18/10/2019

Australia Spends Billions Planting Trees – Then Wipes Out Carbon Gains By Bulldozing Them

The Guardian -  |

Little more than two years of land clearing will cancel out the $1.5bn in taxpayer funds that goes towards protecting native habitat
John Mailler at his tree-planting project around the Moree water park. He calls the extent of land clearing around the town ‘tragic’. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
Since 2015 the Australian government has committed more than $1.5bn of taxpayer funds to climate change projects that plant or protect native habitat. Over a slightly longer period it has also spent nearly $62m on a policy to plant 20 million trees promised under Tony Abbott.
At the same time the country has significantly stepped up land-clearing programs in several states, bulldozing hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests, mostly for agriculture.
Official data allows an estimate of the scale of the contrast: little more than two years of land clearing will effectively cancel out what the public is spending to avoid 125 million tonnes of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. The equivalent to what has been planted over several years in the 20 million trees program is wiped out in just six months of land clearing. “It’s pretty absurd,” says Jess Panegyres, the Wilderness Society’s national nature campaigner.
“We’re putting huge amounts of taxpayer dollars into avoided deforestation and reforestation and at the same time we’re allowing Australia to become a deforestation hotspot globally. Any of the gains that we’re making under these taxpayer-funded schemes are being wiped out almost immediately.”
What is being lost can be cut up in different ways. Using government figures, the Wilderness Society estimates a Melbourne Cricket Ground-sized area of forest and bushland was cleared every two minutes in 2017.
Over a longer timeframe, an academic study found last month that more than 7.7m hectares – an area larger than Tasmania – of potential threatened species habitat had been cleared since 1999. It said 93% of this land had not been referred to the federal environment department for assessment and approval before being cleared, as required under national environment laws.

Land clearing in potential threatened species habitat
Showing potential forest and woodland clearing in areas where threatened species, migratory species, or threatened ecological communities are known or likely to occur. Red indicates land clearing that was not referred to the federal environment department for assessment and approval before being cleared, and blue shows clearing that was referred
Source: Ward et al. 2019 / University of Queensland
Not all land cleared is equal. Much of it is regrown forest in areas that have been felled before. But a significant minority is intact mature forest, which is a deeper store of carbon dioxide. Scientists say both need to be protected if Australia is to stem an unfolding extinction crisis.
Australia has a long history of forest clearing. The proportion of the country covered by forest has fallen from about 30% to less than 16% since European invasion. But, after a relative decline, a big upswing in land clearing began in 2013, when Campbell Newman’s Liberal National government relaxed laws preventing mass deforestation in Queensland.
Data from the state’s world-leading vegetation monitoring system, known as Slats (statewide landcover and trees study), shows that in the five years that followed about 1.7m hectares – an area larger than greater Brisbane – of native vegetation was bulldozed, far more than in the rest of the country combined.
In the most recent two years in which data is available, ending in June last year, about 40% of that was in Great Barrier Reef catchments, increasing the amount of sediment running into the ocean along the coast.
A crop paddock prepared for sowing on the road linking Nyngan to Bourke in outback NSW. It has been left bare because of the lack of rain. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
The Labor state government passed legislation last year that the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said would end broad-scale land clearing – despite environmental lawyers warning that the new laws were full of loopholes. The latest Slats data that will show the result of that are yet to be released, but Panegyres says while the laws should work to reduce the bulldozing of mature forest, anecdotal evidence suggests the loss of growing forest and native vegetation has continued in some areas. “There’s a lot of land clearing still being reported to us,” she says.
While Queensland closely tracks land clearing, the picture in other parts of the country is less clear.
Neither Western Australia nor the Northern Territory keep jurisdiction-wide data. In the west, where land-clearing laws were relaxed under the former Liberal premier Colin Barnett in the name of removing red tape, a partial picture can be calculated by tallying the permits granted by some departments – but this leaves significant gaps.
Land clearing in New South Wales is unarguably on the rise. While it has not reached the heights of Queensland, figures from the state’s Office of Environment and Heritage show clearing for crops pasture and thinning tripled between 2014-15 and 2017-18, the year the state government introduced more lenient native vegetation protection laws. More than 27,000 hectares, nearly 100 times the size of Sydney’s central business district, were cleared for agriculture in the latest year for which data is available. Most of the clearing has been between Moree and the Queensland border. If native forestry is included, the figure rises to 58,000 hectares.
The data shows land clearing had already escalated before the laws came into effect, farmers having apparently anticipated the change. Though some Liberal ministers are deeply concerned about the scale and pace of the escalation and its impact on biodiversity, the National party has repeatedly called for protections to be wound back.
The contrast makes little sense to some people planting trees on behalf of taxpayers. Around the Moree water park, a human-made water-skiing area 6km north-west of the New South Wales town, a small forest of native trees is taking root, despite two years of drought, thanks to a $29,500 grant from the 20 million trees program. Eventually 7,000 trees will be planted.
John Mailler, 80, a retired share farmer and volunteer working on the project, germinates his own plants from local seed at his property 40km away and drives in regularly to tend the trees, which are being planted by a local employment group. He lists the local species: carbeen, casuarina, box trees, emu apple or grewi, brigalow and roly poly.
Mailler’s trees are bred so they don’t need drip irrigation and can survive with an occasional watering. He loves the work but says the loss of local vegetation around Moree is heartbreaking.
“It’s definitely changed. That was open grass country,” he says, gesturing towards the horizon to the east. “But it’s now crops, barley, wheat, chickpeas, lupins, cotton.
“They buy this wide machinery, and they say it’s too much of a problem to go round the trees so they get rid of them. It’s tragic.”
The north-west of NSW is ground zero for tree loss. In the Moree council area alone, 1,189 hectares – roughly the size of the greater Melbourne area – of woody vegetation was lost to cropping, pasture and thinning in 2017-18. Even more went in neighbouring council areas.
The situation is set to get worse in the next year. The NSW government has said it will not pursue cases against farmers who broke the old laws and it is planning to introduce regional plans, beginning with the north-west, that could further increase broad-scale clearing.
On a national scale, some experts have doubts about whether national greenhouse accounts accurately reflect the full impact of forest clearing and have called for the federal government to introduce a nationwide monitoring system on a par with that used in Queensland.
Even without that, Bill Hare, the chief executive and senior scientist with Berlin-based Climate Analytics, says a key message from the national emissions data published by the government is that it expects clearing to continue at current rates for at least the next decade.
Specifically, pollution from land clearing is projected to stay at about 46m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year to 2030, roughly equivalent to emissions from three large coal-fired power plants.
“That’s the bottom line,” Hare says. “This is significantly damaging the climate, as well as the natural environment, and Australia is not planning to do anything to stop it.”

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More Than 370,000 Sign E-Petition For Climate Emergency Declaration

Sydney Morning Herald - Jenny Noyes

A record-breaking e-petition has been submitted to the Australian Parliament, calling for the government to declare a climate emergency, two days after a crossbench motion to do so was blocked.
The "Declare a Climate Emergency" parliamentary e-petition closed at midnight on Wednesday with 370,004 signatures – more than three times the number of signatures on the previous record parliamentary e-petition, which was to remove the GST on menstrual products.
A climate change rally takes place on the front lawn of Parliament House on Tuesday as a motion to declare a climate emergency was voted down. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
The petition calls for the House of Representatives to "immediately act and declare a climate emergency in Australia" and to "introduce legislation that will with immediacy and haste reduce the causes of anthropogenic climate change".
The reason given is that "the overwhelming majority of climate scientists around the world have concluded that the climate is changing at unprecedented rates due to anthropogenic causes.
"The result of these changes will be catastrophic for future generations, and so we must act now to minimise both human and environmental destruction."
As an official parliamentary e-petition, the signatures theoretically carry more weight than other online petitions by organisations such as Change.org that do not require signatories to confirm they are residents or citizens of Australia.
But while the tampon tax was eventually axed in January this year, six months after the 104,185-signature e-petition was submitted to Parliament, it's unclear whether the petition to declare a climate emergency will have the same success.
On Tuesday, the government voted down a motion by Greens MP Adam Bandt, supported by Labor and the crossbench, to declare a climate emergency.
When asked how the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor planned to respond to the petition, a spokesman forwarded his speech to Parliament on Tuesday in which he described the proposed declaration as an "absolutely empty gesture" from Labor and the Greens.
"Labor is making a huge song and dance about declaring a climate emergency, yet refuses to commit to a single policy in this area from the last election," Mr Taylor said on Tuesday.
Labor's climate change and energy spokesman Mark Butler said it was "no surprise" that the government voted against debating the motion, "considering emissions have been rising ever since 2014 and given the government’s own data projects emissions continuing to rise all the way to 2030.
"Parliaments in the UK, Canada and several other nations have already passed resolutions recognising climate change as an emergency and it is time that our Parliament did the same," he said.
While the petition to declare a climate emergency is the biggest e-petition to be put to Parliament, it falls short of at least two pen and paper petitions since signatures were first recorded in 1988.
In 2014, a petition concerning the funding of community pharmacies became the biggest put to Parliament, with a total of 1,210,471 signatures. The second-largest petition, with 792,985 signatures, was presented in December 2000 over the GST on beer.

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Bank Of England Boss Says Global Finance Is Funding 4C Temperature Rise

The Guardian - 

Mark Carney says capital markets are financing projects likely to fuel a catastrophic rise in global heating
An Extinction Rebellion protester outside the Bank of England on Monday 14 October makes a point not too dissimilar to the Bank’s governor. Photograph: John Keeble/Getty Images
The governor of the Bank of England has warned that the global financial system is backing carbon-producing projects that will raise the temperature of the planet by over 4C – more than double the pledge to limit increases to well below 2C contained in the Paris Agreement.
In a stark warning over global heating, Mark Carney said the multitrillion-dollar international capital markets – where companies raise funds by selling shares and bonds to investors – are financing activities that would lift global temperatures to more than 4C above pre-industrial levels.
World leaders agreed in the Paris climate accords to keep the temperature rise this century well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the rise to 1.5C.
But in a stark illustration of the scale of the decarbonisation challenge facing the world economy, Carney suggested companies had already secured financing from investors in the global capital markets – worth $85tn (£67.2tn) for stocks and $100tn for bonds – that will keep the world on a trajectory consistent with catastrophic global heating.
The risks associated with temperatures at or above 4C include a 9-metre rise in sea levels – affecting up to 760 million people – searing heatwaves and droughts, serious food supply problems and half of all animal and plant species facing local extinction.
Speaking to MPs on the Commons Treasury committee, Carney did not give a timescale for the temperature rise, but said: “The objectives are there, but policy is not yet consistent with stabilising temperatures below 2C.
“There are some companies out ahead, either because of stakeholders, or because they’re anticipating that that will change. But there are others that are waiting for the policies to adjust.”
Carney sounded the alarm in the wake of the Guardian last week revealing the 20 biggest companies behind a third of all carbon emissions. The Bank’s governor said the financial system was now starting to wake up to the risks of global heating.
He said some investment companies have analysed the carbon-linked assets in their portfolios, including Japan’s $1.6tn Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF).
Carney told the committee that GPIF’s analysis showed it held assets consistent with 3.7C heating, and that the fund was now trying to manage this down. He said that AXA, the French insurance group, priced US government bonds at 5.4C, to reflect the carbon-intensive nature of the American economy. The UK is much lower, he said.
Based on these assessments, “it indicates that if you price the capital markets – and I’m not giving you a precise figure – that all of the assets are probably north of 4C for the capital markets as a whole,” he said.
“We can observe where the market is in terms of pricing the transition. It’s at least 3C or 3.75C, it’s probably north of 4C. That tells you something in terms of the sum of global climate policy.”
The Bank’s governor has spoken at length about the need for the financial system to accelerate its efforts to tackle the climate emergency, warning that firms that ignore the crisis will go bankrupt.
He said that banks should be forced to disclose their climate-linked risks within the next two years, and said that more information would prompt investors to penalise and reward firms accordingly.
Threadneedle Street is currently drafting a stress test for the UK’s banks based on their climate exposures, he added.
However, the governor said the transition to a low-carbon world economy would still require investors to back firms with significant carbon footprints, given the scale of the adjustment required.
“It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Well I’m going to invest in only renewable energy.’ The system as a whole cannot invest only in renewable energy.
“The contribution of manufacturing or an industrial company in terms of lowering their carbon footprint over the next decade, a big reduction in that, can be as significant if not more significant than further development in the short term on renewables,” he said.
Carney also dropped a heavy hint that the government would shake-up the Bank’s remit for financial supervision to take account of climate risks at the budget on 6 November.
“Remits normally come with the budget, so we’ll see what is in that … Every indication is there is a comprehensive strategy being developed consistent with the objective of net-zero [carbon emissions],” he added.

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