11/04/2019

Adaptation Is The Poor Cousin Of Climate Change Policy

The Guardian - *

 Local governments are feeling the impacts of climate change. What are the major parties doing to help?
‘Even with the most aggressive mitigation efforts, Australian society is already being impacted by a changing climate and will continue to do so.’ Photograph: folkeandersen.com/Alamy Stock Photo 
Announcing new climate change policies is something Australian politicians have learned to fear the most. Over the past decade, climate change politics has knocked off four prime ministers, and split political parties and allegiances apart at their core.
The political risks in this election campaign are no doubt even more exacerbated, with many calling this the “climate election”. Nor is this a battle that is limited to the Green versus Labor swing seats. It is perhaps even more acute in key traditionally safe conservative seats. Buoyed by the result in the Wentworth byelection, several high profile independents are taking on Tony Abbott, Josh Frydenberg and Greg Hunt. Central to their campaign is climate change action.
In the last few weeks the major parties have trepidatiously released their climate change policy platforms.
The LNP policies reflect a party that needs to be seen to be doing something to fend off the independents. Simultaneously it needs to somehow be seen not to be doing too much to avoid deserting votes on the right.
The ALP policies on the other hand reflect a party trying to be seen to be doing a lot to capture the political momentum from the school strike movement, and the broad majority of Australians who want more climate action. On the other hand, being too ambitious gives the Murdoch press the ammunition for headlines it has frothed over for the past decade.
Both parties’ climate policies of both parties are dominated by energy and by and large focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Such policies and actions are often grouped in the category of “mitigation”. Mitigation in this case refers to actions that are taken to limit the magnitude or rate of long-term global warming and its related effects.
The 2019 election should highlight the need for adaptation more acutely than any other previous election
What is missing from both parties’ policy platforms is any substantive commitment to deal with adapting to climate change. Adaptation recognises that even with the most aggressive mitigation efforts, Australian society is already being impacted by a changing climate and will continue to do so.
Even among environment and climate groups, adaptation is often missing from advocacy platforms, or a footnote. Perhaps this is because for many climate activists, promoting adaptation sometimes has that feeling that the battle to combat rising temperatures has been lost.
Adaptation has long been the poor cousin of climate change policy and funding so perhaps this is no surprise. But what is perhaps more intriguing is that adaptation has often been the area of climate change policy that has had more bipartisan support. One of the first national adaptation strategies came about during the Howard era, and in many states, adaptation activity carried through changes in government more in tact than mitigation.
If anything, the 2019 election should highlight the need for adaptation more acutely than any other previous election. The number of weather and climate records surpassed in this last term of government has brought climate change “home” to many Australians. Images of dead fish in the Murray Darling, burning rainforests and button grass plains in the Tasmanian wilderness, coral reef bleaching is front of mind for a large majority of Australians. So are the more personal experiences of hotter and drier conditions and more extreme weather events.
No longer an abstract concern for future generations, it is an issue that is affecting Australians now and in major and complex ways. Unsurprisingly it is this dramatic shift from the abstract to the tangible that is galvanising non-traditional political actors to speak up and demand more. Groups like Farmers for Climate Action, the School Strike for Climate movement, and the Climate and Health Alliance are new movements challenging the climate politics of the past decade.
Local governments and their communities across the country are on the frontline of climate change impacts right here right now and need federal support.
Interestingly, in its 2018 annual survey of Australian attitudes towards climate change, an Ipsos poll found that Australians considered local governments leading when it comes to climate action compared to state and federal governments and industry/business.
Infrastructure upgrades to improve resilience to extreme weather events and hotter and drier conditions are obvious needs. Community and social resilience programs to ensure communities are informed, empowered and have capacity to respond to climate change are also crucial. Several programs are under way, led by local governments such as the Ramp Up Resilience project in rural shires in northern Victoria, and the Resilient South project in South Australia.
Critically, what is needed most is funding support to local communities to design local solutions to the very localised impacts of climate change already being experienced. This goes beyond disaster relief funding, but takes a more proactive approach so that communities can become more resilient to disasters as they will inevitably unfold.
In coming weeks hopefully we will hear both parties reveal the rest of their climate change policies, the much needed adaptation policies.

• Rob Law works for the Victorian Greenhouse Alliances, regional networks of local governments working on climate change projects, advocacy and knowledge sharing.

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Now Adani Has Been Approved, These Are The Nine At-Risk Coalition Seats Most Concerned About Climate Change

ABC - Jackson Gothe-Snape

Key Points
  • New research shows seats where climate change concerns are most common
  • "Keeping day to day living costs down" is the issue most often identified by Australians as a concern
  • Concern over the quality of governance is growing
Liberal seats held by vacating and conservative MPs have extremely high levels of concern for climate change.
And global warming fear was increasing even before the Federal Government approved the Adani coal mine this week.
Electorate-level research released on Wednesday shows the extent of concern for climate change as the election looms.
The polling, completed by Roy Morgan during 2018 as part of the democracy non-profit Australian Futures Project, shows "keeping day-to-day living costs down" is the most pressing concern across Australia, ahead of "improving health services and hospitals" and "open and honest government".
Climate change is the next most commonly identified issue.
At least one in three people (33 per cent) have climate change concerns in nine Liberal seats that are potentially vulnerable at the coming election.
That is significantly above the national average of approximately one in four people (26 per cent).
A majority of these seats have either conservative MPs recontesting or new candidates replacing retiring or ousted MPs.


Australian Futures Project executive director Ralph Ashton highlighted Warringah and Higgins as areas where climate change was the biggest concern.
"People in those seats are represented by a party that they perceive is not doing enough on the issue of climate change," he said.
"People are more concerned about it now than they were even 12 months ago."
Roy Morgan asked Australian electors to nominate the three issues of most importance to them from a list of 18.
The survey included face-to-face interviews with 330 respondents on average in each electorate.
"No current member of Parliament in the Lower House is fully addressing the concerns of their electorate," Mr Ashton said.
"What the politicians are talking about is really not what the Australian public is concerned with."

Call for open and honest government
The popularity of "open and honest government" concerns echoes findings from the long-running Australian Election Study at the Australian National University.
ANU's Ian McAllister said alongside traditional concerns such as health, education and immigration, governance is becoming an issue for Australians.
"Increasingly over the last few years we've seen 'good governance' come in — people have felt they're not being properly governed," he said.
"It's come about due to declining trust in politicians and political parties, and it's particularly come about in the past five or six years with the frequent changes in party leadership."
Mr Ashton said people wanted government and political leaders to solve hard problems.
"Climate change is a classic case of short-term thinking in Australia where we need to shift the conversation from short-term problems to long-term solutions," he said.
The federal election is set to be held in May.

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Former Fire Chiefs Demand Urgent Action On 'Escalating Climate Change Threat'

SBS - Maani Truu

Twenty-three of Australia’s most senior former emergency service bosses have come together in an unprecedented show of unity, calling on the Prime Minister to 'get on with the job' of reducing greenhouse gasses.



Longer bushfire seasons, ‘dry’ lightning storms, increased flooding and higher rates of anxiety: this is Australia’s future without immediate action on climate change, some of Australia’s most senior former emergency service chiefs have warned.
In an unprecedented joint statement directed to the state and federal governments, 23 former emergency service bosses have come together on Wednesday to call for stronger action on climate change, which they believe is threatening lives in Australia.
The 23 signatories, representing every state and territory, have called on Prime Minister Scott Morrison to commit to a parliamentary inquiry into whether the emergency services are fit to defend Australia against the increasing risk of natural disasters.
A fire fighter in front of a spot fire in Victoria. AAP
“In the last year we’ve seen unseasonal fires in Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia, floods and twin cyclones in parts of northern Australia, longer bushfire danger periods, and fires burning in rainforests,” Mr Mullins said.
“Emergency responders are doing their best to protect Australians from worsening extreme weather, but the federal government just hasn’t stepped up to do its part by rapidly and deeply reducing our emissions.”
The demands include that the Prime Minister meets with a delegation of former emergency service leaders, “who will outline, unconstrained by their former employers, how climate change risks are rapidly escalating”, a cease on cutting budgets of services involved in preventing natural disasters and continuing research into mitigating against climate change.
Water bombers in Sydney. AAP
The former executive director of Emergency Management Queensland and former Queensland Fire & Rescue Service deputy commissioner Frank Pagano told SBS News he signed the joint statement because weather patterns can no longer be predicted.
“As former senior emergency service leaders, we are in a position now to talk more unrestrained about what we believe is happening with the weather,” he said.
This year, Australia suffered through its warmest January on record, with fires devastating Tasmania, Victoria and parts of NSW, while in the north of the country, unprecedented flooding swept through Queensland.
Emergency bushfire warnings were in place in Tasmania this summer. AAP
And according to the State of the Climate 2018 report, there has been a long-term increase in extreme fire conditions and the length of bushfire seasons in Australia since the 1950s.
“Our aim is to speak as one. We speak with some authority in the sense of our experience between us. The signatories to the document have well over 600 years of experience,” Mr Pagano said.
“We've seen things and experienced things over our lifetime and over our career that I think can be very informative to a government.”

Australia’s lack of resources
One issue highlighted by the statement was Australia’s reliance on leasing firefighting equipment, such as aircraft, from the northern hemisphere during their cooler months. As Australia’s fire season grows to overlap with the US and Canada, access to the equipment becomes restricted.
Australian states and territories are also dependent on sharing resources, including water bombers, trucks and firefighters, which has up until now been possible due to a staggered start to fire seasons across the country.
“As emergency services leaders we would obviously talk and we would get together and we would plan our attack on the fire season and we'd share resources,” Mr Pagano said.
“But these days that's very difficult because we're having events occurring in each state simultaneously … you're no longer able to plan for that.”
WA firefighters fight a blaze. DEPARTMENT OF FIRE AND EMERGENCY
According to Mr Pagano and the other signatories to the statement, heavy firefighting aircraft is prohibitively expensive to own and operate - but he said it’s time for the federal government to explore whether Australia needs to purchase their own equipment.
“Now countries and hemispheres are competing for resources,” Mr Pagano said.
“It would be very very bad if we have extreme weather events in Australia and we can't get those resources.”

The psychological cost of not acting
Bushfire survivor Janet Reynolds told SBS News earlier this year that she had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after fleeing her home in last years NSW bushfires.
“The skin on the backs of my hands felt as though it was burning all the time,” she said.
“You think of all the people that are going to be threatened if something isn’t worked out now.”
Janet Reynolds standing on her property after it was destroyed by fire. Supplied
Psychologist Dr Susie Burke specialises in the psychological effects of climate change, including treating disorders like depression and post-traumatic stress following extreme weather disasters.
But it’s not just bushfire survivors that are left feeling anxious about the increasing risks of natural disaster.
“We also look at the indirect effects of climate change ... this might be from some of the more slowly unfolding climate impacts. So that might be a prolonged drought or a shifting growing season,” she said.
“That has flow-on effects to it in terms of financial stress and family stress and the economic stresses for farming families and individuals and communities.”
And the number of people suffering from climate change anxiety and distress is growing, Dr Burke said.
“There's a number of reasons for why that might be. One is that with every year of insufficient action around the world we increase the price of runaway climate change and catastrophic consequences,” she said.
“The other thing is that we're also just at the end of a hot dry summer where I work and it's often the case that at this time of year people are looking around at the environment and thinking ‘oh this is what climate change is going to mean.’
“That's truly frightening and we're not doing enough about it globally and certainly not enough nationally.”

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Climate Change Poses Security Risks, According To Decades Of Intelligence Reports

Yale Climate Connections - 

Intelligence analysts have agreed since the late 80s that climate change poses serious security risks
Intelligence officials for three decades have warned of security risks from climate change. (Photo credit: Master Sgt. Ken Hammond, U.S. Air Force)
A series of authoritative governmental and nongovernmental analyses over more than three decades lays a strong foundation for concern over climate change implications for national security.
Most recently, the national intelligence community – including the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other federal agencies – in January 2019 submitted the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment.” In it, the intelligence agencies stated that “climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.”
That report from National Intelligence Director Daniel R. Coats, a former U.S. Republican senator from Indiana, was just the most recent in a long string of analyses that any upcoming challenges to such conclusions will have to address. Those conclusions clearly are at odds with the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine and reverse federal climate policies, and they cast doubt on the President’s next day tweet that “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”
The Trump administration is considering establishing a presidential commission to investigate whether there's a link between climate change and national security. We already know. Click To Tweet
With the White House now reportedly considering an executive order to establish a Presidential Committee on Climate Security that would contest such findings, it’s useful to review the history of climate change/national security official reports and findings. Although it’s unclear where the internal White House thinking on such a committee will lead, it’s been authoritatively reported that the push for such an effort is led by two individuals – Will Happer and Steven Koonin – widely known to have climate change views far different from those of the “established” science community as represented, for instance, by IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences.
Map of the Earth with a six-meter sea level rise represented in red
(uniform distribution, actual sea level rise will vary regionally).
NASA
Former Princeton physicist Will Happer, now with the White House staff, has a long history of scientifically challenged views about climate science. In the past a frequent favorite witness before House hearings overseen by members rejecting the climate science community “consensus,” Happer has acknowledged in a court case receiving funding from Peabody Coal and from other fossil fuel interests. In 2015 the New York Times reported that he was caught in a Greenpeace “sting” agreeing to take money from unknown Middle Eastern oil and gas interests in exchange for writing a report challenging climate science. Steven Koonin has written on blogs and in the Wall Street Journal pieces in stark contrast to the view of the overwhelming scientific consensus.
Concerned about reports of a potential new presidential review of climate change and national security, 58 former military and intelligence officials on March 5 sent a letter to the president cautioning that “imposing a political test on reports issued by the science agencies, and forcing a blind spot onto the national security assessments that depend on them, will erode our national security.”

Three decades of climate national security warnings
Climate and water resources expert Peter Gleick, in a recent review of more than 100 national security documents addressing climate change, has assessed decades of official national security strategy documents prepared to guide Democratic and Republican administrations on national defense priorities and military strategy. Those analyses began warning about threats to U.S. national security from environmental factors in the late 1980s, and in 1990, a U.S. Naval War College Report warned of potential climate change hazards:
Naval operations in the coming half century may be drastically affected by the impact of global climate change. For the Navy to be fully prepared for operations in this future climate environment, resources of both mind and money must be committed to the problem.
President George H.W. Bush’s national security strategy in August 1991 acknowledged climate change as a security issue. In 2003, concerned by research documenting past instances of abrupt climate changes, the Pentagon commissioned a report with the name “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.” The report authors wrote:
an abrupt climate change scenario could potentially destabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war … Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today.
They concluded their report cautioning about climate disruption and conflict becoming “endemic features of life.”
'… increasing risks from climate change should be addressed now because they will almost certainly get worse if we delay.’
Fast forward to 2007: A group of retired three- and four-star admirals and generals working with the Center for Naval Analyses wrote a report on “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.” Their report recommended that “The U.S. should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate change at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.” The authors concluded by saying:
Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States. Accordingly, it is appropriate to start now to help mitigate the severity of some of these emergent challenges. The decision to act should be made soon in order to plan prudently for the nation’s security. The increasing risks from climate change should be addressed now because they will almost certainly get worse if we delay.
A year later, the National Intelligence Council judged that more than 30 U.S. military installations were already facing elevated levels of risk from rising sea levels.
Then came the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review also warning of security threats posed by climate change:
Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.
While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.
The prognoses got no less worrisome when in 2014 the subsequent Quadrennial Defense Review again cautioned that climate change acts as a threat multiplier:
Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating. These changes, coupled with other global dynamics, including growing, urbanizing, more affluent populations, and substantial economic growth in India, China, Brazil, and other nations, will devastate homes, land, and infrastructure. Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increases in food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world. These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.
In 2015, responding to a Congressional request, the Department of Defense stated that climate change is posing “a present security threat, not strictly a long-term risk … the Department is beginning to include the implications of a changing climate in its frameworks for managing operational and strategic risks prudently.”
There’s more. Many of those same concerns were echoed in the Trump administration’s January 2019 Department of Defense report documenting vulnerabilities of 79 military installations to events exacerbated by climate change impacts such as floods, droughts, and wildfires. As just one example, Naval Station Norfolk – the world’s largest naval base – is already experiencing frequent sunny-day flooding.
It’s unclear at this point just when – and even whether – the Trump administration will proceed with establishing a formal overview of climate change/national security links. What is clear is that any such review will have an extensive body of previous official reports to upend if it ends up reflecting conflicting viewpoints.

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