01/07/2021

(AU ABC) Victorian Government Commits $14 Million To Battery Facility, Regional Hydrogen Hub

ABC News - Jackson Peck

All levels of government are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the hydrogen industry. (Supplied)

Key Points
  • The Victorian government has announced a $14 million investment in two Deakin University alternative energy projects
  • The projects will focus on new battery and hydrogen technologies
  • The facilities are expected to host nearly 300 jobs, while nearly 80 jobs are expected to be created during construction
The Victorian government has committed $14 million to a battery facility and a regional hydrogen hub at university campuses in Melbourne and regional areas.

The Hycel Technology Hub at Deakin University's Warrnambool campus will receive $9m to develop and test hydrogen fuel technologies.

Meanwhile, $5.2m will go to the Battery Technology Research and Innovation Hub 2.0 at Deakin's Burwood campus.

Deakin Energy director Adrian Panow said the funding for the hydrogen hub would help make the fuel a feasible option for industry.

"To really make that step change where hydrogen becomes a viable option," he said.

"Particularly for those sectors that are very difficult to decarbonise, so heavy transport in particular, finding a substitute for natural gas with the low carbon footprint.
"It's a small factory that will house equipment to manufacture, to trial and to test fuel cell equipment.
"Importantly, it'll be a facility that will interface directly with communities, and particularly regional communities, to build that social licence so that when hydrogen becomes a viable large scale economy that the community is ready to accept it and we have a trained workforce that knows how to implement safely."

The federal government has committed $2m to the Hycel Technology Hub.

Local Federal Member Dan Tehan at a groundbreaking event at the Hycel Technology Hub in November 2020. (Supplied: Alice Miles)
'Viable, safe and can be implemented'

Dr Panow said the funding would help the development of hydrogen technology at scale.

"What we've heard very clearly from our global collaborators is that the research out of a laboratory can't enter global supply chains unless it's been demonstrated at scale," he said.

"That's why the investment needs to be substantial — so you can manufacture, you can build the small and medium enterprise sector to convert the fantastic science into a scale that a manufacturer can pick up and realise it's viable, it's safe and it can be implemented.

"The regional location is perhaps often underestimated in its importance.

"Hydrogen lends itself very well to that long distance travel and the local industry in the south west of Victoria — dairy, forestry and manufacturing in that area.
"Hydrogen enables that whole sector at alternatives in how it's going to decarbonise."
Will 'green hydrogen' live up to the hype?
It's been identified as the clean energy source that could help bring the world to net-zero emissions, but green hydrogen's future is not yet assured. Read more
Deakin University is also aiming to transition its Warrnambool campus from gas to hydrogen and will convert the Warrnambool Bus Lines fleet to renewable energy.

The battery facility will include a testing lab and pilot production line to research and make batteries using lithium and sodium.

The advanced batteries are expected to be used in defence, agriculture, disaster zones and the health industry.

The state government said the facilities would host 290 jobs in research and manufacturing, while 78 jobs were expected to be created during construction, which was slated for next year.

Minister for Higher Education Gayle Tierney, who helped launch the project funding this morning, said it was a great investment in future industries.

"These projects will create world-class training and research facilities right here in Victoria, with huge benefits not just on skills and training but also industry and our economy," she said.

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(ABC / AFP) Hundreds Dead As Record-Breaking Heat Wave Hits Canada And United States

ABC News - AFP

Canada is reporting record-breaking temperatures thanks to a high-pressure ridge trapping warm air in the region. (Reuters: Jennifer Gauthier)

Key Points
  • Record highs of 49.5C are attributed to climate change 
  • 233 deaths have been reported between Friday and Monday in British Columbia
  • Schools and COVID-19 vaccination centres have been forced to close 
Scores of deaths in Canada's Vancouver area and large wildfires are likely linked to a gruelling heat wave, authorities said Tuesday, as the country recorded its highest-ever temperature amid scorching conditions that extended to the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

The Vancouver Police Department alone said it had responded to more than 65 sudden deaths since Friday, with the vast majority "related to the heat."

The chief coroner for the province of British Columbia, which includes Vancouver, said that it had "experienced a significant increase in deaths reported where it is suspected that extreme heat has been contributory."

The service said in a statement it recorded 233 deaths in the wider British Columbia area between Friday and Monday, compared with 130 on average.

The deaths came as Canada set a new all-time high temperature record for a third day in a row Tuesday, reaching 49.5 degrees Celsius in Lytton, British Columbia, about 250 kilometres east of Vancouver, the country's weather service, Environment Canada, reported.

Climate change is causing record-setting temperatures to become more frequent.

Globally, the decade to 2019 was the hottest recorded, and the five hottest years have all occurred within the last five years.

The scorching heat stretching from the US state of Oregon to Canada's Arctic territories has been blamed on a high-pressure ridge trapping warm air in the region.

Temperatures in the US Pacific Northwest cities of Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington reached levels not seen since record-keeping began in the 1940s.

Homes are being evacuated due to wildfires

Smoke billows during the Sparks Lake wildfire at Thompson-Nicola Regional District, British Columbia, Canada. (Supplied: BC Wildfire Service)

The extreme heat, combined with intense drought, also created the perfect conditions for several fires to break out.

Evacuation orders were issued in British Columbia's Thompson-Nicola region amid wildfires spanning 750 hectares.

Another wildfire at McKay Creek region spanned 3,700 hectares. 

The British Columbia Wildfire Service tweeted images and attributed the fire to the hot, dry weather.

Another blaze on the California-Oregon border burned some 600 hectares by Monday morning.

'Hottest week ever'

"We are in the midst of the hottest week British Columbians have ever experienced, and there are consequences to that, disastrous consequences for families and for communities," British Columbia Premier John Horgan told a news conference.

The heat wave has forced schools and COVID-19 vaccination centres to close in the Vancouver area, while officials set up temporary water fountains and misting stations on street corners.

Stores quickly sold out of portable air-conditioners and fans, so several people without cooling at home told AFP they hunkered down in their air-conditioned cars or underground parking garages at night.

Cities across the western United States and Canada opened emergency cooling centres and outreach workers handed out bottles of water and hats.

The Salvation Army has been handing out bottled water. (Reuters: Karen Ducey)

In Oregon, organisers were forced to adjust the final day of the US Olympic track and field trials, moving afternoon events to the evening.

"Dubai would be cooler than what we're seeing now," David Phillips, a senior climatologist for Environment Canada, told AFP on Monday.

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(ID SMH) ‘Hazards Are Many’: Millions Found To Be At Risk From Sea Level Rise

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Indonesia has been identified as the country with the most land at risk of sea level rise, adding to the threats climate change will pose to Australia’s populous northern neighbour.

New satellite data has found Indonesia has 118,200 square kilometres of land at two metres or less above mean sea level, or an area 14 times larger than previously thought, according to research published Wednesday in the Nature Communications journal.

That land, which amounts to about 6.3 per cent of the archipelago, is already home to 17.2 million people.

New satellite detection methods have identified 267 million people living at elevations of 2 metres or less above sea level. About two-thirds are located in the tropics, with Indonesia home to the largest population at risk as sea levels rise because of climate change. Credit: Getty Images

Remote-sensing Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) pulses detected land around the world that is home to 267 million people living at two metres above sea level or lower, the research found, putting them at flooding risk.

Assuming seas will rise about a metre by 2100 as the climate heats up, those at risk will swell to 410 million even assuming no population increase, with about 72 per cent of them living in the tropics, it said.

“Consequently, whether measured by area, population size or population growth, the burdens of relative sea-level rise are likely to fall [disproportionately] upon developing countries in the tropics that often have limited capacity to adapt,” the paper said.

Vanishing coast
Thousands of kilometres of Australia's beaches at risk from rising seas
Aljosja Hooijer and colleagues at Deltares, a Dutch-based research institute, said that while tropical Asia, in particular, was known to have vulnerable coastal and delta regions before, LiDAR allowed much more precise estimates to be made.

The work, done to 5-kilometre resolutions, would be refined further to 1-kilometre, he told the Herald and The Age.

Dr Hooijer said land elevation data had received relatively limited scientific interest so far, simply because existing data was highly inaccurate with errors well over one metre.

“Our new data show coastal lands to be substantially lower than was known before, which will translate into substantially higher flood risk of course,” he said.

Indonesia faces multiple climate change risks, with sea-level rises just one of them, according to Robert Glasser at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Credit: Getty Images
Along with Indonesia, Bangladesh and China had among the largest areas and populations at risk. Australia had about 30,000 square kilometres of land at 2 metres or less above sea level, which was home to about 300,000 people. With one metre of sea level rise, that area would swell to about 48,000 square kilometres, with 800,000 at risk even without population increasing.

Climate policy
Failure to model costs of climate change to coal, gas ‘beggars belief’
Robert Glasser, head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s climate centre and author of a recent report on the rising threat of global warming in the region, said that the Nature paper underestimated the risks because it did not assess the rising population.

“If people are being flooded and flooded over and over again, people tend to move,” Dr Glasser said. “The pressures on places like Indonesia are going to be enormous.”

In his report, Dr Glasser said the wider Southeast Asian region faced “a dangerous constellation of simultaneous climate hazards” that would pose national security issues for Australia quite apart from its own exposure to threats from a warming world.

“Sea-level there is rising four times faster than the global average, driven by climate change and other factors, such as groundwater extraction,” he wrote.

Even so, most analyses treated climate risks as independent, rather than considering how they would likely interact, his report noted.

A study of the impact that rising temperatures will have on agricultural productivity, for instance, would typically overlook the compounding impacts of other hazards such as flooding, drought, fires, increases of pests, saltwater inundation, cyclones, migrations of people, and so on.

“The hazards are many and the cascades will affect everything,” Dr Glasser said.

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30/06/2021

(UK BBC) Climate Change: Courts Set For Rise In Compensation Cases

BBC News - Matt McGrath

Dutch environmentalists celebrate a recent victory over Shell in court. REMKO DE WAAL
There's likely to be a significant increase in the number of lawsuits brought against fossil fuel companies in the coming years, say researchers.

Their new study finds that to date, lawyers have failed to use the most up-to-date scientific evidence on the cause of rising temperatures.

As a result, there have been few successful claims for compensation.

That could change, say the authors, as evidence linking specific weather events to carbon emissions increases.

So far, around 1,500 climate-related lawsuits have been brought before the courts around the world.

There have been some notable successes for environmental groups, such as in a recent case against Shell decided by a civil court in the Netherlands.

Campaigners also took to the streets to support a successful case that the Dutch government was moving too slowly on climate change. NurPhoto
The judge ruled that, by 2030, the company must cut its CO2 emissions by 45% compared to 2019 levels.

The verdict also indicated that the Shell group is responsible for its own CO2 emissions and those of its suppliers.

However, there have been few successes in cases where the plaintiffs have sought compensation for damages caused by climate change linked to human activity.

This new study has assessed some 73 lawsuits across 14 jurisdictions and says that the evidence presented to the courts lagged significantly behind the most recent climate research.

Over the past two decades, scientists have attempted to demonstrate the links between extreme weather events and climate change, which are in turn connected to human activities such as energy production and transport.

These studies, called attribution science, have become more robust over the years.

For example, researchers have been able to show that climate change linked to human activities made the European summer heatwave in 2019 both more likely and more intense.

The remote Alaskan community of Kivalina brought a climate lawsuit against oil giant ExxonMobil claiming damages, but lost in court. Joe Raedle
A recent paper on Hurricane Sandy - the deadly storm that wreaked havoc from the Caribbean to New York in 2012 - showed that climate change was responsible for about 13% of the $62bn in losses caused by the event.

If peer-reviewed evidence like this was presented to the courts, the authors say, it would be easier to prove causality and make compensation claims more likely to succeed.

"Despite the clear role for attribution science evidence in these lawsuits, we found that the evidence submitted and referenced in these cases still lags considerably behind the state-of-the-art in climate science," said Rupert Stuart-Smith, the study's lead author and a PhD student at Oxford University.

"Crucially, we found that this is, in fact, impeding these causal claims."

"If some of these cases are successful, and the courts see a plausible route to justice or a plausible route to compensation, that would increase the likelihood that more and more communities will turn to the courts."

Sophie Marjanac, from the environmental law group ClientEarth, told BBC News: "As this science improves, the boards of individual fossil fuel companies should be preparing for their day in court, to respond to charges that they are to blame for increased natural disasters and disruptions to the planet's climate stability.

"And as this trend continues, we will also need to see courtrooms keep pace with the work of attribution scientists, so that their judgements are in line with the latest scientific evidence."

One farmer's fight
Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya. Anthony Kwan
Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya's case against the German energy giant RWE has been ongoing since 2014. Mr Lliuya claims that rising temperatures are melting a glacier, threatening his home in Huaraz, in the west of the country, with flooding.

The farmer has spent thousands of dollars trying to stem the waters to little avail. His case for compensation of around $17,000 was based on RWE being responsible for around 0.5% of global warming. While many experts believed the case was weak, in 2017, the courts in Germany recognised that there was merit to the questions that the farmer was raising.

Rupert Stuart-Smith commented: "That case has got further than any other before it on compensation, and it's now in an evidentiary phase where the court has essentially asked the question, is climate change really doing this?"

"And our suggestion is that plaintiffs can answer those questions in their submission to the courts."

The researchers point to the example of the link between smoking and lung cancer. The solid, scientific evidence was eventually accepted by the courts and the tobacco industry paid huge amounts in compensation as a result.

Oil, gas and coal producers are aware of these legal moves to use the most advanced science to prove responsibility - they are likely to do everything in their power to resist them.

"There's increasing concern within the fossil fuel industry, and among investors, that these cases seem to have merit and have a chance of success and the risk perception of investors in the fossil fuel industry could quite rapidly change [so that] emissions could become seen as liabilities," said Rupert Stuart-Smith.

"That could change the game in terms of understanding whether or not it makes sense to continue to dump carbon in the atmosphere, if doing so causes risk for your company."

The study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change. 

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(AU SMH) Failure To Model Costs Of Climate Change To Coal, Gas ‘Beggars Belief’

Sydney Morning Herald - Mike Foley | Nick Toscano

Australia’s 40-year economic outlook is forecasting dwindling demand for some of the nation’s most valuable exports including coal and natural gas after China, Japan and South Korea unveiled targets to achieve net-zero emissions.

But prominent think tank the Grattan Institute on Monday said it “beggars belief” that the Morrison government’s modelling failed to make projections about the scale of loss of export earnings or the impacts from global warming such as drought and natural disasters.

The federal government’s Intergenerational Report 2021 says Australia’s coal and gas exports are under threat from global climate commitments. Credit: Rob Homer

Australia’s mining and energy exports are expected to have hit a record-high of $310 billion this financial year.

The nation’s top export, iron ore, accounted for an all-time-high $149 billion, while fossil fuel exports of coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG) together accounted for $71 billion, helping to underpin the economy amid a worsening trade spat with China and a global pandemic.

However, the Treasury’s 2021 Intergenerational Report on Monday warned the emissions-intensive commodities’ export earnings would fall as global efforts to combat climate change accelerated.

It noted that countries had committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 including key trading partners Japan and South Korea, while China has committed to carbon neutrality by 2060.

“These commitments by other countries, if fully implemented, are likely to reduce demand for unabated fossil fuels over some decades,” it said.

Energy
Gas giants risk ‘going the way of coal’ as climate push heats up
Grattan Institute chief executive Danielle Wood criticised the landmark report for omitting more detailed projections of the magnitude of the losses, saying it “beggars belief that the federal government hasn’t made any attempt to think about it in a structured way”.

“It just makes no sense to run fiscal and economic scenarios out to 40 years without factoring in climate change,” Ms Wood said.

Ms Wood said the NSW government delivered credible cost estimates in its intergenerational report, released in April. It said more frequent and severe natural disasters fuelled by climate change are forecast to cost NSW between up to $17.2 billion a year by 2061. It also said the state’s coal sales would fall 44 per cent between 2030 and 2061.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said “some sectors will need to adjust to falling demand for some exports” as the economy shifted to lower carbon emissions, while new opportunities will open up in other sectors.

“The effects will depend on domestic and global actions, as well as the pace and extent of climate change,” Mr Frydneberg said in his speech launching the report.

An investor coalition backed by funds managing $2 trillion of assets on Monday said climate change loomed as the biggest economic theme of the century and “the outlook is shifting at an extraordinary rate”.

“There’s the impact of fires, and droughts, but also as countries take action on emissions, that’s going to impact our exports,” Investor Group on Climate Change policy director Erwin Jackson said.

After a ministerial reshuffle shunted federal Resources Minister Keith Pitt from Cabinet to the junior minister, Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) chief Andrew McConville said backing the resources sector must remain “high on the new Cabinet’s agenda”.

“The figures illustrate the importance of our sector to the economy and I am sure this won’t be lost on the highest levels of government,” he said.

Nationals
Nationals plan to pay farmers to cut emissions in deal on net zero
“We will continue to have a good working relationship with Resources Minister Keith Pitt and I am sure the new Cabinet also understands our industry is doing the heavy lifting at a time of great economic uncertainty arising from the pandemic.”

Mr McConville said the latest trade data, which showed mining and energy exports hit an all-time high in the past year, underscored the “importance of the commodities to Australia’s economy”.

Climate advocates on Monday seized on the report to attack the Morrison government for continuing to support the expansion of Australian fossil fuel production including its plans for a “gas-led” economic recovery from COVID-19.

“The Morrison government knows that fossil fuels are on borrowed time but it plans to continue squandering taxpayer money subsidising coal, oil and gas when it knows the market for them is rapidly shrinking and will eventually disappear,” Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s David Ritter said.

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(UK The Guardian) New Climate Science Could Cause Wave Of Litigation Against Businesses – Study

The Guardian - 

Experts say scientific advances are making it easier to attribute the damages of climate breakdown to companies’ activities

Previous attempts to take companies to court for their carbon output have often run into trouble, as courts have rejected links between companies’ activities and specific damage to the climate. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP

Businesses could soon be facing a fresh wave of legal action holding them to account for their greenhouse gas emissions, owing to advances in climate science, experts have warned.

More than 1,500 legal actions have already been brought against fossil fuel companies whose emissions over decades have played a major role in building up carbon in the atmosphere.

Last month, in a shock ruling, the multinational oil and gas company Shell was ordered by a court in the Netherlands to cut its emissions by 45% in the next decade. Shell has said it will appeal against the decision. Earlier this month, a Belgian court ruled that the government’s failure to tackle the climate emergency was an infringement of human rights.

Rupert Stuart-Smith, researcher at the Oxford University sustainable law programme, and lead author of a new study, said more such cases were likely to be successful, as new science was making it possible to attribute the damages of climate breakdown more directly to companies’ activities.

“It’s no longer far-fetched to think that these companies can be taken to court successfully,” he said. “The strength of evidence is bolstering these claims, and giving a firm evidentiary basis for these court cases.”

That success could in turn unleash a further new wave of litigation, he said. “It’s possible that we will see precedents made that will make it easier to file future lawsuits on climate impacts.”

The impact was also likely to be felt in the form of less investment in companies with higher emissions, he said. “If more of these cases are successful, then corporate emissions could be seen as liabilities,” he told the Guardian. “There is concern in investor circles about the legal risk. This could have substantial consequences for investors.”

Previous attempts to take companies to court for their carbon output have often run into trouble, as courts have rejected links between companies’ activities and specific damage to the climate, or extreme weather events.

However, using more up-to-date science can overcome some of these difficulties, according to Stuart-Smith and colleagues, in a paper entitled Filling the Evidentiary Gap in Climate Ligitation, published in the peer-review journal Nature Climate Change on Monday.

The paper cited the case against oil giant ExxonMobil brought by the village of Kivalina in 2008 which was thrown out because judges found a lack of evidence linking the company to climate change and to specific harms suffered by the village. If there had been access to more recent scientific techniques, the report’s authors believe, the outcome might have been different.

The researchers examined 73 lawsuits around the world, and found that many failed to use the latest science in their evidence. They concluded that the chances of success of such litigants could have been improved if they had used the latest science, which is increasingly able to show clear links between companies’ activities giving rise to carbon emissions, and the damages caused by extreme weather.

“Limitations in scientific evidence in the past played a role in cases,” said Stuart-Smith. He called on lawyers to work more closely with scientists to ensure that the best evidence was being used.

The branch of climate study known as attribution science has moved on considerably in the last 15 years. It used to be possible only to say that increasing greenhouse gas emissions were very likely to have led to an increase in extreme weather around the world.

Today, scientists can say with great accuracy that specific events were caused or made much more likely by the climate crisis, and can attribute specific damages to the human actions involved in changing the climate. Scientists can also estimate how much certain companies, which are very large emitters, have contributed to make such events more likely.

For instance, research published last month found that the damages from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were increased by at least $8bn from the impact of human actions on the climate, and another study found climate change responsible for $67bn of damage from Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

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29/06/2021

(AU SMH) This Time, The ‘Danger’ Sign Must Go Up

Sydney Morning Herald - Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

Author
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is Professor of Marine Studies at the University of Queensland. He is deputy director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.
There is a distinct possibility that one of our most treasured environmental assets, the Great Barrier Reef, will soon be listed by the World Heritage Committee as “in danger"⁣.

The listing “is designed to inform the international community of conditions which threaten the very characteristics for which a property was inscribed on the World Heritage List, and to encourage corrective action.″⁣

Examples of bleached coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Jason South

Listing the reef as “in danger” was discussed a decade ago when it was noted “with extreme concern the approval of Liquefied Natural Gas processing and port facilities on Curtis Island”.

About the same time, long-term monitoring by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) reported a 50 per cent decline in coral populations over almost 30 years.

There were numerous other concerns as well. As a result of these growing threats, UNESCO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature were invited to visit the reef in March 2012, finding that declining water quality, expanding coastal development, cyclones and mass coral bleaching were affecting the reef.

Then came talk of adding the GBR to the “in danger” list. This led to a massive mobilisation by the Queensland and federal governments to convince World Heritage Committee members and the world that Australia had got the message and had taken significant steps to deal with issues such as water quality and limiting the number of industrial ports up and down the GBR coastline.

Adding the reef to the “in danger” list back then was premature, and giving the federal government the chance to implement changes was justified. As I wrote with University of Queensland legal scholar Justine Bell-James in 2014, it “would seem ill-advised that the World Heritage committee remove one of the only levers it currently has over the treatment of the World Heritage-listed GBR.

Work is underway to plant 100,000 healthy corals on reefs in the Cairns and Port Douglas region. Credit: James Brickwood
“The threat of an ‘in danger’ listing is a major incentive for Australia to improve its game, and has already prompted some reform.

With this lever gone, the influence of UNESCO would largely disappear along with, most probably, any political will to prevent the further decline of the once-pristine reef.”

Rightly or wrongly, we have not improved our game enough.

Fast forward to today and the overall health of the Great Barrier Reef has decreased from “poor” to “very poor” in the latest five-year Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report in 2019.

This comprehensive account of the state of the Great Barrier Reef concluded that climate change was its greatest threat, along with coastal development. According to the report, while some gains have been achieved, many gains are occurring too slowly or not at all.


Most significantly has been the rapid escalation of damage from climate change. In just the last five years, the Great Barrier Reef has experienced three record coral bleaching and mortality events. Taken together these impacts have killed at least 50 per cent of shallow water corals. The scale and the impact of these events has been nothing short of shocking.

So, after 10 years of further decline in almost all dimensions plus exceptional heatwave and bleaching impacts, I think that it is time to recognise that the reef is “in danger”.

Others feel that this is a beat-up that involves the 21 members of the Chinese-led World Heritage Committee. For the Minister Sussan Ley, this is about a government being broadsided by UNESCO processes.

For me, however, the science is telling us that we are not doing enough to ensure the recovery of the reef from decades of declining water quality, coastal development and climate change. It is a story about rapid environmental change driving our reef to rubble.

Australia will oppose a draft World Heritage Committee recommendation that Queensland's Great Barrier Reef be singled out for an "in danger" listing.

Importantly, this is also not a time to be giving up, but a time to accelerate our efforts to fix water quality, control crown of thorns starfish outbreaks, and deal comprehensively with the climate problem. We must seek new solutions – and we must also double down on driving Australia and the international communities to zero emissions as soon as possible.

Given the big impacts that are starting to occur on the Great Barrier Reef, we are heading into territory that will be hard to reverse. We must get to the zero carbon emissions as soon as possible, while helping our neighbours to do so as well.

Great Barrier Reef
Australia criticises United Nations warning that Great Barrier Reef is in danger
The good news is that we still have time, but only if we act deeply and fundamentally to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to put Australia on a pathway compatible with global warming of 1.5 degrees, which is a critical threshold for corals and many other systems.

The climate science tells us Australia must reduce its emissions to zero by 2035 or sooner.

After all, every tonne of carbon going into the atmosphere will cost us, whether as a loss of jobs and income, or the loss of the intangible benefits of a place like the Great Barrier Reef.

While the issue may be inconvenient for Australia’s leadership, it is a wake-up call to all of us that unless we take deep and serious action on climate change, we face the prospect of our World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef no longer being a coral reef paradise.

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