‘Natural Disasters’ And People On The Margins – The Hidden Story

The Conversation - Jason von Meding

NWCG / HANDOUT

With earthquakes devastating Indonesia, and fires raging in the United States, there has been plenty of discussion of so-called “natural disasters” in recent weeks.
These disasters – and the continuing record global temperatures – has again brought to our attention the growing field of climate change attribution, which investigates the links between climate change and extreme weather events.
But we need a broader perspective as well.
Climate change is often seen in itself as a “hazard”. But really it should be seen as a mechanism by which hazards are changing, and will continue to change. It is a “hazard influencer”.
Disasters aren’t actually all that natural. The reality is that social structures harm and disadvantage individuals, putting them at risk of harm when exposed to hazard.
Poverty and inequality are much more entrenched causes of disaster than any hazard (or climate change) is. There is a danger that by focusing on the “grand narrative” of global change – and flashy technological solutions – we obscure the reality of everyday risk experienced by the most marginalised people in our world.

What makes a disaster?
Picture, for example, an earthquake in Antarctica. (Actually, these are reasonably common.) Is this a disaster? Of course not. It is a hazard.
Now picture the same earthquake in a poor urban district of a developing country. The human toll taken by such an earthquake might would indeed be a disaster.
Disasters are therefore socially and politically constructed. Vulnerability – poverty, homesslessness, lack of infrastructure – is a much larger factor in an individual’s risk than any natural hazard.
While climate change makes certain extreme weather events much more likely to occur, we need to consider carefully the narratives of climate change and disasters that we use. How these stories are framed is crucial if we want to reach people with a message that inspires action.

Ignoring inequality
We must not assume that “managing” either hazards or hazard influencers will necessarily change anything for vulnerable people. To make a difference in their lives, we must address the structural violence that exposes them to higher risk than those in affluent societies.
Some now even advocate for a shift towards talking about “risk creation”. This moves the conversation away from poorer communities that often suffer disasters (and cannot rebuild) towards those responsible for causing the problems in the first place.
This kind of conversation is missing or marginal at all high-level forums. It appears easier to score political points by claiming to have found a technical way to treat the symptom.

The narrative of destruction
Stories are incredibly important for us in understanding disasters. People tell stories to cope with trauma, to demonstrate solidarity, and to connect with others.
But what we see from the media in particular is a narrative that focuses on destruction. These narratives gloss over difference, focus on the spectacular, and entirely dismiss social factors.
The narratives are often deliberately blind to race, gender and class. By focusing on short-term impacts, hero stories and sensational individual accounts, the myth of a homogenous society is sustained. This is more striking in the US than anywhere else.
This narrative fails to get to the root cause of disasters or provide any useful way to help the most marginalised people in the long term.
We are seeing a similar trend with climate change narratives. There is a danger of focusing on the wrong problem. That is why talking about justice is so important. This includes both the right of the global south to development, and the rights of those who are most disadvantaged in richer societies.
They are the people that will suffer most from the impacts of climate change. But most of them are already suffering and will continue to. Particularly if we do not actually address the problems they face every day.
Blaming climate change for disasters plays into the myth of “natural disasters” to some degree. The narrative is therefore fundamentally misleading.

How do narratives affect action?
Making the entire climate change argument about weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and onto “clean energy” leaves the root causes of injustice to fester – inequality, discrimination, marginalisation and an economic system built on exploitation.
We desperately need to pursue a climate change narrative that deals with these root causes and advocates for more than a technocratic fix.
The narrative of climate change must be widened to encompass intractable issues of social, environmental and economic justice. Otherwise we may argue for (and get) clean energy and yet still leave the world much worse for many members of future generations.
How we construct our narrative is critical. If we do not recognise the right problem, our solutions will miss the mark.
Big polluters are “going green” so as to continue making profits. This is not just about fossil fuels, or even just about climate change. More broadly, we must address the ideology of limitless growth and consumption.
Otherwise, predatory corporations may indeed agree to the climate change actions that we demand – but most likely they will have simply found a new way to exploit us.

Links

• Unnatural disasters: how we can spot climate's role in specific extreme events
• Extreme weather, climate change, and people: academic views
• Hothouse Earth: our planet has been here before – here’s what it looked like
• Hothouse Earth: seven things you can do to stop it

Extreme Temperatures 'Especially Likely For Next Four Years'

The Guardian - Jonathan Watts

Cyclical natural phenomena that affect planet’s climate will amplify effect of manmade global warming, scientists warn

‘If the warming trend caused by greenhouse gas emissions continues, years like 2018 will be the norm in the 2040s, and would be classed as cold by the end of the century.’ Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

The world is likely to see more extreme temperatures in the coming four years as natural warming reinforces manmade climate change, according to a new global forecasting system.
Following a summer of heatwaves and forest fires in the northern hemisphere, the study in the journal Nature Communications suggests there will be little respite for the planet until at least 2022, and possibly not even then.
Rising greenhouse gas emissions are steadily adding to the upward pressure on temperatures, but humans do not feel the change as a straight line because the effects are diminished or amplified by phases of natural variation.
From 1998 to 2010, global temperatures were in a “hiatus” as natural cooling (from ocean circulation and weather systems) offset anthropogenic global warming. But the planet has now entered almost the opposite phase, when natural trends are boosting man-made effects.



“Everything seems to be adding up,” said the author of the paper, Florian Sévellec of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
“There is a high possibility that we will be at the peak of a warm phase for the next couple of years.”
The scientist built his forecasting system by statistical “hind-casting”.
This crunches the data from previous climate models to measure which combination was most effective in predicting past temperature trends.
Based on this analysis, Sévellec says the statistical upward nudge from natural variation this year is twice as great of that of long-term global warming.
Next year, it is likely to be three times higher.
He cautions that this should not be seen as a prediction that Europe will definitely have more heatwaves, the US more forest fires, South Africa more drought or the Arctic more ice melt.
The likelihood of these events will increase, but his model is on a broad global scale.
It does not predict which part of the world will experience warming or in which season.
But his data clearly suggests that water in the oceans will warm faster than air above land, which could raise the risks of floods, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones.
“Natural variability is a wriggle around the freight train that is global warming,” he says.
“On a human scale, it is what we feel. What we don’t always feel is global warming. As a scientist, this is frightening because we don’t consider it enough. All we can do it give people information and let them make up their own mind.”
He said his model should not be seen as the final word, but be taken alongside other forecasting systems, including those that look in more detail at what is happening on a regional level.
Dr Sam Dean, chief climate scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said the paper indicated mankind will have to rely less on “fortuitously cool years” from natural processes.
Instead of the cooling La Niñas experienced in the first decade of the century, he said there have been more warming El Niños since 2014 and this trend looks set to continue.
“While we can’t be sure exactly how things will play out, at the moment the odds are higher for hot years,” he said.
Other scientists praised the paper but concurred on the need for wider analysis.
“The findings suggest it’s more likely we’ll get warmer years than expected in the next few years," said Prof Gabi Hegerl of Edinburgh University.
"But their method is purely statistical, so it’s important to see what climate models predict based on everything we know about the atmosphere and the oceans. Those are more expensive to run but also use more climate physics and observational information.”
Professor James Renwick of Victoria University of Wellington said the new forecasting system was clever, but its value will only be clear in the future.
The broader trend, however, was clear.
“If the warming trend caused by greenhouse gas emissions continues, years like 2018 will be the norm in the 2040s, and would be classed as cold by the end of the century,” he wrote.

Links

• From greenhouse to hothouse: the language of climate change 
• Domino-effect of climate events could move Earth into a ‘hothouse’ state
• Last year was warmest ever that didn't feature an El Niño, report finds
• Extreme global weather is 'the face of climate change' says leading scientist
• Global warming made Hurricane Harvey deadly rains three times more likely, research reveals
• Climate change: ‘human fingerprint’ found on global extreme weather
• 'Extraordinarily hot' Arctic temperatures alarm scientists
• Flooding: UK government plans for more extreme rainfall
• Extreme weather becoming more common, study says
• Climate change likely to turn UK's weather more extreme
• Scientists attribute extreme weather to man-made climate change

Climate Change Threatens Property And Lives, But Politicians Fail To Work Together

The Fifth Estate - Cameron Jewell

Image: Thomas Hafeneth

A much-anticipated Senate Inquiry into climate change’s impact on housing, buildings and infrastructure has seen the three major political parties unable to agree on a single recommendation.
Referred to the Environment and Communications References Committee back in May 2017, the inquiry looked into climate change’s current and future impacts on the built environment, taking into account all projected climate scenarios.
Topics investigated included sea level rise, extreme heat, storms, flood, cyclones, coastal inundation, impacts on utility provision, impacts on transport infrastructure, and impacts on housing, hospitals, schools and public recreation facilities.
The report, which had submissions from a plethora of peak bodies, industry groups, scientists and academics, had been delayed three times before being released on Monday night.

Coalition fails to make any recommendations at all
But on release, more than a year after being referred, the report contained no recommendations from the committee, which was chaired by Greens Senator Janet Rice and also included three Labor senators, and a Liberal and National senator. Instead, each party provided a separate list of recommendations at the end of the report – or, in the case of the Coalition members, no recommendations at all.

Industry largely on the same page, but parties play politics
The report details the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets at risk from climate change, and the losses already experienced from extreme weather events. There wasn’t much we haven’t heard before: extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts and floods are already being super-charged by climate change; we’re not building to withstand potential climate events; land use planning hasn’t caught up with the realities of climate change and insurance costs are expected to rise dramatically.
There should have been a number of areas where consensus was achieved – for example, auditing infrastructure or construction standards to see if they can stand up to future conditions.
A number of submitters called for a national audit on the cost of climate change impacts on Australian infrastructure. Investor Group on Climate Change chief executive Emma Herd said a “whole-of-economy approach” to auditing was needed so that cost-benefit analyses could be made regarding mitigation efforts. The Climate Council’s Professor Lesley Hughes and the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council agreed.
Kirsty Kelly, on behalf of ASBEC, said an audit wouldn’t even necessarily need to test individual assets, rather construction standards could be reviewed to consider “whether those standards are based on the frequency and intensity of weather events that we are seeing now”.

We’re still building in the wrong areas
Others called for better access to data. Local government associations and insurance companies noted that land use planning and zoning requirements were not reflecting the risks of climate change. In other words, we’re still building on areas likely to be flooded or at high risk of bushfire.
On housing the inquiry received evidence that “Australian buildings are generally not well suited to the existing climate, let alone a future further affected by climate change”. For example, Sustainability Victoria found an average NatHERS rating of 1.81 for homes constructed before 2005.
If the grid failed due to excessive use of airconditioning, those in poor quality houses were at great risk of heat stress and even death. If homes were upgraded to 5.4 stars, deaths from a 2009-type heatwave could be reduced from 374 additional deaths to 37.
A large number of submitters argued that minimum standards needed to be raised, and that NatHERS needed to be updated to better account for heat stress.
“Where the building code currently sits, the six-star minimum standard for NatHERS is not sufficient in its ability to address heatwaves in particular,” City of Melbourne’s Gavin Ashley said.
“It’s based on year-round energy use and splits that between your cooling and heating requirements. That doesn’t give a great indication of how your building is going to perform in a heatwave.”
ASBEC and the GBCA both called for a pathway to net zero emissions in buildings by 2050.

Greens and Labor find common ground
Senator Janet Rice said it was “disappointing” that the panel members could not “arrive at consensus conclusions on issues of such importance”.
In a speech to parliament Ms Rice said she had put forward a suite of recommendations she felt “were based very strongly on the evidence that was produced before us”, but which were not supported by the committee.
Instead each party delivered their own set of recommendations, or otherwise in the case of the Coalition.
“The government senators had no recommendations,” Ms Rice said.
“Their additional comments merely note a range of things that the government is already doing. They were not engaging with the serious nature of the evidence that was put before us in this important committee.”
It should be noted, however, that the Greens and Labor senators reached consensus on most issues, though Ms Rice called Labor’s recommendations a “watered down version” of the Greens’.
There was one recommendation only the Greens put forward, which was the establishment of an independent statutory authority to provide information on climate change. And both parties had different views on mechanisms required to transform the electricity sector.
But there was, largely, solidarity on the other 31 recommendations. These included:

• development of minimum building standards to address heat stress risks
• mandatory disclosure of residential energy efficiency be legislated at sale or rent
• that governments consider setting a date for minimum performance standards for all properties
• federal government committing to a net zero target (2040 for Greens and 2050 for Labor)
• funding of the preparation of a National Climate Change Risk Assessment that includes assessments of extreme risks and worst-case scenarios for Australia’s built environment
• funding Infrastructure Australia to lead a national audit of at-risk infrastructure
• ongoing funding to support the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility and bodies like CSIRO
• identifying options for ensuring that robust post-project reviews of infrastructure projects are conducted
• outlining a transition to net zero emissions transport sector
• that water system and sewer design factor in climate projections
• amending the National Electricity Objective to include decarbonisation of the electricity sector
• the development of a national climate change and health strategy

“At its core, this report serves as a tally of the risks and the costs of a do-nothing approach to climate change – the still severe but manageable consequences of a world where carbon pollution is rapidly reduced and the options available to government to manage and choose between these alternatives,” Ms Rice said.

Links

• Senate Report: Current and future impacts of climate change on housing, buildings and infrastructure
• REST super fund faces legal action for silence on climate change
• Suburb “Cool Scores” key to solving Sydney’s heatwave woes
• Climate risks should be a priority for boards of directors
• On why it’s time to give up our massive risk taking appetite
• Australian heatwave deaths could rise by 500 per cent
• Property sustainability conversation turns to carbon positive
• Will the NEG change the net zero game?