Saturday Paper - Mike Seccombe
Experts called during the opening week of the bushfires royal
commission warned the Black Summer will not be an isolated event.
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Ian Livingston and his son Sydney, 6, among the ruins of their family home, lost to the New Year’s Day bushfires in Cobargo. Credit: Brook Mitchell / Getty Images
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It was February 18, and Scott Morrison was being pressed for government action in response to a growing emergency.
The prime minister justified his refusal to act with these words: “No
one can tell me that going down that path won’t cost jobs.”
The emergency at hand was not the coronavirus; Australia was almost two weeks away from recording its first death from Covid-19.
The focus then was the summer of bushfires and the role climate
change had played in the devastation. Morrison had been asked why his
government, unlike many others around the world, and all Australian
states and territories, had refused to commit to a target of net zero
emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.
His answer – that it would cost jobs and money – rang hollow in light
of the lived, breathed experience of Australians during the summer.
Climate change already was costing jobs, thousands of them. And vast
sums of money. And lives.
But it looks even more hollow now, not least because his inertia in
the face of that crisis so sharply contrasted with his urgency on the
next.
Within a month of dismissing the need for an emissions target,
Morrison and his emergency cabinet of state and territory leaders
responded to the threat posed by Covid-19 with a national lockdown.
While the decisive action was driven by the states, Morrison went
along, enthusiastically serving as chief marketer for their collective
decision. At no point did he cavil on the basis that jobs might be lost.
Instead, he followed the advice of the experts and did what had to be
done in order to avoid a greater catastrophe.
Then this week, the bushfires royal commission – more properly, the
Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements – began its
public hearings. And the evidence given by a succession of expert
witnesses served to remind us there was a bigger crisis that preceded
Covid-19, one that will persist long after it.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate monitoring, Karl
Braganza, gave a PowerPoint presentation filled with alarming graphs and
maps, showing the extent to which carbon pollution had altered
Australia’s climate, and how much worse things will get in the absence
of action.
Already, he told the commission, the fire season is starting three
months earlier in much of south-eastern Australia. Fire danger index
readings that would typically have occurred at the start of summer in
the 1950s are now recorded at the start of spring.
Temperatures are higher, rainfall and humidity lower, soils and
vegetation drier, and westerly winds, blowing from the arid centre of
the continent, are more frequent.
Indeed, Braganza said, referring to one of his frightening maps,
“almost over all of Australia we’re seeing a longer fire season with
more fire danger days during that season, and the severity of the worst
fire danger days is becoming more severe”.
He was clear: the tragedy of
the so-called Black Summer was not a “one-off event”.
“Since the Canberra 2003 fires, every jurisdiction in Australia has
seen some really significant fire events … [that] have really challenged
what we thought fire weather looked like.”
In the first two decades of this century, there were only four wet
years, Braganza said. The 10-year period from 2009 to 2019 was the
hottest decade this country had seen, with 2019 the hottest and driest
year on record.
Not every coming year will be so bad, of course.
It seems the coming season will be less severe, assuming the good
rains so far this year persist as forecast. But the longer-term trends,
Braganza said, “probably load the dice towards worse fire seasons in
general”.
Karl Braganza and the other experts who followed him – not only
climate scientists but also insurers and actuaries whose businesses
depend on accurately assessing risk – provided a comprehensive and dark
picture of increasing threats from climate change.
They spoke of rising sea levels; more intense cyclones that would
strike further south, if less frequently; worse storms and floods; many
more days of extreme heat.
Ryan Crompton of Risk Frontiers, an outfit that provides
risk-assessment services, including what it calls “catastrophe
modelling”, told the commission that between 1900 and 2015, heatwaves
were “Australia’s deadliest natural hazard”.
“They account for almost half of the total number and almost five times the number of fatalities than do bushfires,” he said.
The two phenomena – heatwaves and fires – often coincide. Crompton
pointed to the example of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria,
during which 173 people died as a direct result of the fires, while a
further 374 deaths were attributed to the preceding heatwave. Melbourne
saw three days above 43 degrees the week of that tragic Saturday.
A study undertaken by a team at the Australian National University medical school – published last week in
The Lancet Planetary Health
– re-examined the causes of more than 1.7 million deaths in Australia
between 2006 and 2017 and found that heat was likely to have contributed
to at least 37,000 of them.
In the case of last summer’s bushfires, there was another peril, too. Smoke.
Associate Professor Fay Johnston, of the Menzies Institute for
Medical Research at the University of Tasmania, said about 80 per cent
of Australians were affected by bushfire smoke at some point during last
year’s fire season.
On the basis of analysis carried out by her team, Johnston said,
there were 445 “excess deaths” attributable to smoke, along with 3340
admissions to hospital for heart- and lung-related problems and 1373
additional presentations to an emergency department for asthma.
She estimated the cost associated with premature loss of life and admissions to hospitals at $2 billion.
This did not include a range of other health impacts that her team
had not modelled, including, among other things, “loss of work time,
missing school, needing medications, impacts on diabetes, impacts on
ambulance callouts”.
“Covid showed that people’s attitudes and behaviours can change.
We had leadership, crafting a sense of who we are and what we should do
and how we should act in the interests of ourselves and our
communities.”
There is also the cost, unquantifiable in dollar figures, to the
mental health of the tens of thousands of people who lost loved ones or
homes in the fires.
Professor Lisa Gibbs, of the University of Melbourne, an expert in
disaster recovery and community resilience, and child health and
wellbeing, told the hearings that advancing climate change introduced a
worrying new element for mental health, in that such disasters were “no
longer perceived as rare events”.
She expressed concern the perception of a “new reality”, wherein
devastating fire seasons keep happening, could undermine the sense of
hope that those affected need to get their lives back on track.
The commission was provided with a long list of other costs, too:
3117 homes and 6310 outbuildings destroyed; 89,000 kilometres of fencing
and 880 kilometres of roads burnt.
Some $2.2 billion of insurance claims have already been lodged, says the Insurance Council of Australia.
The loss of economic output is “in the order of $3.6 billion”,
according to the consultancy group EY. Hundreds of millions in welfare
payments have been made by the federal government, hundreds of millions
more for clean-up and recovery from state and local authorities. The
average cost of removing the debris from one destroyed home is more than
$50,000.
There are dollar costs, but there are also intrinsic values that are harder to assess.
How do you value 8.27 million burnt hectares of land, an estimate
that doesn’t even include Western Australia and the Northern Territory,
when most of it is covered by bush? Or the deaths of a billion native
animals?
How do you calculate the impact of habitat loss on 300-odd plant and
animal species already considered endangered or threatened, or the many
others that were considered “secure” before the fires but now are not?
The entire range of some species was burnt, according to evidence
Threatened Species Commissioner Dr Sally Box gave the commission this
week. Extinctions could follow, perhaps even the end of species not yet
known to science.
It is difficult, of course, to compare the impacts of the Black
Summer with those of the coronavirus. The toll of Covid-19 could have
been orders of magnitude larger, if swift action wasn’t taken. The chief
medical officer, Brendan Murphy, says the nation’s handling of the
coronavirus pandemic has avoided about 14,000 deaths.
But timely action was taken and, as of Thursday, the federal Health
Department has recorded 103 Covid-19 fatalities in this country. This is
a little more than one-fifth of the number of deaths attributed to the
fires – 33 direct and another 445 from smoke.
Yet in response to the health emergency, our leaders were prepared to
shut down large sections of our economy, tolerate the loss of maybe a
million jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars, and enforce major
changes to the way all members of society live and work.
To the question of why our government was prepared to do all this in
response to one crisis, while doing so little in response to the greater
threat, Professor Warwick McKibbin, economist, specialist in public
policy at the ANU’s Crawford School and an expert in both pandemics and
climate issues, offers some insight.
With pandemics, he says, the cost of the response always vastly
exceeds the cost of the disease itself. It’s par for the course. Even
without a government-mandated domestic lockdown, much of the economic
loss would have happened anyway as people self-isolated for fear of
infection.
“I haven’t got the final numbers yet, but my guess is that about 10
per cent of the lost economic activity – that’s 10 per cent of the total
loss – is probably due to government [lockdown],” he says.
The rest was largely attributable to other factors, including the
impact on international trade and the spontaneous behavioural change by
the populace.
McKibbin cites a real-time case study in the differing responses of
two otherwise similar nations: Denmark and Sweden. The former imposed a
tight lockdown; the latter didn’t. While the Swedes hoped their response
would keep their economy humming, it didn’t.
“The death rate in Sweden is orders of magnitude bigger than Denmark,
and the economic costs are about the same,” says McKibbin. “The Swedish
central bank is forecasting a contraction in the economy of about 8 per
cent.
“So, if all Sweden’s trading partners have a recession, then the chances are they’ll have a recession.”
This is compounded by the fact that in Sweden, even without a mandatory lockdown, many people changed their behaviour.
It is all very interesting but only broadens the question about the
differing responses to the two crises from both the government and the
community.
McKibbin says one crisis was perceived as being personal and
immediate. The threat horizon for the virus was days or weeks; climate
change, meanwhile, has loomed for decades.
“We were watching morgues in New York overflowing, watching people
dying in the streets in Italy,” McKibbin says. “The impact of the
pandemic was already real.”
The virus set down a clear either/or: “If you don’t do anything in
Australia, you’re going to get it. If you do something in Australia, you
may not get it.”
In relation to climate change, though, the widely held perception is
fatalistic – that, regardless of any actions Australia might take,
“climate change is going to happen anyway, if nobody else does anything
either”.
This sentiment is the subtext of Scott Morrison’s words back in
February: why suffer the costs of change, if no benefit will flow?
But there is growing evidence to suggest this is a false narrative.
The Australia Institute recently conducted a meta-analysis in
response to claims that an ambitious climate response would “wreck the
economy”, combing through 19 reports published in the past five years in
peer-reviewed journals, and from academics and government agencies,
along with three major Treasury reports from 2008 to 2013.
A number of these went to the electricity sector only, with five
modelling a 100 per cent renewable grid. Others looked at the broader
economy. Most of the models showed negligible economic cost would be
incurred by meeting targets broadly in line with the goal of the Paris
climate change agreement. And some showed positive economic gains.
Nonetheless, as McKibbin acknowledges, Australia cannot make much difference to the climate crisis on its own.
But, he says, Australia’s role is bigger than that, as “a laboratory” for the rest of the world when it comes to policy.
“If you do something on climate in Australia … and you demonstrate
that a very high carbon economy can end up with a low carbon economy,
cheaply, then people will copy your policies. And that can actually
totally change the global emissions profile,” he says.
This country has served as such an example to the world many times before.
“We’ve done that when it comes to monetary policy. We’ve done it in
fiscal policy with the tariff policy,” says McKibbin. “We’ve done it in
health policy, [and] designing our education funding through the HECS
scheme. We’ve demonstrated to other countries and they’ve adopted that
scheme. And that’s improved the quality of life for everybody.
“So, Australia’s role is not to be the leader because we’re going to
make a difference to emissions. It’s because we’re going to demonstrate
policy that will make a difference to emissions.”
The question that remains, though, is do we have the will?
The signs from our current federal government are not promising. But
it seems the Covid-19 crisis hasn’t distracted people from the climate
emergency.
An Essential poll conducted in mid-March, at the height of the
coronavirus outbreak in Australia, found 31 per cent of those surveyed
were more concerned about climate than they were a year ago, before the
fires.
Is it possible, then, that rather than supplanting concern about the
climate, the Covid-19 episode has accentuated the popular sense of
urgency?
Kate Reynolds, professor of psychology at the ANU, thinks so. Having
successfully faced one existential threat, she says, people are more
inclined to believe they can deal with another.
“Covid showed us a few things,” she says. “It showed that people’s attitudes and behaviours can change.
“We had leadership, crafting a sense of who we are and what we should
do and how we should act in the interests of ourselves and our
communities. Call it a social identity, a sense of shared social
identity, and a common cause.”
She says that people came to feel in some ways a greater “efficacy”,
in the psychological sense: “Things that seemed hard before Covid – in
making profound changes in the way we went about our lives – proved
possible.”
It will be harder for governments to now make excuses on the basis that change is too big, too costly, too hard.
Reynolds says that as social creatures, humans are motivated to “protect the group, to act in the best interests of the group”.
As civilisation has advanced, that understanding of “the group” has, on the whole, grown more encompassing.
What the coronavirus crisis has shown – and this stands true for the
climate crisis, too – is that our conceptualisation of who is part of
the group will need to further expand.
For when it comes to the really big issues, there is no immunity to the risk. And no one is safe unless all are.
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