6 December 2016, The Conversation. At first glance, the progress reports on the Great Barrier Reef released last week by the Australian and Queensland governments might seem impressive. The update on the Reef 2050 Plan suggests that 135 of the plan’s 151 actions are either complete or on track. The Australian government’s apparent intention in releasing five recent reports is to reassure UNESCO that the Great Barrier Reef should not be listed as “World Heritage in Danger” (as the World Heritage Committee has previously threatened). Sadly, behind the verbosity and colour of these reports, there is disappointingly little evidence of progress in the key areas needed to make a significant difference to a World Heritage Area that is in crisis. Poor baseline The government framework for protecting and managing the Reef from 2015 to 2050, the Reef 2050 Plan, has been widely criticised as failing to provide a sound basis for the necessary long-term protection of the Reef. As well as providing a shaky basis to build effective actions, the Reef 2050 Plan has few measurable or realistic targets. It is therefore not easy to report on the actual progress. Several of the actions that will have the greatest impacts on the overall health of the Reef are shown in the progress reports as “not yet due”. In some cases, such as climate change, the Reef 2050 Plan is silent, instead simply referencing Australia’s national efforts on climate change. Read More here
Category Archives: Ecosystem Stress
6 December 2016, Climate Home, Fire bombs: British Columbia prepares for infernos. The second part of our series on vulnerable communities finds BC taking radical action in the face of a pile up of fire threats. Can it move fast enough? Tasmania and British Columbia are kindred lands; wild outposts of Britain’s empire, never fully tamed by settlers, with cool capital cities and a laid-back reputation that attracts nature lovers and marijuana connoisseurs. But the two share a less merry distinction – they are both sitting ducks for catastrophic fire. The first article in this series found Tasmania’s capital Hobart facing the twin threats of climate change and a landscape over brimming with fuel because traditional fire management by Aborigines had ceased with colonialism. There are strong parallels in BC. As the climate warms, fires are predicted to become more severe, larger and occur more frequently in unusual times of the year. The times call for bold ideas. Here, authorities are attempting to avert danger with a scheme so radical that one fire scientist in Tasmania calls it “crazy”, although not as crazy as living in a tinderbox. “Almost every year for the last five years we’ve said: wow, this is the earliest start to a fire season in a long time or ever,” says Lori Daniels, a forest scientist at the University of British Columbia’s tree ring lab. The coastal region in BC gets more rain than the interior. Even so, the capital Vancouver’s northern slopes, where Daniels lives, are desperately exposed once the perennial summer drought arrives. Here the city has made trouble for itself. The hills around the harbour were once lined by old wet forests. But those have been logged and replaced by more flammable woods. “The forests that have grown back are very productive and are a really different structure and now we have more than a million people who live in the vicinity of those forests and are very active ignition sources,” said Daniels. In other words, Vancouverites have laid their bed and manage to set fire to it every chance they get. Read More here
5 December 2016, Climate Home, Fire bombs: Hobart lies in the path of climate disaster. Around the world, communities are living obliviously close to climate-driven fire disaster. In the first in a series of reports, Karl Mathiesen visits Hobart, Tasmania. Looking down on the Tasmanian capital of Hobart from Knocklofty – one of its surrounding hills – David Bowman describes a truly frightening scenario. A hot, northerly gale and rolling fireball turn the forest around us into a blast furnace. The oil-filled eucalyptus canopies explode. One by one, the hills around the city catch alight. Then with a great sweep the fire runs up the slopes of Mount Wellington. Chunks of burning w1ood are flung into the air and rain down on the city. Office buildings, churches, schools and homes (perhaps the one I grew up in) randomly burn. In all, he says, four or five suburbs are destroyed. That’s the catastrophe, Bowman says, that the residents of Hobart live blithely beside every summer. And the odds are steadily getting worse. Both on land, and in the atmosphere, humans are creating bigger and bigger problems for ourselves. This Climate Home series will examine a dangerous trend in three distinct but related landscapes – Australia, western North America and the Mediterranean. In each of these places, climate change adds what Bowman, a professor in fire ecology from the University of Tasmania, calls “the plus”: a dialling up of danger as weather patterns shift towards a more fire prone future. Read more here
1 December 2016, The Guardian, Obama’s dirty secret: the fossil fuel projects the US littered around the world. Seemingly little connects a community in India plagued by toxic water, a looming air pollution crisis in South Africa and a new fracking boom that is pockmarking Australia. And yet there is a common thread: American taxpayer money. Through the US Export-Import Bank, Barack Obama’s administration has spent nearly $34bn supporting 70 fossil fuel projects around the world, work by Columbia Journalism School’s Energy and Environment Reporting Project and the Guardian has revealed. This unprecedented backing of oil, coal and gas projects is an unexpected footnote to Obama’s own climate change legacy. The president has called global warming “terrifying” and helped broker the world’s first proper agreement to tackle it, yet his administration has poured money into developments that will push the planet even closer to climate disaster. For people living next to US-funded mines and power stations the impacts are even more starkly immediate. Guardian and Columbia reporters have spent time at American-backed projects in India, South Africa and Australia to document the sickness, upheavals and environmental harm that come with huge dirty fuel developments. In India, we heard complaints about coal ash blowing into villages, contaminated water and respiratory and stomach problems, all linked to a project that has had more than $650m in backing from the Obama administration. In South Africa, another huge project is set to exacerbate existing air pollution problems, deforestation and water shortages. And in Australia, an enormous US-backed gas development is linked to a glut of fracking activity that has divided communities and brought a new wave of industrialization next to the cherished Great Barrier Reef. While Obama can claim the US is the world’s leader on climate change – at least until Donald Trump enters the White House – it is also clear that it has become a major funder of fossil fuels that are having a serious impact upon people’s lives. This is the unexpected story of how Obama’s legacy is playing out overseas. Read more here