Deutsche Welle Stuart Braun
Amidst the worst drought in living memory, the world's driest continent
is also heating up due to climate change. Critics say too little is
being done to prevent increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall.
New South Wales, which is Australia's most populous state and about the size of France, was declared
100 percent in drought on Wednesday.
Despite
the fact that it is winter, farmers in the state and throughout the
southern region of Australia are struggling to maintain their
livelihood as crops fail and livestock die.
With grazing land
turned to dust, some farmers have resorted to hand-feeding to keep their
stock alive. They also have permission to shoot kangaroos that compete
for pasture. Depression and suicide among farmers are on the rise.
And
yet, there is no end in sight to this crippling drought, unseen for
generations. The predicted start of bushfire season has been brought
forward two months in New South Wales to prepare for what could be an
apocalyptic summer scenario.
Though
Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth and has regularly
experienced intense droughts since modern record-taking began after
European colonization, the relatively fertile southern regions continue
getting hotter while receiving less rain.
Autumn of 2017 in southern Australia was the
driest for 116 years. And 2017 was also the hottest year ever in New South Wales.
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| A drought crippled New South Wales in 2006 as well |
Increasing drought
"These regions experienced
increasing intensity and frequency of hot days and heat waves over the
past 50 years, in turn increasing drought severity," said Lesley Hughes,
a professor of biology at Sydney's Macquarie University and councillor
with the Climate Council — a climate change information nonprofit
created after the current government closed down the state-funded
Climate Commission.
But the "source of the problem is complex," she told DW.
Scientists
are confident that warming linked to human-induced climate change "has
contributed to a southward shift in weather fronts from the Southern
Ocean, which typically bring rain to southern Australia during winter
and spring," Hughes explained of the reduced precipitation.
As
rain-inducing weather fronts drift away from land to the Southern Ocean,
the risk of drought has increased, especially in agricultural
heartlands such as the Murray Darling Basin in New South Wales.
Benjamin Henley, a research fellow in climate and water resources at the University of Melbourne, shares this view.
"Climate
model projections suggest that with anthropogenic emissions, the storm
track will shift south, reducing rainfall [over land] in the south," he
told DW.
But global warming could also be increasing the
intensity of drought. "Higher temperatures during droughts, which
influence evaporation rates, can be due to both the lack of rain itself
[due to the reduced evaporative cooling], and the higher probability of
warmer temperatures due to climate change," Henley explained.
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| Farmers have had to hand-feed hungry cattle as pasture lands turn to dust in New South Wales |
Working with colleagues at the University of Melbourne, Henley has
been tracking cool and warm season rainfall patterns over 800 years in
an effort to better understand whether this drought, and the so-called
Millennium Drought of the 2000s that was the longest in history, are in
any way unusual.
In an
article published this past May in
The Conversation,
Henley and his co-authors concluded that "major droughts of the late
20th and early 21st centuries in southern Australia are likely without
precedent over the past 400 years."
Paradoxically, while southern Australia has been overly dry, the tropical north has been "unusually wet" over recent decades.
While
Henley says that "natural climate variability is likely playing a large
role" in these patterns, he acknowledges the southern Australia
droughts "will likely worsen with climate change ... given the drying
rainfall projections."
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Australia: 'Land of drought'
Australian Prime Minister
Malcolm Turnbull, addressing the drought in the state of New South
Wales, which produces one-quarter of the country's agricultural output,
said, "Now we are the land of drought." Australia recently passed
legislation to provide hundreds of millions of dollars worth of relief
aid to farmers, including funds for mental health support.
|
Stalling climate action in midst of big dry
While the Australian government has announced a comprehensive
relief package for farmers, there's concern that an essential part of the problem is not being addressed: climate change.
Members
of the conservative government, including former Deputy Prime Minister
Barnaby Joyce, have declared that climate change mitigation will do
nothing to help farmers.
But Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is at least willing to concede that the climate is changing.
"I
think everyone agrees that we're seeing rainfall that is, if you like,
more erratic — droughts that are more frequent and seasons that are
hotter," Turnbull told state broadcaster ABC.
Turnbull, who has
owned a livestock farm in New South Wales since 1982, reiterated the
collective sense that this was the worst drought in living memory.
But
the government has stopped short of attributing the changing climate to
human-induced global warming, and enacting policy accordingly.
Turnbull's predecessor
scrapped a carbon tax scheme introduced by the center-left Labor
government, and the new leader has since failed to introduce an
alternative emissions trading scheme. Australia has also back-pedaled
its commitment to cutting carbon emissions.
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Environmentalists warn that drought and bushfires could help push the iconic koala toward extinction within a decade
|
Hughes says current emission reduction targets are "not even close"
to combating rising temperatures. Under the Paris agreement, Australia
has committed to reducing CO2 emissions 26 to 28 percent from 2005
levels by 2030.
"This has been widely judged as inadequate,"
Hughes said, noting that cuts of 45 to 60 percent had been recommended
before the Paris deal.
Most concerningly, Australian emissions
have actually been increasing every quarter since March 2015. There are
real doubts that even the current, lowered target will be met.
According
to Hughes, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation (CSIRO) and the Bureau of Meteorology have projected that
winter and spring rainfall could decrease by up to around 15 percent
across southern Australia by 2030.
Meanwhile, rainfall could
decline by 20 to 30 percent later in the century, depending on levels of
greenhouse pollution. The southwest could see rainfall declines of 50
percent, which would be a nightmare scenario for the farmers who
contribute a large part of Australian exports.
"The combined
effect of increasing temperatures and declining rainfall mean that
without deep and rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, there is high
confidence that the time spent in drought will increase in coming
decades in southern Australia," Hughes concluded.
 |
Record temperatures, record fires
The Black Saturday
bushfires in Victoria were the deadliest in Australia's history. They
came on the heels of a record heat wave — with scorching temperatures
reaching the mid-40s Celcius for several days before the blazes started.
In the dry heat, all it took was a spark to ignite an apocalyptic
firestorm.
|
New coal mines
Another sign of the Australian
government's lack of committment around climate action are plans to
mine more coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel and a major source of carbon
pollution on the planet.
The conservative government is backing the construction of one of the world's largest coal mines, the so-called
Adani mine located inland from the Great Barrier Reef.
In
addition to high greenhouse gas emissions, the mine will also be a
major drain on precious water resources. "While farmers struggle with
drought, Adani's coal mine is allowed take up to 9 billion liters of
groundwater and 12 billion liters of surface water every year," noted a
tweet under the #StopAdani campaign on Twitter.
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| IMAGE |
Across Australian media, there's a perception that fossil fuel profits
come before the drastic need to preserve water and mitigate climate
change.
In response, political leaders are happy to recycle the idea that the climate has always changed.
"We
are the land of droughts and flooding rains," said Turnbull this week.
"It's a very volatile and often capricious climate, and Australian
farmers are resilient."
Yet as Australian carbon emissions
continue to grow instead of decline, a widely predicted increase in
drought and temperatures may ultimately force many of these farmers off
the land.
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Mars?
In what could be a scene from the red planet, a
kangaroo's shadow is captured as the animal drinks from a water tank on a
barren farm to the west of Gunnedah, a town in northwest New South
Wales. Since the beginning of June 2018, the drought has continued
unabated. "I have been here all my life, and this drought is feeling
like it will be around a while," property owner Ash Whitney told
Reuters. |
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