26/04/2018

Climate Change: The Fiduciary Responsibility Of Politicians & Bureaucrats

RenewEconomy - *
“Fiduciary: a person to whom power is entrusted for the benefit of another”
  “Power is reposed in members of Parliament by the public for exercise in the interests of the public and not primarily for the interests of members or the parties to which they belong. The cry ‘whatever it takes’ is not consistent with the performance of fiduciary duty”
Sir Gerard Brennan AC, KBE, QC
Part 1.
After three decades of global inaction, none more so than in Australia, human-induced climate change is now an existential risk to humanity.
That is, a risk posing large negative consequences which will be irreversible, resulting inter alia in major reductions in global and national population, species extinction, disruption of economies and social chaos, unless carbon emissions are reduced on an emergency basis.
The risk is immediate in that it is being locked in today by our insistence on expanding the use of fossil fuels when the carbon budget to stay below sensible temperature increase limits is already exhausted.
As one of the countries most exposed to climate impact, and in the top half dozen carbon polluters worldwide when exports are included, as they must be, this should be of major concern to Australia.
Instead, politicians and bureaucrats urge massive fossil fuel expansion to supply domestic and Asian markets, the latter justified on the grounds of poverty alleviation and the drug peddlers argument that: “if we don’t supply it, others will”. Blind to the fact that fossil fuels are now creating far more poverty than they are alleviating.
In so doing Australia would be complicit in destroying the conditions which make human life possible.  There is no greater crime against humanity.
Regulators now recognise that climate risk far outweighs the financial risks which triggered the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and demand action. Company directors have a fiduciary responsibility to understand, assess and act upon climate risk.
Overseas, directors are already facing legal action, and personal liability, for having refused to do so, or for misrepresenting that risk. Compensation is being sought from carbon polluters for damage incurred from climate impact.  Similar action will be taken here.
But what of our politicians and bureacrats and their contribution to this crime?
The last few years have seen an unprecendented stream of lies and disinformation emanating from our official bodies around climate and energy policy, in blatant disregard of the facts, with seemingly no end to distortions designed to achieve short-term political advantage.
What fiduciary responsibility do they have to the community they are supposed to serve?
Ministers repeatedly remind us that the first responsibility of government is the security of the people.  On any balanced assessment of the science and evidence, climate change is now the greatest threat to that security and to our future prosperity.
Australia signed and ratified the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, presumably with the intent of meeting its objectives to limit global average temperature increase to
“well below 20C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.50C”,
and
“to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible —– in accordance with best available science”, recognising  that “climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet”.
The voluntary Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) made by Paris participants, if implemented, would not meet the objectives, leading to a global temperature increase in the 3-40C range, a world incompatible with an organised global community.
The Australian commitment, of a 26-28% emission reduction by 2030 on 2005 levels is derisory on any fair international comparison.
Regional temperature variations would be far greater than these global averages, rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable even at 20C, beyond the capacity of human physiology to function effectively. This may well be the case across much of Australia.
Since Paris, our Federal Government has ignored the Agreement, brushing off the increasingly urgent warnings of “the best available science” and ramping up fossil fuel expansion, whilst placing every possible obstacle in the way of low-carbon energy alternatives.
Treasurer Scott Morrison Credit: AAP Image
The fact that many Ministers and parliamentarians are climate deniers for ideological or party political reasons, does not absolve them of the fiduciary responsibility to set aside their personal prejudices and to act in the public interest with integrity, fairness and accountability.
This requires them to understand the latest climate science and to act accordingly.  It is not acceptable for those in positions of public trust to dismiss these warnings in the cavalier manner which has typified the last few years. Particularly when the risk is existential.
The Prime Minister failed this test recently by implying the disastrous Tathra bushfires had nothing to do with climate change.  Every extreme weather event today has some element of climate change involved; it is irresponsible to imply otherwise.
Ministers justify their approach by misrepresenting international studies to support their fossil fuel expansion ambitions. Notably by citing the work of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The IEA sets out its perspective on the energy sector over the next 25 years in its annual World Energy Outlook (WEO), exploring the implications of alternative climate and energy scenarios.
Key scenarios are: current policies (CP) which assumes business-as-usual (4-50C temperature increase), new policies (NP) which extends CP with policy committed to but not yet implemented (3.5-40C temperature increase), and sustainable development (SDS) which is the pathway to meet various sustainable development goals.
SDS claims to keep global average temperature increase below 20C, but only with a 50% chance of success by relying on massive investment in sequestration technologies which have yet to be invented.
In reality, SDS would result in temperature increase substantially above 20C. There is no scenario which realistically achieves the Paris objectives.
The IEA is no paragon of virtue regarding climate change.
It downplays both climate impact, and the potential of alternative energy sources, as a result of strong pressure politically from its developed country membership, and from vested interests who make up its advisory bodies such as the IEA Energy Business Council and the Coal Industry Advisory Board.
Consequently their scenarios are seized upon to justify further fossil fuel investment.  For Australia, Asia Pacific coal demand is a key factor, this being our major export market.
In the November 2017 WEO, under NP assumptions annual coal demand increases by 12% or 480 million tonnes by 2040, but under SDS assumptions it declines by 47% or 1880 million tonnes.
The IEA takes NP as their central scenario as this is where we are headed if governments implement their current commitments.
However, in the fine print the IEA make it clear that NP is not a sustainable future. In the 2017 WEO, Executive Director Fatih Birol says: “Decision-makers also need to know where they would like to get to. — This is the point of the SDS scenario” – even though SDS does not meet the Paris objectives.
Having ratified Paris, presumably this is at least where Australia wants to get to. Not so our Ministers.
Resource Minister Canavan
At his National Press Club address on 28thMarch 2018, Resource Minister Canavan insisted on using the IEA NP Asia Pacific 480 million tonnes annual demand increase by 2040 to justify expansion of our coal industry, ignoring the SDS 1880 million tonnes decline.
The latter is the minimum transition to approach a sustainable future; many existing operations become stranded assets before the end of their working life, and certainly no new coal investment. Ministers Frydenberg and Ciobo similarily insist on using NP estimates and ignore the SDS.
Canavan then assured the Press Club that in the first 40 years of this century, the world will use more coal than in the entire previous history of the coal industry.
The IEA repeatedly emphasise that their scenarios are not forecasts.  They are designed to give decision-makers an understanding of the implications of their actions, and they only cover part of the story.
If the NP pathway is followed, there will be no market for export coal as Asia Pacific economies will shrink rapidly under the weight of climate impact.  If more coal is used by 2040 than in previous history, humanity will become extinct. These are consequences the IEA does not discuss.
Such ministerial naivety is laughable, but it highlights a serious governance failure. As with company directors, it is incumbent upon ministers to understand these issues, in particular the risks to which the Australian community is exposed by their decisions.
The only possible justification for Minister Canavan’s view is that he does not believe climate change is even a problem, let alone accept the need to rapidly reduce emissions. Further, he has no understanding of the implications of his proposed action.
Whatever the Minister’s personal position, or the views of those who voted for him, given the overwhelming science and evidence confirming the urgency to address climate change, such ignorance is unacceptable and a fundamental breach of his fiduciary responsibility to the nation. 

 Part 2.
At the National Press Club, Matt Canavan reacted angrily to a suggestion that the coal industry will phase out, objecting strongly to any thought of planning a transition.  The mining industry will undoubtedly remain an essential part of the Australian economy, but markets for commodities come and go.
Irrespective of political preferences, absent some unlikely technological breakthrough to sequester its emissions, coal will phase out, not instantaneously but relatively rapidly. Coal has been through many transitions in the past.
The lesson from these disruptions is the need for thorough planning, retraining and support to avoid many people being badly hurt. Even more will be hurt, with massive climate impact, social and economic chaos, if the coal industry is expanded. It is irresponsible for the Minister to leave communities unprepared for these realities.
Minister Canavan then turned on “well funded” environmental groups “abusing” our “robust environmental laws” to prevent or slow down major projects, such as the Adani coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.
Australia’s environmental laws were developed when human impact on the environment was far less than  today. As that impact has grown, far from being robust, these laws are no longer “fit for purpose”.
In particular, being domestically focused, they do not take account of the greatest environmental risk of all, which is climate change. Under current UNFCCC rules, emissions from fossil fuel exports such as coal or gas are accounted for in the consuming country and are ignored by Australian courts and institutions in granting approvals for projects such as Adani.
However carbon emissions have global impact; coal exports from the Galilee Basin, would have major climate and environmental implications in Australia, as well as in consuming countries such as India. Our laws must be reframed accordingly if they are to be meaningful.
As for “well funded”? Vested interests pour vastly more money into supporting fossil fuel expansion than has ever been available to environmental groups.
Parliamentarians, particularly ministers seem to have lost sight of the fact that they have a fiduciary responsibility to the public, which imposes upon them a public duty and a public trust.
Sir Gerard Brennan again: “all decisions and exercises of power should be taken in the interests of the public, and that duty cannot be subordinated to, or qualified by, the interests of the (parliamentarian/minister)”.
It is entirely appropriate, when the legal system fails, for affected parties to take action to correct such failure, as with Adani, and with CSG projects in many parts of the country. In fact these are the only groups who are genuinely acting in the public interest.
That the Federal government is now trying to muzzle them indirectly via the proposed Foreign Donations Bill is a further breach of its fiduciary responsibility.
The public has the right to expect that Minister Canavan take an holistic view of the Adani project and the many other fossil fuel developments he is promoting, including an honest appraisal of their climate implications for the community. That is not happening.
Environment and Energy Minister Frydenberg and Prime Minister Turnbull. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Similarily with Environment and Energy Minister Frydenberg, who should be proactive in changing environmental laws to include the climate impact of fossil fuel exports on Australia, rather than advocating that  Adani proceed on the grounds it has met current inadequate environmental approvals.
Minister Frydenberg, and the government generally, breach their fiduciary duty by promoting poor climate and energy policy as represented by the National Energy Guarantee, whatever that ultimately means.
This lowest common denominator solution is only being considered because of the fiduciary irresponsibility of a minority group of right wing parliamentarians, inappropriately identified as the Monash Forum, who put their own self-serving ideological agenda ahead of the public interest.
To claim, as the Minister did in his National Press Club speech on 11thApril 2018, that:
“the future of energy policy must be determined by the proper consideration of the public’s best interest not ideologically-driven predisposition”
just adds insult to injury given that the Coalition is, and has been for two decades, in total ideological denial on climate which largely explains our current policy shambles.
The cost to Australia of this self-indulgence is enormous.
The Minister also misrepresents IEA analysis of Australia’s energy policies.  The IEA conducts a periodic review of individual member countries policies.
The latest IEA Australian review in February 2018 was presented by Minister Frydenberg as “backing the government’s energy policies —  commending Australia’s commitment to affordable, secure and clean energy”.
The report itself did no such thing, being highly critical in many areas, including Australia’s continuing failure to comply with IEA membership oil stockholding obligations of 90 days net imports.
We hold less than half that, thus rendering Australia incapable of contributing to IEA collective action in the event of an international oil crisis; a further major security threat to the Australia community which has not been addressed despite repeated representations over many years.
In the light of these ingrained fiduciary failings, what of the bureaucracy, historically reverred for providing “frank and fearless advice” to the political class?  It seems that analogy no longer applies.  In recent policy reviews, the refusal to accept and articulate the implications of climate change on Australia shines through.
The December 2017 Review of Climate Change Policy was one of the most dishonest reports ever published by government in the climate arena.
What purported to be a comprehensive review of the climate change challenge, and responses to it, is nothing more than a re-iteration of Australia’s wholly inadequate and inconsistent policies.
No discussion of the latest climate science and its implications, no preparedness to face up to the real action required. In short little more than political whitewash for public consumption, pretending to do something whilst doing little.
The 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper acknowledged that climate change will be an important influence on international affairs, particularly in our region.
It then anticipated: “buoyant demand for our exports of high-quality coal and LNG —” based on the IEA NP scenario referred to above, around which policy is presumably centred, despite the fact that demand under this scenario would be decimated by climate impact.
This should be unacceptable to DFAT as our lead Paris negotiator, as it is totally inconsistent with meeting Paris objectives.
The 2016 Defence White Paper for the first time did mention climate change in passing in one of its six key strategic drivers of Australia’s security environment to 2035 and it is understood the Department of Defence have since extended their planning to prepare for its impacts as a “threat multiplier”.
This is encouraging, but far behind action being taken by the military overseas.
The overriding impression is that the Federal bureaucracy, with some notable exceptions, are not treating climate change with anywhere near the urgency it demands; whether because of political pressure to downplay the issue, or because of personal convictions, is not clear.  Either way, fiduciary responsibility arises again.
The Australian Public Service Impartiality Value requires advice given to government to be: “apolitical, frank, honest, timely and based on the best available evidence”.
Further, it must be:
“objective and non-partisan; relevant comprehensive and unaffected by fear of consquences, not withholding important facts or bad news; mindful of the context in which policy is to be implemented, the broader policy direction set by government and its implications for the longer term”.
Henceforth, climate change will determine policy across the spectrum, encompassing national security, defence, energy, health, migration, water, agriculture, transport, urban design and much more.
Given continued urgent warnings from scientists, including the government’s own experts, on the need for far more rapid action, the parlous state of our climate and energy debate and the shortcomings in policy formulation, the Federal bureaucracy is hardly meeting its own standards of fiduciary responsibility to the community.
So what can be done?
Many argue that current failures are the nature of politics and we should expect little else. But when the key issues are existential, that is to consign democracy to the dustbin of history and to accept increasing social chaos.
In contrast to earlier eras, the concepts of fiduciary responsibility, public interest and public trust, are clearly not understood by the incumbency, from the Prime Minister down.  This has to be corrected.
A Federal Parliament with any degree of such responsibility, would recognise that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to Australia’s future prosperity, requiring emergency action.
To those prepared to honour this obligation, there is ample information before parliament to warrant that conclusion.
In the public interest, parliamentarians would set aside party political differences, adopting a bipartisan approach to structuring such action, with the bureaucracy in full support.
That is highly unlikely, so there remains legal action. Around the world the seriousness of the climate threat, and the inaction of governments, is prompting communities to take this step, with increasing success.  The same will happen in Australia, absent an outburst of commonsense within the political class.

*Ian Dunlop was formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is a Member of the Club of Rome 

 Links
at No comments:

The Fighting Has Begun Over Who Owns Land Drowned By Climate Change

Bloomberg - Christopher Flavelle

America’s coastal cities are preparing for legal battles over real estate that slips into the ocean.
Houses along the flood zone in Dauphin Island, Ala. Photographer: Nicole Craine/Bloomberg
One April morning in 2016, Daryl Carpenter, a charter boat captain out of Grand Isle, La., took some clients to catch redfish on a marsh pond that didn’t use to exist. Coastal erosion and rising seas are submerging a football field’s worth of Louisiana land every hour, creating and expanding ponds and lakes such as the one onto which Carpenter had piloted his 24-foot vessel.
Suddenly, another boat pulled up beside Carpenter’s. “You’re trespassing,” the other driver declared, before chasing him and his clients down the bayou. The sheriff’s office later threatened to arrest Carpenter if he ever returned to the pond. There was just one problem: Under Louisiana state law, any waterways that are accessible by boat are supposed to be public property, argued Carpenter—even what was previously unnavigable swampland.
Carpenter sued the sheriff, as well as Castex Energy Inc., which owns the property around the pond, for interfering with his business. A district court decided against him in March, noting that an earlier ruling found that the territory was unnavigable swampland when the state sold it into private ownership in the 1800s. Carpenter is appealing that ruling.
Carpenter’s suit reflects a legal and political dilemma that’s beginning to reverberate around the country: As seas rise and coasts wash away, who owns the land that goes underwater? Versions of that debate are taking place in courtrooms, legislatures, and government offices, raising the question of whether and when climate change justifies seizing private property. The stakes are enormous, affecting not just ownership of offshore mineral and fishing rights but also potentially trillions of dollars of coastal real estate.
A decade after the global financial crisis popularized the term “underwater real estate,” parts of the U.S. are grappling with a new, more literal version of that problem.
“There’s no question it will be a huge fight,” says Holly Doremus, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in environmental law. “We don’t exactly know the boundaries of what the state can do.” For centuries, a body of law called the public trust doctrine has stipulated that, when it comes to coastal property, anything below the average high-tide line is owned by the government for the use and benefit of the public. Those rules also cover what happens when the high-tide line moves. If that movement happens suddenly—for example, if a portion of beach is washed away by a storm—the land owner retains title to the property provided he or she restores it to dry land.
By contrast, if the high-tide line moves slowly, state ownership moves with it. And because it’s Mother Nature taking the land, not the government, there’s no legal requirement for the government to compensate property owners. Legal scholars say climate change has scrambled that distinction. “How do you characterize sea level rise? Is it fast or slow?” asks Josh Eagle, a University of South Carolina professor who specializes in coastal law. “Those rules don’t really make as much sense anymore.”
That uncertainty has compounded the awkward politics of governments taking control of private land without paying for it—especially in Southern and Gulf states with a tradition of protecting private property, and where sea level rise is happening fastest. In North Carolina, the state has blocked attempts by local officials to demolish homes whose foundations are underwater. In Florida, the legislature just made it harder for counties with shrinking beaches to intrude on homeowners’ private land. And in Alabama, owners of lots that are now completely underwater want the government to restore their land, even though nobody knows who would then own it.
Around the country, the combination of rising seas and political stalemate will eventually force courts to intervene, says Peter Byrne, faculty director of Georgetown University’s Environmental Law and Policy Program. Asked how those court fights are likely to unfold, Byrne responded: “We’re going to find out!”
Daryl Carpenter aboard one of his fishing charter boats in the saltwater wetlands near Grand Isle, La., with a barrier erected by a private landowner. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg
In Louisiana, the combination of rising seas, subsiding land around the Mississippi Delta, and the reduced deposit of sediment—thanks to man-made flood controls—has put the state at the forefront of the battle over erosion and property rights. Louisiana is losing land faster than anywhere else in the country. Its bounty of oil, gas, and fisheries has made coastal landowners especially reluctant to relinquish their rights to property that goes underwater.
The state has, in turn, been reluctant to claim these newly created waterways, critics charge, depriving the public of access for fishing and other activity, as well as revenue from any future oil and gas discoveries. Jacques Berry, a state spokesman, says Louisiana asserts its claim to submerged lands whenever it believes, “after scientific and historical analyses, that it has a valid legal claim.” That’s easier said than done: Louisiana employs a single person who’s qualified to survey water bottoms.
Others say the real explanation for Louisiana’s reluctance to claim ownership of submerged land is that officials are loath to antagonize coastal landowners, many of which are the same oil and gas companies that are the core of the state’s economy. In March, Kevin Pearson, a Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, introduced a bill making clear that the state’s navigable water bodies are public property. To his surprise, the bill made it out of committee in April—and then died on the floor. “The landowners are so freaking powerful,” he says.
Public access to this waterway near Grand Isle is hindered by a private property owner’s fence. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg
In Florida, rising seas and erosion have sparked a different debate: As beaches recede, should private property owners near the coast be forced to let the public use their share of what remains? In Walton County, part of Florida’s Panhandle that includes Miramar Beach, the line between public and private land has always been tenuous. The state owns everything below the high-tide line, but the dry beach is a mix of public and private property. Historically, the public has been free to wander across sands that are technically owned by private households.
Then two things happened. In 2005, Hurricane Dennis struck the Panhandle, washing away swaths of sand. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection now lists 18 miles of Walton County’s beaches as “critically eroded,” among the worst in the state.
A few years later, county officials started to notice a spike in confrontations between beachfront homeowners and beachgoers who wandered up onto the sand in front of their homes. The property owners started calling the police, or worse. “We had a homeowner brandish a weapon,” says Louis Svehla, a county spokesman. So last year, officials passed an ordinance that explicitly required homeowners to let the public use the beach on their property. The rule wasn’t a direct response to climate change, Svehla says; the county just wanted to clarify the previously unwritten rules for sharing the beach—rules that had started to fall apart.
Private property owners are suing to stop the ordinance. Meanwhile, Florida lawmakers passed a bill in March that would make it harder for local officials to grant public access to private beaches, requiring such rules to be approved by a judge first. Kathleen Passidomo, the state senator who sponsored the bill, says local officials should be careful about impeding private property rights above the high-tide line. But as that line keeps moving inland, she added, so will the public’s right to access what is now private property. She says it’s unclear what will happen next. “The real problem will be when the mean high-tide line is 20 feet from the back door,” says Passidomo. “At some point it could go right through somebody’s house.”
Louisiana state Representative Kevin Pearson. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg
As sea level rise accelerates, potentially leaving coastal homes abandoned from Texas to New England, the legal debate over submerged land could determine whether governments have the authority to tear down those homes. In 2009, a storm damaged six beach houses in Nags Head, N.C., washing away part of the beach they stood on. Town officials claimed that the houses, whose owner had been renting them out as vacation homes, were now below the high-tide line and effectively trespassing on public property. According to the town, that meant the houses could be declared a nuisance and torn down—with no need to pay the owner.
The owner sued, with backing from the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian advocacy group supported by the Koch brothers. Jim Burling, the foundation’s vice president, says there was a fundamental flaw in the town’s argument: Only the state, not local officials, has the authority to declare that the high-tide line has moved—and where the line’s new position might be.
Gordon Schoeffler, the lawyer representing Carpenter. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg
And the state, according to Cliff Ogburn, Nags Head town manager, had no desire to get involved. If Nags Head wanted to tear down homes that were now in the water, state officials told Ogburn, it would first have to buy them from the owners through eminent domain. “I don’t think there’s interest at the state level to remove private property,” says Ogburn. The office of Governor Roy Cooper didn’t respond to calls or emails seeking comment.
In 2015, town officials settled the suit, agreeing to pay $1.5 million to buy the six properties. Ogburn says Nags Head is now in a bind: It doesn’t have the money to buy out other abandoned homes whose foundations are below the high-tide line—a number that will increase as the waters rise. “Unless the state takes action, I don’t see any other mechanism for getting these houses removed,” says Ogburn. “So they just sit there.”
The stalemate in Nags Head could repeat itself in such large coastal cities as Wilmington, N.C., or Norfolk, Va., says Frank Alexander, a law professor at Emory University who specializes in the rules surrounding vacant or abandoned properties. “Who’s got responsibility for removing the damaged structures?” he asks. Failure to answer that question could mean a “coastline dotted with these structures that are half sticking out of the ground.”
In other parts of the country, the fight over submerged land has taken a surreal twist: Who owns land that the government saves from oblivion? Since 1984, Maria Levenson has owned a beachfront lot on the southern shore of Dauphin Island, Ala., a slender strip of land at the mouth of Mobile Bay. But it comes with a caveat: Since Hurricane Katrina struck, washing away whole chunks of the island’s southern side, Levenson’s property has been completely underwater.
Yet Levenson, along with dozens of other property owners, continues to pay taxes on the submerged lots. Their hope is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will decide to dredge sand from the ocean bottom and deposit it along the beach, putting their properties back above water and allowing them to rebuild. “It’s Gulf-front property,” says Levenson, who now lives in Tennessee. “Someday it will be valuable.”
The idea isn’t far-fetched. The Corps regularly restores coastal land around the country, and has already done so along parts of Dauphin Island. At a public meeting in Mobile in February, residents from Dauphin Island urged the Corps to do so again, in the area around Levenson’s property. But there’s a problem: If the land were restored, nobody knows who would own it. “Some of these properties that are underwater may not return to private ownership,” says Jeff Collier, Dauphin Island’s mayor. “That is definitely a possibility.”
Patti Powell, director of the State Lands Division of Alabama’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which is studying whether to rebuild the shore, says there’s no policy determining whether Levenson and other property owners would still hold the land if it gets reclaimed. “I’m not sure that we have any precedent,” says Powell.
If the situation in Dauphin Island seems remote, imagine the same question being applied to huge swaths of Louisiana, where the state plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to reclaim land that’s going underwater. Gordon Schoeffler, the lawyer representing Daryl Carpenter, says it’s unclear what would happen. “If you have an area that has become eroded, and the Corps of Engineers has come in and done a project where they literally pump mud into a water body and it becomes land again, who owns that?” Schoeffler asks. “Nobody knows.”

Links
at No comments:

Climate Change To Drive Migration From Island Homes Sooner Than Thought

The Guardian - 

Low-lying atolls around the world will be overtaken by sea-level rises within a few decades, according to a new study
The people of Kiribati are under pressure to relocate due to sea-level rise. Flooding in the village of Eita on the Tarawa atoll is increasingly frequent. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images 
Hundreds of thousands of people will be forced from their homes on low-lying islands in the next few decades by sea-level rises and the contamination of fresh drinking water sources, scientists have warned.
A study by researchers at the US Geological Survey (USGS), the Deltares Institute in the Netherlands and Hawaii University has found that many small islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans will be uninhabitable for humans by the middle of this century. That is much earlier than previously thought.
Experts say the findings underline the looming climate change driven migration crisis that is predicted to see hundreds of millions of people forced from their homes in the coming years.
More than half a million people around the world live on atoll islands, often extraordinary and beautiful structures based on coral reefs. Their closeness to sea level makes them particularly vulnerable to climate change.
The increase in urgency comes because, according to the authors of the report, previous studies had been based only on predicted sea-level rises. Today’s study also examined the impact of wave driven flooding on the availability of fresh water.
Aerial photograph of Kwajalein Atoll showing its low-lying islands and coral reefs. Photograph: Thomas Reiss/USGS
Saltwater flooding, leading to the contamination of water sources, will see most atolls become uninhabitable sometime between 2030 and 2060, said Curt Storlazzi, USGS geologist and lead author of the new report. “The tipping point when potable groundwater on the majority of atoll islands will be unavailable is projected to be reached no later than the middle of the 21st century.”
The primary source of freshwater for populated atoll islands is rain that soaks into the ground and remains there as a layer of fresh groundwater that floats on top of denser saltwater, according to the study. But as atoll islands are regularly swamped by salt water this freshwater will be contaminated making “human habitation difficult in most locations beginning between the 2030s to 2060s, requiring the relocation of island inhabitants or significant financial investments in new infrastructure.”
“The overwash events generally result in salty ocean water seeping into the ground and contaminating the freshwater aquifer. Rainfall later in the year is not enough to flush out the saltwater and refresh the island’s water supply before the next year’s storms arrive repeating the overwash event,” explained Stephen Gingerich, USGS hydrologist and co-author of the new report.
The authors say although the study was focussed on Roi-Namur Island on Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands, the results will apply to people living in atolls around the world – including the Caroline Islands, Cook Islands, Gilbert Islands, Line Islands, Society Islands, Spratly Islands, Maldives, Seychelles, and north-western Hawaiian Islands.
But the fate of people living on atolls will be just one part of the much wider climate migration crisis, said Dina Ionesco, head of migration, environment and climate change at the International Organisation for Migration. “Millions of people are going to be at risk from extreme heat, extreme water shortages and flooding as well as sea level rises... we are talking about something that is going to play a huge role in the years ahead in terms of forcing people to leave their homes.”

Links
at No comments: