06/07/2021

(AU SBS) In A Critical Year For Climate Justice, These Torres Strait Islanders Are Leading The Fight

SBS - Abbie O'Brien

Almost three decades since the historic Mabo decision was handed down, a new generation of Torres Strait Islanders are charting unprecedented legal territory in a bid to preserve their right to culture and the land. The group are waging a first-of-its-kind legal battle to force the Australian government to act on climate change.

Yessie Mosby fears his home and culture is at risk of vanishing. Source: Abbie O'Brien/SBS News

Yessie Mosby says the pace at which his home is disappearing is terrifying.

“It's moving very fast," the Kulkalgal man tells SBS News.

"Within four years we’ve seen eight metres get taken away. It is very scary, very scary to see.”

The father of six is standing on a vast sand flat on Masig Island. The marshy, barren area, he says, was once the heartbeat of village life.

Mr Mosby says food sources on Masig are depleting. Abbie O'Brien

“It was full of palm trees. People's houses were here before they moved inland. It used to have roads. People used to come, where we are standing, and all day long and sit [under] the big almond tree, making maps, telling stories.”

“There was no beach here. The beach was like 50 metres that way.”

Here on Masig, and across the Torres Strait Islands, the issue of climate change is one of survival.



The region, off the northern tip of Queensland, is home to a chain of low-lying islands, 18 of which are inhabited by First Nations Australians whose culture is tethered to the land.

Masig is approximately 2.7 kilometres long and only 0.8 kilometres wide. It is home to an estimated 250 people.

Data shows that sea levels in the strait are rising at a rate double the global average. According to the Climate Council, the shallowness of this stretch of ocean exacerbates storm surges, and when they coincide with high tides, extreme sea levels result.


Communities in the Torres Strait Islands are already in peril. Coastal inundation (when seawater rises high enough that it floods infrastructure and buildings or endangers people's safety) is contaminating the water supply and destroying crops. It’s washing away roads, sacred cultural sites and the remains of loved ones.

“We don't know how strong or how big the next inundation or erosion is going to be," Mr Mosby says.

"Every day is a fearful day for us. Every day, something has been taken away from this place.”

Masig is home to an estimated 250 people. Abbie O'Brien
There is mounting concern that if the more extreme projections of sea-level rise come to fruition, islands like Masig will become uninhabitable. "I feel that our people will get moved off this land, then our entire race will die. We will be a lost race of people," Mr Mosby says.

It's also fear held by Herbert Warusam, the Dhoeybaw clan leader on Saibai Island, northwest of Masig.

"The winds, the songs, the traditional language, the traditional gardening, fishing. Land and sea is my connection," he says.

"It's the heart and soul ... all of that is at stake."

"The decision of relocation will be on my children."
I feel that our people will get moved off this land, then our entire race will die. - Yessie Mosby, Masig
Sabai is the second-most northern of the Torres Strait Islands and lies just four kilometres off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The island is, on average, just one metre above sea level and home to roughly 500 people.

Already, Mr Warusam says, the island is experiencing profound change.

“We're witnessing the now impact of climate change. We're going through it in real-time.”

Herbert Warasum is the Dhoeybaw clan leader on Masig Island. Abbie O'Brien
Like Masig, Sabai is “especially at risk" the Climate Council warns. It cautions that even modest sea level rises will threaten the Torres Strait Island communities, with inundation affecting "houses, roads, power stations, sewage and stormwater systems, cultural sites, cemeteries, gardens, community facilities and ecosystems".

Mr Warsasum says saltwater has begun seeping into the freshwater supply.

“Each year, the saltwater, during king tide, it pushes in. I think in 30 to 40 years time, we might see saltwater right up, and the indicators will be in the water wells .”


On Masig, Mr Mosby says food sources are also depleting.

"There will be a particular time that we will eat a certain fish, or we will plant certain plants ... like a yam. You don't see those yams anymore."

"Our major diet is from the sea. Certain fish are not found on a particular reef when they used to be in the abundance. They are not there."


For millennia, Masig and its inhabitants have held out against the sea. It's only the past few decades that the community has faced such unprecedented challenges.

“This thing only happened here … within the last 20 to 30 years or so. As each year passes, it gets worse than the year before,” Mr Mosby says.

Climate change experts warn relocation could be in the offing for Torres Strait Island communities but it's a fate Mr Mosby refuses to accept. To lose the land, he says, is to lose everything.

"There's a lot of elders who say that if we ought to move from this island by force ... that they will remain here and they will go with this island. I feel the same."

Taking their fight to the UN

Mr Mosby is currently among eight Torres Strait Islanders charting unprecedented legal territory in a bid to preserve their right to their culture and the land.

In 2019, the group filed a complaint with the United Nations' Human Rights Committee accusing Australia's federal government of breaching its fundamental right to maintain culture by failing to adequately address the climate emergency unfolding in their island homes.

“My fear for my six kids: I don't want them to be refugees in their own country," Mr Mosby says.

"I want them to live a life of freedom. I want them to practice what I've practiced, what my father and mother [have] practiced and my grandparents, what we've been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.”
My fear for my six kids: I don't want them to be refugees in their own country.
The eight claimants - all Traditional Owners from four different Torres Strait Islands - want the government to take stronger action in reducing emissions and support communities through sustained investment in long-term adaptation measures.

The ruling, set to be handed down within months, comes in a year characterised as “make or break” in the fight against climate change. A UN report describes 2021 as “truly a pivotal year” in steering the planet away from a looming catastrophe.

Saibai is home to an estimated 500 people. Abbie O'Brien
The Mabo legacy looms large in the Torres Strait Islands, almost 30 years since history was made.

Torres Strait Islander Eddie Koiki Mabo's 1992 fight in the High Court saw the overturning of terra nullius - the declaration that Australia was once land belonging to no one. It allowed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to have rights to their land.

Iama Island Traditional Owner Ned David is the chair of the Gur A Baradharaw Kod (GBK) Torres Strait Sea and Land Council, the peak native title body for the region.

“I think you have to resort to going to court, you know, as Eddie Mabo did. This is, I guess the same sort of course of action that we have to take,” he says.

Mr David played a key role in getting the UN human rights claim off the ground, describing it as “the next chapter in our story, ensuring our traditional culture survives climate change”.

“We're extremely optimistic,” he says. “[The case] certainly puts a spotlight on what's happening in [this] part of the world.”

Sophie Marjanac, an Australian climate lawyer with environmental legal charity ClientEarth, is representing the eight claimants.

“We are hoping that this decision will confirm that climate change is a serious human rights issue, not only for the Torres Strait, but for people around the world,” she says.

“They're living with the effects of climate change every day," she says of those on the islands.

"And they are seeing the impacts on their cultural rights, their family life, and their homes.”

The UN case is part of a global wave of climate litigation, with vulnerable populations increasingly seeking legal avenues to pressure governments and organisations to take more urgent action to limit global warming.

But this case is like no other, Ms Marjanac says, and could set a global precedent.

“It's the first time a case like this has gone before a United Nations treaty body. It’s the first time that people from low-lying islands have taken a human rights claim against their own government, and it's the first time a human rights complaint was filed against the Australian government on the basis of a violation of the right to culture of minority peoples.”

“The Human Rights Committee is the ultimate arbiter of international human rights law and its decisions apply to other states around the world. So other states will certainly be watching this decision."

In terms of enforcement, Ms Marjanac says the UN could lay out a series of recommendations in which the Australian government could be compelled to fulfil.

“The committee has follow-up procedures it can use to ensure that Australia has complied with its recommendations.”

Completed in 2017, this $25 million seawall is designed to protect Saibai from inundation. Abbie O'Brien
In a statement provided to SBS News, the federal government said it is "confident its climate change policies are consistent with international human rights obligations". Acknowledging the challenges in the region, it said it is "aware of the risks and is helping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities build their resilience and prepare for the impacts of climate change, including severe weather events".

Construction of a long-awaited $25 million seawall in Sabai was complete in 2017. The infrastructure, which is more than two kilometres long, was funded by both the federal and Queensland governments and is designed to protect the island from inundation.

“It's really helping the island. It’s a good thing. It’s proved to be a very valuable thing to be done by [the governments]” Mr Warasum says.

The federal government has since invested an additional $25 million for sea walls.

On Masig, they're still waiting for construction to begin.

"That's something we [asked] for years ago. We were told it's going to get built probably next year some time," Mr Mosby says.

But time is running out.

Desperate to stop more of the island from being swallowed by the sea, the community has taken matters into their own hands, building their own sea wall out of pallets, sticks and shrub.

"If you go over and you walk on the road, you'll see how the water still comes in, but it's definitely slowed down the process," Mr Mosby says.

Still, the community and environmental experts agree, sea walls are only delaying the inevitable.

“Building seawalls and raising houses can buy time," the Climate Council has stated, but in the long-term, “some communities may face relocation".

A makeshift sea wall built by the community on Masig Island. Abbie O'Brien
The so-called 'Torres Strait 8' are urging the Australian government to set more ambitious targets in reducing emissions.

“Very clearly from the scientific evidence, [the] impacts will worsen dramatically in the coming decades and we say legally that means the Australian government has a duty in law, now, to help these Islanders adapt," Ms Marjanac says.

"And also, Australia needs to mitigate its emissions to get to net-zero as soon as possible in order to reduce the root cause of climate change.”

In 2019, the same year the UN case was filed, the group urged Prime Minister Scott Morrison to visit their islands and see the impacts with his own eyes.

"I want him to see my pain ... listen to our cry," Mr Mosby says.

Mr Morrison is yet to take them up on the offer.

"It's sad. It's very sad. You can go to other countries, but you can't come in [here] and check his backyard. I feel that we are being neglected, that our cries are not being attended to."

Mr Mosby is hopeful the UN case will shine a global spotlight on this little known part of the world.

"We need people to know what we're facing, why we're doing this," he says.

"If we win this fight, the whole of the Pacific, all saltwater people, everybody who is suffering from climate change, whether inland or [on the] coast or out on the islands, their voice will be heard and changes will be happening for them as well."

“We are not only fighting for our children here; we are fighting for all children of this Earth.”

NOTE: NAIDOC Week (4-11 July) celebrates the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This year's theme - Heal Country! – calls for all of us to continue to seek greater protections for our lands, our waters, our sacred sites and our cultural heritage from exploitation, desecration, and destruction.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , ,

(AU The Conversation) ‘Although We Didn’t Produce These Problems, We Suffer Them’: 3 Ways You Can Help In NAIDOC’s Call To Heal Country

The Conversation - 

Shutterstock

Author
 is Research Associate & PhD Candidate, Australian National University     
NAIDOC week has just begun and, after several tumultuous years of disasters in Australia, the theme this year is Heal Country.

In the last two years, Australia has suffered crippling drought that saw the Darling-Baaka run dry, catastrophic bushfires, and major flooding throughout coastal and inland areas of Australia’s east.

Just two weeks ago, UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre recommended one of our national treasures, the Great Barrier Reef, be listed as in danger.

If these events, and the thought of other inevitable climate change-driven disasters sadden or madden you, consider how it impacts Indigenous peoples.

So with this in mind, and the rest of NAIDOC week ahead of us, let’s take a moment (most likely from lockdown) to explore the theme of Heal Country in more detail.

More than a landscape

For Indigenous people, Country is more than a landscape. We tell, and retell, stories of how our Country was made, and we continue to rely upon its resources — food, water, plants and animals — to sustain our ways of life. Country also holds much of our heritage, including scarred trees, stone arrangements, petroglyphs, rock art, tools and much more.

Indigenous people talk of, and to, Country, as they would another person. As the late eminent ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose famously wrote:
Country is not a generalised or undifferentiated type of place, such as one might indicate with terms like ‘spending a day in the country’ or ‘going up the country’.

Rather, Country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life.
As cultural and spiritual beings, and with deep and ongoing attachments to lands and waters, the impacts of climate change interrupt and make uncertain our unique ways of life. This increasing reality is shared with Indigenous peoples all over the world.

The Torres Strait Islands are under dire threat from climate change. Shutterstock

These sentiments were captured by Tishiko King, a Kulkalaig woman from the island of Masi in the Torres Strait. In her reflections on returning home in December 2020, she explained:
I had to pick up the bones of my Elders because erosion is damaging our burial sites. As First Nations people we know that these are our spirits of our old people, and it’s a sign of disrespect.

It’s desecrating who they are. It’s that heart-wrenching pain in your chest.
This is why the National NAIDOC Committee has sought to draw attention to our struggle.

Why Heal Country?

Through this year’s theme, the National NAIDOC Committee invites the whole nation to embrace “First Nations’ cultural knowledge and understanding of Country as part of Australia’s national heritage”. This requires understanding the depths of Indigenous peoples’ connections to Country and treasuring our heritage values.

But “understanding” and “treasuring” will only go so far in the face of increased drought, more severe storms or changing seasons and animal behaviours as a result of climate change.

As Bianca McNeair, a Malgana woman from Western Australia and co-chair of the First People’s Gathering on Climate Change, shared with The Guardian:
[Traditional Owners] are talking about how the birds’ movements across country have changed, so that’s changing songlines that they’ve been singing for thousands and thousands of years, and how that’s impacting them as a community and culture.
All Australians have much at stake if radical steps to cut emissions aren’t taken. For Indigenous peoples, the consequences of climate change are much more profound.

Country also holds heritage, including stone arrangements, rock art, tools and more. Shutterstock

Not all disasters are natural

But talking only of climate change doesn’t capture the full reality threatening Indigenous peoples ways of life.

The destruction of Juukan Gorge by Rio Tinto in 2020 caused international outrage for the clear disregard for not only Indigenous culture, but human history.

Likewise, the notorious McArthur River mine in the Northern Territory has been damaging the environment and nearby township of Borroloola, from the leaking of potentially harmful contaminants to waste rock that smouldered for months.

These events, as well as others, continue to be examined through the Juukan Gorge Senate inquiry.

Protesters outside the Rio Tinto office in Perth in June 2020, after two ancient rock shelters were destroyed. AAP Image/Richard Wainwright

Heal Country forces us to see these events not in isolation, but in a chain of disasters that continue to impact and threaten Indigenous peoples. It invites people to see the land and water through our eyes and understand that although we didn’t produce these problems, we suffer from them.

Heal Country seeks reflection, for all Australians to ask themselves what they treasure about being from, and living on, this land.

If, like us, you find peace, pride and enjoyment from our natural values — our beaches, mountains, rivers, wetlands, forests, deserts and more — then perhaps it’s time to get off the bench and become an advocate for change.

Three ways you can help

Indigenous people continue to stand up for and protect their Country. But in a nation where their connections, culture and heritage are seen by governments as being of lesser value than minerals, it is often a lonely struggle.

I asked people to consider the impacts on Country, culture and heritage in my article for The Conversation during the 2019-2020 bushfires. Now, I ask that you consider it against the backdrop of an uncertain future.

Far from being powerless to protect Country, there is much an everyday Australian can do. Here are three examples:

1) Make a submission to the Juukan Gorge inquiry.

The Juukan Gorge inquiry is one of the most important in our recent history. The protection and management of Indigenous peoples’ culture and heritage is being thoroughly examined, with recommendations to better balance the protection of these things against future economic growth.

You can lend your voice — or that of your organisation — to express support and solidarity with Indigenous peoples through a submission.

If events like coral bleaching sadden or madden you, consider how it impacts Indigenous peoples. Shutterstock
2) Donate to charities that support Indigenous land and sea management programs.

These organisations are key to advocating on behalf of Indigenous people and offer guidance, advice and support to Indigenous communities seeking to establish their own programs. Two of note include Firesticks Alliance and Country Needs People.

3) Write an email to your local member.

Ask your local member how they’re supporting local Indigenous land and sea management programs, including ranger groups or cultural burning initiatives. If you live in the city, ask how their party supports Indigenous groups in their caring for Country aspirations.

Heal Country invites all Australians to walk with us, to stand beside us, to support us.

But perhaps most importantly, it invites Australians to love, treasure and fight for this land, as we have done, and will do, forever.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , ,

(CNN) Unprecedented Heat, Hundreds Dead And A Town Destroyed. Climate Change Is Frying The Northern Hemisphere

CNN - Angela Dewan



The tiny town of Lytton has come to hold a grim record. On Tuesday, it experienced Canada's highest-ever temperature, in an unprecedented heat wave that has over a week killed hundreds of people and triggered more than 240 wildfires across British Columbia, most of which are still burning.

Lytton hit 49.6 degrees Celsius (121.3 degrees Fahrenheit), astounding for the town of just 250 people nestled in the mountains, where June maximum temperatures are usually around 25 degrees. This past week, however, its nights have been hotter than its days usually are, in a region where air conditioning is rare and homes are designed to retain heat.

Smoke rises from a fire at Long Loch and Derrickson Lake in Central Okanagan in Canada on June 30.

Now fires have turned much of Lytton to ash and forced its people, as well as hundreds around them, to flee.

Scientists have warned for decades that climate change will make heat waves more frequent and more intense. That is a reality now playing out in Canada, but also in many other parts of the northern hemisphere that are increasingly becoming uninhabitable.

Roads melted this week in America's northwest, and residents in New York City were told not to use high-energy appliances, like washers and dryers — and painfully, even their air conditioners — for the sake of the power grid.

In Russia, Moscow reported its highest-ever June temperature of 34.8 degrees on June 23, and Siberian farmers are scrambling to save their crops from dying in an ongoing heat wave.

Even in the Arctic Circle, temperatures soared into the 30s. The World Meteorological Organization is seeking to verify the highest-ever temperature north of the Arctic Circle since records there began, after a weather station in Siberia's Verkhoyansk recorded a 38-degree day on June 20.

Visitors at Humayun's Tomb in New Delhi, India, on a hot day on June 30 amid a heatwave.
In India, tens of millions of people in the northwest were affected by heat waves.

The Indian Meteorological Department on Wednesday classified the capital, New Delhi, and cities in its surrounds as experiencing "severe extreme heat," with temperatures staying consistently in the 40s, more than 7 degrees higher than usual, it said. The heat, along with a late monsoon, is also making life difficult for farmers in areas like the state of Rajasthan.

And in Iraq, authorities announced a public holiday across several provinces for Thursday, including the capital Baghdad, because it was simply too hot to work or study, after temperatures surpassed 50 degrees and its electricity system collapsed.

Experts who spoke with CNN said it was difficult to pinpoint exactly how linked these weather events are, but it's unlikely a coincidence that heat waves are hitting several parts of the northern hemisphere at the same time.

A man stands by fans spraying mist along a street in Iraq's capital, Baghdad, on June 30.
"The high pressure systems we're seeing in Canada and the United States, all of these systems are driven by something called the jet stream — a band of very strong winds that sits way above our heads, at about 30,000 feet where the planes fly around," Liz Bentley, Chief Executive at the UK's Royal Meteorological Society, told CNN.

Bentley explained the configuration of the jet stream is preventing weather systems from moving efficiently along their normal west-to-east path.

"That jet stream has become wavy, and it's got stuck in what we call an Omega block, because it's got the shape of the Greek letter Omega, and when it gets in that, it doesn't move anywhere, it blocks it," Bentley said.

"So the high pressure that's been building just gets stuck for days or weeks on end, and these Omegas appear in different parts of the northern hemisphere."

In the US, the same thing happened in mid-June in the Southwest, breaking records in Mexico and places like Phoenix in Arizona. A couple weeks later, a dome of high pressure built over the Northwest, toppling records in Washington, Oregon and southwest Canada.

"So we've seen these unprecedented temperatures — records being broken not just by a few degrees, being absolutely smashed," Bentley said.

Scientist says this could happen every year by 2100

 There is a growing acceptance among some political leaders that climate change is a driving force behind fueling many extreme weather events, particularly for heat waves and storms.

"Climate change is driving the dangerous confluence of extreme heat and prolonged drought," US President Joe Biden said Wednesday.

"We're seeing wildfires of greater intensity that move with more speed and last well beyond traditional months, traditional months of the fire season."

Hundreds of deaths reported across Canada and the Pacific Northwest amid unrelenting heat wave
Scientists are working on sophisticated tools that can rapidly assess just how much climate change may have contributed to a particular weather event.

"We carried out a quick attribution study to get some fast answers to 'What is the role of climate change?'" said UK Met Office meteorologist, Nikos Christidis, who has been developing simulations to carry out such analysis.

"We found that without human influence, it would be almost impossible to hit a new record and such a hot June in the region," he said, referring to an area including those affected in Canada and the US.

Christidis said in the past, without human-caused climate change, extreme heat in the Northwest US or Southwest Canada would have occurred "once every tens of thousands of years." Presently, it can occur every 15 years or so, Christidis said.

And if greenhouse gas emissions continue? Christidis said as often as every year or two by the turn of the century.

A couple and their dog lie in the shade Monday in Portland, Oregon. Portland had another record-high temperature on Monday: 116 degrees.

Several countries, including the US, United Kingdom and those in the European Union, recently increased their commitments — some by a long way — but many scientists and activists say they still don't go far enough to keep global average temperatures within 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

World leaders pledged in the 2015 Paris Agreement to aim for this limit in order to stave off the more most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Climate groups have also urged Canada to increase its commitments and wean itself off oil and gas.

"This is literally the deadliest weather on record for the US Pacific Northwest and far southwest Canada region. The losses and the despair as a result of the extreme heat and devastating fires in Canada are a reminder of what's yet come as this climate crisis intensifies," said Eddy Pérez, Climate Action Network Canada's manager for international climate diplomacy.

"Canada is experiencing historic climate-induced losses and damages while at the same time not doing its fair share to combat dangerous climate change. As an oil and gas producer, Canada is still considering the expansion of fossil fuels which is directly attributed to the global temperature rise."

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , , ,

05/07/2021

Barrier Reef: Ley Stunned By 22 Years Of Warnings

The Saturday Paper - Mike Seccombe

Two decades ago an Australian scientist warned climate change would kill the reef. Since then, governments have steadfastly ignored what is happening.

An aerial bleaching survey of the Great Barrier Reef, March 2020. Credit: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

Thirty years ago, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg was a PhD student at the University of California. The Australian scientist had become interested in the phenomenon of coral bleaching, in which corals lost their vibrant colours and turned ghostly white.

The cause of this bleaching was still a mystery. Was it a disease, or related to levels of salinity or light, or something else?

Hoegh-Guldberg experimented with the various possible causes, and realised it was a function of water temperature. If the water got too hot, the corals would expel the zooxanthellae – the microscopic algae that give them their colour, with which they have a symbiotic relationship – and bleach. Eventually, they would die.

Thus the link was made between coral bleaching and climate change.

Over the decade that followed, Hoegh-Guldberg and other marine scientists researched just how sensitive corals were to temperature rises. The short answer was “very”.

At the same time, climate models were becoming more accurate. “That allowed me to take the climate models,” Hoegh-Guldberg remembers, “and say, ‘Okay, what’s the temperature going to be in 2050 or 2100?’ ”

In 1998, as Hoegh-Guldberg was conducting this research, the world experienced its hottest year on record. There was a mass-bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef. The work to marry climate science and coral science was showing up in the real world.

A year later, Hoegh-Guldberg detailed his findings in the somewhat arcane journal Marine and Freshwater Research, published by the CSIRO in association with the Australian Academy of Science.

They were shocking, even to him. His paper predicted that events as severe as the 1998 bleaching – then the worst on record – would likely become “commonplace within 20 years”. He found that “the thermal tolerances of reef-building corals were likely to be exceeded every year within the next few decades”.

As he tells The Saturday Paper, his research saw no evidence of “miraculous evolutions” in corals that might change the outcome for reefs. They simply cannot live through multiple bleachings. “They can’t really survive more than one or two a decade.”

If reefs were to bleach every year, as Hoegh-Guldberg predicted, they would “disappear” by mid-century.

Unsurprisingly, given the degree of scepticism and outright denial expressed by some about human-caused climate change, his paper “did cause a stir”. Even other scientists suggested he was exaggerating the problem.
“The evidence for the Great Barrier Reef being in danger is very clear. And most of that evidence has been provided by the Australian government itself. So it’s not a surprise…”
“No one had come out and sort of said it quite bluntly like that before,” he says. “And of course, I took flak from scientists and non-scientists, and nutters and all sorts.”

And politicians, too, particularly those on the conservative side, who even then had a long, inglorious record of shooting the messenger when it came to climate science.

Repeatedly, One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts sent dossiers to the vice-chancellor and members of the senate and academic board at the University of Queensland – where Hoegh-Guldberg is a professor of marine studies – demanding his sacking.

Shortly after his paper came out, Hoegh-Guldberg met former Liberal Environment minister Robert Hill. The exchange is documented in Marian Wilkinson’s definitive book on the hijacking of Australian climate policy by denialists and fossil fuel interests, The Carbon Club.

Said Hill, on meeting Hoegh-Guldberg: “Oh, you’re the author of that alarmist paper.”

Hoegh-Guldberg replied: “No, I am the author of an alarming paper, which is somewhat different.”

Within a few years, the scientific debate was resolved, and smart, evidence-based opinion came to appreciate that Hoegh-Guldberg’s was the appropriate description. Hill himself changed his mind. Not that Hoegh-Guldberg finds much satisfaction in having been proved right: “I would much prefer to have been wrong.”

In 2002, there was another mass-bleaching event. Since then, they have come with increasing frequency. There have been three bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef in just the past five years, collectively affecting 80 per cent of the reef.

By 2007 the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, under the then new Environment minister, Malcolm Turnbull, had come up with a Climate Change Action Plan. This was not as promising as it might have seemed.

The plan was light on detail and very light on funding – a paltry $9 million over five years. Importantly, though, it acknowledged climate change as “the greatest long-term threat to the Great Barrier Reef”. It just did too little about it.

That same year the Queensland Conservation Council mounted a challenge to Xstrata’s plans for expansion of the Newlands coalmine in central Queensland, arguing it would contribute to global warming and harm the reef. The president of the Land and Resources Tribunal, Greg Koppenol, disputed the link between fossil fuel and climate change.

Others, for financial reasons rather than blind ideology, would prefer the bleaching and its links to climate change were kept quiet. They point to an estimated $6.4 billion a year and 64,000 jobs that depend on tourists wanting to see the reef.

In 2018, Col McKenzie, the head of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, representing more than 100 businesses in the Great Barrier Reef, made news by writing to the federal government and demanding it stop funding the work of another of the world’s leading reef researchers, Professor Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University.

“I think Terry Hughes is a dick,” McKenzie told Guardian Australia. “I believe he has done tens of millions of dollars of damage to our reef in our key markets, being America and Europe. People won’t do long-haul trips when they think the reef is dead.”

Hughes’s sin was to draw attention to the results of his organisation’s research, documenting the decline in coral as a result of bleaching. The irony is that the scientists are every bit as concerned for the reef’s health as any tourist operator, even more so, and their work is focused on preventing its further decline.

After scientists documented the damage from the 2002 bleaching, for example, the Howard government responded with a rezoning of large parts of the reef to exclude commercial fishing.

In response to the evidence of the reef’s decline and criticism both domestic and at international forums, government now is spending much more on reef management. The federal Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment claims some $200 million a year is spent by the Commonwealth and Queensland, seeking to improve water quality, control pests such as the crown of thorns starfish, and increase the resilience of corals. But the money is not nearly enough and the focus of its spending is too narrow.

“Every year or so, the state of Queensland and the Commonwealth produce what’s called a water-quality report card, and they give catchment-by-catchment grades,” Hughes says. “They’re too often D plus or C minus. It’s a bit like the vaccine rollout: there’s been some modest progress, but the plan is not fully funded. The state of Queensland estimated it would cost something like $800 million or $900 million a year for a decade to fix water quality.”

Hughes says the current state Labor government has acted more effectively than their federal counterpart, through measures including legislating to limit land-clearing in Barrier Reef catchments, the imposition of cane farm nitrogen and phosphorus “budgets” to reduce fertiliser runoff, and buybacks of some land in sensitive areas.

But this does not address the reef’s greatest problem, the one Hoegh-Guldberg’s research pointed to 22 years ago: climate change.

Indeed, governments both Labor and Liberal, state and federal, continue to make it worse. No matter how much is spent on reef management, it is no more than smoothing the dying pillow so long as climate change continues unabated.

Fossil fuels, the cause of that climate change, continue to be exported to the world, ironically on ships passing through the very reef their cargoes will help to destroy.

When scientists make that obvious point, they are criticised for it. They are accused of having political agendas. Since Hoegh-Guldberg’s first predictions, there has been no broad or comprehensive attempt by government to address the impact of climate change on the reef and the very real prospect that rising sea temperatures will kill it.

“In science,” says Hoegh-Guldberg, “problem-solving is meant to be impersonal. You play the ball, not the person. But people have used those sort of tactics to try to deny the science. But of course, I’ve always said that it makes me more determined.”

So we come to the latest example.

When the United Nations scientific organisation, UNESCO, announced its recommendation last week that the Great Barrier Reef be placed on the World Heritage “in danger” list, the Morrison government’s response was furious and misleading in multiple ways.

In a media release, Environment Minister Sussan Ley accused UNESCO of having “singled out” Australia in its “State of Conservation of Properties” report. In fact, the report canvassed the status of dozens of World Heritage sites, across many countries, and called for several others to be added to the existing list of 53 properties whose “outstanding universal value” was in danger of being lost for one reason or another.

Undeterred by this reality, Ley further claimed officials in her department had been assured in the week prior that the reef was not going to be recommended for listing as endangered, and were “stunned” by UNESCO’s “backflip”.

The co-ordinator of UNESCO’s World Heritage Marine Programme, Dr Fanny Douvere, promptly and categorically denied that any such assurance had been given, either formally or informally.

Ley’s combative media release suggested that UNESCO’s recommendation was the result of flawed science. She complained the draft decision had been made “on the basis of a desk top review … without examining the Reef first hand” or appreciation of “the outstanding science-based strategies being jointly funded by the Commonwealth and Queensland Governments”.

“In a call to the Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, with Foreign Minister Marise Payne overnight, I expressed Australia’s dissatisfaction with the process that is being followed,” she said in the release. “I made it clear that we will contest this flawed approach, one that has been taken without adequate consultation.”

Speaking to reporters later, she went further, suggesting a dark conspiracy intended to embarrass Australia. She pointed particularly to China’s involvement on the World Heritage Committee. “Clearly there was politics behind it, and that has subverted the proper process. For the World Heritage Committee not to foreshadow this listing is appalling.”

Terry Hughes describes this as “misinfomation”. He begins a long recitation of the reasons Ley’s claims are wrong and why the government should not have been surprised by the draft listing.

For a start, he says, the recommendation to designate the reef as “in danger” was not made by the World Heritage Committee but by UNESCO scientists.

“The World Heritage Committee, which is the 21 countries, half of which rotate every three years, is chaired by China; but China would not have seen the draft recommendation until it was released by UNESCO.”

As to the claim this assessment was made on the basis of inadequate information, he cites abundant scientific evidence, provided by people such as himself and Hoegh-Guldberg, and more importantly, the Australian government.

“Australia itself has documented the decline of the Great Barrier Reef, primarily due to global warming and runoff, in the three Barrier Reef Outlook Reports that have been produced in the last 15 years, every five years up to 2019,” says Hughes. “The 2019 report – produced by the Commonwealth – downgraded the Barrier Reef from poor to very poor.”

He points out that the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the scientific body that advises UNESCO, also produced a report last year. It listed the reef’s status as “critical”.

“So, the evidence for the Great Barrier Reef being in danger is very clear,” he says. “And most of that evidence has been provided by the Australian government itself. So it’s not a surprise; it’s nothing to do with China.”

Nor is this the first time the reef has been considered for an “in danger” listing. In 2015, the government managed to avoid listing, through a combination of lobbying and promises to better protect the reef.

“The Reef 2050 plan arose because of a directive from UNESCO for Australia to demonstrate that it was doing more,” Hughes says. “And that plan is now five years old. That the plan has nothing much to say about climate change, apart from acknowledging it as the No. 1 threat.”

Hughes says Australia is not being singled out. “UNESCO commissioned a report in 2018 on the vulnerability of the 29 World Heritage areas around the world that have coral reefs in them. Four – the Great Barrier Reef, Lord Howe Island, Shark Bay and Ningaloo – [are] in Australia. And I was part of that report; I’m one of the authors. All of those properties have shown multiple bleaching events in the last 30 years.”

What distinguishes Australia from the countries responsible for the stewardship of most of those sites, however, is its lack of action to address the underlying cause: climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

“Australia is an outlier in that it has the second-highest per capita emissions in the world. Australia is a signatory to the 1.5 degree target of the Paris Agreement, but it hasn’t done anything much to achieve that target,” Hughes says.

“So UNESCO over the last couple of years has been moving towards linking a state party’s policy for climate change and for emission reductions to their responsibilities for management of climate-sensitive World Heritage properties.”

Ley and the government should not have been surprised, then, by what has happened. UNESCO, Hughes says, “has been broadcasting this over a number of years now”.

But the Morrison government has not been tuned in. Instead of climate action, Hughes says, “we have the gas-led recovery, Adani and other new coalmines and gas fields being subsidised and encouraged by the Morrison government”.

Just this week, the government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility announced it would provide $175 million towards a new coalmine in Queensland.

The final decision on the status of the reef will be made a couple of weeks from now, at a virtual meeting of the member states of the World Heritage Committee.

Usually, their determinations are unanimous, but that is unlikely this time. Apart from Australia and China, there are 19 other countries on the committee, and the government has been furiously lobbying them. Ley’s statement suggests the government is very worried.

But the larger point remains. For decades, governments have been warned about the impact climate change will have on the Great Barrier Reef. Those warnings have proved accurate. And yet the government has done nothing substantial to engage with the reality of this. Instead it feigns shock at a listing confirming what it has already long known: that heating seas are killing the reef, which may only have a few decades left before it is gone entirely.

This is the difference between alarmist and alarming, the one Hoegh-Guldberg pointed out, and governments still have not learnt it.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , , ,

(Washington Post) Climate Change Could Cost Condo Boards Billions. They Aren’t Ready For It.

Washington Post - Evan McKenzie

The Surfside, Fla., building collapse is just one example of a bigger looming problem

Investigators are trying to figure out why Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Fla., collapsed. Climate change could leave other condo buildings around the country facing expensive repairs and upgrades to avoid disasters. (Octavio Jones/For The Washington Post)

Author
Evan McKenzie teaches in the political science department and the law school at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of two books about condominium and homeowner associations. 
The collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium building in Surfside, Fla., is a terrible tragedy. Besides the stories of the victims and their grieving loved ones, early attention has focused on the causes of the collapse, such as how the building was constructed, the effects of saltwater on reinforced concrete and whether the condominium association was properly maintaining the high-rise.

Those are important matters, but the disaster exemplifies a bigger problem, one that will still loom once we have answers about what went wrong in Surfside: The untrained, unpaid and unsupervised volunteer directors of the nation’s more than 350,000 condo and homeowners’ associations, armed with limited financial resources, are expected to deal with the unprecedented infrastructure challenges that climate change poses to their communities. And there is no reason to believe that they are up to that task.

More than 20 percent of the U.S. population lives in property administered by condominium and homeowners’ associations, nonprofits run by volunteers elected by the owners. These directors and officers are responsible for an estimated $7 trillion worth of private property and infrastructure, including high-rise buildings, private streets, parks, pools, sewer and water systems, lakes, garages, and many other building systems and amenities.

As condos and HOAs blossomed across the country in the last 50 years, little or no thought was given to the eventual effects of climate change, in terms of location or construction quality. The common-interest housing sector emerged in the 1960s as a way to put more people on less land, increasing developer profits and local property tax revenue.

The model spread rapidly, and condos and HOAs are now the default options for new construction in many states, not just across the Sun Belt where they originated but in older metro areas as well. Many locations are problematic from the outset. Developers often build in places that appeal to buyers but pose environmental challenges — such as on reclaimed wetlands or beaches next to rising seas, as in Surfside.

Other developers place subdivisions at the top of artificial slopes that turn into mudslides in hundred-year storms, which now occur more often than they used to. Terrible disasters have struck neighborhoods built in areas that are prone to drought-induced wildfires. Local governments may approve these location decisions because they are great for sales and the property tax base, but they drop environmental issues right in the laps of condo and HOA boards.

Condo and homeowners’ associations were never designed or empowered to handle such conditions. These associations are essentially on their own, with virtually no support from any level of government. Although most of them operate well most of the time, paying for routine maintenance and repair has always been a challenge, long before climate change made things worse.

For years, industry insiders have pointed out that although directors and officers are responsible for maintaining the property, most unit owners are notoriously unwilling to see their housing costs go up now to sock away funds for repairs in the future. Why, they ask, should they pay today so someone else can have a new roof long after they’ve moved out? Yet that is precisely what they are expected to do. Somehow, dozens, hundreds or even thousands of owners are supposed to overcome their self-interest and collective-action problems and commit to maintaining their private infrastructure in perpetuity.

Now the maintenance and repair responsibilities that condo boards struggle with every day, with varying degrees of success, are being amplified by the effects of global climate change. It is increasingly clear that owner resources and volunteer expertise are inadequate to meet the challenge of maintaining buildings, preventing and mitigating climate-related damage, and restoring property that is severely harmed or even destroyed.

The Surfside disaster is an instructive example of an association faced with environmental challenges beyond its means. The 12-story condo tower with 136 units was built 40 years ago on reclaimed beachfront wetlands, where the proximity of a rising ocean, saltwater and gradual land subsidence have been constant threats to structural integrity. A few years ago, engineers told the condo board that they had an expensive problem on their hands with deteriorating reinforced concrete.

After much internal back-and-forth, the board recently assessed a total repair cost on the owners of $15 million. That averages out to more than $110,000 per unit for this midsize association, an eye-popping figure for any homeowner and one that would undoubtedly put many into foreclosure for failure to pay. Repairs were set to begin soon; residents were initially supposed to decide whether to pay their share of the assessment at once or in monthly installments by this past Thursday.

Some are claiming that the collapse could have been avoided if better maintenance had been done earlier. Maybe. But there are thousands of beachfront condos on the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts. We cannot expect all of them to be maintained consistently to industry standards with sea level rise, storm surge, land subsidence and a host of other coastal climate issues in mind. We know there will always be some that risk skipping maintenance, thinking the worst won’t happen there.

Sea level rise is not the only climate-related problem that places owners in harm’s way and that local governments and developers never anticipated. It is clear by now that climate change produces heavy rainfall, including hurricanes and so-called 100-year storms, that can cause major flooding, landslides and other stormwater-related disasters.

Condo and homeowners’ associations have been severely affected by such events, and developers have been sued from coast to coast over their failure to anticipate them and build accordingly. Expensive litigation after the fact is no substitute for prevention, but it is unrealistic to expect condominium and homeowner associations to undertake costly anticipatory measures. They have neither the expertise nor the resources to do so. In most cases, they don’t even know where to begin.

Many other communities have been built near places prone to wildfires, which have taken on new ferocity in drought conditions fueled by global warming. The costs of safeguarding neighborhoods against these fires are daunting for owners and associations, and prevention is almost entirely out of their hands.

In 2003, wildfires destroyed 331 homes in Scripps Ranch, an upscale San Diego-area neighborhood where developer-created HOA requirements for wooden “shake” shingle roofs accelerated the destruction. The San Diego City Council banned these roofs in new construction, including for people who wanted to rebuild their homes. Yet they faced intense resistance from Scripps Ranch owners over proposed building code changes intended to protect their homes against future wildfires, because implementing those changes would have been expensive.

Owners in a fire-prone area might be understandably angry if their association required them to pay for new roofs, elaborate sprinkler systems, doors and windows with heat-resistant double-glazed material, and special fire-retardant house paint. If local governments encounter pushback when they require such measures, it seems unlikely that condo and homeowners’ associations would adopt them voluntarily.

In effect, condo and HOA developments are a huge experiment in privatization of local government functions, and sometimes the offloading of government responsibilities goes too far. We can expect a condo or HOA board to handle garbage collection, get the leaves and snow removed from private streets, and broadly live up to its responsibilities to residents. But when private communities took off in the 1960s, we didn’t even know what climate change was.

We cannot realistically expect condo boards to prevent damage from sea level rise, more-frequent severe storms, extreme heat and drought, and other major changes in the environment — especially not in buildings that weren’t built to withstand such conditions. If the proliferation of condos and HOAs is to continue in the time of climate change, federal, state and local governments must play a more supportive, directive and protective role. Otherwise, millions of owners and their volunteer community leaders will be swamped by forces beyond their control.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative