As Earth’s Population Heads To 10 Billion, Does Anything Australians Do On Climate Change Matter?

The Conversation - Mark Beeson

The United Nations predicts the world will be home to nearly 10 billion people by 2050 – making global greenhouse emission cuts ever more urgent. NASA/Joshua Stevens

Mark Beeson Mark Beeson is Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia. Before joining UWA at the beginning of 2015, he was Professor of International Relations at Murdoch University. Previously he taught at the universities of Griffith, Queensland, York (UK) and Birmingham, where he was also head of department. He is the founding editor of Critical Studies of the Asia Pacific (Palgrave).

As unprecedented bushfires continue to ravage the country, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his government have been rightly criticised for their reluctance to talk about the underlying drivers of this crisis. Yet it’s not hard to see why they might be dumbstruck.

The human race has never had to grapple with a problem as large, complex or urgent as climate change. It’s not that there aren’t solutions available. There are already some hopeful signs of an energy transition in Australia. As Professor Ross Garnaut has explained, it would be in Australia’s economic interests to become a low-carbon energy superpower.
To successfully tackle climate change will require some painful transitions domestically, and unprecedented levels of international coordination and cooperation. But that isn’t happening. Global action to cut emissions is falling far short of what’s needed – and meanwhile, though it’s controversial to mention, the world’s population quietly climbs ever higher.

Our growing population challenge
The United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2019 report forecast that by 2027, India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country.
By 2050, the UN predicts that the world’s population will be nearly 10 billion, up from 7.7 billion now. Nine countries are expected to be home to more than half of that growth: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt and the United States. The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to double by 2050 (a 99% increase), while Australia and New Zealand are expected to grow more slowly (28% increase).

The world’s population growth rate in recent years. World Population Prospects 2019, United Nations, CC BY

Given how difficult climate politics have been here in Australia, why would we expect it to be any more politically feasible in say, India, which claims the right to develop as we did? However self-serving Australian coal supporters’ arguments about lifting Indians out of poverty are, the underlying questions of national autonomy and the ‘right’ to develop are not easily refuted.

Even talking about demography is asking for trouble – especially if it becomes caught up with questions of race, identity and the most fundamental of human rights, the right to reproduce.
While reducing population growth is plainly important in the long-term, it isn’t a quick fix for all our environmental problems. In the meantime, research has shown that supporting education for girls in poor countries is one of the single most important things we can do now to address this issue.

How Australia can show leadership

I think we need to understand that global emissions don’t have an accent, they come from many countries and we need to look at a global solution… – Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Insiders, ABC, 12 January 2020

This is the central defence of business as usual: there’s no point in Australia making huge sacrifices and ‘wrecking’ (or transforming, depending on your perspective) the economy if no one else is doing so. We contribute less than 2% to global greenhouse emissions, so – some claim – we can’t make any real difference.
As outlined in my 2019 book, Environmental Populism: The Politics of Survival in the Anthropocene, nations such as Australia can play a useful role by showing what an enlightened country, with the capacity and incentive to act, might do. If we don’t have the means and the compelling environmental reasons to make tough but meaningful policy choices, who does?
But even in the unlikely event that Australians collectively retrofitted the entire economy along sustainable lines, there would still be a lot of the world that wouldn’t, or couldn’t even if they wanted to. The development imperative really is non-negotiable in India, China and the more impoverished states of sub-Saharan Africa.

Will China lead the way?
From the privileged perspective of wealthy Australians, the ‘good’ news is that the ecological footprint of the average Ethiopian is seven times smaller than ours. India’s average is even less, despite all the recent development. However, people in India and Ethiopia may not think that’s a good thing.
One of the paradoxical impacts of globalisation is that everyone is increasingly conscious of their relative place in the international scheme of things. The legitimacy of governments – especially unelected authoritarian regimes like China’s - increasingly revolves around their capacity to deliver jobs and rising living standards. Where governments can’t deliver, the population vote with their feet.
As naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned last week, Australia’s current fires are another sign that “the moment of crisis has come”. He called on China for the global leadership we’ve been missing:

If the Chinese come and say: 'Not because we are worried about the world but for our own reasons, we are going to take major steps to curb our carbon output […]’, everybody else would fall into line, one thinks. That would be the big change that one could hope would happen.

China has arguably already made the biggest contribution to our collective welfare with its highly contentious, now abandoned one-child policy. China’s population would have been around 400 million people larger without it, pushing us closer to the crisis Sir David fears.
To be clear, I’m not advocating compulsory population control, here or anywhere. But we do need to consider a future with billions more people, many of them aspiring to live as Australians do now.
Looking ahead, will Australians try to keep living as we do today? Or will we decide to set a new example of living well, without such a heavy ecological footprint? Resolving all these conundrums won’t be easy; perhaps not even possible. That’s another discomfiting reality that we may have to get used to.

Links

• World Population Prospects 2019: Highlights
• Human population reduction is not a quick fix for environmental problems
• Climate change, fertility and girls’ education
• Meeting our climate commitments without wrecking the economy
• Environmental Populism: The Politics of Survival in the Anthropocene
• Global Footprint Network
• Sir David Attenborough warns of climate 'crisis moment'

(AU) Why Prescribed Burns Don’t Stop Wildfires

Sydney Morning Herald - Byron Lamont | Tianhua He

The Prime Minister has declared hazard-reduction burning is just as important as action on climate change to limit Australia’s wildfire risk – but with lives, properties, flora and fauna at real risk, it is critical to understand the realities and limitations of fire management.

The moment the Gospers Mountain fire hammered Bilpin in December. Credit:Nick Moir

Authors  Byron Lamont is a professor in plant ecology at Curtin University Tianhua He is a senior fellow at Curtin University

Prescribed burns are fires created by fire-management authorities to reduce fuel in an attempt to stop the advance of future possible wildfires.
Unfortunately, areas in the devastated fire zones that recently had prescribed burns offered little resistance to the advance of the latest wildfires. The fires simply passed straight through them. But why?
Current practices of prescribed fires essentially burn the ground flora, the shrubs, herbs and creepers. At most, heat from the ground might scorch the upper canopy. It tends to be patchy. These are called surface fires.
But wildfires burn everything. They create their own inferno. Their greatest heat is produced from fuel in the tree canopy. The convective currents created by the firestorm spray embers up to kilometres from the fire front. They simply drop onto or over areas that have received prescribed burns. These are called crown fires.
The aim of fire managers is to avoid crown fires during prescribed burning for fear that the fire gets out of control and goes far beyond the area intended to be burnt.
Controlled fires are only meant to stop the odd cigarette thrown out of a car window from starting a fire, or lightning strikes igniting the ground flora. They may not even achieve those goals because scorching the trees above can lead to considerable leaf drop and build-up of litter that increases flammability and deters germination and seedling establishment.
They could even introduce a new danger. Along transport routes, firebreaks and access tracks, the burnt edges give access to exotic weeds that blow in, especially grasses and herbs from South Africa and Europe. These weeds germinate far more readily than native plants; they are more flammable than the native plants and once they have invaded, they are there to stay.
So, on grounds that they do not stop the progress of wildfires and indeed may lead to weed encroachment, increasing the rate of prescribed burning is no answer to the current wildfire problem.
A wildfire, in its aftermath, will act as an effective deterrent to further fire because no combustible fuel remains. But this is hardly a solution. This inhibitory effect might last for five or so years, but when the vegetation returns it will be able to carry a fire again.
It may seem counter-intuitive but the longer old-growth forests remain fire-free, the less combustible they become. The thicker canopy creates more shade, the undergrowth becomes thinner and less vigorous - and hence there is less fuel for fires.
Ironically, the Australian flora has experienced wildfires of the current type for many millions of years. It is adapted to wildfires, not prescribed burns. Thus, all eucalypts, paperbarks, she-oaks and banksias release their seeds only when their canopies are burnt and there is massive seedling recruitment in the next wet season that ensures the vegetation recovers.
Have no doubt, the vegetation will recover strongly. But with reduced rainfall it will be unusually slow. Ultimately, we are guests in the world’s most flammable continent and have to learn to live with that fact. The Aboriginal inhabitants did, but we have not.
In the long term, prescribed burns do not achieve the goal of protecting life and property. The side effects of climate change will be a period of intensified fire as mean temperatures rise and dry fuel increases. This will be followed later by less intense fire as the fuel load gradually reduces in the presence of lower rainfall.
In the meantime, Australians should expect the worst and plan for more devastating wildfires.

Links

• Prime Minister says hazard reduction burns as important as emissions
• PM calls for a national hazard reduction burn system panned by experts
• Hazard reduction program
• Is Fuel Reduction Burning the Answer?
• Explainer: how effective is bushfire hazard reduction on Australia's fires? 
• Are hazard reduction burns effective in managing bushfires? The answer is complicated

{AU) ‘I Am Horrified’: Scientist Who Linked Climate Change With Bushfires In 1987 Says It’s Not Too Late

New Daily - Cait Kelly

The link between climate change and bushfires has been known for more than 30 years.

A scientist who predicted our current bushfire crisis four decades ago is ‘horrified’ we did not listen to his warnings on climate change.
In 1987 then-CSIRO scientist Dr Tom Beer pioneered the world’s first research into the link between climate change and worsening fire seasons.
It might seem obvious now, but Dr Beer’s research, published as ‘Australian bushfire danger under changing climatic regimes’, predicted that growing greenhouse gas emissions would have horrific consequences for Australia’s bushfire season.
For Dr Beer, this summer has been the worst told-you-so moment.

Dr Tom Beer. Photo: RSV

“For decades, climate scientists have been warning Australian governments about the escalating threat of catastrophic bushfire conditions because of climate change,” Dr Beer said.“I am horrified that what my study found has now occurred and the fact this means it is only going to get worse,” he said.
This year’s bushfire season started early and has killed 29 people, destroyed more than 2200 homes, burnt 10 million hectares and covered large areas of the globe in toxic smoke.
When Dr Beer started his research the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 were the worst the country had seen.
“Since then, we have experienced the Black Saturday fires, had to create a new catastrophic fire danger rating, and in the past few months, we’ve seen 10 million hectares of Australia burn,” he said.
His research was presented at the 1987 CSIRO conference and published in a book. Dr Beer spoke to the media and travelled internationally to talk to specialists in the US about his findings.
For the most part, it was ignored by the Australian government.

Not too late
On Wednesday the 72-year-old was joined by Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science at the University of Tasmania, David Bowman and the Climate Council’s Professor Will Steffen, in calling for urgent action.
“Climate change is fuelling the national bushfire catastrophe, and it will get worse without radical action,” they said.
Calling for state and federal governments to work together, they said Australia needs an urgent plan to prepare for worsening fire seasons and to rapidly phase out the burning of coal, oil and gas.
“The length of the bushfire season has increased substantially, making it harder to prepare for dangerous conditions,” he said.
“The costs of fighting fires have also increased substantially, as have the costs of their impacts.
“Clearly, bushfire conditions are now more dangerous, and the risk will continue to escalate. The risk to people and property has increased significantly and will continue to do so.”

Their calls for urgent action have been backed up by the business, medical and scientific communities here and abroad.

Last month, a team of UK climate scientists conducted a rapid review of research conducted since 2013 and found that human-induced climate change will cause an extra 20 to 30 severe fire danger days each year in the future.

We need to phase out coal to mitigate the climate threat. Photo: Getty

The reason action on climate change has stalled is vested interests borrowing straight from the big tobacco playbook, spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance, Greg Barns, said.
“In some ways, this is like the tobacco debate when we knew tobacco was harmful, that cigarettes caused cancer but governments ignored the advice,” Mr Barns said.
“There are some analogies between the way in which the big pharma and big tobacco litigation emerged, where there was clear and unequivocal advice given to governments which said that radical action had to be taken.
“Particularly in relation to planning and environmental decisions, in relations to the increase in bushfires, the strength of those fires and the length, as a result of climate change.
“Governments in effect ignored those reports, or worse than that, buried them. So there are some parallels.”
The similarities in the situation could potentially lead to class actions against the government, Mr Barns said.
“For a government to deliberately ignore un-contradicted scientific evidence, that showed an increased risk of bushfires, weather catastrophes, is gross negligence and shows a complete lack of moral compass.
“Speaking from a legal point of view, if it can be shown that the government has deliberately failed to implement policies when they had demonstrable evidence, that is a very serious matter.”

Links

• Australian bushfire danger under changing climatic regimes
• Climate change increases the risk of wildfires
• How climate change increases bushfire risk
• What are the links between climate change and bushfires? – explainer 
• Is there a link between climate change and bushfires?
• Australian Lawyers Alliance