21/01/2022

(Australian Museum) Impacts of Climate Change

Australian Museum

Climate change brings social, environmental and economic impacts.

Impacts of climate change

Climate change affects everything. It’s already putting pressure on our planet—on people and other living things, on economies and on governments.

The gases released through burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) create a blanket around the Earth, trapping heat. This heat creates more extreme and unpredictable weather. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and more intense. We experience longer droughts, longer and more severe fire seasons, more intense storms, less ice and snow cover, floods, rising sea levels and our oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic.

Human communities around the world are increasingly losing habitable land, houses, and sites of cultural significance. Our sources of reliable food and fresh water are dwindling. Also, our health suffers with hotter summers and as air quality gets worse during the bushfire seasons. But we’re not the only species being deeply impacted. The impacts of climate change affect all life on Earth.

As the oceans warm, coral reefs bleach and die, which means many fish and other marine creatures lose their habitats. Animals and plants are also having to shift where they live to stay within comfortable living limits. Mammals, reptiles, fish, insects, plants, fungi and other species are maturing, reproducing, flowering or fruiting at different times now, to keep up with temperature changes. This means the food sources that each one relies on to feed themselves and their offspring are often not available when needed.

Climate change is damaging the Earth’s capacity to act as a life support system, for us and for Earth’s many other species.

We can slow down the damage.

Impacts of climate change in Australia

Australia is experiencing higher temperatures, more extreme droughts, fire seasons, floods and more extreme weather due to climate change. Rising sea levels add to the intensity of high-sea-level events and threaten housing and infrastructure.

The number of days that break heat records has doubled in the past 50 years. Heatwaves are of particular concern: they are occurring more often and are more intense than in the past. In recent decades more people have died in Australia in heat waves than all other natural disasters combined. Some parts of Australia – inland areas particularly, are expected to warm faster than along the coasts.

Higher temperatures create a range of extreme weather and climate events: longer droughts in some areas of the continent, and in others, heavier rainstorms due to greater evaporation. Marine heatwaves are on the rise devastating Australia’s kelp forests, seagrass meadows, coral reefs and all the underwater creatures that depend on them.

These impacts also affect humans—the creatures and habitats are sources of food and income. Coral bleaching has increased in frequency and severity on the Great Barrier Reef. It is now occurring so frequently that large areas are unlikely to ever recover.

As the oceans absorb not just heat but also excess carbon from the atmosphere, oceans and seas have become more acidic. This acidity reduces the capacity of crustaceans, hard corals, and coralline algae to draw out calcium carbonate from the water, to grow and strengthen their skeletons.

In our communities, the impacts of climate change are broad. It damages our health, including mental health, the livelihoods of industries that are suffering (tourism and hospitality particularly) and it adds to the stresses on our medical and emergency services.

In the words of the Climate Council:
“Our new extremes of heat and other severe weather mean we now need to re-imagine how our towns and cities function, ensure we provide essential climate safety services, and rethink how we go about our daily lives and care for others.”
To predict how severe these impacts will be, teams of scientists who model climate change impacts have established ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs) to track the concentrations of greenhouse gasses expected to be in the atmosphere by 2100, depending on how much effort is put into limiting emissions around the world. The impacts resulting from low to high effort have been estimated, making clear the extreme costs of inaction.

How are people responding to impacts of climate change in Australia?

There is a rising groundswell of people concerned about and taking action on climate change in Australia.

There is important work on climate change underway across Australia, in universities, academies and museums, in government research organisations such as CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, and commercial research and development groups. These researchers are working to document climate change impacts in Australia, to better model and predict future changes, safeguard biodiversity and communities, and to establish more – and more efficient – ways of reducing emissions and capturing carbon.

There are many groups bringing people together to support strong solutions to the human impacts on environment. Well-established groups – Greening Australia, 350.org Australia, 1Million Women, the Climate Council, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Seed and more – are creating collective efforts to reduce carbon emissions and better care for our planet. Groups within the community are banding together to advance positive action: Doctors for the Environment Australia, Australian Parents for Climate Action, and Farmers for Climate Action are just three examples.

Many businesses, industries and organisations in Australia are seeking investment in clean energy and technology, clean operations, insuring economic benefits and environmental protection. Investment in solar and wind power and electric car infrastructure is increasing at an unprecedented rate. As engineers from the Australian National University reported at the end of 2019, Australia is the “runaway global leader” in building and installing renewable energy. “In Australia,” they report, “renewable energy is growing at a per capita rate ten times faster than the world average.”

Some of the research organisations developing important understanding and solutions to climate change in Australia, along with our own work here at the Australian Museum:

Climate change in the Pacific

Climate change has had a major impact on all countries and ecologies across the Pacific region for many decades. From the 1980s at least, Pacific Islanders have been sounding the alarm about the impacts of global warming on their islands. These are some of the lowest emitting nations in the world, yet they bear the full brunt of the impacts of climate change.

The rising temperatures caused primarily by heavy-emitting nations are causing sea level rise. This is because melting icesheets are adding water to the oceans—and water expands as it warms. This means in low-lying Pacific islands, coastlines, family lands, houses, and sacred sites are washed away by increasingly high tides and storm surges.

Cyclones are more intense as warm water evaporates more readily, creating super-charged storm systems. Hotter days and nights make everyday life harder and cause health problems for many people. Longer droughts, bigger floods, salt water intrusion into freshwater lenses, bleaching reefs and more storm damage: all these things make getting enough food, fresh water and shelter and maintaining health and wellbeing an increasingly hard challenge across the Pacific.

How are people responding to climate change in the Pacific?

Climate action groups have been outstandingly creative and powerfully outspoken for decades now, bringing voices from the Pacific to international climate policy forums. Social media has been providing increasing numbers of Pacific Islanders with wide-reaching channels for raising awareness and support for the push to switch to renewable energy and safeguard living systems. The slogan voiced by Islanders to powerful effect across social media platforms and at the UN Climate talks in Paris helped to set the optimal global target: “1.5 to Stay Alive”.

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