Rising seas are threatening to encroach on low-lying parts of
Melbourne within 20 years, causing flooding and erosion in suburbs
including St Kilda, Point Cook, Mordialloc, Seaford and Frankston.
Other
places at risk include areas around Queenscliff and Barwon Heads on the
Bellarine Peninsula; the south-west Victorian towns of Port Fairy and
Portland; and Tooradin, Lang Lang and Seaspray in the state's
south-east.
Melbourne bayside areas are among those ranked as at risk. Credit: Luis Ascui
A
report tabled in Victoria's Parliament last week examines the myriad
threats to the state’s fragile coastline, painting an alarming picture
of damage to the environment and suburban Melbourne if no action is
taken.
The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council report cites
a 20-centimetre sea-level rise by 2040 and between 40 centimetres and
one metre by century’s end.
“Sea-level rise will lead to more
frequent inundation of low-lying areas, loss of coastal habitat, cliff,
beach and foreshore erosion,” the report says.
“Climate change
will also put pressure on ageing coastal infrastructure and ultimately
impact on feasibility of living in or developing some coastal
locations.”
Locals Dave Sutton
(left) and Phillip Heath on the remaining strip separating the surf
beach from the road at Inverloch, where erosion has caused major
problems. Credit: Justin McManus
Increasing
storm intensity, coupled with rising seas, will cause extensive erosion
of the Victorian coastline by 2040, the report says.
“The most
extensive area vulnerable to erosion by 2040 is the Gippsland coast,” it
says. “Other coasts at risk include west of Portland, beaches in Port
Phillip Bay between Mordialloc and Frankston, and the coast between Cape
Paterson and Cape Liptrap in South Gippsland.”
Coastal erosion has already had a dramatic impact on the foreshore at Inverloch, which has receded 33 metres since 2012.
Erosion
has also caused major problems in Port Fairy, where the local council
has stepped up research and planning to tackle the problem.
The
report also considers the impact of other coastal threats, including
tourism and development. It outlines how a growing population may
increase water pollution, with higher levels of treated sewage effluent
and industrial wastewater expected to be discharged into the sea.
School students protesting for greater action on climate change. Credit: Justin McManus
The report is intended as a planning tool for the state government, which is developing a policy for coastal protection.
A government spokeswoman said action was being taken to protect the coastline in the face of climate change.
"We’re
preparing the Victorian coast for the climate change challenges ahead
through research, policy change and on-ground action – investing more
than $60 million into marine and coastal projects since 2014," she said.
The
spokeswoman said the government was working with communities and
councils on a range of projects, including a beach "renourishment
program" to mitigate erosion.
It has also spent $10 million on its
Port Phillip Bay Fund, which provides grants for community projects
that protect and preserve the health of the bay.
Victorian
Environmental Assessment Council member Geoff Wescott said the modelling
and predictions contained in the report laid out the consequences of
failing to take action.
“When you see those maps of St Kilda or the Elwood Canal flooding, that is what happens if nothing is done,” he said.
The
government has also commissioned the CSIRO to begin a fresh assessment
of the likely coastal hazards that rising seas and bigger storm surges
will create along the shores of Port Phillip Bay.
The swollen Elster Creek flooded the Elwood Canal in 2016. Credit: Penny Stephens
That work by Australia’s national science agency is due to be finished by the middle of next year.
Melbourne
University senior property lecturer Georgia Warren-Myers said even
small sea-level rises coupled with storm surges could have a major
impact on some densely populated parts of Melbourne.
A
report Dr Warren-Myers co-wrote found that 33 per cent of properties in
the City of Port Phillip would be affected by a sea-level rise of half a
metre when combined with storm surges.
But she warned property
taxes, a key revenue source for state and federal governments, would
also be impacted if buyers began rejecting particular areas due to their
vulnerability to flooding.
“There are future economic implications that haven’t been really thought out,” she said.
Dr
Warren-Myers called for local governments to include more information
about sea-level rise and potential flood risk in planning overlays, so
they had to be included in Section 32 legal documents that sellers are
required to provide to potential buyers.
Port Phillip Baykeeper
Neil Blake said erosion and sea-level rises posed huge challenges and
may eventually force some Victorians to move from currently populated
areas. “There will have to be a major adaptation required to address
that,” he said.
Mr
Blake said it was beyond time to be discussing climate change in
theoretical terms as its consequences were now having a tangible impact
on the community and environment.
But he said plastic litter was one of the biggest threats to the health of Victoria’s coastline.
Predicted coastal erosion impact along Victoria’s coastline. VEAC Report
If the world were on track to meet the Paris Agreement goal of less
than 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, methane levels in the
atmosphere would theoretically be dropping.
Instead, they have been
rising since 2007, and shooting up even faster since 2014.
A perspective
published in the journal Science discusses the potential causes and consequences of our planet's out-of-control methane.
Methane decays in the atmosphere faster than carbon dioxide
does, but it is a far more powerful greenhouse gas.
According to the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a molecule of methane will cause 28-36 times
more warming than a molecule of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period.
Recent data shows that methane concentrations in the atmosphere have risen from about 1,775 parts per billion in 2006 to 1,850 parts per billion in 2017.
The emissions targets in the Paris Agreement were based largely on
data from the 1990s and early 2000s, when methane levels were flatter,
said Sara Mikaloff Fletcher, a climate scientist
with New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research
in Wellington and first author of the new article.
The only emissions
scenario that achieves Paris Agreement goals in climate models
assumes that methane levels have been declining since 2010, when in
fact they have been rising since 2007, she said.
There may be other ways
of keeping climate change under 2 degrees Celsius, but they would
involve compensating for rising methane with more drastic cuts to other
greenhouse gases.
Scientists aren't sure why methane levels are rising.
A 2017 study
attributes about half of the increase to cows and other ruminant
livestock, which burp methane as they digest food.
Another contributing
factor could be that people are releasing more fossil fuel emissions
while burning less wood and other biomass.
In Mikaloff Fletcher's view, the most alarming possibilities are the
ones we have little control over.
Rising temperatures could be
triggering wetlands to release more methane, and changes in atmospheric
chemistry could be slowing the rate at which methane breaks down.
Farhana Yamin is an international environmental lawyer and activist with
the Extinction Rebellion movement. Over the past three decades, she has
co-authored a number of international treaties on climate change,
including the Paris climate agreement. She is a contributor to This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook.
At this point in human history we have three choices: to die, to survive or to thrive.
From the wildfires in the U.S., coral die-back in the
tropics and the deadly hurricanes battering small islands, the signs
are crystal clear: climate devastation is already here.
The world’s
poorest people and indigenous communities
are on the front line. They are also bearing the brunt of the sixth
mass extinction, which is under way due to conversion of their forests,
wetlands and other wild landscapes into concrete cities, dam reservoirs
and fields growing soya.
I joined Extinction Rebellion
to fight against the climate and ecological emergency we are now facing
– an emergency that threatens the very conditions of all life on Earth.
I have been an environmental lawyer for thirty years, working to create
new treaties, E.U. agreements and national laws aiming to prevent the
situation we now find ourselves in. Sadly, I know this emergency cannot
be averted by governments signing weak compacts and voluntary agreements
with the biggest polluters on Earth. Nor by tweaking carbon markets
that have been gutted of climate ambition by fossil-fuel lobbyists. We
need to overhaul our political systems to limit access to government by
big business. We need citizens’ assemblies to allow ordinary people to
decide the scale and pace of transition on the basis of independent
scientific advice.
Normal politics has failed us. It has brought
the whole planet to the brink of ecological disaster. We cannot invoke
and rely on the inadequate legal tools of the past 30 years that have
allowed this crisis to happen. We need everyone to unite – from the
left, the right, and every shade in between, and especially young
people, many of whom are too disillusioned to vote or are excluded
because they are only 16. We need everyone to undertake mass civil
disobedience to create a new political reality the whole world over.
But we can’t get there if we work in silos and factions. We need a “movement of movements”
to model the unity and urgency we need right now. The new movement of
movements must be led by our youth and by those who have been resisting
“business as usual,” especially communities of color and those at the
forefront of oppression.
The new movement must be based on the reality
that the legacy of colonialism, combined with current forms of
capitalism based on never-ending extractive growth, is literally killing
us. The reality is that four environmental defenders a week are being
killed in the Global South. We in the Global North need to honor their
work and join their struggles by also throwing our own bodies on the
line.
We need a socially just transition for everyone on
Earth, not just for workers trapped in the toxic industries that need to
be phased out, but for everyone at the sharp end of austerity and
ecological destruction. Climate and ecological destruction are at heart
issues about social and intergenerational justice. We can’t just fixate
on the maths and science of climate change and leave people and fairness
out of the equation.
These are the facts that justify the
unification and intensification of our shared struggles and which will
only succeed if we have a worldwide rebellion. Climate-change denialists
cannot cover up the fact that the struggle for access to natural
resources, especially fresh water and arable land, is intensify- ing,
and that large parts of the planet are already becoming uninhabitable
due to food and water scarcity.
Farhana
Yamin, Extinction Rebellion activist speaks at the Climate emergency
protest in Parliament Square outside the Houses of Parliament on May 01,
2019 in London, England. John Keeble—Getty Images
The world’s insect population has fallen
by 60 per cent since the 1970s. Large parts of Europe look green but are
‘biodiversity deserts’ – the birds and bees are dying. Current
extinction rates are at least tens, and possibly hundreds, of times
greater than background rates, destroying entire eco- systems both on
land and in the sea. Climate change is warming up the atmosphere,
oceans are acidifying and the cryosphere – the parts of the world
covered in ice – is literally in meltdown. Abrupt, non- linear,
irreversible changes are underway in the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland
and the world’s glaciers, which are crucial to food, water and
agricultural production.
The human consequences of these changes – economic
instability, large- scale involuntary migration, conflict, famine and
the collapse of economic and social systems – are plain to see and
reported daily, but these stories are not linked in mainstream political
and media coverage to the climate and ecological emergency that is
already upon us.
Between 2006 and 2011, 60 per cent of Syria suffered
the worst long- term drought and crop failures in the country’s history.
Two to three million people became poor and many more were internally
displaced. The resulting social instability amplified the political
factors that led to war in Syria, with now half its original population
of 13 million having migrated or been internally displaced. Something
similar is occurring in Yemen, where up to 10 million people face
starvation, despite millions trying to move to safer, once fertile
areas.
The received political wisdom that people in rich countries
can sit tight and buy their way out of catastrophic environmental
outcomes, or know that the welfare state will save them, is looking more
and more fanciful as we remain in the grip of austerity politics.
Anyone with an understanding of how the global food system works,
especially how much of the world’s food supply passes through less than a
dozen ‘choke point’ ports, will know that our economies are deeply
intertwined. Everyone will be affected, joining the millions who already
are all over the world. Poor communities, especially people of color,
whether in the Global North or the Global South, who have always been on
the front lines of environmental injustice, will likely also bear the brunt of the new catastrophes.
Climate
change activists from the Extinction Rebellion group march up to block
the street at Bank in the heart of the City of London financial district
in protest that the government is not doing enough to avoid
catastrophic climate change and to demand the government take radical
action to save the planet, on 25th April 2019 in London, England, United
Kingdom. Mike Kemp—In Pictures via Getty Images
Are humans destined to become extinct as a species? Will we be slugging
it out for what little remains by arming our- selves and building walls
to keep out those less fortunate than ourselves? Can we really dismantle
the toxic systems that have given rise to these gargantuan problems in
the short window we now have?No one knows what will happen, and no
one can say for sure whether or not fundamental ecological tipping
points have already been breached. The good news is that there are
millions of people mobilizing to stop humanity falling off a cliff.
And they also have some sharp new ideas to create
kinder, regenerative societies that can start the process of restoring
nature and create communities of resistance and resilience to the
impacts we cannot avoid. They want to do more than just avoid extinction
or merely survive. They are building a movement built on solidarity and
well- being so everyone, and every part of everyone, can flourish.
Ending domination over nature goes hand in hand with tackling all forms
of domination and hierarchy. The struggle for climate justice is also
the struggle for racial, gender, sexual and economic equality. We are
not alone. Actions are now happening all over the world.
In Ghana, Extinction Rebellion activists recently
held an event calling for action on the climate and ecological emergency
in Africa. The event was staged in solidarity with those in the Global
South and the entire world. ‘The impact of the climate catastrophe is
part of our daily life. This is why this event is important,’ says the
Ghanaian activist Mawuse Yao Agorkor.
These voices cannot be ignored
any longer. This year, Extinction Rebellion has injected a new sense of
energy and urgency into the climate movement. Thousands of people have
joined, participating in non- violent actions by blocking bridges,
blockading roads and shutting down government buildings.
Members
of the Extinction Rebellion Youth group locked themselves to the fence
of Parliament demanding climate change action on May 3rd 2019 in London,
United Kingdom. Kristian Buus—In Pictures via Getty Images
While media
headlines have focused on our work in the United Kingdom, Extinction
Rebellion has started an International Solidarity Network to support
existing resistance in the majority world, working closely with
activists in West Papua, Bangladesh, Mongolia and the Caribbean. Extinction Rebellion is also linking with and learning from other movements.
At the U.N. Conference on Climate Change, Extinction
Rebellion supported the Alliance of Small Island States and the Climate
Vulnerable Forum – together representing over 80 countries with 1
billion people. We helped pull together an international ‘emergency
coalition’ to reject weak language that would have condemned them to
extinction. While we in the Global North might only just be feeling the
effects of climate change, the majority world has long since known the
tragedy that the climate crisis brings.
Support is also being provided to the youth-led school strike movement started by Greta Thunberg,
and to the newly emerging Birthstrike movement which is taking off in
many countries to support people who are choosing not to bring children
into this world unless, and until, conditions improve. In the U.S., the
Sunrise Movement is building bipartisan support for a ten year
mobilization and investment plan called the Green New Deal.
What all these movements have in common is a complete
rejection of neoliberal economics and ‘business as usual’ politics.
Yes, it is too late to prevent all the negative impacts of climate
change. But this cannot destroy our capacity to nurture. It cannot
destroy our capacity to love and our sense of justice.We can and now
must redesign human societies based on love, justice and planetary
boundaries so that no person or society is left to face devastating
consequences and we learn to restore nature together.
Faced with
toxic systems that are destroying all life on Earth, affirmation of this
vision and rebelling against whatever gets in its way becomes a sacred
duty for all. We can and must succeed in catalyzing a peaceful
revolution to end the era of fossil fuels, nature extraction and
capitalism.
Life on Earth depends on it.
Senior APRA official Geoff Summerhayes says it is clear that climate change financial risks are now "orthodox economic thinking"
Mr Summerhayes says "government spending decisions may need to be reprioritised" to spread the costs of climate change
NAB chairman and former Treasury secretary Ken Henry says Australia will move to 100pc renewable electricity by mid-century, even without a carbon price
Climate change pain is inevitable with the only question being "how much and when", a top prudential regulator has warned.
Australian
Prudential Regulation Authority executive Geoff Summerhayes said
businesses that ignore climate change risks could confront their own "Kodak
moment", referring to the film giant that failed to foresee the rapid
rise of the digital world and went into bankruptcy protection.
"Companies
that delay or avoid adjusting to new economic realities, no matter how
famous or successful, can quickly find themselves on the verge of a
Kodak moment," Mr Summerhayes warned an insurance conference in
Singapore.
Mr Summerhayes said the warnings about foreseeable and
potentially catastrophic climate change as a first-order economic risk
were no longer limited to fringe groups and environmentalists but now
include conservative bodies, such as the Reserve Bank of Australia, APRA
and corporate regulator ASIC.
"When a central bank, a prudential
regulator and a conduct regulator, with barely a hipster beard or hemp
shirt between them, start warning that climate change is a financial
risk, it's clear that position is now orthodox economic thinking," he
said.
"Debate has largely moved on from whether there is a threat
that requires a response to questions about the urgency of threat, who
should carry the financial burden of addressing it, and whether the
benefits are worth the cost.
"Regardless of their choice, some pain will be felt; the only questions being how much and when."
Mr
Summerhayes said while businesses around the world were struggling to
find the appropriate balance, data around how to best manage climate
change "remains under-developed, making informed debate challenging …
and decision-making difficult."
Local electricity sector will be '100pc renewables'
Mr
Summerhayes told the International Insurance Society Global Insurance
Forum that, while climate change debates exist around the world, they
are particularly sensitive in Australia given the nation's exports of
iron ore, coal, natural gas and crude petroleum.
"Government
spending decisions may need to be reprioritised, and not every member of
society will be able to bear these short-term costs equally
comfortably," Mr Summerhayes said.
"The benefit of such an
approach is a substantial reduction in the expected catastrophic
physical risks of climate change in the long-term."
Earlier this
week, outgoing National Australia Bank chairman and former Treasury
secretary Ken Henry told The Business that the corporate sector was
already moving ahead to confront climate change, rather than waiting for
government or regulatory action.
"Australia's energy transition is going to happen anyway," he told the program.
"Almost
no matter what the policy framework is, the decisions taken by business
leaders today will ensure that by about mid-century Australia's
electricity sector will be 100 per cent renewables. It's almost irrespective of what decisions are taken at a policy level."
Mr
Summerhayes repeated earlier calls for the finance industry to disclose
their climate risks to put themselves in the best position to adjust to
"a new economic reality".
