26/05/2020

(AU) Fire Season Extends By Almost Four Months In Parts Of Australia

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam | Laura Chung | Mike Foley

The fire season in parts of eastern Australia has lengthened by almost four months since the 1950s, with climate change a prominent driver in the trend, the Bureau of Meteorology says.

Karl Braganza, head of the bureau's climate monitoring, told the first day of public hearings for the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements on Monday that the South Coast of NSW and eastern Victoria now see fire weather arriving three months earlier, occurring towards the end of winter rather than the end of spring.

Firefighters overwhelmed by flames at bushfire in Orangeville in NSW in early December. Credit: Nick Moir>



At the end of the season, both areas were also reporting fire conditions - when the main index tracking risks tops 25 - extending about 21-30 days further into autumn, Dr Braganza said.

The longer season had implications for agencies trying to combat bushfires, with overlapping conditions stretching resources at home and abroad with similar climate trends appearing in other nations.

The royal commission is one of several inquiries under way, including the NSW government inquiry. Both are keen to wrap up before the new fire season begins, with the NSW report due by the end of July and the federal royal commission reporting a month later.

Dr Braganza's evidence emphasised how the background warming climate was "loading the dice" by exacerbating Australia's natural variability. For instance, the number of days of extreme heat with daily mean temperatures in the top 1 per cent had soared.

The trend for the South Coast of NSW in particular is for an earlier start to the bushfire season, as measured by the first day when the fire index tops 25.  Credit: Bureau of Meteorology LARGE IMAGE

"Now we have these spike days that are more extreme," he told the royal commission.

While the past season's bushfires had been set up by conditions in the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean that favoured drier-than-average conditions, the longer-term warming trend and the drying out of southern Australia during the cooler April-October period also played a role, Dr Braganza said.

The first two decades of this century stand out as warmer than any previous period, increasing the odds of extreme weather, including more severe bushfires.

"Really since the Canberra 2003 fires every jurisdiction in Australia has seen this," Dr Braganza said. "[We] have seen some really significant fire events that have challenged what we do to respond to them, and have really challenged what we thought fire weather looked like preceding this period."

Days of 'heat spikes' across Australia have been increasing as the climate warms both here and globally, the bureau says. Credit: Bureau of Meteorology LARGE IMAGE
Using projections of trends, the area of Australia experiencing extreme heat will probably grow.

For instance, much of Australia could endure extended periods above 48 degrees if conditions during the 2009 Black Saturday run-up were repeated and the expected climate warming added in, bureau modelling showed.

While the past summer was bad, conditions could have been worse, Dr Braganza said.

Extreme heat in the future. Credit: Bureau of Meteorology LARGE IMAGE

The Otway Range, to Melbourne's south-west, was as primed for fires as many of the areas that did burn, with only the source of ignition missing, he said.

The neutral conditions in the Pacific also moderated the possible extremes had there been an El Nino event, which often accompanies the type of conditions observed in the Indian and Southern oceans, Dr Braganza said.

He added this year was expected to get a lot more rainfall than in 2018 and 2019, which could lessen the severity for the upcoming bushfire season.

"At this point what we would be saying is your chances of getting the sort of season that you saw in 2018, 2019 and 2019-2020 are reduced," he said.

The royal commission will also address the wider issues of co-ordination, preparedness, responses, and recovery, natural disasters, as well as improving resilience and adapting to changing climatic conditions.

Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Helen Cleugh said, as the climate warmed, droughts and fire seasons were expected to worsen, while sea levels were expected to rise.

"For the next few decades, the rates of sea-level rise, both globally and here in Australia are partially locked in by our past emissions but, as we look further into the later century and to centuries beyond that, beyond 2100, those sea levels projections critically depend on the greenhouse gas emissions from now onwards," Dr Cleugh said.

The commission also heard from risk assessment experts on Monday afternoon. Sharanjit Paddam from the Actuaries Institute of Australia said it would be wrong to assess the impact of bushfires solely by looking at property losses from the so-called Black Summer, which destroyed around 3000 houses.

“The hail storms that hit Canberra a few months ago [on January 20], in 15 minutes those hail storms damaged a whole suburb, they were hitting things in the middle of a city … and if we were to do it per-second of natural disaster, that would be far more than six months of bushfires,” Mr Paddam said.

“People's lives, even if they're insured to the full extent of the damage, are very adversely affected by these natural disasters.”

Dr Ryan Crompton of Risk Frontiers said bushfires ranked fourth in terms of fatalities caused by natural disasters, accounting for 10 per cent of deaths between 1900 and 2015.

Extreme heat caused 4555 fatalities, or 46 per cent, and bushfires had caused 974, or one-tenth. Floods have accounted for 19 per cent of deaths and cyclones 12 per cent.

Risk Frontiers' figures include Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, which killed 173. It does not include last summer, when 33 people perished in the fire season.

The federal inquiry attracted almost 1700 submissions from individuals, companies and government bodies, about 100 more than its NSW counterpart. As of May 22, the commission has received more than 16,000 documents on discovery, totalling about 200,000 pages.

Six witnesses are expected to appear on Tuesday, including Mallacoota residents, the Red Cross and Australian Financial Complaints Authority.

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(AU) Climate Change Critical Issue In Eden-Monaro Byelection As Six In 10 Voters Say More Action Needed By Government

The Guardian - 

About the same number would more likely vote for candidate who supported local publicly funded renewable energy projects, poll finds 

Bushfires swept through many of the towns in the bellwether seat of Eden-Monaro. Six of seven voters polled said they had been heavily affected by the summer disaster. Photograph: Andrew Quilty/The Guardian

The Morrison government will come under pressure over climate change in the looming byelection in Eden-Monaro, with a new poll showing six in 10 voters in the seat believe the Coalition is not doing enough to tackle the problem.

The polling, commissioned by the progressive activist group GetUp, also illustrates the far-reaching impact of the summer of bushfires across the key New South Wales electorate, with nearly six in seven people surveyed saying they were affected in some way.

The Liberals fired the starting gun on their campaign on Sunday as their newly preselected candidate, Dr Fiona Kotvojs, sought to emphasise her green credentials by saying she had solar panels on her house and believed “that humans contribute to that changing climate”.

Kotvojs – who narrowly fell short of winning the seat at the 2019 election – has been criticised in the past for playing down the central role of humans in contributing to the climate crisis.

At a media conference in the town of Murrumbateman, Scott Morrison said the government was committed to lowering emissions and that Kotvojs “knows how to get things done”.

She will be facing off against Labor candidate Kristy McBain, the former Bega Valley mayor, who has been campaigning without a major rival candidate for the past three weeks. McBain has sought to highlight gaps in the federal government’s support for local communities during the drought, fire and coronavirus crises.

A byelection date is expected to be confirmed in the coming days, with speculation it could be set for 27 June or 4 July – just before the NSW school holidays.

The survey, conducted by uComms on behalf of GetUp, polled 879 residents across Eden-Monaro last Wednesday night. It found 59% of the sample agreed with the statement that “the government is not doing enough to address climate change” – including 48% who strongly agreed.

About 27% of the sample disagreed with the statement – including 12% strongly.

Roughly 59% of the sample said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported publicly-funded renewable energy projects to create secure, full-time jobs in the local area, while 17% said they would be less likely to support such a candidate.

Of the 85% of the respondents who said they were affected by the recent bushfire events, about 7% said they were affected severely, 21% significantly, 31% moderately and 27% slightly.

However, the sample was evenly divided on whether they were satisfied with the federal government’s response and support during the bushfire crisis. The poll’s margin of error was about 4 percentage points.

The national director of GetUp, Paul Oosting, said the poll showed people “overwhelmingly want real, urgent action on climate change”.

“People in Eden-Monaro won’t let politicians forget how their community was devastated by the bushfire crisis,” he said.

Oosting said GetUp had more than 6,000 members who lived in Eden-Monaro and they would be “talking to their community about how we can recover better from the bushfires and create a safer climate future and sustainable jobs with investment in clean renewable energy”.

Robynne Burchell, a GetUp member from the southern NSW town of Delegate which was evacuated three times during the bushfire crisis, said the fires were still front of mind for most people as they saw it everyday when they drove somewhere.

The federal government has resisted calls to commit to net zero emissions by 2050, even though every Australian state has signed up to the goal and scientists say the world must reach it around the middle of the century to achieve the Paris agreement aspiration of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

he energy minister, Angus Taylor, told Sky News on Sunday gas and coal would “continue to play a really important role in our system for many years”.

Guardian Australia revealed last week that a group advising the government on the Covid-19 recovery argued Australian taxpayers should underwrite a massive expansion of the domestic gas industry.

On Sunday, McBain congratulated Kotvojs and said she hoped all candidates would “run a clean campaign, free of dirty tricks, focused on the issues that actually matter to people in Eden-Monaro”.

Declaring her central focus would be on jobs, McBain seized on the revelation the jobkeeper program would cost $60bn less than originally forecast to call on the government to expand its eligibility, including to short-term casuals.

It is unclear whether the Nationals will preselect their own candidate for the seat after John Barilaro, the NSW deputy premier, pulled out of the race a few weeks ago amid tensions with the federal Nationals leader, Michael McCormack, and the Liberal state minister Andrew Constance, who also abandoned plans to run.

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(AU) Australia’s ‘Failing’ Environmental Laws Will Fuel Further Public Health Crises, Nobel Laureate Warns

The Guardian - 

Catastrophic bushfires led to loss of human life, physical injuries and respiratory problems, while animal welfare and destruction of habitat were at the heart of the Covid-19 crisis, says a letter to government signed by 180 health professionals. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Leading health professionals, including a Nobel laureate and a former Australian of the Year, say the government must put human health “front and centre” in a new generation of environment laws in the aftermath of the Covid-19 and bushfire crises.

The Nobel prize-winning immunologist Peter Doherty and the epidemiologist and former Australian of the Year Fiona Stanley are among 180 professionals who have warned the government that Australia’s “failing” environmental laws will fuel further public health crises.

In a letter to the environment minister, Sussan Ley, they’ve called on the government to use the once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act to strengthen environmental protections and acknowledge the importance of a healthy environment to human health.

“We note that the EPBC Act review is occurring during a period where Australia has experienced back-to-back crises of extraordinary scale in the 2019-2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires and now the Covid-19 pandemic,” the letter, organised by Doctors for the Environment Australia and the Climate and Health Alliance, states.

“These events highlight the fundamental interdependence between humans and the natural world and the consequences for human health when this is ignored.”

The businessman Graeme Samuel is chairing the independent review and is due to hand down a draft report in June. The final report is due in October, however, the government has indicated it is prepared to introduce changes to the act before that deadline.

Environmental organisations have long called for an overhaul of the act, highlighting its failure to stem Australia’s high rate of extinction.

Businesses and the government have spoken of the need to cut environmental bureaucracy – so-called “green tape” – in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Others, however, have told the Morrison government Australia’s prosperity depends on eradicating greenhouse gas emissions.

Stanley said the prospect of weakened environmental protections was “scary” and “the most devastating thing we could do for the health and wellbeing of our people”.

“The danger of the pandemic is they’ll slip this relaxing of environmental and other laws in without us noticing. It’s unacceptable,” she said.

“The people pushing for that are the people who are going to make the profits.”

The letter to Ley instead calls for an “entirely new generation of environmental law” with more robust protections.

As part of that, the health professionals state human health must be included in the act and public health professionals should sit on institutions responsible for administering environmental law.

The letter says the catastrophic bushfire season had not only caused unprecedented ecological devastation and loss of wildlife, it had also led to loss of human life, physical injuries, respiratory problems, and displacement of people. It says the mental health effects of the disaster will be long-lasting.

It says animal welfare and destruction of habitat were at the heart of the Covid-19 crisis and protection of nature was necessary to “prevent further and potentially even more deadly pandemics”.

Stanley said Australian environment and climate policy was late in acknowledging the importance of human health.

She said healthy ecosystems allowed children to grow up physically and mentally healthier and would reduce costs associated with health care.

“Planetary health leads to our health. In the end, it leads to better economies and more cost effective ways of providing energy,” she said.

“We should be talking about investment in society, investment in environment and biodiversity. It’s an investment, not a cost. The cost comes from not doing it.”

Stanley said environmental and climate policy in Australia had suffered for two decades due to the denigration of science

She said the fact Australia was slowly starting to ease its Covid-19 restrictions showed what was possible when scientists were listened to.

“At least everybody now knows what epidemiologists are,” Stanley said.

“Because they’ve listened to the science all through this pandemic, our hope is they might listen to the science with regards to the letter we’ve just sent.”

A spokesman for Ley said the letter had been received and would be considered by Samuel as part of the EPBC Act review.

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