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The sun rises above Uluru in outback Australia. David Gray/Reuters

Increasingly, our leaders talk of Australian values and presume that these arose organically, as though through some moral forge. An alternative view is that our national character and sense of identity have been shaped mostly by the land itself: we are a nation of individualistic, resilient and resourceful individuals because our land is isolated, expansive, capricious and unique.

Our country’s dust, drought, flood, blood and harsh beauty have made us what we are.

In a report published today, the Pew Charitable Trust compiled a series of perspectives on how people living in remote and rural Australia see their lives and country. We interviewed about 12 groups over the course of a year, trying to understand the intricate relationships between our people and our nature.

The core questions addressed in these accounts are simple. How do we see our land? How do we live in it? How do we care for it? How are we shaped by it? What do we value in it, or seek from it? And to what extent does the land now need us?

The responses were intriguing. For many Indigenous Australians, country is a defining feature, a place of belonging, imbued over countless generations with meaning and spiritual significance. For many other Australians living in remote regions, country still provides an embracing sense of place, a setting in which life can be meaningful.

“This place is where I feel safe and inspired and needed,” conservation manager Luke Bayley said of Charles Darwin Reserve. “I love the landscape – the big sky, the weathered rocks and the harshness; the beauty when it all comes together […] I also find it an endless journey.”

Although they may want different things from the land, miners, pastoralists, Aboriginal landowners, wildlife rangers and tourism operators all share some pivotal values, concerns and language.

All seek to treasure and maintain its productivity and health; all recognise the new threats that may be subverting it; all feel a sense of belonging and a responsibility to it; all appreciate the need to know how it works in order to draw benefit and sustenance from it; all see beauty and wonder in at least some of its constituent elements; all recognise the challenge of managing vast lands with few people; and, to some degree, all understand a mutual dependency between land and people.

This common ground provides a robust foundation for the collaboration and regional - or national - scale planning needed for the management of Outback Australia, with its unique challenges of complex environmental linkages across vast distances, pervasive threats and few management resources.

But the nuanced differences in perspectives are also important. Many living in Outback Australia identify strongly with other groups living on the land. But there is much scope – so far little developed – in remote Australia for increased recognition of the perspectives and expertise of others.

Most notably, there is extraordinary opportunity to bring together the intimate knowledge of country and its care held by Indigenous Australians with the often complementary strengths of land management based on western science. We can create distinctively Australian environmental management, based on intimate knowledge of country and the capacity to respond to its new threats.

A previous Pew study mapped the ‘Outback’ based on factors like low population density and infertile soil, and found it covered 73% of Australia. Pew Charitable Trust, The Modern Outback (2014)

Of course, there are also some notable inconsistencies among the perspectives we investigated, indicative of unresolved issues that need attention and a better process for conciliation or mutual understanding. For example, the values attributed to dingoes and wild dogs, and hence their management, remain highly polarised among people living in remote Australia. The elements of water and fire are pivotal in the Outback, and their use is often also contested.

Furthermore, just as our society has been moulded by our country, increasingly we are re-shaping the country, deliberately or inadvertently, expertly or ineptly. Across most of the world, biodiversity is in decline particularly in areas with high human population density and extensive habitat destruction.

The Australian outback is one of the world’s few remaining large natural areas, along with places like the Amazon Basin and the Sahara. Such areas are most likely to long support functional and healthy ecological processes and biodiversity.

However, somewhat counterintuitively, in much of the Outback, nature is in decline even in its most remote and sparsely populated regions. This decline reflects the loss from many areas of a long-established, intricate and purposeful Indigenous land management, that has long moulded its nature. Now, fire is often managed inexpertly or not at all, leading to uncontrolled and destructive wildfire. And the decline of biodiversity and loss of productivity in remote Australia is due also to the extensive spread of many pests and weeds introduced over the last century or so, and the inadequate resources committed to their control.

Inexorably, we will lose much that is special in our nature unless we can collectively address these causal factors and manage our lands more effectively. The land managers we talked to are skilled and willing, but they need more support.

One example is Les Schultz, a Ngadju elder from the country around Norseman in south-western Australia. He told us he wants to see the Great Western Woodlands managed properly, saying,

We will always be around, and it ticks all the boxes of everything good in terms of outcomes for Ngadju people and the general community …. We need Ngadju rangers with boots on the ground.

A similar call comes from some pastoralists, such as Michael Clinch from the Murchison region of WA. He inherited a land long over-exploited by unsustainable levels of grazing, and is now seeking new management approaches to to take his land on “a journey of redemption”:

The Outback, to me, is the cathedral of Australia. We’re desperate to reclaim the quality and value of the Outback, and to achieve that vision we need support … We’re not asking for a handout, but by jeez we’re asking for a hand up. We need assistance to rebuild and restructure our grazing. If we don’t do it, who the hell will?

The accounts showcase people at home in their country. Such accounts, of characters living in the bush, have long been emblematic for our nation. But these lives represent a diminishing minority of Australians.

In our increasingly urbanised society, for much of our nation’s population, the bush remains quixotic and unfamiliar, to be experienced superficially or fearfully. One objective of this collation is to allow urban Australians to see and feel the country through the eyes and hearts of those who are immersed in it.

We would like all Australians to more appreciate the care bestowed on our land by those who cherish it, the benefits we all derive from that care, and the need to better support those who seek to maintain our natural legacy.

We cannot live well in this land unless we understand it, and value it.

This article is based on Outback Voices, a report compiled by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

John Woinarski worked with Pew Charitable Trusts to contribute to a series on Outback Australia. He is currently a deputy director of the Threatened Species Recovery Hub, funded by the Australian government's National Environmental Science Programme.

The domestic cat is descended from wild cats that were tamed twice - in the Near East and then Egypt.

Rising temperatures are set to wipe out half of Ethiopia’s coffee-growing areas, with loss of certain locations likened to France losing a great wine region

Global warming is likely to wipe out half of the coffee growing area in Ethiopia, the birthplace of the bean, according to a groundbreaking new study. Rising temperatures have already damaged some special areas of origin, with these losses being likened to France losing one of its great wine regions.

Ethiopia’s highlands also host a unique treasure trove of wild coffee varieties, meaning new flavour profiles and growing traits could be lost before having been discovered. However, the new research also reveals that if a massive programme of moving plantations up hillsides to cooler altitudes were feasible, coffee production could actually increase.

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Study shows risks have climbed steadily since 1980, and the number of people in danger will grow to 48% by 2100 even if emissions are drastically reduced

• South-west heat wave: tell us how you’re keeping cool

Nearly a third of the world’s population is now exposed to climatic conditions that produce deadly heatwaves, as the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere makes it “almost inevitable” that vast areas of the planet will face rising fatalities from high temperatures, new research has found.

Climate change has escalated the heatwave risk across the globe, the study states, with nearly half of the world’s population set to suffer periods of deadly heat by the end of the century even if greenhouse gases are radically cut.

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Any Brexit changes to the UK's wildlife laws will increase - not reduce - environmental protection, Michael Gove has pledged.

The release of the Finkel report has refocused national attention on climate change, and how we know it’s happening.

On a Q&A episode following the report’s release, Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie said we’ve seen:

… worsening heatwaves, hot days doubling in Australia in the last 50 years.

Excerpt from Q&A, June 12, 2017. Quote begins at 2:12.

Her comment provides the perfect opportunity to revisit exactly what the research says on heatwaves and hot days as Australia’s climate warms.

Examining the evidence

When asked for sources to support McKenzie’s assertion, a Climate Council spokesperson said:

Climate change is making hot days and heatwaves more frequent and more severe. Since 1950 the annual number of record hot days across Australia has more than doubled and the mean temperature has increased by about 1°C from 1910.

Specifically, there has been an increase of 0.2 days/year since 1957 which means, on average, that there are almost 12 more days per year over 35°C.

You can read full response from the Climate Council here.

How do we define ‘heatwaves’?

Internationally, organisations use different definitions for heatwaves.

In Australia, the most commonly used definition (and the one used by the Climate Council) is from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). It provided the first national definition of a heatwave in January 2014, describing it as:

A period of at least three days where the combined effect of excess heat and heat stress is unusual with respect to the local climate. Both maximum and minimum temperatures are used in this assessment.

The BOM uses a metric called the “excess heat factor” to decide what heat is “unusual”. It combines the average temperature over three days with the average temperature for a given location and time of year; and how the three day average temperature compares to temperatures over the last 30 days.

We can also characterise heatwaves by looking at their their intensity, frequency and duration.

Researchers, including Australian climate scientist Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, are trying to standardise the definitions of “heatwaves” and “hot days” and create a framework that allows for more in-depth studies of these events.

Are heatwaves ‘worsening’?

There’s not a large body of research against which to test this claim. But the research we do have suggests there has been an observable increase in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves in Australia. Research published in 2013 found a trend towards more heat waves in Australia between 1951 and 2008.

A review paper published in 2016 assessed evidence from multiple studies and found that heatwaves are becoming more intense and more frequent for the majority of Australia.

The following chart shows heatwave days per decade from 1950 to 2013, highlighting a trend toward more heatwave days in Australia over time:

We’ve seen a trend towards more heatwave days over Australia. Trends are shown for 1950-2013 in units of heatwave days per decade. Stippling indicates statistical significance at the 5% level. Adapted from Perkins-Kirkpatrick et al. (2017) Have hot days ‘doubled’ in the last 50 years?

While the number of “hot days” (as defined by the BOM) has not doubled over the last 50 years, as McKenzie said, the number of “record hot days” certainly has. “Record hot days” are days when the maximum temperature sets a new record high.

Given that McKenzie made her statement on a fast paced live TV show, it’s reasonable to assume she was referring to the latter. Let’s look at both figures.

The BOM defines “hot days” as days with a maximum temperature higher than 35°C. The BOM data show there were more hot days in Australia in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 than in any of the 50 years from 1966 to 2016 (the last year for which data are available).

In fact, there were more hot days in the years 2013-2016 than in any other year as far back as 1910. If we compare the decades 1966-76 and 2006-16, we see a 27% increase in the number of hot days.

The following map shows the trend in the number of days per year above 35 °C from 1957–2015: Bureau of Meteorology

A 2010 Bureau of Meteorology/CSIRO report found record hot days had more than doubled between 1960 and 2010. That data was collected from the highest-quality weather stations across Australia.

Number of record hot day maximums at Australian climate reference stations, 1960-2010. Bureau of Meteorology 2010 Number of days in each year where the Australian area-averaged daily mean temperature is extreme. Extreme days are those above the 99th percentile of each month from the years 1910-2015. Bureau of Meteorology Why are heatwaves worsening, and record hot days doubling?

The trend in rising average temperatures in Australia in the second half of the 20th century is likely to have been largely caused by human-induced climate change.

Recent record hot summers and significant heatwaves were also made much more likely by humans’ effect on the climate.

The human influence on Australian summer temperatures has increased and we can expect more frequent hot summers and heatwaves as the Earth continues to warm.

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie, speaking on Q&A. Q&A

In relation to this article responding to Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie’s claim that heatwaves are “worsening” and “hot days” have doubled in Australia in the last 50 years, a spokesperson for the Climate Council gave the following responses. Questions from The Conversation are in bold.

Could you please provide a source, or sources, to support Ms McKenzie’s statement that heatwaves are “worsening” and hot days have doubled in the last 50 years?

Climate change is making hot days and heatwaves more frequent and more severe. Since 1950 the annual number of record hot days across Australia has more than doubled and the mean temperature has increased by about 1°C from 1910.

Specifically, there has been an increase of 0.2 days/year since 1957 which means, on average, that there are almost 12 more days per year over 35°C.

What did Ms McKenzie mean by the terms “heatwaves” and “hot days”?

Hot days – the number of hot days, defined as days with maximum temperatures greater than 35°C.

Heatwaves – three days or more of high maximum and minimum temperatures that is unusual for that location.

Furthermore, heatwaves have several significant characteristics. These include (i) frequency characteristics, such as the number of heatwave days and the annual number of summer heatwave events; (ii) duration characteristics, such as the length of the longest heatwave in a season; (iii) intensity characteristics, such as the average excess temperature expected during a heatwave and the hottest day of a heatwave; and (iv) timing characteristics, including the occurrence of the first heatwave event in a season.

Is there any other comment you would like us to include in the article?

Climate change – driven largely by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from the burning of coal, oil and gas – is increasing temperatures and cranking up the intensity of extreme weather events globally and in Australia.

The accumulating energy in the atmosphere is affecting all extreme weather events. Climate change is driving global warming at a rate 170 times faster than the baseline rate over the past 7,000 years.

Temperature records tumbled yet again during Australia’s ‘Angry Summer’ of 2016/17. In just 90 days, more than 205 records were broken around Australia.

Heatwaves and hot days scorched the major population centres of Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney, as well as the rural and regional heartlands of eastern Australia. The most severe heatwave of this Angry Summer began around January 31 and continued until February 12, with the highest temperatures recorded from February 9-12.

This heatwave was made twice as likely to occur because of climate change, while the extreme heat in New South Wales over the entire summer season was at least 50 times as likely to occur because of climate change.

The severe heatwave of February 2017 that spread across much of Australia’s south, east and interior caused issues for the South Australian and New South Wales energy systems. In New South Wales around 3,000MW of coal and gas capacity was not available when needed in the heatwave (roughly the equivalent of two Hazelwood Power Stations).

In South Australia, 40,000 people were left without power for about half an hour in the early evening while temperatures were over 40°C. This heatwave highlights the vulnerability of our energy systems to extreme weather.

Read the article here.

Over the next few years, Sango Wildlife Conservancy in Zimbabwe is donating 6,000 animals to rewild a war-torn park across the border in Mozambique. Sango’s owner says it couldn’t have happened without revenue from big-spending trophy hunters.

Call it Noah’s Ark on lorries: on Sunday, dozens of trucks rolled over the Zimbabwe savanna carrying elephants, giraffe, African buffalo, zebras, and numerous other large iconic mammals. Driving over 600 kilometers of dusty roadway, the trucks will be delivering their wild loads to a new home: Zinave National Park in Mozambique. The animals are a donation from Mozambique’s Sango Wildlife Conservancy – a donation that owner, Wilfried Pabst, says wouldn’t be possible without funds from controversial trophy hunting.

“In remote places and countries with a weak tourism industry and a high unemployment rate, it is very difficult – or almost impossible – to run a conservancy like Sango without income from sustainable utilization,” Pabst said.

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Members of the W&J Traditional Owners Council outside the Federal Court. W&J Council

The Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Family Council (W&J) is involved in a remarkable struggle to assert their Indigenous rights in opposition to the proposed Adani Carmichael coal mine. Despite the company’s board-level decision to proceed, the mine has not cleared all legal hurdles.

W&J’s efforts – recognised globally as a leading Indigenous rights campaign – are challenging Australia’s native title system, and the notion that compliance with industrial projects is the pathway to development for Indigenous people.

The W&J struggle has largely focused on contesting Adani’s efforts to secure an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (Ilua) – the consent of the traditional owners for the mine to proceed. The Ilua would let Adani undertake all works associated with the project, and secure a 2,750 hectare area for critical infrastructure related to mine operations, including an airstrip, workers village, and washing plant.

While the National Native Title Tribunal authorised the Queensland Government to approve the mining leases for Adani in 2016 without the consent of the W&J, this is subject to ongoing legal challenge. Without an Ilua, there is no legal basis to build the infrastructure. In this scenario, the only option would be the compulsory acquisition of land by the state – an unprecedented move in the history of native title that would privilege mining interests above the wishes of traditional owners.

We are undertaking a research project in collaboration with the W&J and Australian Lawyers for Human Rights. The W&J have provided us with access to their files, and we have conducted preliminary analysis of the political, social and economic context of their campaign.

Changing the rules

Earlier this week both houses of Parliament passed amendments to annul the effects of a February 2017 Federal Court full bench decision that confirmed the Native Title Act required all registered native title claimants to sign an Ilua. This overturned a previous decision made by a single judge, which allowed that one signature was sufficient, as long as an Ilua had been approved by the claim group.

The W&J had moved quickly, on the basis of the court decision, to have Adani’s claimed deal struck out. But the Federal Government moved swiftly too, less than two weeks later placing amendments before Parliament that removed the W&J Council’s option to annul.

These amendments, while validating existing Iluas that could have been brought into question, are also widely acknowledged as a fix for Adani. In April, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull reassured senior Adani executives in India that the native title situation would be fixed.

However, the future of the Ilua and Adani’s mine is far from secure. W&J legal action challenging Adani’s Ilua process on several grounds is set for hearing in the Federal Court in March 2018.

The Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has affirmed the question mark over the agreement, saying:

It is not my understanding that this bill will provide some kind of removal of a final legal hurdle for the Adani mine […] they [the W&J] have made clear that there are some very serious allegations of fraud that have been made against Adani.

In a further recent twist, Wangan and Jagalingou representative Craig Dallen, who previously signed Adani’s Ilua documents, has withdrawn his support in an affidavit. He’s also raised doubts about the meeting processes that were used to construct the deal.

In evidence submitted to the Federal Court, the W&J argue the attendance record at the meeting organised and paid for by Adani shows that many attendees were not present at prior native title group authorisation meetings, and are not Wangan and Jagalingou claimants.

The lure of Iluas

Iluas are very hard for Indigenous people to resist. The native title regime provides very limited protection, such that Indigenous people are often forced to take a poor Ilua deal, rather than risk ending up with nothing at the National Native Title Tribunal.

While Adani has filed for registration of an Ilua, the W&J calls it a “sham”, asserting that the Wangan and Jagalingou people have rejected a deal with Adani on three separate occasions since 2012.

The limitations of Iluas for Indigenous people partly arise because native title is a highly contingent and weak form of title. It does not apply where Indigenous observance of custom has been disrupted. However the colonial pattern of frontier violence and policies such as assimilation sought, by design, to directly eliminate custom.

Native title can also be extinguished, and can only be claimed in certain areas where other legal title (such as freehold) does not exist. Rights granted under native title are also typically non-exclusive, giving little opportunity to control access to land or its use.

While the W&J are making use of the legal avenues available to them through the native title process, they are also asserting their rights apart from it. Their legal strategy is a rejection of what they see as a constrained native title system, in which Indigenous peoples’ agreement or acquiescence to mining is the norm.

Instead, the W&J are part of a growing international Indigenous rights movement that firmly centres Indigenous peoples’ interests in struggles for restitution and a sustainable future for their people. They stand on their right to free, prior and informed consent, reflected in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

More fundamentally, though, the W&J stress that they are custodians of country, and are acting in accordance with Aboriginal law in their resistance to the Carmichael mine. This is contrary to Marcia Langton’s recent assertion that opposition to Adani’s mine is driven by a minority of Indigenous people at the behest of the greens.

This article is based upon a recently released report, Unfinished Business: Adani, the State, and the Indigenous Rights Struggle of the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Council.

Morgan Brigg receives funding from through the Global Change Institute’s Flagship Program at The University of Queensland.

John Quiggin receives funding from the Global Change Institute’s Flagship Program at The University of Queensland. He is a consultant for Farmers for Climate Action and has worked for other environmental organisations on a voluntary basis. He has received funding from the Australian Research Council, and was formerly a Member of the Climate Change Authority

Kristen Lyons receives funding from the Global Change Institute’s Flagship Program at The University of Queensland. She is a research fellow with the Oakland Institute and is a member of the Australian Greens.

Internationally renowned geographer and conservation ecologist, Professor Jamie Kirkpatrick AM, is the recipient of the Australian Heritage Council’s 2017 Sharon Sullivan National Heritage Award.

In the past week, future prices fell again in all states. The downtrend is now firmly established and prices in the out years are significantly lower than in 2018. That’s particularly noticeable in Victoria.

Billed as a "once in a generation" opportunity to bring Australia's energy market into the 21st Century, the Finkel Review is rapidly being reduced to absurdist arguments about the lights going out – by the very government that commissioned it. So much for Grid 2.0.

Bedgebury Pinetum, Kent As if wanting us to appreciate more fully the weird loveliness of its song, the nightjar flew towards us

We found the nightjar on the edge of a young conifer plantation, just before 10pm. The weather rumbled ominously in the background as dusk settled around us, the trees soughing and shushing in the breeze. Willow warblers carolled in the canopy and a fat woodcock roded over.

Luke lit a cigarette, I slapped at midges. We saw the nightjar before we heard him (which is unusual). Just enough light to see white wing patches, plumage like wave ripples on sand. He flew over, tentative, circling, standing on the handle of his tail and clapping his wings a few times, before arrowing off into the trees.

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