26/04/2020

(AU) 'Kick Them Into Action': Fire Group Takes EPA To Court Over Climate

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Lisa Roberts spent 25 years building a native plant business that was as sustainable as they come, with off-grid solar power and water harvesting, only to see it go up in flames in the recent bushfires.

Her home and nursery in Wandella in southern NSW reduced to rubble, Ms Roberts fled to Canberra, powerless to act as fires threatened another venture in nearby Pialligo. Living in the smoke-choked capital also damaged her vocal cords, which have still not recovered.

Lisa Roberts and her partner lost their home and nursery in Wandella in summer's bushfires, prompting her to lead a novel legal case against the NSW Environment Protection Authority. Credit: Lisa Roberts

"A part of me totally rages at the world for its totally inadequate response to climate change," Ms Roberts said. "Everybody's safety is at risk."

That anger is being now channelled into a legal challenge against the NSW Environment Protection Authority. Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, of which Ms Roberts is a member, began the suit last week with the NSW Environmental Defenders Office "to kick [the EPA] into action", she said.
EDO chief executive David Morris said the case, in the Land and Environment Court, would seek to force the EPA, which does not have a climate policy, to use its powers to keep communities safe from the increasingly severe impacts of a warming world.

Mr Morris said the EPA was chosen as a test case among similar agencies nationally in part because of a section of the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997.

That section requires the agency to “develop environmental quality objectives, guidelines and policies to ensure environment protection”.

"It's an opportunity for the EPA to recognise they have a legal obligation to take action," he said. "They should have a policy and a plan to address the greatest threat to the environment."

'A part of me totally rages': Lisa Roberts, a horticulturist entrepreneur, is part of a legal challenge against the NSW Environment Protection Authority after bushfires hit her multi-million businesses hard.

An EPA spokesman said the agency had received court documents from the EDO "and is considering them". A spokesman for NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean said it was "inappropriate to comment" on an ongoing legal matter.

The Land and Environment Court has made significant climate-related decisions before, including in February last year when it found the final, so-called scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions produced by burning coal should be taken into account when considering the environmental impacts of new mines.

Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action chairwoman Jo Dodds says she can't look at the environment without imagining how it will look when it is burnt.

Bushfire Survivors chairwoman Jo Dodds, who is also a Bega Shire councillor, said the group's 30-odd members had endured fires from the 2003 blazes in Canberra, Black Saturday in Victoria in 2009 and the fires that devastated parts of her town in Tathra two years ago.

Cr Dodds said the legal action was aimed at making the EPA "live up to its remit".

The agency "needs to have adequate policies around climate change", including setting limits on greenhouse emissions and enforcing them, she said.

Cr Dodds said she had to evacuate to the Bega River in 2018 and watch on as aerial water bombers tried to save hers and other homes from being engulfed in flames.

That experience, and the past season's endless fire threat, had left lingering emotional scars.
"I'm always looking at the environment and imagining what it will look like when it burns," she said.

At the time, the Tathra bushfires in March 2018 seemed unseasonal because they erupted in autumn. Last fire season, though, ran from July until February 2020. Credit: Suzie Duffy



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(AU) If We Can Put A Man On The Moon, We Can Save The Great Barrier Reef

The Conversation - Paul Hardisty | Christian Roth | Damien Burrows | David Mead
                                  Ken Anthony | Line K Bay | Mark Gibbs | Peter J Mumby

Credit: Shutterstock

Scientists recently confirmed the Great Barrier Reef suffered another serious bleaching event last summer—the third in five years. Dramatic intervention to save the natural wonder is clearly needed.

First and foremost, this requires to be slashed. But the right combination of technological and biological interventions, deployed with care at the right time and scale, are also critical to securing the 's future.

This could include methods designed to shade and cool the reef, techniques to help corals adapt to warmer temperatures, ways to help damaged reefs recover, and smart systems that target interventions to the most strategically beneficial locations.

Implementing such measures across the breadth of the reef—the world's biggest reef ecosystem—will not be easy, or cheap. In fact, we believe the scale of the task is greater than the Apollo 11 moon landing mission in 1969—but not impossible.

That mission was a success, not because a few elements worked to plan, but because of the integration, coordination and alignment of every element of the mission's goal: be the first to land and walk on the moon, and then fly home safely.

Half a century later, facing the ongoing decline of the Great Barrier Reef, we can draw important lessons from that historic human achievement.

Research into breeding coral hybrids for heat-stress resistance could help restore parts of the reef. Credit: Marie Roman/AIMS, Author provided

Intervening to save the reef

 The recently released Reef Restoration and Adaptatio … pt feasibility study shows Australia could feasibly, and with reasonable probability of success, intervene to help the reef adapt to and recover from the effects of climate change.

The study, of which we were a part, involved more than 100 leading coral reef scientists, modellers, economists, engineers, business strategists, social scientists, decision scientists and reef managers.

It shows how new and existing interventions, supported by the best available research and development, could help secure a future for the reef.

We must emphasise that interventions to help the reef adapt to and recover from climate change will not, alone, save it. Success also depends on reducing global greenhouse emissions as quickly as possible. But the hands-on measures we're proposing could help buy time for the reef.

More than 100 coral reef scientists took part in the feasibility study. Credit: Nick Thake/AIMS, Author provided

Cloud brightening to heat-tolerant corals

 Our study identified 160 possible interventions that could help revive the reef, and build on its natural resilience. We've whittled it down to the 43 most effective and realistic.

Possible interventions for further research and development include brightening clouds with salt crystals to shade and cool corals; ways to increase the abundance of naturally heat-tolerant corals in , such as through aquarium-based selective breeding and release; and methods to promote faster recovery on damaged reefs, such as deploying structures designed to stabilise reef rubble.

But there will be no single silver bullet solution. The feasibility study showed that methods working in combination, along with water quality improvement and crown-of-thorns starfish control, will provide the best results.

Harder than landing on the moon

 There are four reasons why saving the Great Barrier Reef in coming decades could be more challenging than the 1969 moon mission.

Field testing the heat resistant coral hybrids in the Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Kate Green/AIMS, Author provided

First, warming events have already driven the reef into decline with back-to-back bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, and now again in 2020. The next major event is now only just around the corner.

Second, current emission reduction pledges would see the world warm by 2.3-3.5℃ relative to pre-industrial levels. This climate scenario, which is not the worst case, would be beyond the range that allows today's coral reef ecosystems to function.

Without swift action, the prospect for the world's coral reefs is bleak, with most expected to become seriously degraded before mid-century.

Third, we still have work to do to control local pressures, including water quality and marine pests crown-of-thorns starfish.

And fourth, the inherent complexity of natural systems, particularly ones as diverse as coral reefs, provides an additional challenge not faced by NASA engineers 50 years ago.

So keeping the Great Barrier Reef, let alone the rest of the world's reefs, safe from climate change will dwarf the challenge of any space mission. But there is hope.

The Great Barrier Reef has been hit by consecutive bleaching events – restoring it may be harder than landing on the moon. Credit: Shutterstock

We must start now

 The federal government recently re-announced A$100 million from the Reef Trust Partnership towards a major research and development effort for this program. This will be augmented by contributions of A$50m from research institutions, and additional funding from international philanthropists.

Our study shows that under a wide range of future emission scenarios, the program is very likely to be worth the effort, more so if the world meets the Paris target and rapidly cuts greenhouse gas emissions.

What's more, economic analyses included in the feasibility study show successful Great Barrier Reef intervention at scale could create benefits to Australia of between A$11 billion and A$773 billion over a 60-year period, with much of it flowing to regional economies and Traditional Owner communities.

And perhaps more importantly, if Australia is successful in this effort, we can lead the world in a global effort to save these natural wonders bequeathed to us across the ages. We must start the journey now. If we wait, it may be too late.

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The Pandemic Could Be A Call To Action On Climate Change

Washington Post - Ishaan Tharoor

This combination photo shows Murcia, Spain, days before the national coronavirus lockdown on Feb. 29, left, and again weeks into the lockdown on April 23. (Maarcial Guillen/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Amid its horrors and tragedies, the coronavirus pandemic has driven home a startling reality.

Travel bans and lockdowns have cleaned the globe, flushing the murk from Venice’s canals, clearing Delhi’s polluted smog, making distant snowy peaks visible for the first time in years from the shores of the Bosporus.

With humans in retreat, nature reclaimed what was once its own in whimsical ways: Goats strutted through villages, antlered deer grazed on manicured city lawns and mountain lions found perches by suburban fences.

U.S. scientists still predict 2020 will be the hottest year on record, even as experts forecast the largest annual drop in carbon emissions in modern history — a direct consequence of the pandemic’s freeze on human activity, trade and travel. The crisis isn’t uniformly good news for the planet: For example, satellite data shows that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is at its fastest pace in years, with environmental officials otherwise sidelined or preoccupied by the outbreak.

The pandemic is not just a reminder of the human impact on the environment, including the significance of man-made emissions on global warming and air pollution. It’s also similar: an imperceptible menace that knows no borders, overwhelms aging infrastructure and bedevils policymakers and politicians who struggle to grapple with the scale of the threat.

“A good way to think about the coronavirus pandemic is that it is like climate change at warp speed. What takes decades and centuries for the climate takes days or weeks for a contagious disease,” New York University climate economist Gernot Wagner wrote last month. “That speed focuses the mind and offers lessons in how to think about risk in an interconnected world.”
The question now is who’s learning what lessons.

 The commemorations for the 50th annual Earth Day saw a litany of prominent climate campaigners link action on that front to the experience of the outbreak.

For years, climate scientists have been calling on governments to “flatten the curve” — that is, reduce emissions to lessen the likely catastrophic toll global warming will exact on societies in decades to come.

In the Boston Globe, former U.S. secretary of state John F. Kerry pointed to evidence suggesting climate change could be a “threat multiplier” for zoonotic and pandemic diseases. He also took aim at President Trump and other politicians who cling to positions outside the scientific consensus and impede collective action.

“Just as in today’s pandemic, progress has been halted by finger-pointing, denial, replacing real science with junk science, misinformation, and flat-out lies, elevating political hacks instead of scientists and experts, refusal to work with allies and even adversaries, and leaving states and cities to fend for themselves,” wrote Kerry.

“The coronavirus pandemic has delivered sharp and painful reminders of our collective vulnerability and the value of paying very close attention to reality,” wrote physicist Mark Buchanan. “If there’s any good to come out of the current tragedy, it may be in helping to persuade a few people to help tip the scales and get our leaders to take the next looming issue much more seriously.”

The Trump administration isn’t quite set on tipping the scales.

Stimulus money the White House has been empowered to spend in the pandemic’s aftermath may go to U.S. fossil fuel companies that were already in financial trouble before the crisis.

On Earth Day, Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, sought to shift focus away from climate change to government efforts to curb pollution.

“We’re taking climate change seriously,” Wheeler told The Washington Post’s PowerUp newsletter. “But it’s not the only environmental issue that we face as a planet.”

But away from the White House, others are seeking to take the lead. Under the aegis of the World Economic Forum, major financial firms — including some that may help manage elements of the federal response to the pandemic — have pledged to divest from fossil fuels. Campaigners are calling for government stimulus to fund sustainable development projects that could build the green economy. The World Bank is proposing linking governments’ post-pandemic spending to greener infrastructure projects and future disaster-proofing.
In Washington, there’s a cautious hope that the urgency presented both by climate change and the pandemic may cool the geopolitical tensions between the United States and China and force greater global collaboration.

“We all breathe the same air and we’re all going to live with the same rising seas,” Michael Chertoff, a former head of the Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration, told Today’s WorldView during a webinar this week. “And whatever we may disagree about some things, we’re going to need to sit down with them and our like-minded allies and everybody else and figure out what can we do collectively to protect the global commons against either pandemic diseases or disastrous climate change.”

But, as Slate’s Joshua Keating noted, the opposite may well be true, given the growing hostility between both countries. He added that some right-wing parties elsewhere in the West have already seized on the threat of climate change not as a call for collective action, but as a justification for limiting migration and unraveling globalization.

“It’s not hard to imagine a future U.S. administration, rather than denying the increasingly obvious reality of climate change, using it to argue that the country needs tougher immigration controls and fewer refugees,” wrote Keating. “The alternative, they will argue, is to be overwhelmed by the human invaders and see our own natural resources depleted in the way other countries already have.”

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