9 September 2016, The Conversation, EcoCheck: the Grampians are struggling with drought and deluge. Our EcoCheck series takes the pulse of some of Australia’s most important ecosystems to find out if they’re in good health or on the wane. The Grampians National Park is a large conservation reserve, sprawling across 168,000 hectares embedded in western Victoria’s agricultural landscape. With a rich cultural heritage and regionally important flora and fauna, it is a hugely significant area for conservation. But in recent years it has been subjected to a series of major wildfire events, a flood, and long periods of low rainfall. Our research shows that this has sent small mammal populations on the kind of boom-and-bust rollercoaster ride usually seen in arid places, not temperate forests.The fire and the flood We began studying the Grampians in 2008, investigating how small mammals had responded to a catastrophic wildfire that burned half of the national park in 2006. What started as a one-year study has turned into a long-term research program to investigate how the past few years of hypervariable rainfall and heightened bushfire activity have affected the animals that live in the park. Fortunately (for our study, at least), the beginning of our research in 2008 was in the middle of a long run of very poor rainfall years, as the Millennium Drought reached its height. The drought was broken at the end of 2010 by the Big Wet, which led to well-above-average rainfall and floods in the Grampians. But soon after, rainfall rapidly dipped back to below average. It has stayed there ever since. We also saw two more major fire events, in 2013 and 2014, which together with the 2006 fire burned some 90% of the Grampians landscape. Read More here
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9 September 2016, The Conversation, He may have insulted Obama, but Duterte held up a long-hidden looking glass to the US. This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has taken his “bad manners” – having gained global notoriety with his election campaign insults earlier this year – to a new level. At a press conference at Davao International Airport on Monday, on his way to meet US President Barack Obama and other leaders attending the ASEAN summit, Duterte muttered a few short words in tagalog at the end of a lengthy and irritated reply to a local journalist. With those words, he again made international headlines. If that were all there was to it, we could rightly roll our eyes and move on. After all, Duterte’s language is vulgar; his slander of people and groups is liable to incite violence; and his determination to kill drug pushers (to fight “crime with crime”) an abuse of power. He should not be defended for any of this.But as someone who has spent a long time studying US-Philippine relations, I think there’s something more for us to see here. And if we want to judge the Philippine president (and, by default, the nation for electing him) from high moral ground, I think we have a responsibility to pay attention to it. Restoring an invisible history “Who is he to question me about human rights and extrajudicial killings?” So asked Duterte on Monday. It’s actually a very good question, and one long overdue from a Philippine president. The extent to which the violence of US relations with the Philippines has been made invisible by a history written predominantly by Americans themselves cannot be overstated. It began with a three-year war (1899-1902) that most Americans have never heard of. The war overthrew a newly independent Philippine republic and cost between 250,000 and a million Filipino lives – only to be called “a great misunderstanding” by American colonial writers. Read More here
7 September 2016, Climate Home, EU-sized coal fleet shelved since Paris climate deal. China and India are cracking down on excess projects, but remaining pipeline will still blow the 2C carbon budget, say analysts. The volume of coal plants in planning worldwide fell dramatically in the first half of 2016, as China and India tightened up their policies. That is according to data meticulously gathered by researchers at Coal Swarm from company, media and NGO reporting. Between January and July, more projects were shelved or cancelled than added, shrinking the pre-construction pipeline by 158GW – a change of 14%, equivalent to the EU’s entire coal power fleet. The cooling off follows a landmark climate summit in Paris, where 195 countries agreed last December to phase out greenhouse gas emissions. Coal is the biggest source of emissions from energy worldwide and a prime target for climate policy. “It is very significant,” Coal Swarm director Ted Nace told Climate Home, although he added the remaining 932GW in the works would still blow the 1.5C and 2C carbon budgets. Read More here
7 September 2016, The Conversation, Pacific pariah: how Australia’s love of coal has left it out in the diplomatic cold. Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will have some explaining to do when he attends the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Pohnpei, Micronesia, this week. Australia’s continued determination to dig up coal, while refusing to dig deep to tackle climate change, has put it increasingly at odds with world opinion. Nowhere is this more evident than when Australian politicians meet with their Pacific island counterparts. It is widely acknowledged that Pacific island states are at the front line of climate change. It is perhaps less well known that, for a quarter of a century, Australia has attempted to undermine their demands in climate negotiations at the United Nations. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – organised around an annual meeting between island leaders and their counterparts from Australia and New Zealand – is the Pacific region’s premier political forum. But island nations have been denied the chance to use it to press hard for their shared climate goals, because Australia has used the PIF to weaken the regional declarations put forward by Pacific nations at each key milestone in the global climate negotiation process. In the run-up to the 1997 UN Kyoto climate summit, Pacific island leaders lobbied internationally for new binding targets to reduce emissions. However, that year’s PIF leaders’ statement was toned down, simply calling for “recognition of climate change impacts”. Likewise, in the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen talks, Pacific island countries called for states to reduce emissions by 95% by 2050. But at that year’s PIF meeting in Cairns, the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, convinced leaders to scale back the proposed target to 50%. Pacific media branded the outcome “a death warrant for Pacific Islanders”. Ahead of last year’s Paris summit, Australia again exercised its “veto power” over Pacific climate diplomacy. Over the preceding years Pacific island leaders had made their climate positions quite clear, both at UN discussions in New York and in a string of declarations including the Melanesian Spearhead Group Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change, the Polynesian Leaders’ Declaration on Climate Change, and the Suva Declaration on Climate Change. Read More here