-based adaptation can more effectively increase resilience, but does it actually work in practice?
To understand whether externally funded community-based adaptation programs can reduce vulnerability and increase resilience, we conducted focus groups and interviews across six communities in the Pacific island nations of Vanuatu and Kiribati to measure local perceptions of the appropriateness, effectiveness, equity, impact, and sustainability of these activities.


 Appropriate Community-Based Adaptation Improves Awareness
In Vanuatu, we found that the information provided by community-based adaptation programs was especially effective.
Communities in the program gained a better understanding of climate change, recognized the need to adapt, incorporated adaptation into their daily lives, and reported an increased ability to cope.
These results show that raising awareness is critical for reducing vulnerability. On the other hand, the lack of awareness activities in Kiribati was identified as a missed opportunity and was cited as an area for improvement.
For the most part, we found that adaptation activities were appropriate for the local contexts; they were delivered in local languages and catered to existing levels of skills and knowledge. In Vanuatu, the projects also consistently addressed the communities’ most pressing needs, such as food security.
But we did find some room for improvement: Local knowledge was often not integrated into designs, and activities were not always aligned with the participants’ existing schedules. And in Kiribati, the project activity did not address the community’s primary concern, which was water insecurity.

 Programs Found Lacking in Equity and Sustainability
The level of equity was highly variable across the adaptation programs—and a clear area for improvement in program design and implementation.
In Vanuatu, the communities largely perceived the programs as equitable, likely due to their gender-inclusive measures and consideration of pre-existing inequalities.
Exclusions, however, persisted; those with lower levels of education, the elderly, and members of a particular religious minority group were left out (an important reminder that we must not overlook religion when working in the Pacific). In Kiribati, men also felt excluded from activities.
Although some participants in Vanuatu believe that the programs’ trainings and practical demonstrations built their capacity to continue activities without support, we found an overall negative perception of the long-term sustainability of these programs.
The activities’ short-term nature, the projects’ insufficient agricultural output, and a lack of ongoing support from implementing organizations demotivated participants and led them to prioritize other commitments.
Furthermore, we also found that the communities were often overly dependent on outside aid to continue the projects, presenting a significant hindrance to successful community adaptation into the future.
As these activities were still relatively new when we evaluated them, it is particularly worrying that issues with sustainability emerged so soon after implementation.


Adaptation: An Effective Development Tool?
The community-based approach to adaptation—like other development-focused adaptation programs—ensures that regardless of the future climate change scenario, there are some positive, development-related improvements.
Our findings reflected this: Although project outputs included many failures, the projects always provided some benefits, including, for example, increased empowerment, community cooperation, and self-esteem, as well as short-term benefits in income and health.
However, it is too early to determine whether community-based adaptation can effectively reduce long-term vulnerability.
We need ongoing monitoring and evaluation to assess long-term performance. And due to its local nature, the impacts are highly contextual.
We also need to evaluate activities in other vulnerable regions, as well as in other countries in the Pacific, to reach a universal understanding of whether community-based adaptation works.
Sharing best practices from these studies will be crucial for the effective use of future resources by NGOs, donors and governments.
Based on our research, we recommend that donors and program designers should:
  • Better understand and integrate local contexts in design and implementation;
  • Use more participatory processes and integrate local knowledge into design stages;
  • Focus on and effectively implement awareness activities; and,
  • Support longer-term projects.
One thing is certain: We need to act on climate change in the Pacific.
By moving away from the ineffective top-down processes of the past, community-based adaptation programs offer new hope.
But are they really the panacea for effective future adaptation? Only time will tell.

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Why The World Is Looking To The Philippines For Climate Justice

The Conversation -  |  | 

Shutterstock
Corporations and governments around the world increasingly stand accused of causing or failing to prevent the damaging effects of climate change. Test cases are being filed in many countries to establish who is responsible and what action should be taken.
In 2016, after a series of particularly violent typhoons hit the Philippines, a group of Filipino citizens and civil organisations, including Greenpeace, accused 47 corporations of having significantly contributed to climate change, and called for them to be held accountable. Dubbed the “Carbon Majors”, these included the likes of Shell, BP and Chevron.
The group asked the Philippines Human Rights Commission to investigate the Carbon Majors’ responsibility for alleged breaches of Filipinos’ human rights to “life, health, food, water, sanitation, adequate housing and self determination” that are associated with climate change.
The Carbon Majors petition bases its claims on a study by climate expert Richard Heede which attributes “the lion’s share of cumulative global CO2 and methane emissions since the industrial revolution” to the world’s largest producers of crude oil, natural gas, coal and cement.
The Philippines Human Rights Commission is investigating a petition against 47 multinational corporations, dubbed the Carbon Majors, for having significantly contributed to climate change that has caused devastation in the country. Shutterstock
Taking on the big guns
In an unprecedented move, in December 2017, the commission agreed to investigate the Carbon Majors petition. Its powers are relatively modest: the commission can only make recommendations to the Filipino authorities and those found to have breached human rights, but it cannot award damages and it has no enforcement powers. Still, its decision could be a game changer for climate change litigation.
In 2005, a group of Inuit petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to assert the United States’ responsibility for human rights violations associated with climate change in the Arctic. But the petition was dismissed on procedural grounds. So what has changed since then?
In recent years, a long string of United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions has emphasised the role of human rights in tackling climate change. The most recent international climate change treaty – the 2015 Paris Agreement – explicitly links human rights and the obligations of climate change law. These developments seem to have emboldened efforts to use human rights law as a means to tackle climate change.
Far from being an isolated complaint, the Carbon Majors petition is part of a global upsurge in climate change litigation. Yet, there are complex legal obstacles to attributing responsibility for breaches of human rights caused by climate change.
First, applicants have to demonstrate that the obligations of corporations encompass human rights violations associated with the adverse effects of climate change. Second, they have to prove that a specific corporation has contributed to climate change, in such a way that amounts to a breach of human rights.
But a balance has to be struck between environmental protection and other legitimate interests, such as providing energy for consumers. However, John Knox, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, has pointed out that this cannot result in unjustified, foreseeable breaches of human rights. He has also suggested that improved scientific knowledge, such as that used to identify the Carbon Majors, has made it easier to trace the links between particular emissions and resulting harm.
Campaigners believe that climate change caused by the Carbon Majors is breaching the rights of Filipino people to basics such as food, water and shelter whenever a typhoon strikes and destroys entire communities. Shutterstock
A petition for justice
All of these elements come together in the Carbon Majors petition, which concerns harm caused by corporations that was largely foreseeable. Recent research suggests that corporations have long known about climate change and its likely consequences, but have failed to act on it.
So the petition can be likened to ground-breaking litigation for harm caused by smoking tobacco or by driving cars. Before successful court cases were brought, liability for either of these hazardous activities was hard to establish. It was only when courts started to attribute responsibility that victims were provided with redress, and dedicated insurance schemes and liability regimes were created.
The decision of the Philippines Human Rights Commission to investigate the Carbon Majors petition is, then, potentially revolutionary. In 2018, the commission will carry out a series of fact-finding missions and public hearings in the Philippines, London and New York to establish whether multinational corporations can be held responsible for human rights violations associated with climate change and, if so, recommend ways to mitigate them.
Far from being a symbolic gesture, this acknowledgement of multinationals’ role in causing climate change would be a primer, and could potentially spark a domino effect in climate change litigation elsewhere.
Corporations are already being brought to court in the US, where the cities of New York and San Francisco are seeking to hold the world’s biggest oil companies responsible for present and future damage caused by climate change.
All eyes are now on the Philippines to see what conclusions its Human Rights Commission will draw; for many, it has already made history by deciding to investigate the Carbon Majors petition in the first place.

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