09/12/2019

Climate Change Now 'The Most Significant Threat' To Australia's Wet Tropics

The Guardian - 
Wet Tropics Management Authority offers grim assessment of impacts on region’s biodiversity and economy
The Wet Tropics Management Authority warns climate change is likely to result in ‘substantial ecological change’ in north Queensland. Photograph: Maria Grazia Casella/Alamy Stock Photo
Climate change is escalating as “the most significant threat” to Australia’s wet tropics world heritage area, with an update to parliament reporting the outlook for the bioregion is a cause of “great concern”.
The grim assessment of the critical north Queensland rainforest region is outlined in an annual snapshot of the protected area prepared by the Wet Tropics Management Authority, which urges greater national and international effort to address the causes of climate change.
The wet tropics world heritage area spans 450km of tropical north Queensland coastline between Cooktown and Townsville and comprises the world’s oldest living rainforests and the largest area of rainforest in Australia.
It also supports the highest level of biodiversity of any region in Australia, being home to 36% of Australia’s mammals, 29% of Australia’s frog species, 60% of Australia’s butterfly species and 50% of Australia’s bird species.
Of over 173,000 protected areas, the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area was rated as the second most ‘irreplaceable’ natural World Heritage Area on earth and the sixth most irreplaceable protected area by a team of international scientists. Although it represents only 0.12% of the total area of the Australian landmass, the Area is home to an exceptionally high proportion of the nation’s biodiversity.
The agency’s two annual reports, one specifically on the state of the world heritage area, both warn that the conservation outlook for the region is deteriorating, with climate change seen as “likely to result in widespread and substantial ecological change”.
“Climate change is escalating as the most significant threat to the wet tropics long-term outlook, including changes to the distribution and density of endemic and specialised cool adapted rainforest species,” the report says.
“Changes to endemic and specialised cool adapted rainforest species distribution and density having already been recorded – and some somber predictions of modelled effects are already being realised.”
The agency reports that after receiving new evidence of the “accelerated decline of unique, endemic wet tropics animals”, such as the lemuroid ringtail possum which is at risk of imminent extinction, the board released a climate impact statement and a 10-point plan for climate adaptation.
“The board’s call is for urgent action and investment to improve resilience and protection to give the area the best chance of withstanding extreme events and climate impacts, pending a reduction in global emissions,” it said.
The snapshot also warns that “more extreme and unplanned bushfires” will occur in the future, posing a significant threat to the old-growth rainforest.
“Although not directly attributable to climate change, our rapidly warming climate, driven by human activities, is exacerbating every risk factor for more frequent and intense bushfires,” the report says.
Other threats reported by the authority include the damage being inflicted by invasive species, with feral pigs, yellow crazy ants, invasive weeds and pathogens such as myrtle rust all having an impact.
Funding cuts are also listed as a threat, with the authority reporting a “significant decline in research and monitoring of the property”.
“Despite previous historical investment in research in the area, research funding has significantly declined over recent years,” the report says.
Under the current National Environmental Science Program (2015-2021) commonwealth research funding investment into wet tropics rainforests was not a priority.
The final threat listed by the agency is the increased demand for infrastructure like roads, dams and energy supply, “caused by a growing urban population and tourist visitor numbers, distributing visitation across a wider area”.
The wet tropics area, which was declared protected in 1988, was also examined in 2017 by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature which carries out regular assessments of the world’s 241 natural world heritage sites.
The 2017 Outlook Report reported that the wet tropics region was under direct threat from “invasive plants, animals and diseases, and the high risk posed by the predicted impacts of climate change”.
The authority is concerned that the threat to the region’s ecology could also threaten the world heritage listing, which would have a knock-on effect to the Queensland economy.
“Climate change is one of the most significant threats to the area and is likely to result in widespread and substantial ecological change,” the report says.
“This change will impact the biodiversity values underpinning the world heritage listing of the area and has the potential to affect the region’s economy.”
A spokesman for environment minister Sussan Ley said the wet tropics was an “incredibly important area and one that receives significant funding.”
“In addition to its annual funding, the government has further invested $9m in crazy ant eradication and the formation of a Tourism Destination Development Plan to enhance opportunities for Indigenous cultural tourism enterprises and grow appropriate eco-tourism.
“We will continue to work with Queensland to protect this very important place.”

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We Really May Have Just 11 Years To Save The Climate

Climate Home News - 

“Eleven years to save the world” reads a common sign at the global Fridays for Future climate strikes.
(Photo: Pixabay)

Thomas Hale
Thomas Hale is associate professor in public policy (global public policy) at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.
This article was published in the fourth issue of the Oxford Government Review, published in November 2019 by the Blavatnik School of Government.
Millions of people in over 100 countries, many of them too young to vote, have taken to the streets to demand governments radically increase efforts to fight climate change over the next decade.
But do we really have until just 2030 to avert climate catastrophe? While emphasising the importance of urgent action, scientists have tried to caveat this crude message. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we need to halve global emissions by 2030 in order to have at least a one in two chance of limiting warming to 1.5C, the goal set by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The world will not “end” in 2030. But if we are not on a rapidly falling emissions pathway by that point, we are likely to blow through the 1.5C limit around 2040.
By that time, the climate strikers on the streets today will be entering middle age, starting families, rising up in their careers, and outvoting their irresponsible forebears. So can they not just solve the problem then?
Geophysically speaking, perhaps. Because carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linger in the atmosphere for decades or longer, what matters most is the total stock of emissions over time. That means sluggish action today could, in theory, be compensated for by aggressive action in the future. Accordingly, some oil and gas companies have shifted from denying climate change altogether to accepting incremental steps like modest carbon prices.
But anyone advocating an incremental approach – which most governments are now following – is making a strong assumption not just about climate models, but about the politics of climate change in the middle of the 21st Century. In joint work with Jeff Colgan at Brown University and Jessica Green at the University of Toronto, my research is exploring how, as both climate change and decarbonisation advance over the next decades, climate politics will be increasingly existential. This change will shift governments’ focus from prevention to reaction.
To date, contestation over climate policy resembles what political scientists call ‘distributional politics’. Policies like carbon taxes or renewable energy deployment benefit some economic sectors and populations and impose costs on others. Interest groups that stand to win or lose from these changes advocate for their preferred policies.
But as we push the climate system to further extremes, the costs of climate change will become much more intense and widespread. Not just small islands, but whole coastal regions will be inundated. Droughts will cut off vital water supplies from hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers as well as those that feed global supply chains. Deadly heat will render whole regions uninhabitable. Under these conditions, climate politics will not just be a question of ‘who gets what, when, how’, as the political scientist Henry Laswell famously put it. Rather, climate politics will become a question of who gets to survive.
At the same time, the advance of decarbonisation will pose a similar existential threat to companies, workers, regions and regimes whose economic survival is linked to fossil fuels. Already, hundreds of coal plants and mines have shuttered across the world, taking investments, jobs and pensions with them. For this reason, a key demand of climate protestors today is for governments to provide a ‘just transition’ for workers in carbon-dependent sectors. Oil and gas companies may follow coal, and countries and political regimes based on the exploitation of these resources may follow. Those that have managed to diversify or channel resources into sovereign wealth funds may adapt. Others – cruelly, it will be those least able to manage – may discover that the only thing worse than the ‘resource curse’ is the curse of lack of resources.
In other words, the advance of both climate change and decarbonisation efforts will not just change the distribution of resources; it will threaten the very existence of large swathes of the global economy and population. How can we expect political leaders in the middle of the century – the young people who are today demanding action in the streets – to react?
In the face of urgent survival needs, it may be substantially more difficult to invest political effort and resources in preventing further climate change by reducing emissions. Instead, governments will face increasing, and in some cases overwhelming, pressure to limit the harm climate change and decarbonisation are causing in the short term.
Imagine you are the mayor of a Middle Eastern city in which the night time temperature has been over 50C for the last week. Will you spend the city budget on climate-saving electric cars or climate-destroying air conditioners?
Broadly, there are four strategies we can take to counter climate change. We can mitigate it by reducing emissions. We can adapt to it by taking steps like building seawalls or developing drought-resistant crops. We can compensate those who are hurt by its effects to reduce suffering. Or we can, perhaps, develop geoengineering technologies to limit temperature change or suck carbon from the atmosphere. To date we have focused mainly on mitigation. But as climate politics get existential, political incentives may shift to more defensive approaches.
Indeed, we are already seeing a growing emphasis on such strategies. When the countries of the world pledged, in the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to “prevent dangerous changes in the Earth’s climate,” they meant reducing emissions. Since that time, vulnerable nations and ‘frontline communities’ have pushed adaptation onto the global agenda. We are already being affected by climate change, they argue, so we need to not just prevent but also treat the current harm being done.
More recently, the most affected countries and populations have pushed for compensation. Not only have we failed to prevent climate change, they argue, but its impacts are already so great they cannot be adapted to. Low-lying islands, for whom even a small degree of climate change is existential, have been strong advocates for so-called ‘loss and damage’ measures in international climate policy, demanding that those who have contributed most to climate change pay the reparations. In the future, expect these claims to grow.
And as climate change proceeds, what was previously unthinkable may become widely demanded. Today, many climate advocates reject geoengineering techniques (such as building machines to suck carbon from the air, or seeding clouds to reflect more sunlight back into space) as an unproven distraction from mitigation efforts. But if the impacts of climate change continue to accumulate, governments may come to see such technologies as vital components of national security.
All of these strategies will be far more costly, and far less effective, than mitigation. But by the time today’s climate strikers are watching their own children take to the streets, they might be the only options left.
The good news is that these trends are not inevitable. The more we can prevent climate change now, while also making sure that those dependent on fossil fuels are not left behind, the less existential climate politics will be in the future. In other words, the urgency of action today is demanded not only by climate science, but also by political science. We will certainly be dealing with climate change for longer than the next 11 years, but we may have only the next decade to prevent it.

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UN Climate Talks: What's On The Agenda In Madrid And What It Means For Australia

The Guardian - 

Angus Taylor heads to COP25 next week, where Australia has already twice been given the ‘fossil of the day’ award
 UN Climate Change Conference COP25 in Madrid, on 2 December, 2019. Photograph: Jose Maria Cuadrado Jimenez/AFP via Getty Images 
For two weeks at the end of every year, the world’s governments meet to work on a global response to climate change. This year is the 25th meeting of what is known as the conference of the parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Those who attend know it as COP, or COP25.
Here’s what you need to know about this year’s talks, which started on Monday in Madrid, and what they could mean for Australia.

What does Australia stand coming into the talks?
There are nearly 190 countries represented at the UN climate talks and, contrary to some perceptions, Australia is not just a bit player.
Under UN greenhouse accounting, Australia is responsible for about 1.3% of annual pollution, which places it 16th on a ladder of polluting nations. It emits more each year than 40 countries with larger populations, including G7 members Britain, France and Italy.
On other measures Australia performs worse. It emits more per person than any other developed country (and far more than most developing countries), and a recent analysis found it was third for exported emissions.
It is the world’s biggest seller of coal, particularly metallurgic coal used in steel-making, and either number one or two for natural gas. It is easily the largest emitter in the south Pacific, and has been increasingly drawing criticism from Pacific leaders for not doing more to tackle the issue.
As the talks began last week, Australia was at the forefront of the climate emergency in other ways, as drought and bushfires made global headlines. Scientists say both are unprecedented and in line with climate projections.
Observers such as Howard Bamsey, the country’s former special envoy on climate change, say events in Australia are noticed and could be used to influence other countries to do more. But the government’s message focuses on its own actions: that it has set a 2030 emissions reduction target, that it more than met previous targets it set for itself and that it will meet this one.

Who is representing Australia?
Australia has a 21-strong delegation from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, led by Jamie Isbister, a senior diplomat who was appointed environment ambassador less than three weeks ago.
In the second week’s political stage, Australia will be represented by Angus Taylor, the minister for energy and emissions reduction. It is his first time at climate talks. He arrives under pressure on several fronts, including a bizarre public spat with American author Naomi Wolf.

How is Australia positioning itself?
Australia is a member of what is known as the umbrella group of countries – a coalition of mostly developed nations outside the EU, including Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Ukraine and the US (which has a big delegation despite planning to leave the Paris agreement next year). The group doesn’t agree on everything but works together when like-minded.
Observers say the first week of talks has been slow. Australia is in a camp that does not want the meeting to focus on increasing the ambition of targets volunteered under the Paris deal and emphasises the need to implement what has already been agreed.
Australia, Brazil and Japan win the Fossil of the Day award during the second day of the climate conference. Photograph: Pablo Blázquez Domínguez/Getty Images 
Non-government groups say it is a concerning sign ahead of the next summit in Glasgow at the end of 2020, when countries are meant to come armed with new commitments to move the world closer to the goals agreed in Paris: limiting industrial global warming to well below 2C and as close to 1.5C as possible.
According to a UN report published before the talks, global emissions must fall by about 7.6% a year for the next decade to give a chance of meeting the 1.5C goal. Current targets would result in more than 3C warming, considered a disastrous scenario that would trigger dangerous tipping points.
Scott Morrison has indicated Australia has no plan to increase what it is doing beyond its 2030 target of a 26-28% cut compared with 2005 levels, which is less than what government advisors found would be Australia’s fair share or it could afford to do.
The prime minister has not acknowledged what groups representing business, unions, farmers, investors and the social policy sector this week spelled out in a joint statement – that the goals of the Paris agreement mean Australia will need to plan to stop emitting any carbon dioxide.
Australia’s emissions are not coming down and most experts believe it is not on track to meet its target. But the government released two sets of data before Taylor left for Madrid to buttress his argument that the country has “a track record of which all Australians can be proud”. The first used newly adjusted emissions data to suggest national pollution was basically flatlining, and had dipped slightly over the past two years, rather than increasing year-in-year as the greenhouse accounts had previously shown.
The second updated projections of how much pollution will be released to 2030 and found, contrary to other evidence, the country was expected to meet its Paris target. It did this by including an accounting loophole known as carryover credits. More on that in a moment.
Environment and other civil society groups at the conference have highlighted Morrison’s language on climate change. They twice last week awarded Australia a “fossil of the day” award, the climate talks equivalent of a Razzie. One was for a tweet he sent from the cricket about the fires. Are carryover credits a big issue at the talks?
Potentially.
Beyond holding the line on targets, Australia’s most prominent negotiating position is using these credits.
They are an accounting measure that allows countries to count emissions cuts from exceeding previous targets against future targets. They were allowed under the soon-to-be-obsolete Kyoto protocol. They are not mentioned in the Paris agreement and Australia is the only country planning to use them under it.
Australia accrued the credits after setting unambitious targets, including that it would increase national emissions by up to 8% between 1990 and 2012. The government says it will have credits equivalent to 411m tonnes of carbon dioxide to use against its Paris target, effectively cutting what it needs to do in new emissions reductions by more than half.
Critics say it is exploiting a loophole. Under UN rules, the carryover credits can only be banned through consensus, and the Australian delegation made clear in pre-COP briefings that it would not agree to that. But this may not be the end of the discussion. Several countries, including Britain, the European Union, Canada and Pacific nations, have either raised doubts or said outright they should not be used.
Analysts say use of the carryover would be at odds with other clear principles set out in the Paris deal. The text of the agreement says countries will make national commitments that are more ambitious through time and reflect the “highest possible ambition”. Some groups, such as the Investor Group on Climate Change, representing institutional investors with $2tr in funds, say use of carryover credits is inconsistent with the agreement because it reduces the action taken.
A potential scenario is that developing countries introduce an effective ban on using Kyoto carryover credits into the draft text that governments are negotiating over.
Richie Merzian, a former government climate negotiator, now director of the climate and energy program with The Australia Institute, says the Morrison government has yet to formally declare to the UN that it plans to use carryover credits. They do not appear in the statement submitted under the Paris deal explaining how Australia would meet its target.
“If the government is gung-ho on this, then it should back itself,” Merzian says from Madrid.

What else is on the agenda?
A major issue is what is known as Article 6, the part of the Paris rulebook that aims to revive a global carbon market that would help countries cut emissions by paying for measures that reduce pollution in developing countries. The credits generated through these markets differ from carryover credits, as they are tied to actual emissions cuts.
Debate over Article 6 is looking at carbon market design and operation and what to do about concerns that some countries led by Brazil are trying to “double count” by claiming emissions reductions for credits sold to wealthy nations.
The Australian business community has been concerned in the lead-up to the talks that Article 6 may not be resolved. The government’s position is arguably contradictory. Morrison was a frequent pre-election critic of Labor’s plan to use international credits, but supports their use in negotiations.
But Bill Hare, the chief executive and scientist at Climate Analytics and an adviser to small developing countries, says Australia is not working to ensure the rules guarantee that the use of offsets always results in real emissions reductions. “I think it’s all about having the ultimate flexibility in what countries want to do, rather than rigorous or accountable oversight,” he says.

What happens at the conclusion?
However the conference ends, the negotiations push on. Next year will be a major test of whether many countries are prepared to deliver on the pledge made in Paris and ramp up commitments before meeting again in to Glasgow.
In Australia, the environment department has been quietly working on a long-term climate strategy that is expected to be released for feedback in the new year. Thus far the government has said little to indicate what that might involve.

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