Climate Council - Hilary Bambrick*
On August 16, the New South Wales
Rural Fire Service posted on Facebook “there’s 79 bush and grass fires
across the state, with 32 uncontained…And we’ve just checked. Yes, it’s
still winter”.
That same day saw Queensland enact a total fire ban across the south-east.
This
earliest ever start
to the eastern Australia fire season is just one of the many signs that
our climate is changing.
This same month, Europe has suffered through
record heat, Athens burned, fire tornadoes engulfed California, and
Tokyo recorded its highest ever temperatures.
Sweden enlisted overseas
firefighting personnel and expertise to cope with their increasingly
fire-prone landscape, manifesting as firestorms in the Arctic Circle.
In
Kerala in India’s south, massive floods displaced 800,000 people and
directly killed more than 350.
Around the same time, the entire state of
New South Wales was declared to be in
drought.
These aren’t isolated, statistically
unusual events that just happened to coincide. Records are now
continually being broken as we experience new extremes. They are off the
charts, and we better get used to it.
Here in Australia we’re being newly
challenged by increasingly hot days, severe bushfires, storms and
floods, and prolonged drought, while sea-level rise is threatening
housing and infrastructure in our coastal cities.
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.
Escalating temperatures are putting
more lives at risk. Older people and those with chronic health
conditions are especially vulnerable, but so are people living in poor
thermally performing houses, or in less green parts of the city, or who
don’t have air-conditioning or can’t afford to run it, or who don’t feel
safe to open their windows at night, or who are less mobile, or who are
socially isolated, or who don’t have a home, or who work outside.
In recognition of increasingly hot
summers, Queensland has just opened up a conversation about changing the
start date of the school year to attempt to shorten the season where
children’s capacity to learn, and their wellbeing, is adversely affected
by heat.
Similarly, we also need to rethink how we structure our daily
activity, including what standard work and school hours look like, so as
to minimise exposure to dangerous temperatures while working or during
the commute.
Rescheduling sporting events to protect both the players
and the crowds from worsening heat should no longer be delayed,
highlighted by the on-court temperatures hitting 69 degrees C during the
most recent Australian Open.
Next year’s review of national
building standards is none too soon, as we’re a long way from ensuring
structures are suitable to the current climate in which they are
situated, let alone what’s on the way.
Take a journey through the
expanding footprint of Western Sydney and you’ll see large houses with
black roofs and no eaves on small blocks with no trees, oriented
inappropriately so as to maximise developer income, and each with
air-conditioning to make up for poor design and materials. Just this
last summer the temperature in Penrith soared to 47.3 degrees; the last
thing cities need are more energy-inefficient hot boxes.
We also don’t need to grow our cities
ever outwards and over prime agricultural land, or further into
bushland that is increasingly fire-prone.
A more thoughtful,
climate-ready approach to urban development would ensure cooler cities
through ample greenspace and heat-reflective materials, welcoming and
accessible public amenities where people can escape from the heat, and
mixed-use street plans that encourage community-building and active
transport rather than isolation and car use.
Such a city would run on
affordable and effective public transport that reduces congestion,
improves mobility and withstands climate extremes. Within these cities,
small scale urban farming and community gardening can bring people
together, forge stronger links with food production and the environment
on which we depend, and provide refuge for key pollinator species of
bees and birds.
We need to prioritise investment in
affordable, reliable renewable energy to address the health impacts of
climate change and minimise risk to the most vulnerable.
As outdoor
temperatures soar, nights no longer cool down, and heat waves become
seemingly interminable, cheap and clean energy will directly save lives.
Now is the time to invest in this clean energy future for all rather
than continue to prop up a dirty, dangerous and increasingly expensive
fossil fuel industry.
A well planned, timely energy transition will be
good for workers and their communities, and provide much needed
certainty in the energy sector.
Major climate related events should
no longer come as a surprise; the reactive, short-term responses to
acute events, such as the tax levy implemented following the 2011
Queensland floods, are inadequate and unsustainable.
We need to plan now
for future climate shocks even if we’re not one hundred per cent sure
the shape that they will take or where they will occur. They may seem
unpredictable yet the fact of these events is entirely foreseeable.
When a major event strikes, we also
need to move beyond our traditional stoic tendency to simply rebuild and
replace what was lost and face the hard truth that it might instead be
time to up stumps and move.
That once peaceful bushland community may be
at risk of repeated catastrophic infernos. That one-in-a-hundred-year
floodplain may soon see a major deluge every 7 years.
That family farm
that was managed productively for 100 years may never again see
significant rainfall. A dose of climate reality is unpleasant but
necessary medicine. We need to know our place, understand more deeply
the environment on which we depend, and become more adept at being
caretakers of the land.
In our increasingly hostile climate,
we will also need to take greater care of others. Checking up on family
and looking out for our older neighbours during a heat wave or other
emergency saves lives. This neighbourliness should extend regionally, as
Pacific islands are lost to sea level rise, and island livelihoods are
lost to unprecedented cyclones.
As a wealthy and robust neighbour,
Australia can afford to provide refuge to people whose nations are
damaged by climate change. Given our role as a major emitter of
greenhouse gases through both our home industries and our exports, it is
also the morally right thing to do.
It’s not only the wellbeing of people
that matters and that requires our additional care during extreme
weather, but also animals.
What do we do when we can’t take a beloved
pet to an evacuation centre? What happens to the horses when a farm is
threatened by bushfire? How are dairy cattle managed and given relief
during extreme heat? How do we provide care for bush animals injured in
fire?
Unfortunately as resources of land,
water and food become more severely threatened by climate change, we
risk shifting away from a culture of offering care and shelter and
towards greater conflict, with civil disturbance, war and mass
population displacement the likely outcome when people fight for
survival.
The changes we need to make to meet
the challenges of climate change are not just structural, but cultural
as well, and require a shift in thinking from short term electoral
cycles to long term adaptive planning; from mere survival to a society
that flourishes.
Rethinking how we structure our
physical, economic and social worlds to be more mindful of the
environment, build strong communities and a culture of care, and reduce
socioeconomic disadvantage, will have a profound impact on how we as a
nation experience and cope with our increasingly hostile climate.
Some
of these things, such as checking in on our neighbours more often,
require just a little tweaking in the way that we do things. Others,
such as rethinking our transport and energy systems, are necessarily
transformative.
We can plan now for the inevitable to ease these
transitions, to be adaptive rather than merely reactive. We can choose
the directions we take and the Australia we wish to live in. The time to
do this is now.
*Professor Hilary Bambrick is Head of the School of Public Health and
Social Work at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She is an
environmental epidemiologist and bioanthropologist researching health
impacts and adaptation, especially in more vulnerable communities.
Working in Australia, the Pacific, Asia and Africa, her research is
focused on the health challenges facing communities and the ways in
which to strengthen climate resilience.
Links
