This week, Prue Clarke talks with Julian Cribb, co-founder of the Council of Human Future, and Kyle Pope, the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, about how to cover climate change.
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Links
13/02/2022
(Podcast) Changing How We Cover Climate Change
Whooshka -
Podcast
This week, Prue Clarke talks with Julian Cribb, co-founder of the Council of Human Future, and Kyle Pope, the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, about how to cover climate change.
Links
This week, Prue Clarke talks with Julian Cribb, co-founder of the Council of Human Future, and Kyle Pope, the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, about how to cover climate change.
Links
(AU The Conversation) Time For A Reckoning: Cricket Australia, Fossil Fuel Sponsorship And Climate Change
The Conversation
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As we head towards the end of the summer sporting calendar, Cricket Australia
is facing pressing questions well beyond replacing Justin Langer as coach of
the men’s national teams.
Chief among them is the question of climate change.
While other sporting codes and teams around the world are starting to use their clout to push for more and faster action, Cricket Australia’s powerbrokers seem to be largely paying lip service to climate action.
Meanwhile, many players are taking action.
You might think cricket and climate change have nothing in common. Sadly, that’s not the case.
On a practical level, steadily rising temperatures and heightened natural disasters make it harder to play the sport safely over summer.
And on a cultural level, fossil fuel power companies have long used sponsorships to “sportwash” their reputations.
It’s time for Cricket Australia to take a stronger stance on climate and turn away from fossil fuel sponsorships.
Is cricket really at risk?
There is clear and growing evidence rising temperatures, bush fire smoke, cyclones, floods and drought brought by climate change are hurting cricket and the health of its players around the world.
That’s to say nothing of sea level rise and stronger
hurricanes, which threaten to take chunks out of cricket-mad island nations in the
Caribbean.
In June last year, Grenada Prime Minister Keith Mitchell called on Cricket Australia and the International Cricket Council to sign on to UN efforts to harness sport for climate action.
In response, Cricket Australia said they would look into it. We’ve heard nothing further.
No doubt some readers will baulk at the idea of putting the politics of climate change and cricket together. But if the last century of sporting history has taught us anything, it’s that high level sport and politics go hand-in-hand, from Cold War Olympics, to race relations, to nationalism.
Climate change is the single biggest issue of our time, dubbed “code red for humanity”. It’s an exceptionally well established issue seen across atmospheric, chemical and physical patterns.
To tackle it requires a massive collective undertaking. That means politics. But to make big changes requires public buy-in.
Sport, which absorbs so much of our attention, has a vital role to play.
Players are taking the lead on climate action
Many of Australia’s leading players – including men’s Test captain Pat Cummins – are not waiting. They are calling for urgent action to protect the sport and the generations of younger players to follow.
For Cummins, the realisation was personal. In January 2020, his local cricket club in Penrith sweltered as Western Sydney became the hottest place on earth. Smoke haze from Black Summer megafires forced match cancellations.
Two years earlier, Cummins watched as English captain Joe Root was taken to hospital after battling 47℃ heat.
Last week, Cummins launched Cricket for Climate, which will install solar panels on club facilities around the country. He’s not alone in his activism. This is just the latest surge of support for urgent climate action by our athletes.
Cricket for Climate follows on from AFL Players for Climate Action, which now has 260 members.
On a broader scale, there’s The Cool Down, a national climate campaign led by Emma and David Pocock which has more than 300 top athletes as backers, including cricket’s Alex Blackwell, Rachel Haynes and Sean Abbott.
Our athletes want faster, stronger action. So what’s the hold up?
Cricket Australia supports climate action through the fine work of the Sports Environmental Alliance as an organisational member. But it could do much more.
While Cricket Australia has signed on to Cummins’ new initiative, it has not committed to either of two UN initiatives, Sports for Climate Action Framework or the Race to Zero Initiative.
You’d be hard pressed to find detail on Cricket Australia’s environmental initiatives. There’s no information about this in their current five year plan or their annual report.
There’s no reporting on the “holistic” sustainability strategy the organisation stated it was developing in 2020 in the face of concerns about extreme heat.
The problem of sportswashing and sponsorships
Unfortunately, professional sport is awash with lucrative sponsorships from fossil fuel companies. The main sponsor of our men’s cricket team is Alinta Energy, which owns one of Victoria’s largest coal-fired power plants, Loy Yang B.
While Alinta is moving into wind and solar, its parent company, Pioneer Sail Holdings, is still the sixth highest carbon emitting corporation in Australia as of 2019-2020.
These kinds of sponsorships are coming under increasing scrutiny nationally and internationally, with comparisons drawn between our current fossil fuel corporation sponsorships and tobacco company sponsorships in the 1980s.
Fossil fuel companies seek out the “soft power” of sport as a way to improve their public image and create positive brand associations.
So what would it take to deny fossil fuel companies this kind of social
license? Cricket managers don’t have to look far at all. There’s an excellent
example at Rod Laver Arena, just over the train tracks from Cricket
Australia’s head office.
In January, Tennis Australia sent shockwaves through sport by cancelling its multi-year sponsorship with their “official natural gas partner” Santos ahead of this year’s Australian Open. The cancellation came after a long campaign targeting “sportswashing”.
This sudden shift is positive. It means the comparison with tobacco companies now has real teeth. Remember that in the 1980s, tobacco advertising was everywhere.
To reduce the damage done by smoking, Australia progressively denied tobacco companies the social license offered by sponsorships and advertising, as part of a broader push.
We need a similar effort to encourage a wholesale shift away from fossil fuels.
The question now for Cricket Australia is simple.
How long will it hesitate at the climate crossroads, caught between the health of its players and planet and the fossil fuel interests of its sponsors? The players aren’t waiting.
Pat Cummins and many other players are leading the way to a safer future for cricket and those who love it.
It’s time for their national governing body to follow them.
Links
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Shutterstock
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Author is Professor of Media and Communications, Monash University |
Chief among them is the question of climate change.
While other sporting codes and teams around the world are starting to use their clout to push for more and faster action, Cricket Australia’s powerbrokers seem to be largely paying lip service to climate action.
Meanwhile, many players are taking action.
You might think cricket and climate change have nothing in common. Sadly, that’s not the case.
On a practical level, steadily rising temperatures and heightened natural disasters make it harder to play the sport safely over summer.
And on a cultural level, fossil fuel power companies have long used sponsorships to “sportwash” their reputations.
It’s time for Cricket Australia to take a stronger stance on climate and turn away from fossil fuel sponsorships.
Is cricket really at risk?
There is clear and growing evidence rising temperatures, bush fire smoke, cyclones, floods and drought brought by climate change are hurting cricket and the health of its players around the world.
|
|
Smoke from the Black Summer bushfires overshadowed the Sheffield
Shield match at the SCG on December 10, 2019. Craig Golding/AAP |
In June last year, Grenada Prime Minister Keith Mitchell called on Cricket Australia and the International Cricket Council to sign on to UN efforts to harness sport for climate action.
In response, Cricket Australia said they would look into it. We’ve heard nothing further.
No doubt some readers will baulk at the idea of putting the politics of climate change and cricket together. But if the last century of sporting history has taught us anything, it’s that high level sport and politics go hand-in-hand, from Cold War Olympics, to race relations, to nationalism.
Climate change is the single biggest issue of our time, dubbed “code red for humanity”. It’s an exceptionally well established issue seen across atmospheric, chemical and physical patterns.
To tackle it requires a massive collective undertaking. That means politics. But to make big changes requires public buy-in.
Sport, which absorbs so much of our attention, has a vital role to play.
Players are taking the lead on climate action
Many of Australia’s leading players – including men’s Test captain Pat Cummins – are not waiting. They are calling for urgent action to protect the sport and the generations of younger players to follow.
For Cummins, the realisation was personal. In January 2020, his local cricket club in Penrith sweltered as Western Sydney became the hottest place on earth. Smoke haze from Black Summer megafires forced match cancellations.
Two years earlier, Cummins watched as English captain Joe Root was taken to hospital after battling 47℃ heat.
Last week, Cummins launched Cricket for Climate, which will install solar panels on club facilities around the country. He’s not alone in his activism. This is just the latest surge of support for urgent climate action by our athletes.
Cricket for Climate follows on from AFL Players for Climate Action, which now has 260 members.
On a broader scale, there’s The Cool Down, a national climate campaign led by Emma and David Pocock which has more than 300 top athletes as backers, including cricket’s Alex Blackwell, Rachel Haynes and Sean Abbott.
Our athletes want faster, stronger action. So what’s the hold up?
Cricket Australia supports climate action through the fine work of the Sports Environmental Alliance as an organisational member. But it could do much more.
While Cricket Australia has signed on to Cummins’ new initiative, it has not committed to either of two UN initiatives, Sports for Climate Action Framework or the Race to Zero Initiative.
You’d be hard pressed to find detail on Cricket Australia’s environmental initiatives. There’s no information about this in their current five year plan or their annual report.
There’s no reporting on the “holistic” sustainability strategy the organisation stated it was developing in 2020 in the face of concerns about extreme heat.
The problem of sportswashing and sponsorships
Unfortunately, professional sport is awash with lucrative sponsorships from fossil fuel companies. The main sponsor of our men’s cricket team is Alinta Energy, which owns one of Victoria’s largest coal-fired power plants, Loy Yang B.
While Alinta is moving into wind and solar, its parent company, Pioneer Sail Holdings, is still the sixth highest carbon emitting corporation in Australia as of 2019-2020.
These kinds of sponsorships are coming under increasing scrutiny nationally and internationally, with comparisons drawn between our current fossil fuel corporation sponsorships and tobacco company sponsorships in the 1980s.
Fossil fuel companies seek out the “soft power” of sport as a way to improve their public image and create positive brand associations.
|
|
India’s Sourav Ganguly suffers from heat exhaustion in the 2007
Test in Australia. Andrew Brownbill/AP
|
In January, Tennis Australia sent shockwaves through sport by cancelling its multi-year sponsorship with their “official natural gas partner” Santos ahead of this year’s Australian Open. The cancellation came after a long campaign targeting “sportswashing”.
This sudden shift is positive. It means the comparison with tobacco companies now has real teeth. Remember that in the 1980s, tobacco advertising was everywhere.
To reduce the damage done by smoking, Australia progressively denied tobacco companies the social license offered by sponsorships and advertising, as part of a broader push.
We need a similar effort to encourage a wholesale shift away from fossil fuels.
The question now for Cricket Australia is simple.
How long will it hesitate at the climate crossroads, caught between the health of its players and planet and the fossil fuel interests of its sponsors? The players aren’t waiting.
Pat Cummins and many other players are leading the way to a safer future for cricket and those who love it.
It’s time for their national governing body to follow them.
Links
- We need to 'climate-proof' our sports stadiums
- Sportswashing: how mining and energy companies sponsor your favourite sports to help clean up their image
- (AU SMH) Australia’s Top Cricketers Make The Baggy Green Even Greener
- (Global Voices) Why Beijing’s Artificial Snow At The 2022 Winter Olympic Games Is Stirring Controversy
- (AU ABC) Climate Change Threatens Future Of Winter Olympics And All Snow Sports, Research Suggests
- (USA NPR) Could The World Become Too Warm To Hold Winter Olympics?
- (AU RenewEconomy) Conservatives Want Australia’s Cricket Captain To Shut Up About Climate
- (AU The Guardian) ‘We All Have A Role’: More Than 260 Australian Rules Footballers Sign Up To Climate Campaign
- (AU The Guardian) Every One Of Us Should Care About The Climate Crisis. Together We Can Make A Big Difference
- (AU The Guardian) David Pocock Leads 250 High-Profile Australian Athletes In Climate Campaign
- (AU ROAR) Cricket Must Start Preparing For Climate Change
(AU RenewEconomy) Australia’s Bushfire Threat Already Beyond Worst-Case Scenarios, Thanks To Climate Change
RenewEconomy -
Australia will continue to experience more extreme impacts of climate
change, with the bushfire threat already exceeding the ‘worst case’
scenarios, experts have told the Australian National University’s 2022
Climate Update event.
The director of the ANU’s Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Mark Howden, said that the observed impacts of climate change were indisputable evidence of the human effects on the environment.
“The human influence on the global climate is now unequivocal. Essentially, as a matter of fact, it’s not uncertain,” Howden said.
“We can put to bed a lot of that argument that it’s not human influence. It was clear that there was widespread rapid intensifying an unprecedented influence of humans on many different aspects of the climate system.”
Howden pointed to the worsening threat posed by the increasing severity of bushfires, no longer limited to Australia’s summer months, and now becoming a year-long issue.
“Across most of Australia, the fire danger index is increasing and increasing significantly, particularly in the southeast,” Howden said.
“Starting from spring and ending early in autumn, and we can see [the area burned] going up, essentially linearly. But if we look at the winter period, the autumn and winter period, the cool season, what we see is the area burnt is actually going up essentially exponentially.”
“There is no reason to feel comfortable about how fire is evolving at the moment. And this is beyond the worst-case climate change scenarios for this type at this time span, which were produced just a few years ago,” Howden added.
The latest Annual Climate Statement, recently published by the Bureau of Meteorology, found that while 2021 brought the coolest average temperatures for Australia since 2012, it still ranked amongst the top 20 hottest years on record at 0.56 °C warmer than the 1961–1990 average.
The lower temperatures are partially attributable to the ongoing influence of a La Niña event, which usually brings cooler and wetter periods to Australia’s east coast that can help spur the growth of vegetation.
Howden said that it formed part of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle that can amplify the bushfire risk when the warmer and drier periods return.
"A lot of our fire danger arises through our climate variability, which in large part is driven by El Niño,” Howden said.
“So that’s the difference between the wet years when we grow a lot of biomass and the dry years where that dries out and becomes an immediate fire risk.”
“We’re likely to see the rainfall variability associated with the ENSO cycle likely to increase. The difference between the wet years and the dry years in a place like Australia is likely to increase with a whole series of implications for droughts and floods and fires.”
Howden, who also serves as vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that he saw the government response to the Covid-19 pandemic, with linkages being made by policymakers between public health and economic health, as a potential model that could be replicated in response to climate change.
“In COVID, we very demonstrably showed that if you look after your people, you look after your economy, those countries which acted well and very proactively, in terms of COVID, also fared well, economically,” Howden said.
“And the same goes for climate change. If we don’t look after our people and environment, our economy will suffer. And it’s increasingly become clear across a whole range of studies.”
At the end of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its next landmark report on climate change, detailing the anticipated impacts of climate change, the vulnerability of natural systems, and options for adaptation measures.
It will follow last year’s IPCC report, which outlined the latest scientific understanding of the physical basis of climate change and detailed global warming projections.
Links
 |
| Australia's bushfire threat is beyond 'worst case scenario's experts say. (AAP Image/Darren Pateman) |
The director of the ANU’s Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Mark Howden, said that the observed impacts of climate change were indisputable evidence of the human effects on the environment.
“The human influence on the global climate is now unequivocal. Essentially, as a matter of fact, it’s not uncertain,” Howden said.
“We can put to bed a lot of that argument that it’s not human influence. It was clear that there was widespread rapid intensifying an unprecedented influence of humans on many different aspects of the climate system.”
Howden pointed to the worsening threat posed by the increasing severity of bushfires, no longer limited to Australia’s summer months, and now becoming a year-long issue.
“Across most of Australia, the fire danger index is increasing and increasing significantly, particularly in the southeast,” Howden said.
“Starting from spring and ending early in autumn, and we can see [the area burned] going up, essentially linearly. But if we look at the winter period, the autumn and winter period, the cool season, what we see is the area burnt is actually going up essentially exponentially.”
“There is no reason to feel comfortable about how fire is evolving at the moment. And this is beyond the worst-case climate change scenarios for this type at this time span, which were produced just a few years ago,” Howden added.
The latest Annual Climate Statement, recently published by the Bureau of Meteorology, found that while 2021 brought the coolest average temperatures for Australia since 2012, it still ranked amongst the top 20 hottest years on record at 0.56 °C warmer than the 1961–1990 average.
The lower temperatures are partially attributable to the ongoing influence of a La Niña event, which usually brings cooler and wetter periods to Australia’s east coast that can help spur the growth of vegetation.
Howden said that it formed part of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle that can amplify the bushfire risk when the warmer and drier periods return.
"A lot of our fire danger arises through our climate variability, which in large part is driven by El Niño,” Howden said.
“So that’s the difference between the wet years when we grow a lot of biomass and the dry years where that dries out and becomes an immediate fire risk.”
“We’re likely to see the rainfall variability associated with the ENSO cycle likely to increase. The difference between the wet years and the dry years in a place like Australia is likely to increase with a whole series of implications for droughts and floods and fires.”
Howden, who also serves as vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that he saw the government response to the Covid-19 pandemic, with linkages being made by policymakers between public health and economic health, as a potential model that could be replicated in response to climate change.
“In COVID, we very demonstrably showed that if you look after your people, you look after your economy, those countries which acted well and very proactively, in terms of COVID, also fared well, economically,” Howden said.
“And the same goes for climate change. If we don’t look after our people and environment, our economy will suffer. And it’s increasingly become clear across a whole range of studies.”
At the end of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its next landmark report on climate change, detailing the anticipated impacts of climate change, the vulnerability of natural systems, and options for adaptation measures.
It will follow last year’s IPCC report, which outlined the latest scientific understanding of the physical basis of climate change and detailed global warming projections.
Links
- CSIRO study proves climate change driving Australia’s 800% boom in bushfires
- Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub
- Australian Research Finds Climate Change Behind Bushfire Surge
- Bushfire best practice guide - CSIRO Research
- Bushfire Crisis Australia - The Nature Conservancy
- Bureau of Meteorology Annual climate statement 2021