The Conversation

When only 14 of any species are left in the wild, you know they are in trouble.

Such is the crisis faced by the last remaining population of orange-bellied parrots in southwest Tasmania. To make matters even worse, very few of these birds are females.

On our trip to southwest Tasmania on Tuesday, we found four nests. We will be returning to the site soon to count the fertile eggs.

There have been some heartening stories of the reversal of fortunes when endangered species crash to such low levels, but these stand against a bleak backdrop of increasing extinction rates in the 21st century.

In perhaps the most dramatic success story, there were only five Chatham Island black robins left in 1980, with the survival of the species hinging on just one breeding pair. The outlook was bleak, but a dedicated team of New Zealand scientists took the daring step of cross-fostering eggs and young to another species to boost productivity.

The fostering program developed to save the black robin worked so well that it became the benchmark for how to save endangered birds around the world. There are now more than 200 Chatham Island black robins in the wild.

Orange-bellied parrots breed only in the south-west Tasmanian wilderness. Dejan Stojanovic Difficult birds

Orange-bellied parrots have an awkward habit that makes them an especially difficult bird to conserve: they migrate.

Every autumn the parrots leave their breeding grounds in Tasmania and fly across Bass Strait to spend the winter in the salt marshes along the Victorian coastline. Migration is a dangerous business and many do not return.

Parrots often move around in flocks looking for food. Knowing where to go, and when, is cultural knowledge held in trust by the flock. Older, experienced birds lead the younger ones and share their knowledge of vast landscapes. This transfer of information from parents to offspring, and between all flock members, is essential.

When numbers fall and birds cannot draw on that reservoir of knowledge, or indeed benefit from the safety of numbers, things begin to go wrong.

Numbers are now so low that it is doubtful whether enough experienced parrots are left to lead the flock to food and safety. The value of the remaining wild birds is especially high.

View from the nest box. Dejan Stojanovic Last chance

Several years ago the Tasmanian government showed tremendous foresight by setting up a captive breeding colony of orange-bellied parrots. These were the “insurance population” for gradual release into the wild to bolster the critical mass of wild birds.

However, the captive-raised parrots have not proved to be as hardy as their wild cousins. Numbers in the wild continue to dwindle in spite of several decades of bird releases at the breeding site. A major outbreak of parrot beak and feather disease in 2015 also wiped out many of the nestlings hatched by wild parrots.

With only 14 wild birds left, difficult decisions must be made and dramatic action is required. The “insurance population” remains our trump card.

We recently launched a crowd-funding campaign to cover the costs of an emergency intervention using the insurance population.

The extent of the crisis only washed over us about a week ago. But hamstrung by the slowness of raising funding via usual methods, and with the agreement of all parties involved, we decided to raise funds quickly to enable the required emergency actions.

We reached our initial target of A$60,000 in less than two days. As we write, we are crashing through the A$100,000 mark in pledges from concerned members of the public. We have just lifted the bar to A$120,000 to fund our work well into next year.

We feel truly humbled by the generosity of the public reaction. It shows the extent to which people from all walks of life care about saving this species from extinction.

A parrot at the nest. Dejan Stojanovic

Our immediate plans are simple by necessity. As the few remaining orange-bellied parrots have already laid their clutches, we have little time to act if we are to help them breed to full capacity this season.

We will closely monitor the breeding birds and wherever necessary replace any infertile eggs with fertile ones from the captive birds. We will bolster with eggs and nestlings the brood of any female who has too few, and we will remove and hand-rear back to full health any nestlings that appear to be ailing. We will also boost the number of female nestlings to try to overcome the imbalance of the sexes.

In short, we will use the precious insurance birds in the best way possible, by turning their young into fully wild birds, who are fighting fit thanks to close bonds with their wild foster parents.

It will be a long road to recovery and there are no guarantees of success. But we simply cannot let these beautiful birds go extinct without joining the courageous team who have nurtured them this far and throwing absolutely everything we have at getting them back on their feet (or on the wing) in the wild.

Rob Heinsohn receives funding from the Threatened Species Hub (Australian Federal Government) and the Australian Research Council.

Dejan Stojanovic receives funding from the Australian Government as part of a Research Offset, the Australian Research Council, and the National Environmental Science Program.

The idea is to come up with better alternatives to this. Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, CC BY

Japan’s fleet has left port for another season of “scientific” research whaling in the Southern Ocean.

Like last year, there is little that anyone can do to legally rescind Japan’s self-issued lethal research permit – a fact that has led to calls for more pragmatism and less confrontation in efforts to conserve whales.

Such avenues include greater collaboration between the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and other organisations, and a renewed emphasis on marine ecosystem research in the Southern Ocean.

How whale poo can help

While Japan’s new whaling program dominated the IWC’s summit last month, a Chilean-sponsored resolution nicknamed the “whale poo” resolution was also quietly adopted at the meeting.

More formally known as the Draft Resolution on Cetaceans and Their Contribution to Ecosystem Functioning, the resolution notes the growing scientific evidence that whale faeces are a crucial source of micronutrients for plankton.

The resolution will lead to a review of the ecological, environmental, social and economic aspects of whale defecation “as a matter of importance”, while the IWC’s Scientific Committee will review the research and identify any relevant knowledge gaps.

Why is this important?

Much of the Southern Ocean is described as high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll (HNLC) waters. This means that the despite high concentrations of important nutrients such as nitrate and phosphate, the abundance of phytoplankton is very low.

Phytoplankton is the base of the marine food chain, and plays an important role in the global carbon cycle by removing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through photosynthesis. However, the growth of phytoplankton in large HNLC regions of the Southern Ocean is limited by the availability of a key micronutrient: iron. In essence, the Southern Ocean is anaemic, and whale poo is the remedy.

It works like this. Antarctic krill graze on phytoplankton, taking up the iron. The krill are then consumed by whales, which store some iron for their own use as an oxygen carrier in their blood (as in ours), but also expel large amounts of iron in their faeces.

Adult blue whales, for example, consume about 2 tonnes of krill a day, and the amount of iron in their faeces is more than 10 million times higher than normal seawater.

Conveniently, whale poo is liquid, and is released at the surface where it can act as a fertiliser to promote phytoplankton growth in the ocean’s sunlit top layers. Therefore, whales are part of a positive feedback loop that helps sustain marine food chains.

The whale poo positive feedback loop. Indi Hodgson-Johnston/University of Tasmania

More whales obviously make more whale poo, so it makes sense that more research and protection should be afforded to whales to ensure a healthier marine ecosystem.

Scientists collect whale faeces from the surface of the water, making this a great way to do whale research without killing or harming them.

What about scientific whaling?

Some have suggested that the legal arguments against scientific whaling are well and truly exhausted, and that controlled commercial whaling could be the next step. Assuming that anti-whaling nations such as Australia would not follow such a pathway, and that hard law options are frustrated, other avenues to end lethal research are needed.

The whale poo resolution also aims to increase the IWC’s existing collaborations with various research organisations. This includes the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), of which Japan is a member. CCAMLR made headlines last month when it approved, by consensus, the world’s largest marine protected area in Antarctica’s Ross Sea.

While the CCAMLR Convention states that nothing in it shall derogate from the rights and obligations under the Whaling Convention, the role of whales are important to CCAMLR’s ecosystem approach to conserving marine life in the Southern Ocean.

Japan’s current whaling program has the stated scientific objective of investigating “the structure and dynamics of the Antarctic marine ecosystem through building ecosystem models”. This aligns with both the research needed for CCAMLR’s ecosystem approach and the Australian Antarctic Division’s own research priorities.

With an emphasis on research such as ecosystem modelling, collaborations that include and value Japan’s abundant non-lethal research in the area could help to most of the stated scientific objectives of Japan’s whaling program without harming whales.

Of course, many people contend that the main purpose of Japan’s whaling program is not scientific. But this doesn’t change the fact that the same old battles at sea and in the courts have done little to prevent the taking of whales. The Whaling Convention cannot be changed, and nor can Japan’s interpretation of it. A different tack is clearly needed in both law and diplomacy.

As the new marine protected area shows, Antarctica is a proven platform of peace. Increasing joint scientific research, and riding on the wave of the recent success in the Ross Sea, may provide fresh dialogue with which to resolve the stalemate. What we need is a newly respectful, non-combative discourse with Japan which, whaling aside, is a brilliant contributor to Antarctic science.

Joint Australian and Japanese research in other areas of Southern Ocean and Antarctic science has a long and friendly history. It is upon these longstanding and positive relationships that research addressing relevant objectives should be focused and funded.

Constructive intervention

While some, including the Australian Greens, have called for an Australian government vessel to intervene, Japan is whaling in waters that are recognised by most countries as the high seas.

Since the landmark 2014 International Court of Justice ruling, Japan no longer consents to that court’s jurisdiction on matters of living marine resources. And with little recognition of Australian jurisdiction in the area, and the risk of any intervention being illegal under laws of the sea, there is little hope for successful international legal action. Sending an Australian ship to intervene or collect evidence would therefore be largely futile.

On the other hand, researching marine ecosystems in the Southern Ocean is difficult and expensive. Instead of sending a customs vessel, Australia should divert its funds and attention to research that will boost our understanding of the Southern Ocean ecosystem and its role in the global carbon cycle.

By increasing knowledge and recognition of whales’ role in the Southern Ocean ecosystem, the resolution offers yet another avenue for developing norms of non-lethal whale research that are recognised as legitimate by all International Whaling Commission members.

Perhaps in one of Australia’s most vexed diplomatic issues with their close ally, whale poo could pave the way to more intensive and thoughtful scientific collaborations, and help deliver a peaceful end to Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.

The author would like to thank Lavy Ratnarajah, a biogeochemist at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC, for her kind assistance with the scientific aspects of this article. The views expressed are solely those of the author.

Indi Hodgson-Johnston receives funding from the University of Tasmania.

Water produced when coal seam gas (CSG) is extracted from below ground can be safely re-injected hundreds of metres underground, according to new CSIRO research.

Water is pumped out of coal seams to access the gas held within them. CSG in the Surat Basin, Australia, produces on average 70 gigalitres of water each year - a seventh of the water held in Sydney Harbour. What to do with this water is one of a number of concerns voiced by communities around CSG.

Our research shows that injecting large volumes of treated CSG-produced water at suitable locations within the Surat Basin is unlikely to cause any harm to groundwater quality.

However, to achieve this the water has to be treated adequately to eliminate the risk of polluting groundwater with arsenic – a generally immobile toxic element that occurs naturally in some of the rock formations being considered for re-injection.

Why re-inject CSG water anyway?

In Queensland, the state government’s policy on managing “produced water”, also commonly known as “CSG water”, is to “encourage the beneficial use of CSG water in a way that protects the environment and maximises its productive use as a valuable resource”.

In many cases the most suitable and socially-accepted option is to treat the water, using reverse osmosis technology, and inject it into deep aquifers. The re-injected water can be used to top-up already stressed aquifers.

However, looking at similar projects around the world, especially from Florida, has shown that injecting clean water underground can sometimes mobilise naturally occurring contaminants such as arsenic.

When rainwater seeps underground and becomes groundwater it changes its composition. During the subsurface passage that can often take thousands of years the groundwater composition changes slowly to successively take on the characteristics of the rocks.

When water with a non-compatible composition is directly injected into deep aquifers, the injected water will also react with the rocks and therefore change its characteristics to one that is compatible with the new host rock. This occurs through the release of elements from the rocks, a process called mineral dissolution.

In addition, arsenic mobilisation can also occur by a process called desorption, in which case loosely-attached ions are released from mineral surfaces. Both processes may proceed until a new balance or “geochemical equilibrium” is established and both have the potential to mobilise toxic elements such as arsenic.

Testing the waters

In our new research, we analysed results from injection experiments at Reedy Creek and at Condabri, both located in the Surat Basin in Queensland, through computer models that can simulate groundwater flow and groundwater quality.

This analysis showed that if and how much arsenic is mobilised depends on the composition of the injected water. From the research we conclude that minimising arsenic release most importantly depends on oxygen being stripped from the water prior to injection of the CSG water.

During the research elevated arsenic levels have been found during a field experiment at one of the sites (Reedy Creek), for which both experiments and computer modelling suggest that arsenic release was triggered by the injected water.

However, computer modelling also demonstrated that this type of arsenic mobilisation could have been completely prevented by adjusting the pH of the injected water to the pH of the naturally-residing groundwater.

The experiments performed at the second research site at Condabri under different experimental conditions showed that arsenic concentrations in the groundwater increased substantially if the injected water was not stripped of oxygen.

When oxygen was not removed from the injected water this caused the dissolution of the naturally-abundant mineral pyrite, or “fool’s gold”. Arsenic is often embedded in trace amounts in this mineral.

What can we do?

The findings from this research were used to guide the design requirements for the large-scale implementation of CSG water injection into the Precipice aquifer. During the treatment process all water is now deoxygenated prior to injection and the pH of the injected water is similar to the natural groundwater.

The Reedy Creek re-injection scheme is now successfully operating and injecting treated CSG water. Since starting the injection in 2015, over 10 gigalitres (GL) has been injected into the Precipice aquifer and the scheme is currently Australia’s largest treated water re-injection scheme.

As a result groundwater levels in parts of the Precipice aquifer have started to rise for the first time in the last few decades.

This research received funding from National GISERA (National Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance). This is a collaborative vehicle established to undertake publicly-reported independent research addressing the social, economic and environmental impacts of Australia's onshorel gas industry. The governance structure for National GISERA is designed to provide for and protect research independence, integrity and transparency of funded research. Visit www.gisera.org.au for more information.

We all remember March 11, 2011, when the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan earthquake triggered a 14-metre tsunami that flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Four of the six reactors on site were badly damaged, three suffering core meltdowns.

Also affected by the tsunami, but to a much lesser extent, were the four reactors at the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant, roughly 11km further south. That site was partially flooded, but sufficient safety systems were still available to shut down and cool the reactors safely.

At 5.59 am local time on Tuesday the tsunami alarms sounded again, as a magnitude-6.9 earthquake 10km off the coast shook the area. Just over half an hour later the resulting tsunami hit the Fukushima coast – but this one was barely a metre high, and well below the height of the 5.7m seawall, meaning that Fukushima’s nuclear plants were spared another flood.

However, the earthquake caused a circulation pump in the used fuel cooling pond of Fukushima Daini reactor 3 to shut down. After checking the system, the pump was restarted after 99 minutes, and operator TEPCO said the plant had suffered no lasting damage.

The situation might have been more serious were it not for the fact that Fukushima Daini, like most of Japan’s nuclear power stations, has been out of action ever since the disaster at its neighbouring station prompted Japan to shut down all of its nuclear reactors for safety checking and upgrades.

Although all of Daini’s systems have since been restored, its reactors have not been restarted. All the fuel has been removed from the reactors and is stored in cooling ponds – which is where the circulation pump failed that normally pushes water through a heat exchanger for cooling.

Because of the low residual heat in the used fuel, the reported temperature rise was less than 1℃ during the 99-minute outage. Without cooling, the temperature of the cooling pool would be expected to rise by 0.2℃ per hour. It would therefore take more than a week without cooling before the normal operating range of 65℃ would be exceeded, and this would still be far below the fuel melting point of around 2,800℃.

There has been no reported damage from the latest earthquake at the Fukushima Daiichi plant where decommissioning work continues (although it was briefly stopped in response to the earthquake). As of 11am on Tuesday, plant parameters show reactor cooling systems operating normally with reactor temperatures of 20-25℃, again far below any dangerous levels. Again, the low amount of residual heat in the fuel means that any changes on loss of cooling are slow. This is in stark contrast to the situation in 2011 where loss of cooling to the operating reactors led to fuel melting in less than four hours.

Is Japan’s nuclear power coming back?

Before the 2011 meltdowns, there were 54 nuclear power reactors operating in Japan. Since then, only three reactors have completed all of the required modifications and safety inspections and returned to operation, and one of these is currently shut down for routine refuelling. Currently 42 reactors will potentially be restarted, 24 of which are slowly going through the restart approval process.

The extent of modifications to avoid possible damage from tsunamis is illustrated by the work that Chubu Electric Power Company is carrying out at its Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Japan’s southeast Shizuoka prefecture. This year Chubu has completed construction of a huge seawall, 22m high and 1.6km long, which together with other safety upgrades will cost about 400 billion yen (A$4.9 billion).

After TEPCO faced accusations that it failed to take full account of the tsunami risk at Fukushima, Japan is clearly taking no chances next time around.

Tony Irwin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

It seems almost certain that US President-elect Donald Trump will walk away from the Paris climate agreement next year. In the absence of US leadership, the question is: who will step up?

Sadly this is not a new question, and history offers some important lessons. In 2001 the world faced a similar dilemma. After former vice-president Al Gore lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush, the newly inaugurated president walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, the previous global pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

That sent shockwaves around the world, and left nations facing a choice about what to do in the United States’ absence – something they may face again next year. The choice was made more difficult because the US withdrawal made it less likely that the Kyoto Protocol would ever come into force as a legally binding agreement.

However, Europe quickly picked up the baton. Faced with a US president who had abdicated all responsibility to lead or even participate in the global emissions-reduction effort, the European Union led a remarkable diplomatic bid to save Kyoto.

To the surprise of many people, especially in the United States, this diplomatic push brought enough countries on board to save the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force in 2005 following Russia’s ratification.

What will happen this time?

While the withdrawal of the United States slowed international efforts back then, as it doubtless will now, this time around the world is in a better position to respond.

First, the Paris agreement has already come into force and global ambition is arguably stronger today than it was in 2001. Whereas the Kyoto Protocol took almost a decade to come into force, the Paris Agreement has taken less than a year. And importantly, whereas countries with emerging economies shied away from any commitment to limit their greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, this is not so today. Under the Paris deal, both developed and developing countries have pledged to rein in their emissions.

Second, should Europe decide to take on a leadership role as it did in 2001, the rise of China offers a new and potentially powerful partner. China is now the world’s number-one energy consumer and greenhouse emitter. But it has also been one of the most active proponents of climate action.

Under the Paris agreement China has already agreed to cap its emissions and is actively taking steps to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, especially coal. Recent data indicate that China’s coal consumption peaked in 2014 and is now set to decline.

Filling the void

If Europe and China together decide to fill the vacuum left by the United States, they could form a powerful bloc to lead global efforts against climate change. Leaders in Europe have already hinted at retaliation should the United States withdraw from the Paris Agreement, with former French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy suggesting a carbon tax on US imports. Should China follow the same path, together they would represent the largest import market in the world, giving them a very large stick to wave at America.

An EU-China bloc could also help to ensure that there is less potential for other nations, including Australia, to follow the United States down the do-nothing path.

That said, while the world’s politicians may be in a better position than in 2001 to deal with the fallout from another recalcitrant American administration, the world’s climate is not. The growth in fossil fuel emissions has been slowed but not yet reversed, and global temperatures continue to climb. The effects are evident around the world, not least in this year’s devastating bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.

We should expect that President-elect Trump will withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Even if he changes his mind (which he has done on plenty of other issues), there are many in the Republican Party who will hold him to his word.

The climate isn’t waiting to see what a President Trump does, and neither should the world. Should China and Europe decide to lead, many nations will follow, and one day soon so too will the United States.

Christian Downie ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son poste universitaire.

In many ways, the Marrakech climate summit was entirely ordinary. As is usually the case, the first week was spent drowning in technical detail while most of the second was dedicated to photo opportunities and political speeches. And as always the negotiations ran over time, finishing early on Saturday morning.

But while this latest “Conference of the Parties” (COP) was intended to be an “action COP”, aimed at getting down to the business of implementing the Paris Climate Agreement reached last year, it will mainly be remembered as the “Trump COP”. It was a summit held under the spectre of renewed US climate recalcitrance in the wake of the surprise election result, which dropped like a bombshell on the summit’s third day.

The main topic of debate in the first week was the creation of a “Paris Rulebook”, set to be finalised by the end of 2018. The Paris Agreement sets up a loose skeleton for a pledge-and-review system of deepening emissions-reduction targets over the coming decades. Marrakech was intended to be one of the main political moments to put some flesh on the bare bones of this framework.

Such details included establishing the target years for future pledges, how to ensure transparency in action, and how the collective review of pledges (the “global stocktake”) would be conducted.

The going was slow and the outcomes procedural. On many issues, countries have got no further than agreeing on what questions need answering. The answers will have to wait for next November’s climate summit in Bonn.

Moreover, the schism between developed and developing countries over their respective responsibility for the climate problem began to reappear after being largely buried in Paris.

The meeting agreed that 2017 will mark the start of a five-year plan to address “Loss and Damage”, a broad category that includes both sudden and chronic climate impacts. But the tricky question of whether to continue with the Kyoto Protocol’s Adaptation Fund – created in 2001 to help developing countries deal with climate adaptation costs – was also kicked down the road for future discussions.

Roadmaps and ratification

Yet despite the slow progress of the central negotiations, Marrakech also produced plenty of promises of future action. Australia was among 11 countries that ratified the Paris Agreement during the summit, bringing the total to 111 since the treaty opened for signatures in April. The fact that countries continued to ratify even after Donald Trump won the keys to the White House was seen as a hopeful sign of resistance against his promise to unravel the Paris treaty.

During the summit’s closing days, 47 of the world’s poorest and most climatically vulnerable countries pledged to shift to 100% renewable energy as soon as possible.

Many richer and more powerful countries showed ambition too. Germany and Brazil were among 22 countries – plus 15 cities and 196 businesses – that committed to the “2050 pathways platform”, which involves developing strategies to become largely carbon-neutral by mid-century.

The United States signed up to the platform too, unveiling a plan to cut greenhouse emissions by at least 80%, relative to 2005 levels, by 2050. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to become official US government policy any time in at least the next four years.

There was also the release of the “Marrakech Action Proclamation”, an ambitious if vague one-pager pushed by the Moroccan government. The proclamation reaffirms numerous existing agreements and commits to the “full implementation” of the Paris Agreement and “to bring together the whole international community”.

Two common threads unite these various initiatives. First, while all are ambitious, they all also lack legal substance and specifics. They are political promises made in a time of tumult.

Second, they have a clear subtext: a note of defiance in the face of the potential threat that President-elect Trump poses to the Paris Agreement.

The Trump COP

Before November 9, the negotiations seemed largely unperturbed by the external world, secure in the prospect of a Hillary Clinton victory.

The election result’s impact was stark. Young activists wept and rallied; civil society held emergency strategy sessions. Many of the negotiations continued unabated, but unease was expressed behind the scenes.

Some delegations used the US election outcome for more sinister purposes. Saudi Arabia was reported to have told some delegations that Paris was dead under President-elect Trump, and that negotiations should instead turn back towards the original UN climate convention first agreed in 1992.

Behind closed doors, ministers doubtless discussed how to handle the incipient Trump presidency. The (now defeated) French presidential candidate Nicholas Sarkozy threatened to put a carbon tax on US imports if Trump withdraws from the Paris Agreement.

Just one day after the election, Venezuela publicly asked a US negotiator whether Trump would cause a “second Kyoto” – a reference to the disruption caused by former president George W. Bush’s refusal to ratify the earlier treaty. The response was coy, noting that no one knows what Trump will actually do.

Almost every side event had at least one Trump-related question that sent silent shudders through the room. France’s current president, François Hollande, warned Trump that the Paris Agreement is “irreversible”.

On the final day, the incoming presidency of Fiji (which will host the next climate summit in Bonn rather than at home) pleaded with Trump and invited him to visit the island nation to see the effects of climate change at first hand.

But there was little beyond the bluster. These were all emotive moments that drew applause, but ultimately were toothless speeches that neither Trump nor his transition team is likely to hear or heed.

Unfortunately, the official negotiations did not make the time to discuss how to address a renegade United States. This has been justified as a “wait and see” approach, but it looks more like a rabbit stuck in the headlights.

The negotiators in Marrakech spent so much time discussing future processes, yet could not summon the courage and foresight to confront a potentially existential threat head-on. A cynic would say that is fitting and symbolic of the climate negotiations to date.

Luke Kemp has received funding from the Australian and German governments.

Telling an illegal log from another is no easy feat. CIFOR/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Forensic science has achieved infamy, thanks to television dramas like CSI. But it isn’t just about solving human crimes. Scientists are also using evidence from wood to help solve murders, but in this case the victims are the trees themselves, and the crime is illegal logging.

Illegal logging is a serious environmental and economic threat to forests. The value of the illegal timber trade is hard to calculate, but estimates range from US$30 billion to $100 billion, potentially involving 100 million cubic metres of wood.

But new scientific methods, highlighted in a recent study in Bioscience, are helping law enforcers identify tree victims and fight illegal logging.

Timber outlaws

Tropical regions such as Southeast Asia, Central Africa and Central and South America suffer disproportionately. Some 50-90% of timber produced from these regions is thought to be illegal, compared with 15-30% globally. Aside from the environmental destruction, countries that experience illegal logging lose out on tax revenue and have the value of their legitimate timber diminished.

Such large markets attract big players, with organised crime networks at the centre of much of the illegal trade.

Combating illegal logging is the moral responsibility of all countries, be they timber producers or consumers. Along with laws on how local timber can be harvested, an increasing number of laws are targeting the international illegal timber trade. These include Australia’s own Illegal Logging Prohibition Act, which prohibits the importation of timber that has been illegally harvested overseas.

At the international level, the CITES Convention provides a mechanism through which trade in certain species can be regulated in order to avoid driving them to extinction.

Smarter forensics

These laws are necessary and are already starting to have a positive effect through improved governance and procurement policies. But they rely on us knowing when a law has been broken.

Timber is notoriously hard to identify, even for experts. By looking at the structure of the wood alone, it is usually only possible to identify it to the genus level, rather than the species itself.

This is a problem because most timber laws protect individual species, and often only part of the range of that species. This means that law enforcement must rely on the paper trail that accompanies timber shipments, which is open to fraud.

Science can help by focusing on new ways to identify timber. Looking at the anatomy of wood (despite its inability to reveal species or place of origin) still provides the fastest and cheapest way to get an initial identification.

However, new identification techniques including genetic and chemical fingerprinting can provide more detail and could deliver the detection capacity we sorely need. By combining several techniques, the type and source of timber can be determined with great accuracy.

Developing techniques in a lab is a far cry from applying them to the real world, however. A major problem is that although forensic methods have been proven to work in case studies, developing tools that distinguish between hundreds of species and geographic regions requires investment in research and development.

One of the major challenges is to collect reference material (wood and herbarium specimens of commercially important species, and their lookalikes, from across the globe).

A recent CITES meeting approved a raft of measures to help increase the collection and sharing of reference materials for timber. This will help to improve identification tests.

Enforcing the law

While we find new scientific ways to protect the world’s forests, it is equally important to make sure these tools are available at the front line. Law enforcers have a huge task.

Customs officers are already responsible for preventing trade in illegal drugs, firearms and wildlife products, as well as human trafficking. Identifying shipments of illegally harvested wood within a massive legitimate trade is a big ask, so we must find ways to make this possible.

The international community has recognised these problems. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has released a guide to timber identification and a decision-making tool to help law enforcers and the scientific and legal communities through the complex processes of dealing with illegal timber.

Ethical consumers

As a timber researcher and part of the international team driving most of these initiatives, it’s satisfying to see progress not only in the science of protecting our forests, but also in international cooperation to make sure we see concrete results.

Yet I can’t help feeling that it’s not enough. Real progress must come not just through enforcement (because of course, once a crime has been detected, it is too late) but through consumers making smarter choices.

We are all consumers of timber, from the furniture we sit on to the paper we write on. And as consumers, we can demand more accountability from suppliers, to support verified and certified products harvested from sustainable sources.

By doing so we can increase the incentives for legal logging and support those businesses that do the right thing. So next time you buy something made from a tree, give a thought to where it has come from and try to make an ethical choice.

Eleanor Dormontt works for The University of Adelaide and has consulted for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Her group has received funding from the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO), The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), The Australian Research Council (ARC), The World Resources Institute (WRI) and Double Helix Tracking Technologies Pte Ltd (DX).

While the Australian government congratulates itself on ratifying the Paris Agreement on climate change, it is dragging its feet on a less well known, but very important, international treaty on air pollution. Despite signing in 2013, Australia has still not ratified the UN’s Minamata Convention on Mercury.

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin. In fact, the treaty is named after the city of Minamata in Japan, where mercury release was linked to developmental disorders after pregnant women ate contaminated fish in the 1960s.

Currently human activities are releasing around 2,000 tonnes of mercury each year. Scientists predict that this could reach 3,400 tonnes each year in 2050 unless we take action.

Australia’s reticence puts us behind 35 nations that have ratified the convention, including developing nations such as Madagascar, Gabon, Guinea, Guyana, Lesotho, Djibouti and Nicaragua. So what’s the holdup?

Why reduce mercury?

The goal of the Convention is to protect human health and the environment from anthropogenic (human-caused) emissions and releases of mercury and mercury compounds.

Airborne mercury emissions can be transported far from their point of origin, even across continents, and are dispersed widely before being deposited, primarily via rainfall, into lakes and streams and the ocean.

The most important chemical forms of mercury are elemental mercury (Hg), divalent inorganic mercury (Hg²⁺), methylmercury (CH₃Hg⁺), and dimethylmercury ((CH₃)₂Hg).

Through chemical conversion, mercury compounds enter food webs. Mercury becomes concentrated at the top of the food chain, in predatory fish through a process of biomagnification. Readers with a penchant for tuna sashimi or sushi might have some concern about mercury, as research highlighted on The Conversation pointed out that mercury levels in tuna are increasing.

People are exposed to methylmercury through their diet, particularly if it is high in fish, and especially those high up the food chain.

As methylmercury, mercury damages the human central nervous system and is extremely harmful to pregnant women and their offspring.

The Mercury Convention

Australia signed the Minamata Convention on Mercury on 10 October 2013 at Kumamoto in Japan, when the text of the Convention was first adopted and opened for signature. But it has not taken sufficient action since then to ratify it.

One issue is that the Convention will not come into force unless enough countries ratify it. 50 ratifications or accessions are required, but so far there have been only 35.

In March 2014, the Department of Environment issued a public consultation paper seeking the views of the Australian public on ratifying the Convention.

In January 2015, the Department of Environment commissioned an economics consulting firm to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of ratifying the Minamata Convention. That taxypayer-funded document has not been made public. Nor has the timetable for ratification. The consulting firm claims the report is the “intellectual property” of the Australian government.

Electricity sector a major source

It is likely that one reason for the delay in ratification is deference to the objections voiced by the fossil-fuel energy sector. The electricity sector is a significant source of mercury emissions in nations that rely heavily on coal-fired electricity generation, including Australia. Coal currently supplies about 75% of Australia’s electricity (excluding rooftop solar).

The latest data from the National Pollutant Inventory show that 2,700kg of mercury were emitted from 105 electricity generators in 2014-15, an increase from the previous year’s emissions of 2,600kg.

The nation’s top three mercury emitters from the electricity sector were all power stations in Victoria, burning brown coal (lignite): Hazelwood (420kg; due to close in 2017), Yallourn (310kg), and Loy Yang B (290kg, down from 470kg).

Pollution is regulated by state environment protection authorities, but pollution licenses show an alarming lack of attention by the regulator to the issue. For example, the licence for Hazelwood power station places limits on carbon monoxide, chlorine compounds, NO₂, particulate pollution, and sulfur oxides, but does not regulate mercury at all. The word does not even feature in the licence.

Mercury is capped under general Victorian air pollution regulations, but in combination with antimony, arsenic, cadmium and lead.

Tightening pollution controls

Unlike the United States, Australia does not have a federal Clean Air Act. The question of mercury emissions from coal combustion is largely left to state pollution laws.

Australian federal environmental laws do not regulate or restrict emissions of either mercury or carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations. This is especially the case since the July 2014 repeal of the price signal that had been set by the carbon tax.

What would ratifying the Minimata Convention mean for coal power stations? As mercury pollution is now a matter of international concern there is a strong constitutional basis for Federal legislative action, even prior to the Convention coming into force.

State pollution control regulations will need to be tightened to impose stricter limits on mercury emissions. Presently the standards found in some of the pollution licences are much weaker than those to be applied under the US standard introduced in 2013.

Unsurprisingly, the owners of Australia’s coal-fired generators have pushed back against stricter pollution controls implied under the Convention, as shown by their submissions to the public consultation paper.

They claimed that “if Australia is forced to adopt US-based mercury emissions reduction technologies, new and existing coal-based plant would cease to be competitive”, and pleaded that “requirements to retrofit Australian coal-based power stations with mercury capturing equipment would not only be very costly and unnecessary”.

Such pollution controls are only unnecessary if we are unconcerned about the environmental and health implications of mercury emissions. Researchers at MIT found that the US standard will provide benefits worth billions of dollars each year.

Given Australia’s recent ratification of the Paris Agremeent, it would seem consistent for the Australian government to move ahead more rapidly with the ratification of the Mercury Convention. This will require a closer examination of the adequacy of domestic laws in order to implement the Minamata Convention.

The Minamata Convention has not been tabled yet in Federal Parliament and this means the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties has not yet moved ahead with its part of the ratification process.

New Zealand’s analysis of ratification concluded it was “strongly” in that country’s interest to ratify. Even if the Australian government continues to delay ratification of the Minamata Convention, it is likely to come into force quite soon, and the international scientific literature is already making a strong case for stricter emissions controls in Australia.

Ratification of the Mercury Convention by Australia is a necessary step for human health and the environment.

James Prest receives funding from the Australia-Indonesia Centre.

Floods are often seen as a force of destruction. From photographs of crops under water and houses being swamped by swollen rivers, to stories of road, business and public amenity closures, the news during flooding understandably emphasises human loss.

But as river ecologists, we find it hard not to see the positive side of flooding. Why? Because although floods cause destruction, they are also creators, of which we are all beneficiaries.

Floods as destroyers

Rivers have played pivotal roles in most civilisations throughout human history due to the universal need for drinking water and other resources like food. Rivers feature in the mythology, religion, philosophy and culture of so many societies and also play political roles, acting as borders between tribes, states and nations.

Virtually all of the world’s major cities were founded on soils made fertile by flooding. In fact, floods – and the fertility that they bring - have been one of the most important reasons why human societies exist where they do today.

But despite their benefits to humans, rivers also bring death and destruction. In terms of lives lost, the top two worst natural disasters on record are floods.

The worst was in 1931, when at least 4 million people died and almost 30 million people were affected by floods in China.

In the United States, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 affected about 630,000 people and covered an area of almost 70,000 square kilometres. That flood’s destructive power was exacerbated by the failure of levees, as has commonly happened elsewhere.

By contrast, death tolls from Australian floods have been comparatively light. Purportedly the most lethal flood in Australia’s history was the 1852 Gundagai flood, which claimed almost 90 lives. Many drowned because the town was previously built on the lowland flood plain of the Murrumbidgee River.

Deaths and destruction occur to the extent they do because of our desire to live in the very areas that are most prone to flooding. But with living on flood plains comes risk, and sooner or later, a big flood will come.

Floods as creators

Generally, rivers flood every one to two years. It is just what they do. The reason is because of the interaction of geology, geomorphology and climate.

When rivers flood, water moves out onto the flood plain. But so does sediment and a lot of organic matter, nitrogen and phosphorus - the energy and materials that fuel river ecosystems and productive farm land. There is in fact mutual exchange of these rich materials between rivers and flood plains, which is why river flats are valued so much by farmers, and often why these areas became permanent settlements.

Some fish and other animals move backwards and forwards between the main channel and flood plain too, but all benefit from the rich materials transported by flooding.

Nature over nurture

In our ambition, we think that we can live on and exploit flood plains through controlling flooding. But this has been shown time and time again to be deluded.

Since the industrial revolution, vastly ambitious and expensive engineering projects around the world have sought to separate rivers from their flood plains, to reclaim land on which to build houses or to farm, and to prevent flooding. In most cases, levees have been built to effectively raise the level of river banks.

Levees have been constructed to separate rivers from their flood plains. Bidgee/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

While these reduce the incidence of minor floods in some areas, they mostly fail to stop the major ones, and generally make flooding much worse in areas downstream.

Flood damage in the European Union from 2000-12, for example, cost an average US$6.8 billion a year, despite the extensive networks of levees designed to prevent flooding. Similar networks of dams and levees are ineffective at preventing large-scale flooding in Australia. Climate change is set to make the costs even higher.

Going with the flow

If we’ve learned anything from floods, it is that trying to prevent flooding, especially the big ones, is enormously expensive, rarely works and causes ecological and socio-economic damage. There are, however, ways in which people can live and enjoy the benefits of rivers without causing damage.

For example, the Yolo Bypass in Sacramento, California is a clever way of harnessing the floodplain’s capacity to buffer the effects of flooding, rather than trying to prevent flooding in the first place. The bypass, built in the 1930s, transports a large percentage of high flows away from the city, and into a reconnected flood plain. The flood plain is, during non-flood periods, used for agriculture and other activities.

The Yolo Bypass is California is one way of harnessing floodwater for good. Mwehman/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Researchers argue that there are many human uses consistent with periodic flooding, such as the growing of pasture and timber, but building infrastructure on flood plains is not one of them.

Solutions such as these are far less costly than trying to prevent flooding and mopping up after inevitable failure. But of course, this requires a transformation in thinking when planning the design of towns and in developing flexible agricultural practices.

Floods are reminders that nature can be both creator and destroyer. Herodotus referred to Egypt as “the gift of the Nile”. It would be wise of us to view our own flood plains in the same way: that they are the gift of our rivers.

We should learn to accept that there will be times when the landscape on which we live, farm or play is reclaimed by the river that created it. On the flipside, we can rejoice when the river spends its time confined to its banks, and make hay while the sun shines.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Boa constrictors are frequently found at large in Australia, despite being banned. Marcos André/flickr, CC BY

Australians are banned from keeping non-native reptiles as pets, but there is a nevertheless a thriving illegal trade in these often highly prized animals. We have documented the threat that these species – many of them venomous or potentially carrying exotic diseases – pose to people and wildlife in Australia.

In a study published in Conservation Letters, we estimate that of 28 alien reptile species illegally traded in Victoria between 1999 and 2012, 5 of them (18%) would have the potential to establish themselves in the wild if they escape or are released. Our findings also indicate that smaller alien reptiles are more likely to establish in the wild in Australia.

Worryingly, more than a third of these illegal reptile species are highly venomous snakes (10 out of the 28 species). The presence of 10 alien venomous snakes represents a serious human health hazard, even in Australia which is already home to some of the most venomous snakes in the world.

Previous research has focused on the overharvesting of wild populations to meet the demand for illegal wildlife products such as traditional medicine ingredients and other commodities, as well as live animals themselves.

But the trade in illegal wildlife poses a risk not just to the species being trafficked, but also to the people and ecosystems potentially exposed to new hazardous alien species as a result. Unfortunately, these risks are often overlooked or underestimated by wildlife agencies.

Frogs take their diseases with them

Effective biosecurity measures are crucial for tackling these threats. Are Australia’s biosecurity activities as good as they are made out to be in popular television shows about customs officers policing our borders?

Let’s look at the example of ranaviruses, an emerging disease that kills huge numbers of amphibians around the world. The introduction of these viruses to Australia could be catastrophic for native frogs. Alien frogs transported as unintentional stowaways can carry ranavirus, so intercepting those alien frogs will also prevent the spread of these pathogens.

In an earlier study, we examined the effectiveness of Australian biosecurity activities for stopping the introduction of dangerous alien ranaviruses. Our main conclusion was that existing biosecurity measures have significantly reduced the likelihood of introduction of alien ranaviruses.

Moreover, biosecurity activities do not need to intercept every single incoming alien frog in order to reduce significantly the likelihood that new diseases will be introduced. This is particularly good news for threatened native frogs.

Puff adders have been illegally kept in Victoria, despite being a seriously dangerous pet. Julius Rückert/Wikimedia Commons A way forward

Unfortunately, many other countries seem to have inadequate systems for keeping unwanted species out, despite the many social, economic and ecological impacts that alien species cause across the world.

This situation paints a bleak picture for the future of biodiversity, with alien species increasingly wreaking havoc across all environments. But we believe there is hope and a way forward – as long as countries are willing to work much harder to combat the threats posed by alien species.

Foremost, we need to improve our understanding of the importance and drivers of transport pathways through which alien species travel. Armed with that knowledge, we can plan more effective management – although a lack of data is no excuse for delay in the meantime. Prevention is always better than cure, so our number one goal should be to prevent the introduction of alien species, rather than simply tackling the problems they cause.

Some important lessons emerge from our research. The illegal wildlife trade and the transport of stowaways are global issues. Therefore no country, however effective its biosecurity, can solve its problems on its own. Multilateral biosecurity agreements will be necessary to manage both stowaways and the illegal wildlife trade.

In Australia, we need to raise public awareness about alien species. We have to enlist the public in reporting suspicious activities and the presence of alien species at large. Meanwhile, supporting biosecurity activities is a no-brainer. Biosecurity is a responsibility shared by all Australians, and the general public have a role to support biosecurity activities, even if that means a few more minutes to clear biosecurity ports and airports. Be on the lookout for potential alien species, and if you spot anything unusual, report it to the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources.

Pablo Garcia-Diaz receives funding from the Invasive Animals CRC and the Department of Education and Training (Australian Government).

Joshua Ross receives funding from the ARC, NHMRC, and D2D CRC.

Phill Cassey receives funding from Australian Research Council and the Invasive Animals CRC.

South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill’s announcement of a non-binding public vote, no earlier than 2018, on his proposed high-level nuclear waste storage facility looks like an act of political desperation.

It’s understandable that Weatherill wants to explore every possible option to replace some of the jobs lost in his state when the Abbott government withdrew support for the car industry. To that end, he took the unusual step of setting up a Royal Commission to consider South Australia’s potential role in the nuclear industry. His appointed Commissioner, Kevin Scarce, faced accusations of pro-nuclear bias.

Scarce’s report put a very positive spin on the idea of SA accepting high-level radioactive waste from other countries, suggesting that nations like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan would be willing to pay serious money to make their nuclear waste problems go away.

The local business community embraced the idea enthusiastically, while Adelaide’s newspaper, The Advertiser, published a series of articles promoting the scheme, describing the expected economic returns as “gigantic” and running Liberal senator Sean Edwards’ claim that nuclear energy would have “no cost apart from the poles and wires”.

The way ahead was not straightforward, however, with the community clearly divided. Public meetings convened by those opposed to the proposal saw packed halls, and thousands turned up to a rally outside Parliament House. Indigenous groups are particularly hostile to the prospect of overseas radioactive waste being brought onto their land.

Next, a citizens’ jury was appointed to offer a verdict on the issue. The randomly selected individuals interrogated experts with a range of views and probed the findings of the Royal Commission in great detail over several days. Their two-thirds majority view that the scheme should be dropped was seen by many as sounding its death knell.

The jury’s scepticism is understandable. After deep probing of the estimates, they concluded that the numbers are very rubbery. Moreover, recent examples like the Royal Adelaide Hospital redevelopment do not inspire public confidence in the state government’s ability to manage a complex project within a fixed budget. So the jury decided that the probability of a good financial outcome was not high enough to justify risking billions of dollars of public money developing the waste management system.

Pressing the plebiscite button

It’s difficult to know why we need a plebiscite on top of all this. If government members want to know what well-informed members of the public think, they can read the report of their own citizens’ jury. If they want to know what relatively uninformed members of the public think, they can consult opinion polls. And if they want to know what members of the public think after being systematically fed slanted information, they can check the polls conducted by The Advertiser.

The only rational explanation for Weatherill’s decision to hold a public vote is that he is hoping for a different outcome. It’s a political tactic with a very notable recent precedent. When it became clear to conservatives in the Abbott government that they had lost the public debate on same-sex marriage, and that a free vote in parliament would probably see it approved, they came up with the idea of holding a national plebiscite. At the very least, they thought, this would delay the arrival of an outcome they opposed, while there was always the chance that a well-funded, carefully targeted scare campaign might shift the public mood.

But the same-sex marriage plebiscite died when it became clear that it would not be binding on politicians, and that public money would be used to fund the opposing campaigns. Senators sniffed the public wind and voted down the scheme.

Weatherill has invested a lot of political capital in his nuclear waste proposal. He funded the Royal Commission and the citizens’ jury process. But by pressing the plebiscite button as a way to end the ongoing impasse, he risks running foul of the same problems.

In Canberra, the Senate reflected the general public opinion that a non-binding plebiscite on same-sex marriage would be a waste of taxpayers’ money, as well as probably causing an acrimonious and unproductive public debate. One might very well say the same about the idea of a vote on radioactive waste management.

We elect our politicians to decide on policy after studying the issues carefully. It is therefore hard to justify spending millions of dollars on an expensive opinion poll.

Whether Weatherill opts to abandon his radioactive waste proposal or push ahead with it, his decision will inevitably be very unpopular with some. It’s a tough call, but it’s his job to make it.

Ian Lowe is the former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

A researcher taking a photo-identification shot of a whale shark (C) Peter Verhoog, Dutch Shark Society

Every year in March juvenile male whale sharks arrive at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia, supporting a thriving ecotourism industry. But where do they go in July once they leave this meeting site?

Results from our study, published today in Royal Society Open Science, suggests they don’t go far. By comparing identification photos of whale sharks in a collaborative study across the Indian Ocean, we have found that juvenile males appear to return to the same sites year after year.

Researchers swim alongside a whale shark at Ningaloo Reef. Peter Verhoog, Dutch Shark Society The biggest fish in the sea

Whale sharks are the largest fish in the sea, reaching sizes of more than 12 metres. These peaceful giants are filter-feeders, mostly eating tiny crustaceans, fish eggs and small fish that they sieve from the water using plates on their gills.

They reach maturity when they are around 8m long, but it can take them up to 30 years to reach this size. Because of this slow growth rate and their vulnerability to ship strikes and bycatch in fisheries worldwide, the status of whale sharks has recently been upgraded to Endangered by the IUCN Red List. If conservation strategies for the species are to be successful, we need to know where these animals are going and the places they visit on their migrations.

Whale sharks form aggregations off tropical coasts around the world that are a response to seasonal pulses in the abundance of their food. In the Indian Ocean, these occur at Ningaloo Reef as well as in the Maldives, off the coast of Mozambique, and in the Seychelles.

Because these sharks are docile and spectacular, aggregations are the target of ecotourism industries in each of these localities. To date, genetic studies have suggested the sharks in all these different aggregations form one population, implying that animals are moving between these sites. However, no direct evidence for these movements exists.

Photo-identification

Just like a fingerprint, we can identify whale sharks from their unique spot and stripe patterns. By comparing photos of a standard area on the body of a whale sharks among both years and locations, we can then determine if an individual is moving to a new location, or returning in multiple years. This method is called photo-identification.

Using the large and expanding database of whale shark photos taken by ecotourists, tour operators and researchers in the Indian Ocean, we used this method to look at movement patterns. Using a semi-automated matching program, we compared a database of over 6,000 images of whale sharks across the Indian Ocean.

The area of spot and stripe patterns on a whale shark used in photo-identification. What did we find?

From our comparison we were able to identify about 1,000 individual whale sharks, of which 35% were seen again at the same site in more than one year, and none of which were found to move across the Indian Ocean. One shark was tracked between Mozambique and the Seychelles, suggesting that regional links do occur, however on a larger scale, populations appear to be isolated and distinct.

Within these aggregations, juvenile males are returning on a regular basis. At Ningaloo, juvenile males photographed in 1992 have so far been seen up to 19 years later, with many sightings in between. In more recent years as the photograph databases have expanded with the tourism industries, we have seen some sharks returning in up to six consecutive years.

Females and adult males were rarely spotted at these sites, so it is possible that they aren’t homebodies like the young males.

A sample of the identification photos from the database. Good news for whale sharks

The absence of large-scale movements here is good news for the endangered whale shark. Conservation and management efforts can focus on smaller areas, and a lesser degree of cross-jurisidictional management will be required than if we found cross-ocean movements to be commonplace.

Researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science get ready to photograph a whale shark. Peter Verhoog/Dutch Shark Society

However, we need to improve our understanding of the regional movements of these animals. A computer simulation analysis study of our data indicated we need to increase the number of study sites and photos taken to get an estimate of their migration patterns at larger scales.

Mark Meekan receives funding from Quadrant Energy Ltd and the Save Our Seas Foundation for this work.

Samantha Andrzejaczek does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

There are fewer than a thousand Graveside gorge wattles in Kakadu National Park. Parks Australia

Norfolk Island, nearly 1,500km from Australia’s east coast, is home to one of the country’s most endangered species, but you probably haven’t heard of it. Clematis dubia, a woody climber with white and hairy flowers, was known to number only 15 mature plants in 2003.

Once common on the island, this clematis illustrates what stands in the way of survival for many of our threatened plants. Around 84% of Australia’s native plants don’t occur anywhere else on Earth.

Threats to our native plants include ongoing habitat destruction, fire, invasive species, more frequent extreme weather events, and declining populations of the animals involved in their pollination and seed dispersal.

Clematis dubia is lucky to call Norfolk Island National Park home. Our national parks are places of beauty and adventure for us to enjoy. They are also a haven for many species.

But life in a national park doesn’t guarantee a species’ survival. Recently we assessed 41 endangered or significant plants that occur in Australia’s six Commonwealth National Parks, to identify ways to help these plants recover.

We found that many of these species don’t occur outside national parks, meaning the parks play a huge role in their conservation. Few of these species have been secured in living plant collections or seed banks, and very few are regularly monitored in the wild.

We have little information on either the impacts of threats or of species biology, which limits our ability to secure these species against further loss.

There were only 15 mature Clematis dubia on Norfolk Island known in 2003. Parks Australia Threats to plants

Clematis dubia lives in small and isolated populations. It faces many perils of modern life, like invasive weeds. We understand very little of its biology, including how its seeds are dispersed, how long it takes to start producing seed, and even how long it lives.

Another plant we assessed was the Graveside Gorge wattle (Acacia equisetifolia) found in Kakadu National Park. A small shrub, less than a metre tall with small yellow flowers, this wattle is listed as critically endangered.

Fewer than a thousand plants are growing in only two locations about a kilometre apart in a restricted area of the park. There is little information on the basic biology of this shrub.

Like other acacias, Graveside Gorge wattle is probably pollinated by, and provides food for, a variety of different insect species. It probably only reproduces sexually and its seeds might be dispersed by ants and probably germinate after fires. The main threat to this species is fires, especially ones that are too frequent or too intense.

As a safeguard against extinction, Parks Australia has collected seed from the Graveside Gorge wattle, which is now stored in the National Seed Bank at the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra.

Hibiscus brennanii is a vulnerable shrub found in Kakadu National Park. Parks Australia Jenny Hunter, Kakadu ranger, collecting Hibiscus brennanii seed for the seed bank. Parks Australia

Seed banking can extend the longevity of seeds to hundreds of years, protecting a species from extinction and helping in its recovery should the worst happen. Germination trials at the National Seed Bank help unlock the often complex germination requirements of different species so that they can be regrown from seed.

As a result of trials with Graveside gorge wattle, the Gardens now has a living collection of this species. In Kakadu, Parks Australia is protecting the two wild populations by planning protective burning to create longer intervals between fires and reduce the likelihood of severe fires.

Protecting plants

Seed banking and living collections are two of the strategies we recommended to safeguard populations of threatened plant species. Some species may also benefit from establishing new populations outside national parks, similar to the management strategies used for vertebrate animals.

We also recommend surveying all endangered plant species in national parks that are not currently part of a formal monitoring program or that have not been surveyed within the past two years.

Finally, realising the gaps in our knowledge of the biology of and threats to many of Australia’s threatened plants, we recommend partnering with researchers and NGOs with restoration experience to draw on available scientific and on-the-ground knowledge.

And what of Norfolk Island’s endemic climbing clematis, Clematis dubia? Along with the low number of individuals, competition from weeds is a major threat to the survival of this species, so conservation efforts by Parks Australia have involved intensive weed control work, particularly to deal with the invasive guava plant.

Recent searches in likely habitat have revealed an additional 33 plants, a mix of adults and juveniles. Happily, new seedlings are now showing up in areas where guava has been removed, improving the future prospects for this species.

The report Constraints to Threatened Plant Recovery in Commonwealth National Parks was funded by the Australian Government through the Threatened Species Commissioner, Gregory Andrews. It was authored by researchers at the Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research, a joint initiative between Parks Australia’s Australian National Botanic Gardens and CSIRO.

Linda Broadhurst receives funding from the Threatened Species Commissioner and the Australian Commonwealth Government. She is affiliated with the Australian Network for Plant Conservation.

In 2016, an isolated scientific outpost in northwest Tasmania made a historic finding. The Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station measured carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere exceeding 400 parts per million.

This wasn’t the first time the world has breached the symbolic climate change threshold – that honour was reached by the northern hemisphere in 2013 – but it was a first for the south.

Behind these recent findings is a history of Australia’s role in global scientific advancement. The Cape Grim station has now been running for 40 years and the resulting data set chronicles the major changes in our global atmosphere.

A national response

In 1798, Matthew Flinders’ encounter with Cape Grim confirmed to Europeans that Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land) was separated from the mainland of Australia.

Fast forward to the early 1970s and a small group of innovative scientists were hatching a plan to take advantage of Cape Grim’s isolation and unique geographical position. The site soon became one of the world’s most significant atmospheric measurement sites, meticulously measuring and recording some of the cleanest air that can be accessed on the planet.

There were two threads to the beginnings of Cape Grim. One was the young scientists at CSIRO, keen to pioneer an emerging field of science. The second was a call from the United Nations for global governments to work together to set up a network of monitoring stations. The Australian response was championed by Bill Priestley and Bill Gibbs, the respective senior climate figureheads at CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.

The scientific community decided that Cape Grim was the most appropriate site for a permanent monitoring station, thereby establishing in 1976 the Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station.

The first set of instruments lived in an ex-NASA caravan. Today the station is managed by the Bureau of Meteorology and housed in a permanent building that features state-of-the-art infrastructure, including a tower fitted with important monitoring equipment. Many of the early pioneering scientists are still actively involved in this research.

The first set of air monitoring instruments lived in an ex-NASA caravan. CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology The world’s cleanest air

The station, part of the World Meteorological Organisation’s Global Atmosphere Watch network, was sited at Cape Grim to take advantage of the “roaring forties” - the prevailing westerly winds that bring clean air from over the Southern Ocean to the station.

Air that arrives at the station from the southwest is classified as “baseline” air. Having had no recent contact with land, it represents the background atmosphere and is perhaps some of the cleanest in the world.

While we focus on this clean air, most of the instruments monitor continuously, regardless of wind direction, and can detect pollution from Melbourne and other parts of Tasmania in certain conditions.

The station measures all major and minor greenhouse gases; ozone-depleting chemicals; aerosols (including black carbon or soot); reactive gases including lower-atmosphere ozone, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds; radon (an indicator of changes to the land); solar radiation; the chemical composition of rainwater; mercury; persistent organic pollutants; and finally the weather.

The Cape Grim Air Archive, initiated by CSIRO in 1978 and soon adopted into the operations of the station, is now the world’s most important and unique collection of background atmospheric air samples, underpinning many research papers on global and Australian emissions of greenhouse and ozone depleting gases.

The human fingerprint

Cape Grim data are freely available and have been widely used in all five international climate change assessments (1990-2013), all ten international ozone depletion assessments (1985-2014), in four State of the Climate Reports 2010-2016 and in lower-atmosphere ozone assessments.

Measurements at Cape Grim have demonstrated the impact of human activity on the atmosphere. For example, CO₂ has increased from about 330 parts per million (ppm) in 1976 to more than 400 ppm today, an average increase of 1.9 ppm per year since 1976. Since 2010 the rate has been 2.3 ppm per year. The isotopic ratios of CO₂ measured at Cape Grim have changed in a way that is consistent with fossil fuels being the source of higher concentrations.

Cape Grim has also demonstrated the effectiveness of action to reduce human impacts. The decline in concentrations of ozone-depleting substances measured at Cape Grim demonstrates the progress of the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to phase out the use of these chemicals, and leading to the gradual recovery of the ozone hole.

Measurements at Cape Grim have contributed significantly to global understanding of marine aerosols, including some of the first evidence that microscopic marine plants (phytoplankton) are a source of gases that play a role in cloud formation. With 70% of the Earth’s surface covered by oceans, aerosols in the marine environment play an important role in the climate system.

Cape Grim data are also used by the Australian government to meet international obligations. For example, the station’s greenhouse gas data have independently verified parts of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, which reports Australia’s annual emissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Persistent organic pollutants have been reported to the Stockholm Convention on these chemicals and Cape Grim mercury data will be reported to the Minimata Convention.

Data collected from the Cape Grim Station have been used in more than 700 research papers on climate change and atmospheric pollution. By working with universities Cape Grim is a training ground for the next generation of climate scientists.

CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology

Melita Keywood is employed by CSIRO and receives funding from the Department of the Environment and Energy, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, University of Wollongong.

Paul Fraser receives funding from MIT, NASA, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Department of the Environment and Energy, and Refrigerant Reclaim Australia.

Paul Krummel receives funding from MIT, NASA, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Department of the Environment and Energy, and Refrigerant Reclaim Australia.

Sam Cleland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The journal Climatic Change has published a special edition of review papers discussing major natural hazards in Australia. This article is one of a series looking at those threats.

Australia is a huge continent, but a coastal nation. About 80% of Australians live within 50km of the coast, and a sea-level rise of 1.1 metres (a high-end scenario for 2100) would put about A$63 billion (in 2008 dollars) worth of residential buildings at risk.

Anyone who lives along Sydney’s northern beaches, especially in Collaroy, saw at first hand the damage the ocean can wreak on coastal properties when the coastline was hit by a severe east coast low during a king tide in June.

There are many different factors that determine which coastal homes or suburbs are most at risk of inundation or erosion, either now or in the future. In a review published as part of a series produced by the Australian Energy and Water Exchange initiative, we investigated the causes of extreme sea levels and coastal impacts in Australia, how they have changed, and how they might change even more. While significant progress has been made over recent decades, many questions remain.

The first factor to consider is the average sea level, relative to the land elevation. This “background” sea level varies, both from year to year and season to season. Depending on where you live and what the climate is doing, background sea level can fluctuate by up to about 1m. Around Australia’s northern coastline, for example, El Niño and La Niña can cause large variations in year-to-year sea levels.

On top of this are the tides, which rise and fall predictably, and whose range varies by location and phase of the moon. Most places have two tides a day, but curiously some only have one - including Perth.

On top that again is the effect of the weather, the most notable short-term effects being storm surges and storm waves. During a surge, the storm pushes extra water onto the coast through a combination of wind pressure, wave buildup, and atmospheric pressure changes. Obviously these factors are much more localised than tides.

Extreme sea-level events, such as the one that hit Sydney in June, can arise from isolated events such as a storm surge. But more often they are due to a combination of natural phenomena that on their own may not be considered extreme. In Sydney, several factors aligned: a storm surge driven by an east coast low, an uncommon wave direction, a king tide, and a higher-than-average background sea level.

These processes already have the capacity to destroy coastal homes and infrastructure. But for the future, we also need to factor in climate change, which will raise the background sea level and may also change the frequency and intensity of storms.

Long-term trends

Average sea levels in Australian waters have been rising at rates similar to (but just below) the global average. Since 1993, Australian tide gauges show an average rise of 2.1mm per year, whereas satellite observations reveal a global average rise of 3.4mm per year.

What really counts is extreme sea levels, and these have been rising at roughly the same rate, meaning that the rising background sea level is a fairly good guide to how extremes are increasing.

The effects of a king tide on Queensland’s Gold Coast. Bruce Miller/CSIRO, CC BY

This trend will continue in the future, although more energetic storm systems may also cause larger storm surges and hence higher rates of extreme sea levels in some places. More frequent storms are also set to make extreme sea-level events more common.

By 2100, global average sea level is projected to rise by 0.28-0.61cm, relative to the period 1986-2005, if this century’s global warming can be held to about 1℃. But if greenhouse emissions continue to increase at their current rate, the world is in line for sea-level rises of 0.52-0.98cm.

This rise will not be uniform around Australia’s coastline. The east coast is likely to experience up to 6cm more sea-level rise than the global average by 2100, because of the expected warming and strengthening of the East Australian Current.

Trends in Australia’s weather and waves are harder to predict. Satellite measurements over the past 30 years suggest that waves are getting slightly higher in the Southern Ocean, and climate models suggest that this may continue. As the tropics continue to expand with climate change, the band of westerly winds over the Southern Ocean will retreat further south and strengthen, whipping up higher waves that will travel to Australia’s southern coast as swell. On the other hand, weakening winds nearer to Australia may help to dampen down wave heights. On Australia’s eastern coast, climate models suggest fewer large wave events due to decreasing storminess in the Tasman Sea in the future.

A significant challenge we face is not having the data available to monitor the changes along our southern coastline. Australia has the longest east-west continental shelf in the world, but we have only a handful of wave buoys to measure these processes; much of the coastline is not monitored despite widespread coastal management concerns.

Our understanding of extreme sea-level change in Australia is also limited by available tide gauge coverage. Only two digital tide gauge records (in Fremantle and Fort Denison) extend back to at least the early 20th century, and records elsewhere around the coast typically span less than 50 years.

However, our investigation discovered that there is an opportunity to increase the length of available records by digitising old paper tide gauge charts. This could extend several records along our southern and tropical coastlines.

We also have major gaps in our knowledge about how our coastlines will be changed by flooding and erosion. The simple methods used to predict coastal erosion may underestimate erosion significantly, particularly in estuaries.

Given the considerable urban infrastructure located within estuaries, and the fact that they are vulnerable both to coastal storms and river floods, this is one of the many crucial questions about life on the coast that we still need to answer.

Kathleen McInnes works for CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, and receives funding from the Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Energy and Environment National Environmental Science Program, through the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Mark Hemer works for CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, and receives funding from the Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Energy and Environment National Environmental Science Program, through the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Ron Hoeke works for CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, and receives funding from the Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Energy and Environment National Environmental Science Program, through the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Kelp forests are declining around the world and in Australia, according to two new studies.

The first, a global study published in the journal PNAS, found that 38% of the world’s kelp forests have declined over the past 50 years.

The second, published in the same PNAS edition, investigated one cause of the declines. Kelp forests in eastern Australia are losing out to tropical species as the seas warm.

Together the studies show that we need local and global solutions to prevent our underwater forests from vanishing.

Deep trouble

Satirist Jordan Shanks recently argued that marine biologists may well have the worst job on Earth. Although most people think we spend our days diving in crystal-clear blue waters, spotting whales and sailing into the sunset, this is actually quite far from the truth.

More often than not, our job unfortunately involves documenting the depressing deterioration and decline of precious marine habitats.

While bleaching of coral reefs worldwide has been front and centre in the news over the past year, in fact all of our coastal ecosystems have been affected by human impacts.

One such ecosystem is the underwater forests formed by the large seaweeds known as kelp, which dominate temperate, coastal rocky shores worldwide.

Kelp forests are found in waters off all continents, and around Australia they form the Great Southern Reef which stretches from the Queensland border to near Kalbarri in Western Australia, and contributes more than A$10 billion annually to the Australian economy.

Although this year’s global coral bleaching event has been most featured in the media, we should be at least equally concerned about the loss of kelp forests in cooler waters. Clockwise from top left: A. Vergés, Creative Commons, J. Turnbull, A. Vergés A health check for global kelp forests

In the first study, the authors provide the first ever global “health check” for kelp forests. A team of international experts compiled and analysed a data set of kelp abundance at more than 1,000 sites across 34 regions around the globe.

While 38% of the world’s kelp forests have declined, it isn’t all bad news. Just over 25% of kelp forests have actually increased in abundance.

But there is another big problem: there are many regions where kelp exists, but we have no data and simply no idea how it’s doing.

A kelp forest in South Africa. The species Ecklonia maxima is one of the few kelps that are expanding its distribution. This species is ‘the giant cousin’ of the common kelp in Australia, Ecklonia radiata. T. Wernberg

Unfortunately, Australia’s kelp forests feature heavily among the declining populations. Kelp forests have declined in Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales. The causes of this loss are diverse, but share a common factor: people.

In Western Australia kelp forests were wiped out during an extreme marine heatwave, which was probably a consequence of climate change. In South Australia, the kelp has succumbed to years of pollution from nutrient-rich wastewater.

And in Tasmania, warming has enabled a kelp-eating sea urchin to jump from the mainland and graze on local kelp forests. This was compounded by overfishing of large lobsters, which normally eat the urchins.

Turning tropical

The second paper shows that a phenomenon known as “tropicalisation” of ecosystems is now threatening kelp forests in New South Wales, and potentially globally.

Tropicalisation occurs as ocean waters warm and tropical species start making a home in habitats previously dominated by cold-water species. In the case of NSW kelp forests, these tropical intruders are herbivorous fishes that eat the kelp – sometimes down to the ground.

Our initial research has shown that, over ten years, lush kelp forests have completely disappeared in some key offshore sites at the Solitary Islands Marine Park. This region is famous for bringing together a unique mosaic of tropical and temperate habitats, but our data clearly shows that tropical species are winning and starting to take over.

Screen grabs from Baited Remote Underwater Videos collected by Dr Hamish Malcolm, showing dense kelp beds back in the early 2000s that completely disappeared from 2010 onwards. Hamish Malcolm

We were able to quantify the year-by-year decline of kelp using a long-term video dataset collected by Hamish Malcolm from the NSW Department for Primary Industries.

The video footage revealed not only the gradual decline of kelp, but also helped us identify fish as central culprits behind this disappearance. Between 2002 and 2012, we saw both an increase in the number of fish bite marks on kelp and a clear rise in the abundance of warm-water seaweed-eating species.

We also ran a series of kelp transplant experiments, which identified two warm-water fish species that rapidly consumed transplanted kelp within hours: a rabbitfish and a drummer.

Interestingly, however, the species that we think had the greatest effect, surgeonfish, did not actually feed on the adult kelp. Instead, the surgeonfish rapidly consumed smaller carpet-forming seaweeds. This suggests these “tropicalising” fishes maintain deforested reefs by removing kelp while they are tiny, before they start making large fronds.

These NSW findings are by no means an isolated phenomenon. Voracious consumption by invading warm-water fish have also been linked to the loss or failure to recover of kelp forests in Japan and in Western Australia.

Frenzied feeding on transplanted kelp by a school of rabbitfish (Siganus fuscescens) is only briefly interrupted by a large predator in the Solitary Islands, eastern Australia. What can we do?

Both studies found a net decline in the abundance of kelp forests, from both local (nutrients, fishing) and global (ocean warming and its effects) effects of humans. If we want to arrest these declines, action is therefore required at both local and global scales.

Locally, water quality around some major cities has been improved. When coupled with active restoration efforts of damaged seaweeds, this can lead to conservation success stories like the return of crayweed forests to Sydney. Marine reserves, where fishing is prohibited, can also reduce the ability of warm-water species to colonise cooler habitats.

But of course, ultimately, global action is needed to prevent further climate change impacts. That includes reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions, in Australia and around the world.

Adriana Vergés receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Peter Steinberg receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Thomas Wernberg receives funding from The Australian Research Council and The Hermon Slade Foundation.

2016 is set to be the world’s hottest year on record. According to the World Meteorological Organization’s preliminary statement on the global climate for 2016, global temperatures for January to September were 0.88°C above the long-term (1961-90) average, 0.11°C above the record set last year, and about 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels.

While the year is not yet over, the final weeks of 2016 would need to be the coldest of the 21st century for 2016’s final number to drop below last year’s.

Record-setting temperatures in 2016 came as no real surprise. Global temperatures continue to rise at a rate of 0.10-0.15°C per decade, and over the five years from 2011 to 2015 they averaged 0.59°C above the 1961-1990 average.

Giving temperatures a further boost this year was the very strong El Niño event of 2015−16. As we saw in 1998, global temperatures in years where the year starts with a strong El Niño are typically 0.1-0.2°C warmer than the years either side of them, and 2016 is following the same script.

Global temperature anomalies (difference from 1961-90 average) for 1950 to 2016, showing strong El Niño and La Niña years, and years when climate was affected by volcanoes. World Meteorological Organization Almost everywhere was warm

Warmth covered almost the entire world in 2016, but was most significant in high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Some parts of the Russian Arctic have been a remarkable 6-7°C above average for the year, while Alaska is having its warmest year on record by more than a degree.

Almost the whole Northern Hemisphere north of the tropics has been at least 1°C above average. North America and Asia are both having their warmest year on record, with Africa, Europe and Oceania close to record levels. The only significant land areas which are having a cooler-than-normal year are northern and central Argentina, and parts of southern Western Australia.

The warmth did not just happen on land; ocean temperatures were also at record high levels in many parts of the world, and many tropical coral reefs were affected by bleaching, including the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.

Global temperatures for January to September 2016. UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre

Greenhouse gas levels continued to rise this year. After global carbon dioxide concentrations reached 400 parts per million for the first time in 2015, they reached new record levels during 2016 at both Mauna Loa in Hawaii and Cape Grim in Australia.

On the positive side, the Antarctic ozone hole in 2016 was one of the smallest of the last decade; while there is not yet a clear downward trend in its size, it is at least not growing any more.

Global sea levels continue to show a consistent upward trend, although they have temporarily levelled off in the last few months after rising steeply during the El Niño.

Droughts and flooding rains

El Niño was over by May 2016 – but many of its effects are still ongoing.

Worst affected was southern Africa, which gets most of its rain during the Southern Hemisphere summer. Rainfall over most of the region was well below average in both 2014-15 and 2015-16.

With two successive years of drought, many parts are suffering badly with crop failures and food shortages. With the next harvests due early in 2017, the next couple of months will be crucial in prospects for recovery.

Drought is also strengthening its grip in parts of eastern Africa, especially Kenya and Somalia, and continues in parts of Brazil.

On the positive side, the end of El Niño saw the breaking of droughts in some other parts of the world. Good mid-year rains made their presence felt in places as diverse as northwest South America and the Caribbean, northern Ethiopia, India, Vietnam, some islands of the western tropical Pacific, and eastern Australia, all of which had been suffering from drought at the start of the year.

The world has also had its share of floods during 2016. The Yangtze River basin in China had its wettest April to July period this century, with rainfall more than 30% above average. Destructive flooding affected many parts of the region, with more than 300 deaths and billions of dollars in damage.

Europe was hard hit by flooding in early June, with Paris having its worst floods for more than 30 years.

In western Africa, the Niger River reached its highest levels for more than 50 years in places, although the wet conditions also had many benefits for the chronically drought-affected Sahel, and eastern Australia also had numerous floods from June onwards as drought turned to heavy rain.

Tropical cyclones are among nature’s most destructive phenomena, and 2016 was no exception. The worst weather related natural disaster of 2016 was Hurricane Matthew. Matthew reached category five intensity south of Haiti, the strongest Atlantic storm since 2007. It hit Haiti as a category 4 hurricane, causing at least 546 deaths, with 1.4 million people needing humanitarian assistance. The hurricane then went on to cause major damage in Cuba, the Bahamas and the United States.

Other destructive tropical cyclones in 2016 included Typhoon Lionrock, responsible for flooding in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea which claimed at least 133 lives, and Cyclone Winston, which killed 44 people and caused an estimated US$1.4 billion damage in Fiji’s worst recorded natural disaster.

Arctic sea ice extent was well-below average all year. It reached a minimum in September of 4.14 million square kilometres, the equal second smallest on record, and a very slow autumn freeze-up so far means that its extent is now the lowest on record for this time of year.

In the Antarctic, sea ice extent was fairly close to normal through the first part of the year but has also dropped well below normal over the last couple of months, as the summer melt has started unusually early.

It remains to be seen what impact the summer of 2016 has had on the mountain glaciers of the Northern Hemisphere.

While 2016 has been an exceptional year by current standards, the long-term warming trends mean there will be more years like it to come. Recent research has shown that global average temperatures which are record-breaking now are likely to become the norm within the next couple of decades.

Blair Trewin is a staff member of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The World Meteorological Organization is the United Nations' specialized agency on the state and behaviour of the Earth's atmosphere, its interaction with the land and oceans, the weather and climate it produces and the resulting distribution of water resources. 191 countries and territories are members.

The journal Climatic Change has published a special edition of review papers discussing major natural hazards in Australia. This article is one of a series looking at those threats in detail.

Storms, wind and hail do a lot of damage to Australians and their property. The 1999 Sydney hailstorm, for instance, cost A$1.7 billion in insured losses. That makes it the biggest single insurance loss in Australian history; in today’s money it would have cost more than A$4 billion.

Our understanding of wind and hail depends on the type of storm that generates them – and this is where it gets complicated. Thunderstorms can generate not just heavy rainfall but also high winds, lightning and hail, albeit in very localised areas. Large-scale storms such as tropical cyclones are a different phenomenon altogether, bringing not just destructive winds, but also storm surges and soaking rains, often over wide areas.

This complexity makes storms difficult to study, because limited research resources are spread across the many different storm types and their associated hazards.

To help address these issues, we collated and reviewed the latest knowledge and understanding of storms in Australia, covering the current scientific literature on the assessment, causes, observed trends and future projected changes of storm hazards, with a specific focus on severe wind and hail. We found that progress has been made in many areas, but also that much remains to be done.

Are we getting more or less storms?

In short - we don’t know with confidence. Despite the severity of the impacts wrought by storms, there is limited observational data for some types of storms and their associated hazards, particularly for the estimation of hail and wind.

Current estimates of the hail hazard in Australia, for example, are available only from the Bureau of Meteorology’s severe storm archive, which suffers from large uncertainties associated with biases and changing reporting practices. This makes it unsuitable for assessing the climatology of hail storms on a national scale.

Similarly, issues such as changes to Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) and limited records of atmospheric pressure observations, have hampered efforts to develop high-quality surface wind datasets across Australia. Bob Dylan might have been right when he told us “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” but then again he didn’t win his Nobel Prize for meteorology.

European researchers have analysed hailstorm trends using networks of devices called “hailpads”. But these records do not exist in Australia, and so there is a significant gap in our knowledge about hailstorm histories and trends.

The projections of future wind hazard in and around Australia are equally limited and differ from region to region. For example, in the tropics, research suggests that extreme wind hazard may decrease in the future, although confidence in this prediction is low. Meanwhile, summer wind increases are possible in those parts of Australia that are subjected to East Coast Lows.

We also don’t really know what to expect from future severe thunderstorms, and while research suggests that they may become more frequent in southeastern Australia, there is a wide range of uncertainty around this projection.

For future trends in hail, again there are only a few studies currently available, but there is at least an indication of increases in hail frequency in southeastern regions.

But while the picture is very uncertain for now, we hope this uncertainty will be reduced with the help of improvements in both the observation and computational modelling of storms and their associated hazards. We are growing more confident in our predictions for tropical cyclone, forecasting that the overall number will decline, but that the strongest storms will grow stronger still.

We also hope to improve our understanding of severe thunderstorms by using remote sensing platforms to record hail and extreme wind events right across Australia. These include the GPATS lightning-detection network, the new Himawari-8 and 9 satellites, and the Bureau of Meteorology’s soon-to-be upgraded radar network. Validation of these techniques, of course, will also require high-quality direct observations of these severe weather conditions – the very thing we currently lack.

Is this where you come in?

Citizen scientists may, however, help to fill some of these gaps. There are exciting prospects for improving severe weather observations, such as the success of the mPING crowdsourced weather reports project in the United States, which allows participants to use a mobile phone app to report severe weather, which then feeds into new research.

This approach could prove to be an excellent way of getting data in such a vast and diverse landscape as Australia, while simultaneously engaging with both the public and the atmospheric science community. We could also enlist the help of scientific study groups, which bring together academics, scientists and industry partners to exchange ideas and develop research techniques.

“The storm is up, and all is on the hazard,” cried Cassius in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. How true that is of storms in Australia.

If we don’t increase our observational and research abilities, we might never fully understand the impacts of severe storms, much less be able to deal with them.

Chris White receives funding from various Tasmanian State Government research funding programs, Wine Australia and the Bushfire and Natural Hazard CRC.

Jason Evans receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Environmental Science Programme Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub, Sydney Water, Water Research Australia, and various NSW state government research funding programs.

Kevin Walsh receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other international funding organizations.

China's concerns about air pollution from burning coal is one reason behind the emissions slowdown. China coal image from www.shutterstock.com

For the third year in a row, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry have barely grown, while the global economy has continued to grow strongly. This level of decoupling of carbon emissions from global economic growth is unprecedented.

Global CO₂ emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and industry (including cement production) were 36.3 billion tonnes in 2015, the same as in 2014, and are projected to rise by only 0.2% in 2016 to reach 36.4 billion tonnes. This is a remarkable departure from emissions growth rates of 2.3% for the previous decade, and more than 3% during the 2000s.

Given this good news, we have an extraordinary opportunity to extend the changes that have driven the slowdown and spark the great decline in emissions needed to stabilise the world’s climate.

This result is part of the annual carbon assessment released today by the Global Carbon Project, a global consortium of scientists and think tanks under the umbrella of Future Earth and sponsored by institutions from around the world.

Global CO₂ emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and industry. Emissions in 2016 (red dot) are based on a projection. Fossil fuel and industry emissions

The slowdown in emissions growth has been primarily driven by China. After strong growth since the early 2000s, emissions in China have levelled off and may even be declining. This change is largely due to economic factors, such as the end of the construction boom and weaker global demand for steel. Efforts to reduce air pollution and the growth of solar and wind energy have played a role too, albeit a smaller one.

The United States has also played a role in the global emissions slowdown, largely driven by improvements in energy efficiency, the replacement of coal with natural gas and, to a lesser extent, renewable energy.

What makes the three-year trend most remarkable is the fact that the global economy grew at more than 3% per year during this time. Previously, falling emissions were driven by stagnant or shrinking economies, such as during the global financial crisis of 2008.

Developed countries, together, showed a strong declining trend in emissions, cutting them by 1.7% in 2015. This decline was despite emissions growth of 1.4% in the European Union after more than a decade of declining emissions.

Emissions from emerging economies and developing countries grew by 0.9% with the fourth-highest emitter, India, growing at 5.2% in 2015.

Importantly, the transfer of CO₂ emissions from developed countries to less developed countries (via trade of goods and services produced in places different to where they are consumed) has declined since 2007.

CO₂ emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and industry for the top 4 global emitters.

Deforestation and other changes in land use added another 4.8 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2015, on top of the 36.3 billion tonnes of CO₂ emitted from fossil fuels and industry. This is a significant increase by 42% over the average emissions of the previous decade.

This jump in land use change emissions was largely the result of increased fires at the deforestation frontiers, particularly in Southeast Asia, driven by dry conditions brought by a strong El Niño in 2015-16. In general, though, long-term trends for emissions from deforestation and other land use change appear to be lower for the most recent decade than they were in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The carbon quota

When combining emissions from fossil fuels, industry, and land use change, the global economy released another 41 billion tonnes to the atmosphere in 2015, and will add roughly the same amount again this year.

We now need to turn this no-growth to actual declines in emissions as soon as possible. Otherwise, it will be a challenge to keep cumulative emissions below the level that would avoid a 2℃ warming, as required under the Paris Agreement.

As part of our carbon budget assessment, we estimate that cumulative emissions from 1870 (the reference year used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to calculate carbon budgets) to the end of 2016 will be 2,075 billion tonnes of CO₂. The remaining quota to avoid the 2℃ threshold, assuming constant emissions, would be consumed at best in less than 25 years (with remaining quota estimates ranging from 450 to 1,050 billion tonnes of CO₂). Ultimately, we must reduce emissions to net zero to stabilise the climate.

The carbon budget to keep mean global temperature below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels with more than 66% probability, showing used carbon budget (black) and remaining carbon budget (red). Values rounded to nearest 50 billion tonnes of CO₂. The remaining quotas are indicative and vary depending on definition and methodology. Rogelj et al. 2016, Nature Climate Change

Pep Canadell receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program - Earth Systems and Climate Change hub.

Corinne Le Quéré is affiliated with the UK Committee on Climate Change.

Glen Peters receives funding from the Research Council of Norway.

Rob Jackson receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and Departments of Energy and Agriculture. He is a member of Stanford's Natural Gas Initiative, an industry affiliates program, working to reduce methane emissions.

Stunned. Shocked. Speechless. Devastated. Political tsunami. These were the key words rising to the surface of the babble of conversations that took place in the corridors of the climate negotiations in Marrakech on Wednesday 9 November – the day Donald Trump won the US presidency.

A climate denier, Trump has vowed to tear up the historic Paris Agreement along with the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which seeks to slash greenhouse emissions from power plants. He has also given the green light to renewed fossil fuel exploitation in the United States.

Oil and gas stocks unsurprisingly rose, and coal stocks soared, on his victory day. If implemented, Trump’s promises would make it impossible for the United States to reach its national pledge under the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions by 26-28% relative to 2005 by 2025.

At the moment, Trump’s previous declaration of climate change as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to undermine US industry looks particularly poignant.

His election is a dramatic turnaround from the years of constructive bilateral climate diplomacy by the Obama administration with China, which culminated in the joint US-China statement on climate change in November 2014. This joint announcement of the headline national action plans by the world’s two biggest emitters (together covering 40% of global emissions) injected significant momentum into the negotiations leading to the Paris Agreement in 2015.

But now the US elections have delivered not just a presidential victory against action on climate change, but made it much easier for Trump to deliver on his plans than it was for Obama. The Republican Party is now set to control all four branches of government: the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Presidency and soon the Supreme Court (once Trump nominates a new judge following the death of Justice Scalia, bringing the number of judges back to nine, with a conservative majority). This leaves only the media and civil society to speak up for a safe climate in the face of the national government’s agenda.

Turning back time

Seasoned negotiators and observers at Marrakech with long memories recalled the moment in 2001 when former president George W. Bush declared that the United States would withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the predecessor to the Paris Agreement. This withdrawal cast a long shadow over the negotiations, which was finally lifted with the Obama administration’s re-engagement with climate change that made the Paris breakthrough possible.

Yet the world today is very different to what it was in 2001. The Paris Agreement is now in force after a speedy ratification, the US share of global emissions has declined, and renewable energy is now much cheaper. Many US states, cities and businesses will continue to work towards reducing emissions, and many Republican politicians have let go of their aversion to renewable energy in response to public and business pressure.

In short, much of America and the rest of the world will continue to build momentum under the Paris Agreement, despite the changing of the guard in Washington DC.

Given Trump’s record of policy flip-flopping, it also remains an open question as to how far he will actually go to undo the diplomatic climate legacy of the Obama administration. Much will depend on who takes over as Secretary of State, and how the State Department assesses the broader diplomatic consequences of withdrawing from the Paris treaty, particularly in terms of transatlantic relationships. European Council president Donald Tusk has already invited Trump to attend a US-EU summit. We might therefore see some easing of Trump’s hard anti-climate talk, much as his social rhetoric softened on election night. Trump the President may not be quite the same as Trump the candidate.

Moreover, under Article 28 of the Paris Agreement it will take a total of four years for any formal withdrawal by the United States to take effect. If the US were to turn its back on these legal niceties and abandon its obligations during this period, it would be widely regarded as a climate pariah state. In contrast, China will enjoy its rising status as a climate leader.

Meanwhile, after the initial pause to digest the shock of Trump’s victory, the negotiators at Marrakech have got back down to their business, which is to fill in the implementation details of the Paris Agreement.

Robyn Eckersley receives funding from the Australian Research Council to research a project called 'What makes a climate leader?'