Planners need to allow for Coastal wetlands migration due to sea level rise, climate change

Indymedia.org (Australia): Coastal Wetlands are under pressure. They face rising seas from climate change, but their biggest obstacle to migrate naturally inland is human development with roads, houses and other infrastructure blocking their way. And our urban planners are largely unaware of this tricky situation.

We all love to live beside the sea, but coastal urban development and rising seas will increasingly threaten sensitive coastal wetlands with no room to move and imperilling the survival of their unique plants, birds and fish.

Our urban planners have taken a stable sea level for granted with development to date, often destroying wetland environments for coastal development, agriculture and aquaculture.

More recent urban planning incorporating sea level rise predictions places an emphasis on the threat to peoples houses, roads, railway embankments and other human infrastructure. But planning also needs to encompass the coastal wetland environments that share our coastlines. These ecosystems will also need to migrate inland as the ocean rises....

Gippsland Lakes in Victoria, Australia, from NASA

Climate change will force Australian farmers to adapt

Sarah Clarke in ABC News: Australia's farmers will need to adapt to cope with a potentially hotter and drier continent as the effects of climate change take hold, scientists say. As the UN's chief science body meets in Hobart today to update the latest climate modelling, the CSIRO says forecasts show Australia will have to cope with less rainfall, longer dry periods and crops struggling to grow in changing conditions.

CSIRO climate applications scientist Steve Crimp says the nation's agricultural sector will likely feel the heat of a hotter climate. "Certainly across most of southern Australia, the projections of the future are for warmer and drier conditions, so when we experience warm and dry conditions, growing those crops, canola, wheat, barley etc will be more challenging in the future," he said.

A CSIRO report warns climate change will threaten Australia's farming productivity and says grazing livestock, particularly cattle, will be stressed as a result and less likely to breed. Central Australia is predicted to experience the greatest warming.

Modelling shows irrigated cropping may also be challenged, especially in the south east where water is drawn from upstream in the Murray-Darling Basin. The CSIRO forecasts all cropping could be hit by less rainfall....

Drought in the Wheatlands, Western Australia, shot by Phillip Capper, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

First sparks of climate change seen in Australian infernos

The Philippine Star via Xinhua (China): As Australians face another week of record temperatures and 99 bushfires continue to rage across the state of NSW alone, authorities are starting to grapple with a future where even the first sparks of climate change could turn the arid continent into an inferno.

 With temperatures soared into the forties on Saturday - despite the first signs of an unexpected cool change - a total fire ban across the state was extended for a further 24 hours through Saturday in response to the threat. Australia is now a country under climate siege.

The fires stem from the continent's lingering, seasonal droughts. Cruel, dry and arid conditions now permeate even in its humid climatic regions. While the merest stretch of dry years bring the disaster of fire hazards, the summer of 2012/13 has eclipsed most heatwaves on record and witnessed the outbreak of hundreds of fires in virtually every Australian state.

Now in Australia, drought condition conducive to widespread outbreaks of wildfire extends into the Humid Subtropical and even Marine climates. One of the most damaging fires this week occurred in Tasmania, an island state with a climate more usually equated with the highlands of Scotland.   

Climate experts have begun to identify Australia's ongoing disaster as the first, terrible consequences of the future yet to come for the southern continent, and that the wider world must develop planning strategies to adapt to such disasters stemming from an increasingly hotter and dryer earth....

Tasmanian bushfires, January 4, 2013, shot by ToniFish, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

How Australians survive the raging bushfires

Barry Parker in AFP: Dozens of out-of-control fires have burnt vast tracts of Australia, destroying homes and crops and killing animals, but not a single person has died.

The success of the operation to safeguard lives has much to do with a detailed guide to surviving bush blazes, along with an official danger rating system that was introduced after 173 people perished in the 2009 Black Saturday firestorm.

In addition the Rural Fire Service (RFS) is extremely proactive in promoting safety precautions and warns every family how to make their own survival plans. RFS Deputy commissioner for New South Wales Rob Rogers spent Friday morning on radio and television bracing the nation for more to come as firefighters faced soaring temperatures in the battle to douse more than 100 fires.

"We've obviously got severe fire danger," Rogers said running through the basic requirements of survival designed to "protect the lives of your family".

"Prepare, act, survive," say the guidelines, continuing: "The majority of deaths during bushfires result from people trying to leave their homes at the last moment." The danger ratings system culminates in severe, extreme and catastrophic conditions, which are used to determine whether to evacuate or to stay and fight....

Fire danger sign, showing "Very High" risk, Red Cliffs, Victoria, Australia, 2008.  Shot by Longhair, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Australian bushfires worry insurers less than cyclones and floods

Peter Hannam in the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia): With large parts of the country under threat during this bushfire season, it seems counter-intuitive - if not insensitive - to downplay the economic risks. With both Victoria and New South Wales declaring total fire bans and with bushfire researchers warning the danger period has barely begun, moves to minimise potential losses might also seem premature.

Still, while the costs of the latest fires are not trivial - 525 claims for $52.5 million for the Tasmanian fires alone - the reality is only a fraction of a typical premium reflecting bushfire risk, according to Karl Sullivan, the general manager policy risk and disaster planning at the Insurance Council of Australia. ''[It's] in the vicinity of less than 2 per cent,'' Sullivan says. ''Internal fires from kitchen fires and things like that rate higher.''

The insurance industry does not dismiss the human and financial costs from bushfires. Victoria's 2009 Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2000 homes. A report issued this week by Suncorp, one of the country's biggest insurers, noted the blazes cost at least $4 billion. Of that, the federal government spent $468 million on relief and disaster recovery, the state government $269 million and the insurance industry $1.07 billion.

But for the industry, bushfires are another of the major hazards facing Australians and less of a worry to insurers than tropical cyclones and floods. The reinsurance giant Munich Re says research shows Australia is more exposed than other regions to climate change but fire is not the foremost hazard, according to Ernst Rauch, head of the company's corporate climate centre.

Longer term, ''water and precipitation are probably the most significant issues related to climate change, in both directions'', he says....

Bushfire smoke over Melbourne in 2009, shot by Nick carson, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Cool change aids Australia firefighters

Terra Daily via AFP: A drop in temperatures helped firefighters battling blazes across Australia Wednesday but up to 30 wildfires were still raging out of control, destroying a handful of homes and forcing people to flee.

After facing one of the highest-risk fire days in its history on Tuesday, residents in hard-hit New South Wales state woke to much cooler conditions as a southerly change dropped temperatures significantly.

While temperatures topped 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 Fahrenheit) in Sydney Tuesday, they were forecast to peak at just 25 C a day later, while Victorian capital Melbourne was down to 20 C.

The ratings on many bushfires were downgraded with none now at the "catastrophic" level, which signifies fires will be uncontrollable, unpredictable and fast-moving, with evacuation the only safe option.

But NSW Rural Fire Service commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons warned against complacency with new fronts breaking out despite the colder weather. "It's been a long busy night for firefighters on the ground, for incident controllers working out of those fire control centres and of course the communities affected by these fires," he told ABC television....

Aerial view of fire at Copping/Forcett at around 4pm on 4 Jan 2013 - view from window of an airplane leaving Hobart Airport. Shot by Chuq, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Australia braces for "catastrophic" wildfire day

The West via Reuters: Australia was bracing on Monday for days of "catastrophic" fire and heat wave conditions, with fires already burning in five states and as a search continued for people missing after devastating wildfires in the island state of Tasmania.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard toured fire-ravaged Tasmanian townships and promised emergency aid for survivors, who told of a "fireball" that engulfed communities across the thinly-populated state on Friday and Saturday.

"The trees just exploded," local man Ashley Zanol told Australian radio, recounting a wall of flames that surrounded his truck as he carted water to assist fire crews in the hard-hit township of Murdunna, largely levelled in the inferno.

Tasmanian police said around 100 people feared missing in bushfires had been accounted for and there had so far been no deaths as authorities combed through still-smouldering ruins of homes and vehicles, while evacuating local people and tourists.

Bushfires were ablaze in five of Australia's six states, with 90 fires in the most populous state New South Wales, and in mountain forests around the national capital Canberra....

A 2010 bushfire in Australia, shot by 80 trading 24, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Bushfires strike with extreme heatwave blanketing most of Australia

Indymedia.org (Australia): Hobart recorded it's highest recorded minimum temperature Thursday night and highest recorded daytime temperature on Friday. Bushfires are currently raging in Tasmania destroying houses and forcing evacuations (see below).

....Elevated temperatures in an extreme heatwave are occuring across a brought sweep of Australia, with the heatwave expected to last at least a week. It is very unusual that a heat wave covers such a large area of the continent at one time, according to Karl Braganza, manager of climate monitoring at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Australia's weather has switched to hot and dry after one of the wettest two year periods in Australia's history influenced by an extremely strong La Nina event.

Over the southern winter and spring weak El Nino conditions have caused below average rainfall across much of Australia with a heatwave and above average temperatures in early Spring. An extreme summer heatwave is forecast to happen from January 3 over a wide area of Australia, particularly central inland areas, lasting for at least a week.

"We have a major heat event under way," Karl Braganza, manager of climate monitoring at the Bureau of Meteorology, said. "There are not many instances in the historical record where you get a heat event covering such a large area of the continent."

Brett Dutschke, senior meteorologist at Weatherzone, said it was unusual to have so prolonged a hot spell. "It's a once-in-20 or 30-year heatwave event in desert areas," he said. "More populated areas further south … are going to experience some of this as well."....

The Red Center in Australia, shot by Gabriele Delhey (GDelhey), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Wildfires light up western Australia

NASA: Careful observers of the new "Black Marble" images of Earth at night released this week by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have noticed bright areas in the western part of Australia that are largely uninhabited. Why is this area so lit up, many have asked?

Away from the cities, much of the night light observed by the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite in these images comes from wildfires. In the bright areas of western Australia, there are no nearby cities or industrial sites but, scientists have confirmed, there were fires in the area when Suomi NPP made passes over the region. This has been confirmed by other data collected by the satellite.

The extent of the night lights in this area is also a function of composite imaging. These new images were assembled from data acquired over nine days in April 2012 and 13 days in October 2012. This means fires and other lighting (such as ships) could have been detected on any one day and integrated into the composite picture, despite being temporary phenomena.

Because different areas burned at different times when the satellite passed over, the cumulative result in the composite view gives the appearance of a massive blaze. These fires are temporary features, in contrast to cities which are always there.

Other features appearing in uninhabited areas in these images could include fishing boats, gas flaring, lightning, oil drilling, or mining operations, which can show up as points of light. One example is natural gas drilling in the Bakken Formation in North Dakota....

This nighttime image of Australia was cropped from the Suomi NPP "Black Marble" released by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in December 2012. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC

To drought-proof city’s water supply, Sydney proposes a second set of pipes

Brett Walton in Circle of Blue:  The City of Sydney, one of 38 political subdivisions in Australia’s largest metropolitan region of the same name, is in the final stage of preparing an ambitious master plan that seeks to refashion its water infrastructure to meet the constraints of a water-scarce future.

One of the oldest sections of Australia’s 224-year-old hub, the City – which includes the central business district and is home to 185,000 of the 4.6 million people in greater Sydney – envisions a second water-distribution network that would provide water for purposes other than drinking. This parallel system would tap into new sources like salty water, purified by waste heat from power plants, as well as existing sources, such as recycled wastewater and rainwater, which are typically flushed out to sea.

“For a major urban centre to have two networks — one delivering potable water and another delivering non-potable water — it would be ground breaking in Australia,” Monique Retamal wrote in an email to Circle of Blue. Retamal, a researcher at the Sydney-based Institute for Sustainable Futures, helped to develop the City’s water plan. “As far as I am aware, there are no other similar plans elsewhere in the world.”

The city council not only wants to adapt its obsolete infrastructure to a changing climate, said Bhakti Devi, the city’s manager for water strategy. Because cities worldwide will soon be confronting the same problems, the City also wants to be a pioneer for urban water solutions globally....

Sydney and Sydney Harbour Bridge taken from North Shore, 19 March 1932. Shot by E.W. Searle

Oceania Biodiscovery Forum & ABS Capacity Development Workshop in Brisbane

From 19-22 November, 2012, the first ever Oceania Biodiscovery Forum took place in Brisbane, Australia. The meeting was jointly facilitated by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the Eskitis Institute of Griffith University, the Australian Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (SEWPaC) and the ABS Capacity Development Initiative. This meeting was followed by an Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS)  capacity development workshop for ABS Focal Points and other relevant stakeholders in the Pacific region from 22-23 November.

The Biodiscovery Forum provided a platform for exchange on the nature of bioprospecting activities by Australian research institutes, both public and private. A number of researchers shared the nature of their work, ranging from small-scale commercial bioprospecting activities to large-scale gene banks of marine genetic resources. These activities were then discussed against the backdrop of the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing to the Convention on Biological Diversity and Australia’s draft policy as a user of genetic resources as well as the existing permit system as a provider of genetic resources. A number of national and regional benefit sharing examples with local communities were shared with participants. 

Both the European Commission and Switzerland shared their current status in implementing the Nagoya Protocol as users of genetic resources, and the extent to which genetic resources would be protected once they left their country of origin. This led to substantial debate as some participants were not satisfied with the current interpretation of both Switzerland and the European Commission in relation to the temporal scope of the Nagoya Protocol as well as their definition of what constitutes ‘access’. In their view the current wording would result in too many resources currently in gene banks being excluded from the Protocol’s protection and subsequently undermine the very purpose of the Protocol.

Finally, the Biodiscovery Forum ended with a visit to the Eskitis Institute, which houses a wealth of terrestrial and marine compounds to support the Institute's search for novel drug- and cell-based therapies against cancer, infectious diseases and neurological diseases. 

The ABS Capacity Development Workshop, the third of a series of three regional workshops in 2012, targeted ABS Focal Points and other relevant stakeholders from the Pacific region. Representatives from the Cook Islands, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Niue, Kiribati, the Federation of States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Samao, Palau, Nauru, Tonga, Vanuatu as well as the overseas territories of American Samoa and New Caledonia participated . Also invited were representatives from South Africa and Jamaica to facilitate further South-South exchanges. 

At the request of participants from previous workshops, this training focused on Prior Informed Consent and Mutually Agreed Terms as the two key elements of implementing ABS. Johanna von Braun from Natural Justice served as one of the key resource people in the workshop together with Daniel Robinson (University of New South Wales), Morten Tvedt (Fridtjof Nansen Institute), Geoff Burton (United Nations University), Ben Phillips (SEWPaC), Clark Peteru (SPREP) as well as Andreas Drews and Susanne Heitmueller from the ABS Capacity Building Initiative. Further presentations included a presentation of Locally Managed Marine Areas (LMMAs) as relevant community governance structures for ABS by Alifereti Tawake and a presentation on relevant funding opportunities by the GEF Small Grants Programme.

Australia approves plan to save vital river system

Space Daily via AFP: Australia approved an "historic" plan Thursday to save an ailing river system vital to the nation's food bowl by returning the equivalent of five Sydney Harbour's worth of water to the network each year.

Environment Minister Tony Burke said he signed into law the final draft of a water reform plan for the Murray-Darling Basin, a river network sprawling for one million square kilometres (400,000 square miles) across five Australian states.

The scheme will see 2,750 gigalitres of water, equivalent to five Sydney Harbours, returned annually as environmental flows to the system -- short of the 4,000 gigalitres sought by conservationists but more than wanted by farmers.

Burke said the figure could reach 3,200 gigalitres with infrastructure improvements to which the government had committed Aus$1.77 billion (US$1.83 billion). Two million tonnes of salt -- enough to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground -- would also be flushed out every year under the plan, which he described as "historic".

"The foundation and reason for the reform is unequivocally and unapologetically to restore the system to health," Burke told reporters "Consistent over-allocation and mismanagement (have) seriously degraded the health of the system."...

Menindee Lakes in NSW from 16,000 feet, part of the Murray-Darling system, shot by Tim Keegan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Climate change action focuses on tourist traps, say researchers

University of Queensland, Australia: Efforts to help Queensland's tourism industry to adapt to the effects of climate change are likely to be focused on areas that attract the most tourist dollars rather than those with the greatest need, according to new UQ research.

Researchers at The University of Queensland Business School fear that natural heritage such as The Great Barrier Reef and northern tropical rainforests could lose out if investment decisions are made on the basis of economic values that fail to take into account its environmental value.

The research by UQ Business School Masters students suggests that Queensland tourism could be badly affected by climate change.  With the industry generating close to $19 billion in annual revenue and accounting for one in 10 jobs, measures to adapt to overcome the adverse effects would be necessary.

Using different climate change scenarios, the students compared leading tourist destinations on their tourism revenue, their vulnerability to climate change, and their ability to adapt to it. They found the south-east coast, from a purely business perspective, should be given the highest priority for climate change action, with the lowest priority given to the Australian outback and northern tropical rainforest regions.

UQ Business School Lecturer and corporate sustainability expert Dr Martina Linnenluecke said: “This research is one of the first studies to combine insights into the costs of adaptation, as well as the vulnerabilities of different regions....

The Pelican Waters brush fire in Queensland, 2006, shot by thinboyfatter, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license