The Conversation

Aquaculture is in the spotlight again, with an ABC investigation raising concerns over the sustainability of the expansion of Tasmania’s salmon-farming industry.

Controversies over fish farming are newsworthy and emotive, particularly when company profits and communities are at stake. Unfortunately, independent scientific evidence is often used selectively or even ignored in these debates.

Science is an essential tool for managers and regulators when planning industry expansion, and Australia’s aquaculture industry does have a strong research base.

Fish farming can be sustainable, but only if it takes proper account of scientific research – and only if that research moves fast enough to give an up-to-date picture of the risks.

Demand for sustainable aquaculture

The ever-growing demand for seafood, combined with the limited opportunity to increase catch from wild fisheries, means we need more aquaculture. Farming already produces roughly 50% of the global seafood supply, and farmed fish production now exceeds that of farmed beef.

Intensive aquaculture is relatively new, with supply rising tenfold since the mid-1980s. It is thus unique among food production sectors in that its initial expansion has taken place in an era of unprecedented scrutiny from government, environmentalists and the community.

This scrutiny is warranted, given that many fish farms are in coastal waters considered as a multi-use, common resource. In Australia, the industry is subject to high environmental standards and constantly evolving management.

Intensive aquaculture has several inherent advantages over other forms of agriculture (besides the intrinsic health benefits of seafood). These include efficient food conversion (it takes just 1.3kg or less of feed to produce 1kg of salmon, compared with 1.8kg for chicken and 2.6kg for pork); relatively limited use of fresh water; and the absence of fertilisers.

However, there are also significant sustainability challenges, including limiting marine feed ingredients; waste management; the use of drugs, colourants and other chemicals; impacts on wild marine species; management of fish health and welfare; site selection; and societal attitudes.

The aquaculture research community is acutely aware of these challenges. At a World Aquaculture conference in Adelaide in 2014, the program was dominated by issues related to sustainable development.

Planning for the future

In the forseeable future, world aquaculture production is projected to grow at least at its current and long term rate of 6.5% a year. Australia’s industry, while representing less than 0.1% of world production, is growing even faster: more than 7% a year over the past decade.

Given cost constraints, this future expansion will be mostly inland or in coastal marine environments. Scientific input will be crucial if this expansion is to be managed in a sustainable way.

For example, coastal aquaculture operations are exposed to conditions that create good years and bad years. Understanding the spatial and temporal variation in these conditions is critical. It is not in the industry’s interest to risk growing fish in marginal conditions.

Conditions are also becoming more challenging as a result of climate change – the oceans off Australia’s southeast are among the fastest warming on the planet.

Enlightened aquaculture businesses are trying to anticipate these conditions by working with scientists including CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology to understand future environmental risks on a range of timescales.

Seven-day ocean forecasts and medium-term outlooks covering several months will help the industry make decisions about cage locations, stocking density, diet, disease management, and when to harvest.

Monthly forecast of ocean temperatures for the east coast of Tasmania for the coming months Author provided

Meanwhile, longer-term planning, on time scales of years and decades, will be informed by climate models. For example, the industry can aim to breed fish to cope with changing conditions such as warmer water.

Of course, forecasts are never 100% accurate, meaning that aquaculture businesses still need to account for risk and uncertainty.

Planning for now

Science is clearly crucial for effective future planning. But it is also important to ensure that current management is the best it can be, and that current risks are managed.

In the case of finfish aquaculture, the potential for localised impacts on the seabed around sea cages is well known, and monitoring and management strategies well established.

The potential for adverse effects on the water in and around cages is also important, and water column monitoring is increasingly a management requirement.

Broader ecosystem interactions – such as changes in fauna and flora on reefs around cages – are progressively being recognised as an issue for many aquaculture regulators and managers.

As scientists’ understanding of these risks increases, regulators and managers can implement strategies to protect a broader suite of environmental assets and values.

However, there is no “one size fits all” management approach for this rapidly growing industry, and strategies need to be considered in the local context (ecological, social and economic). Science can provide a better understanding of a particular scenario, but it is up to managers to use this information wisely – and to exercise caution where risks are not well understood.

Fast responses

Management may aspire to be “best practice”, but it is important to recognise that this does not mean that it will be static or finite. Management should respond to changes in the environment (both natural and social) and should adjust as the science and understanding develops.

It is important to acknowledge the different but complementary roles that science and management play in aquaculture planning. Scientists seek to understand the situation (such as the current or future environmental conditions) and share that understanding impartially and objectively. Regulators and managers need to make decisions with a much broader mandate, and as such need to consider factors beyond the science alone. Good planning needs to recognise the value of both.

Aquaculture development and policy needs to be able to trust the science, which in turn, must be delivered in a timely manner, to ensure long-term sustainability of this industry.

Graham Mair receives funding from FRDC, the commonwealth government and industry for research related to aquaculture. He is a director of Australian Seafood Industries (ASI) Ltd. which is a company that manages a selective breeding program for Pacific Oysters. Graham Mair is a member and Past-President of the World Aquaculture Society which is a professional society that has no advocacy role.

Alistair Hobday is involved in research developing short-term, seasonal and climate scale forecasts which are used by marine industries, including salmon aquaculture. This work has been funded by FRDC, CSIRO, BOM, and co-investment from industry associations.

Catriona Macleod is an environmental scientist with a focus on environmental impact assessment and sediment remediation in the coastal zone and as such has been involved with research related to salmon aquaculture. She has received funding from a number of different government and philanthropic sources, including the FRDC and the Tasmanian state government.

Next year the Ross Sea will be home to the world's largest marine reserve. Andrew Mandemaker/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Conservationists have been celebrating the creation of the world’s largest marine park, covering 1.55 million square kilometres of the Ross Sea off Antarctica.

The agreement, brokered at last week’s annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) in Hobart, will enter into force on December 1, 2017 – thanks in large part to China ending its resistance to the proposal.

For the next 35 years, fishing will be totally banned in a “no-take zone” covering 1.12 million square kilometres (72%) of the marine park, with exceptions for krill and toothfish in specially designated research zones.

The marine park’s creation follows years of often frustrating negotiations. The United States and New Zealand brought the idea to the 2012 CCAMLR meeting, but were met with concerns, particularly from Russia and China.

At the 2014 meeting, China set out the reasons for its opposition. Its delegates argued that the term “conservation” should balance protection and rational use of marine living resources; that marine parks should not be set up in the Southern Ocean without convincing data showing they will work; and that the CCAMLR has already adopted a wide range of successful conservation measures in the seas around Antarctica.

A year later, China once again looked set to block the issue, posing a series of questions about the proposed marine park. How could marine parks allow rational use of marine living resources? How could they facilitate scientific research? How would they be monitored and regulated, and how long would the protections last?

Nevertheless, China surprisingly supported the Ross Sea proposal at the end of the 2015 CCAMLR meeting, paving the way for this month’s decision.

Why the turnaround from China’s previous opposition? And what does this mean for its growing and changing influence on Antarctic diplomacy?

Global influence

There are three key reasons that explain China’s shifting position. First, China is a latecomer to the current global ocean governance regime. When the Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959, China was still relatively isolated from the international community. It was not until 1978 that it opened its doors to the world and engaged with the current international legal system, and as such it had little influence on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

It has taken time for China to develop the necessary diplomatic and scientific expertise to become comfortable in this space. As a historic rule-taker rather than rule-maker, its government may need to overcome a natural mistrust of many existing regimes.

This issue is not unique to marine parks. Such hesitation was also evident when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and when it started engaging with UN climate change negotiations in 1994. But China now uses the WTO dispute settlement body as frequently as other members, and ratified the Paris climate agreement at September’s G20 summit which it hosted for the first time – another sign of its increasing diplomatic engagement.

Second, China became a party of the CCAMLR in 2007. As the world’s second-largest economy and largest fishing nation, China has global fishing interests, including off Antarctica. Chinese Krill fishing in Antarctica has grown significantly since 2009, reaching 54,300 tonnes in 2014. This partly explains China’s concerns over proposed no-take zones.

There is, however, a deeper philosophical concern, which might be described as “anxiousness for commons”. While China’s Antarctic fishing interests account for only a very small share of its global catch, they are highly symbolic because Antarctic fishing showcases China’s quest for freedom in the “global commons”.

Third, the international community is currently developing a new global ocean governance regime. By coincidence, negotiations on the regulation of fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean and other international areas of the high seas have been going on at the same time as the discussions about the Ross Sea. In the Northeast Atlantic, the OSPAR has already established a network of high sea marine parks.

As a rising power, China would not be happy to face constraints or bans on its activities at a time when its rising status gives it access to places like the high seas, the ocean floor, the poles, and outer space. It would be a shame if China were to remain silent on those issues, and it probably won’t – China’s 13th Five Year Plan (2016-20) clearly says the nation would like to take a more active role in global ocean governance.

In the foreseeable future, we could possibly see China become more comfortable and active within the CCAMLR as well as the Antarctic Treaty System. Although generally being supportive, China would not keep silent. Rather, it would speak up more openly for its Antarctic interests, and have more intensive engagement with the Antarctic Treaty System.

One challenge for China would be how to enhance its capacity and expertise so as to provide high-quality proposals, which could not only pursue its own interests, but as an important global player, also help to make a concrete contribution to achieving sustainability in the Southern Ocean.

Nengye Liu receives funding from the EU Centre for Global Affairs, University of Adelaide, Australia and is working on a Project "The European Union and Conservation of Marine Living Resources in Antarctica".

These days, after an extreme weather event like a cyclone, bushfire, or major storm, it’s common to find people asking: was it climate change?

We also often hear people saying it is impossible to attribute any single weather event to climate change, as former prime minister Tony Abbott and the then environment minister Greg Hunt said after the bushfires in New South Wales in 2013.

While this may have been true in the 1990s, the science of attributing individual extreme events to global warming has advanced significantly since then. It is now possible to link aspects of extreme events to climate change.

However, as I describe in an article co-written by Susan Hassol, Simon Torok and Patrick Luganda and published today in the World Meteorologcal Organization’s Bulletin, how we communicate these findings has not kept pace with the rapidly evolving science. As a result, there is widespread confusion about the links between climate change and extreme weather.

Evolving science

The science of attributing individual extreme weather events to climate change dates back to 2003, when a discussion article in Nature raised the question of liability for damages from extreme events. The idea was that if you could attribute a specific event to rising greenhouse gas emissions, you could potentially hold someone to account.

This was soon followed by a 2004 study of the 2003 European heatwave, which caused more than 35,000 deaths. This analysis found that climate change had more than doubled the risk of such extreme heat.

These early studies laid the foundations for using climate models to analyse the links between specific extreme weather events and human-induced climate change. Many studies since then have focused on putting numbers to the risks and likelihoods of various extremes.

Attribution science has now evolved to the point where it is possible to analyse extreme events almost as they happen. The World Weather Attribution project is an example of an international effort to sharpen and accelerate our ability to analyse and communicate the influence of climate change on extreme weather events.

This project examined the major flooding in France and nearby countries in 2016. The floods – which forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes and caused damage estimated at more than a billion euros in France alone – were made about 80% more likely by climate change.

Lost in translation

The communication of this science outside the research community has, with a few notable exceptions, not fully reflected these scientific advances. This confusion about the state of the science comes from many sources.

The media, politicians and some scientists outside this area of research still often claim that we can’t attribute any individual event to climate change. In some countries – including Australia – the causes of specific extremes can be seen as a politically charged issue.

In the aftermath of an extreme event such as a fire or flood, it can be seen as insensitive or overly political to discuss the human-induced causes of loss of life or property. The views of political and media leaders can be influential in shaping public opinions about extreme climate events.

It doesn’t help that confidence and uncertainty are widely misunderstood concepts outside the scientific community.

Another part of the problem is that for a long time, many scientists themselves repeated this message because of the complexity of the climate system. All extremes take place in a naturally variable and chaotic climate system, which complicates event attribution.

Attribution scientists have the greatest clarity and confidence in attributing heat events that occur over large areas and extended time periods. For example, two separate studies found that the 2013 extreme heat in Australia would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.

Rainfall events are trickier. This complexity can create confusion about the extreme events that are better understood, and lead to missed communication opportunities.

The need for better communication

Understanding the precise causes of recent extreme weather and climate events isn’t just an academic pursuit.

Extreme event attribution has become a research avenue with important benefits to the public. Society’s beliefs about which events are caused by climate change will influence decisions about how to adapt to those changes. Poor decisions in this area can jeopardise infrastructure and human health.

For example, if we dismissed the link between climate change and the 2003 European heatwave without scientific analysis, we would be poorly prepared for protecting vulnerable people from heat stress in the future under further global warming.

Any assessment of future climate risk and preparedness requires a scientific basis. It should not be based on opinions formed from personal perceptions, media reports, or politicians’ comments.

A community responsibility

Changes in extreme weather and climate events are the primary way that most people experience climate change. While scientific discussions around global average temperatures are useful for understanding the wider issue, you don’t experience “global average temperature”. Yet we all have some direct experience of extremes.

We argue that scientists need to communicate accurately the scientific links between extremes and global warming, so that people can make informed decisions about actions to limit the risks posed by these events.

We propose several simple guidelines for clear communication around extremes:

• Lead with what the science does understand and save the caveats and uncertainties for later. For example, start by explaining the impact of global warming on heatwaves and then discuss the specifics of an individual event.

• Use metaphors to explain risk and probabilities. For instance, discussion of global warming as “loading the dice toward more rolls of extreme events”, or “stacking the deck” in favour of extremes, are examples of accessible language.

• Avoid loaded language like “blame” and “fault”.

• Use accessible language for conveying uncertainty and confidence. For example, scientists often use the word “uncertainty” to discuss the envelope of future climate scenarios, but to the public, “uncertainty” means we just don’t know. Instead, use the word “range”.

• Try to avoid language that creates a sense of hopelessness. For example, rather than calling further increases in some extreme weather “inevitable”, we can discuss the choice we face between a future with increases in extreme weather, and one with less.

These guidelines may also help the public evaluate the accuracy of reporting about weather extremes. If the link between an extreme event and climate change is rejected outright without an attribution analysis, it probably doesn’t represent the evolving science.

Conversely, if an extreme is presented as evidence of climate change, without discussion of nuance and complexity, it is equally unlikely to reflect up-to-date attribution science.

If scientists get better at communicating their work, and readers get better at assessing what’s accurate and what’s not, we will all be better informed to make choices that can hopefully stave off a future with more extreme weather.

This article is based on an analysis published today in the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Bulletin, led by Susan Hassol and Simon Torok.

Sophie Lewis receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

The ongoing uncertainty over the future of the Hazelwood power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley has raised the prospect that the ageing generator will be shut down in the near future.

The power station has a nameplate capacity of 1.6 gigawatts, which represents 22% of the coal-fired generation capacity in Victoria, and 6% of the total coal-fired capacity in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales combined (South Australia no longer has an operating coal-fired power station).

Coal-fired power stations provide the bulk of the “baseload” electricity requirements in the National Electricity Market (NEM). Baseload refers to generation that meets the minimum demand, and from an economic point of view this is best delivered by generation that produces constant, reliable output. Brown coal provides the cheapest baseload power – or at least, it does if we’re prepared to ignore factors such as the long-term costs of climate change.

So if Hazelwood departs the market, as one of the cheapest generators in the NEM, it seems logical that electricity prices will increase. The extent of that increase will depend on what takes up the slack. So what can we expect to happen?

On the decline

Until 2007, average electricity demand in the NEM had increased every year since the grid was first built. But after that demand started to fall. The reasons are varied, including increasing takeup of rooftop solar panels, improved efficiency of lighting and appliances, and reductions in industrial demand.

Looking at July (when baseload electricity demand is typically at its highest), the average demand has fallen from 25.4GW in July 2007 to 22.9GW in July 2016, a reduction of 2.5GW.

But there has also been significant retirement of coal-fired generation capacity in Australia since 2010, driven partly by the retirement of old power plants, and partly by the costs associated with the carbon price, which ran from 2012 to 2014.

The retirees include Morwell and Anglesea in Victoria (0.2GW), Playford B and Northern in South Australia (0.8GW), and most significantly Redbank, Wallerawang and Munmorah in New South Wales (2.5 GW). This adds up to a total of 3.5GW of coal-fired capacity shut down this decade.

This means that more capacity has been retired than the baseload demand has decreased. So in theory, the retirement of another baseload power station at Hazelwood would result in even more tightening of the balance between supply and demand.

But if we look at the current average capacity factors of the remaining coal-fired power stations we can see that many of the larger ones, in NSW in particular, are running at very modest capacities. For example, Liddell has been running at 43% of its total capacity for the past 12 months, and Eraring at 59%. Across the NEM the average is 65%.

Now, of course some of this generation is used when the demand increases during particularly hot or cold weather, but most of this “peaking” demand is supplied by hydro and gas. So while baseload is not the only way to meet demand in the energy system, there nevertheless seems to be plenty of baseload available.

Why are coal-fired stations running at such low levels? One reason is that while demand has been falling, there has also been an extra 4GW of wind power capacity added to the grid. Meanwhile, several new plants were commissioned in the years leading up to the peak in demand, with the expectation that demand would continue to rise. These plants include Callide C, Millmerran and Kogan Creek, which add up to 2.7GW.

If Hazelwood shuts down, it would be reasonable to expect that the remaining coal-fired generators in the grid will take up the slack. The generators in Victoria are running at relatively high capacity factors, so we might expect that NSW generators will increase their output. The interconnector between Victoria and NSW currently sends Victorian electricity into NSW, but it can reverse that flow if required.

One reason why Victorian power stations are running at higher capacities is because they are cheaper to run. ACIL Tasman figures from 2010 show short-run marginal cost (the cost to run a power station in addition to fixed costs) in Victoria is around A$2-5 per megawatt hour, compared with A$12-17 per MWh in NSW.

Predicting what will happen to electricity prices in the future is harder than picking the winner of the Melbourne Cup, so making an exact price forecast is tricky. But if the hole left by Hazelwood’s retirement is filled by the excess capacity in NSW, then all things being equal the impacts on the overall costs of running the system would be modest.

Still, the NEM is very complex. Generators (especially in Victoria) are privately owned and will adjust their market strategies to take advantage of the tightening of supply. Meanwhile, the growing market share of renewables, the potential for electricity demand to begin rising once again, and the possibility of further coal closures, all mean that the full impact of the retreat of coal-fired power is yet to be seen.

Roger Dargaville has received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency

Australia and New Zealand were claiming a conservation success this week, when their resolution against lethal “scientific” whaling was adopted at the International Whaling Commission’s biennial meeting in Slovenia. But in reality the non-binding decision will do little to stop Japan’s whaling program.

This resolution aims to tighten the loophole that allows nations to catch whales under the guise of scientific whaling. It provides for greater oversight of the currently self-assessed special permits for lethal scientific whale research.

After the disappointment of failing to establish a South Atlantic whale sanctuary, the anti-whaling bloc of nations at the IWC meeting have hailed the latest resolution, with Australia’s environment minister Josh Frydenberg describing the decision as “a big win”.

Where next for Japanese whaling?

Japan conducts its whaling under a self-issued permit, under Article VIII of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. This article allows a country to grant its nationals special licence “to kill, take and treat whales for purposes of scientific research subject to such restrictions as to number and subject to such other conditions as the Contracting Government thinks fit”.

In 2014 the International Court of Justice ruled Japan’s JARPA II whaling program illegal on the basis that it was “not for the purposes of scientific research” and therefore in breach of Article VIII. But crucially it did not ban all future scientific whaling activities by Japan.

After the decision, Japan created a new research programme called NEWREP-A (New Scientific Whale Research Program in the Antarctic Ocean), which purported to have different scientific methods to its predecessor.

As Japan no longer recognises the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice regarding “living resources of the sea”, arguments on adherence to the broader principle laid down in the decision would possibly be in vain.

A new tack

This brings us back to the new resolution, which was brought to the IWC by Australia, New Zealand and other anti-whaling nations in a bid to make it harder for nations such as Japan to issue themselves with special permits for scientific whaling.

The underlying principle is Australia’s repeated assertion that “lethal scientific research is simply not necessary”.

Japan’s new NEWREP-A program included the killing of 333 minke whales in the 2015-16 season, and the IWC’s Scientific Committee was powerless to prevent Japan from proceeding, given that the conditions of special permits are currently self-assessed and can proceed without scientific endorsement from the committee.

The new resolution establishes a Working Group under the Convention, which will consider the Scientific Committee’s recommendations in relation to all special permits. It also gives a greater role to the Commission in the process of issuing special permits.

The aim is to apply much greater scrutiny to the granting of special permits, rather than allowing nations simply to award them to themselves. Plans for special permits are requested to be submitted to the new working group at least six months in advance of the Scientific Committee’s meeting, alongside the data used to back up a country’s claims to be running a scientific whaling program. These data will be evaluated both during the program’s development, and during ongoing and final reviews.

These inquiries into the special permit will then be presented to the IWC itself, which will form its own official view on the proposed whaling program and publish its findings.

Overall, the resolution gives the Commission a much greater role in deciding whether a given nation should be allowed to kill whales. But resolutions are not legally binding, and there is no function to penalise those who do not follow them.

Non-binding resolutions

In response to the new resolution, Japan’s Commissioner to the IWC said that Japan “will abide by the Convention itself”. This implies that Japan will continue to apply its own interpretation of the Convention, and will not follow the extra steps outlined in the new resolution.

So despite the new emphasis on applying scientific scrutiny to whaling permits, at a higher level than before within the IWC’s structure, this actually doesn’t mean much in practical terms for Japan. The reality is that Japan will continue to act independently of IWC advice due to its view on what Article VIII means.

As a result, Japan is unlikely to stop killing whales any time soon, despite the efforts of Australia, New Zealand and other anti-whaling nations to shut the program down.

Indi Hodgson-Johnston receives funding from the University of Tasmania and the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems CRC.

Australian government 'Grow your own' campaign billboard, 1943. NAA C2829/2

During the devastating floods that hit Queensland in 2011, Brisbane and regional centres came perilously close to running out of fresh food. With the central Rocklea produce market underwater, panic-buying soon set in and supermarket shelves emptied fast.

Such events expose the vulnerability of our urban food systems. Climate change and resource depletion present more slow-burning challenges, but the fact remains that urban food policy is at risk of complacency.

Gardening is certainly good for you, but does it have a role to play in increasing urban food security and resilience? Perhaps history can tell us the answer.

While Australian research has focused on recent urban agriculture initiatives, a real-world experiment in gardening for food security took place in Australia more than 70 years ago, during the Second World War.

Winning the war with home-grown food

Britain, facing serious food shortages, began using the slogan “Dig for Victory” in 1939. In Australia, low-key efforts at encouraging home food production began two years later.

A 1941 survey of Melbourne households revealed that 48% of them already produced food of some kind. In spacious middle-ring suburbs the proportion was as high as 88%, whereas in the dense inner cities it was less than 15%. Food production was most common among middle-class and skilled working-class households, and less so among the poor and marginalised.

By 1943, significant food shortfalls were expected in Australia. The government responded with a range of measures, including a large-scale “Grow Your Own” campaign.

Movies, radio broadcasts, public demonstrations, competitions, posters, newspaper ads and brochures all urged home gardeners to grow their own vegetables. It was hoped this would reduce the strain on the commercial food supply, as well as offering substitutes for rationed food items, providing insurance against commercial food supply failures, and easing the demand on items such as fuel and rubber. Municipal councils and schools also ran vegetable production programmes.

A ‘Grow Your Own’ campaign advertisement from around 1943. PROV, VPRS 10163/P2

While there are no reliable statistics on the campaign’s effectiveness, anecdotal evidence suggests that home food production increased – but not without hitting obstacles along the way.

Wartime disruptions led to shortages of pesticides, seeds, rubber and fertilisers. Livestock and fowl can play an important role in nutrient cycling in sustainable food production, but cows and goats had been excluded from many urban areas in the decades before the war. As a result, competition for local manure was fierce; some gardeners would wait with bucket and shovel for horses on grocery rounds to pass by.

Artificial fertilisers were also expensive and hard to come by. Even the use of blood and bone as an organic fertiliser was restricted, as it was diverted for commercial poultry and pig feed. Alternatives included composting of waste, although this required time and skill, and its nutritional value for plants was limited.

Labour, too, was in short supply. Many able-bodied people had joined the armed forces and others were working long hours in war jobs. This left relatively few urban residents with the time and energy to devote to a vegetable garden. The Women’s Land Army was involved in some urban cultivation, and the YWCA established a “Garden Army” of women who established and tended community gardens on private or public land.

Lessons from the past

What lessons can we learn from this history about the capacity for suburban food production to boost urban food supply in a time of prolonged scarcity?

The most important is that home and community food gardens can contribute meaningfully to resilient urban food systems, but as our urban form is changing we need to explicitly plan for this contribution.

For example, vegetable gardens need space – public or private – that is reasonably open and not crowded by trees. This is one reason why the spacious middle-ring suburbs of Melbourne were more productive than the inner city in 1941.

Sustainable urban food production also requires skill, knowledge and time. Much food gardening today relies heavily on purchased seedlings, manures and pesticides. Resilient food gardens need to have a range of strategies for sourcing essential inputs locally, for example through seed saving networks, composting, local livestock and fowl, and on-site rainwater collection and storage. They also need people with the time and skills to manage these systems.

Vegetable gardening needs skill and knowledge PROV, VPRS 10163/P2

This history also provides inspiration in the form of stories of self-provisioning by everyday people, such as the 56-year-old woman running a habadashery and confectionery store who in 1941 produced all the vegetables and eggs she and her sister required at their Essendon home.

The low-density form of much of Australia’s urban landscape provides considerable potential for sustainable and resilient food production. But our cities still need to invest in developing the skills and systems to sustain this kind of farming.

This is especially critical for low-income areas where resource scarcity will bite hardest. It is also a task that looks ever more challenging as farms are pushed further from the city, while standard homes on shrinking lot sizes and poorly designed infill development eat up urban garden space.

We may not yet be at the stage of needing a nationwide “Grow Your Own” campaign on the scale seen during wartime. But if we want to increase our cities’ resilience and sustainability, we would be foolish to ignore its lessons.

Andrea Gaynor receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Marlin are one of the prized fish in Australia's oceans. Marlin image from www.shutterstock.com

Ocean health relies on a strong backbone of protection and management. Marine reserves can be part of the solution, but only if they’re constructed in the right way. Recent recommendations on Australia’s marine reserves would leave more ocean unprotected.

Marine reserves are a mix of multiple-use zones that allow activities such as mining and fishing, and highly-protected zones called marine national parks that are free of extractive activities. These marine national parks are the gold standard for protecting our oceans. Globally, less than 1% of the world’s oceans are fully protected in no-take marine national parks or their equivalents.

Australia is currently deciding how much of its ocean territory it will place in marine national parks and where. To this end, the government recently released its commissioned review of Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Reserve Network.

Such a review is welcome as Australia has yet to provide comprehensive, adequate and representative protection for its oceans. This is despite the general recognition within the Australian community that economic growth depends on a healthy and properly functioning environment.

Marine national parks play a fundamental role in contributing to ocean ecosystem function and provide a means to assess the health of areas outside of these zones that are open to greater use by humans.

This understanding of the interdependence of how we protect and sustainably use our oceans is, unfortunately, largely missing from the review’s recommendations.

The gold standard

In early 2016 the Ocean Science Council of Australia (OSCA) prepared a scientific analysis aimed at helping define what Australia’s marine reserves should deliver.

Based on hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and myriad international consensus statements from researchers on the need for strong ocean protection, the Council concluded that science-based decisions and actions should:

(1) Prevent fishing, mining and other extractive activities on at least 30% of each marine habitat, according to the international standard for ocean protection to deliver protection of both biodiversity and ecosystem services

(2) Improve representation of marine national parks in bioregions (regions of the ocean defined by particular species and climate) and key ecological features (such as the continental shelf and offshore reefs) that were already under-represented in the 2012 marine reserve plans

(3) Build and maintain large, contiguous, highly-protected marine national parks in regions such as the Coral Sea

(4) Quantify the benefits of Australia’s marine reserves so as to make their value to Australia clearer.

What the review says

The government review reflects science and community concerns in some respects, recommending for instance that more bioregions have at least one marine national park. This review also recommends more protection for some important coral reefs and there is an expansion of protection from mining in some areas.

Most importantly, the review recognises the fundamental role of highly-protected marine national park zones in the conservation of species and ecosystems. As a corollary of this, the review also recognises that “partial protection” zones within reserves are primarily used to address narrow sector-based concerns such as fishing, and result in reduced conservation outcomes (as reviewed here and here).

It requires explanation therefore that the review mostly fails to recommend zoning changes consistent with its own findings on the science. In comparison with the 2013 recommended zoning, the review’s recommended zoning would:

(1) Remove a total of 127,000 square kilometres of marine national park from the overall network, an area 1.9 times the size of Tasmania, with a net loss of 76,000 sq km

(2) Reduce by 25% the contiguous Coral Sea marine national park

Changes to Coral Sea marine national park proposed by review. Map generated from shape files provided by the Department of the Environment.

(3) Demote 18 areas from marine national park zones to varying forms of partial protection

(4) Shift the location of some marine national parks from the continental shelf to offshore areas as a way of maintaining cover but further eroding representation and indeed reducing protection on the shelf where it is most needed.

Overall, the review’s recommendations would see only approximately 13% of Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone protected in marine national parks. This falls well below the recommended international standard of at least 30% of habitats being under high protection, or indeed higher levels as recently determined.

Smoke and mirrors

The recommendations in the review are tainted by a feeling of smoke and mirrors. While some of the review’s authors suggest that their recommendations would increase protection, there would indeed be a net loss of highly-protected zones should these recommendations be adopted by the government.

Under the review’s recommendations, Australia would do a great job of protecting the deep water abyss, but achieve little to protect ocean wildlife on the continental shelf where human pressures are highest. This out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach does not address the principles of marine conservation and also departs from recommendations from the research community.

Australian marine national parks are too-often relegated to residual areas of relatively little conservation value simply because these areas are of little value to commercial interests.

The significant erosion of protection in the Coral Sea is further evidence of this failure. Much of the erosion of this important reserve reflects a shift from full protection to partial protection in order to open up more ocean to tuna fishing.

The 25% reduction in large marine national park would increase tuna catch and value by 8-10% across the fishery, worth a mere A$26,376 to individual tuna fishers. This recommendation fails both the science and the economic test.

Where to from here?

The changes recommended by the review in many cases appear to prioritise economic benefits, no matter how trivial, over conservation. This is despite conservation being the core reason behind the marine reserves.

This stands in stark contrast to international moves towards protection of large areas of the ocean as a response to ongoing declines in ocean health.

Key examples of such large-scale protection are US President Barack Obama’s recent expansion of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument over the North West Hawaiian Islands and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key’s declaration of the Kermadec Marine Sanctuary in New Zealand’s waters.

Australia still has a major opportunity to protect and secure its marine ecosystems and make a significant contribution to global ocean conservation. At the same time we can develop important economic activities such as fishing and mining. Large and well-managed areas are going to become more important, not less, as climate change intensifies.

This will require the federal government to acknowledge and build on the global body of science and create a backbone of representative marine national parks. This will include retention of the Coral Sea’s high level protection and resisting the temptation to shift of marine national parks offshore. At a time of great environmental change, these moves are not just important, but urgent.

This is a contribution from the Ocean Science Council of Australia.

Jessica Meeuwig receives funding from a range of government and philanthropic organisations to support primary research on the state of our oceans and their response to management. She is a member of the Ocean Science Council of Australia.

Craig Johnson receives funding from the Australian Research Council and several other research providers to work on elucidating and predicting marine ecosystem dynamics, how these dynamics are influenced by human activity, and the spatial distribution of marine species and diversity. He works at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) at the University of Tasmania, and is a member of the Ocean Sciences Council of Australia (OSCA).

David Booth is affiliated with the Australian coral Reef Society and OSCA. He has received funding from the Australia Research Council for research into coral and fish dynamics on the Great Barrier Reef.

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg undertakes research on coral reef ecosystems and their response to rapid environmental change, which is supported primarily by the Australian Research Council (Canberra), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Washington, D.C.), Catlin Group (London), and Great Barrier Reef Foundation (Brisbane). He not receive salary for writing this article.

The Balleny Islands off East Antarctica - one of the many stops along the way. Krudller/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Spending three months inside a metal container on board an icebreaker in the Southern Ocean, filtering water while attempting to ignore freezing temperatures and huge ocean swells outside. It’s not everyone’s idea of fun … but it’s what I’ll be doing next year, in the name of climate science.

From late December 2016 to March 2017 I will be on board the Russian research vessel Akademik Treshnikov, taking part in an expedition that will take me and 54 other scientists from 30 countries on a complete lap of Antarctica – the first international research expedition to circumnavigate the frozen continent.

The Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (with the funky abbreviation ACE) is the first project run by the Swiss Polar Institute, and involves 22 projects covering different aspects of the biology, physics and chemistry of the Southern Ocean.

Rough ride

We’re not expecting the conditions to be particularly fun – but it will be worth it. A better understanding of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean surrounding it is critical – not just for the preservation of this pristine environment but also for the whole planet.

The Akademik Tryoshnikov: home for the first three months of 2017. Tvabutzku/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

The Southern Ocean is massive. It is also really far away from everywhere, which makes it hard for scientists to go there and study it. On top of that, there is no land at these latitudes to stop waves from building up, so waves can get really big, making the Southern Ocean a less than ideal environment for scientific work. I’m expecting that all of us will get seasick at some point.

Because of the size and isolation, our understanding of the physics, chemistry and biology of the Southern Ocean is not very good. What we do know is that this region is disproportionately important for the planet’s climate. For example, it was responsible for storing an estimated 43% of the carbon dioxide produced by humans between 1870 and 2005, and 75% of the overall oceanic heat uptake.

The ACE expedition is a unique opportunity to collect data in the Southern Ocean. The voyage will set off from South Africa, visiting all of the Southern Ocean’s main islands and traversing a range of latitudes – visiting the Antarctic coast just once, at Mertz Glacier in East Antarctica.

By spending three months completing a full circuit of the ocean, we will be able to collect an unprecedented set of samples and measurements, which will greatly improve our understanding of the Southern Ocean.

Productive research

My research is concerned with phytoplankton – microscopic algae that live in the sunlit surface layer of the oceans. Just like plants on land, phytoplankton in the oceans photosynthesise, using the energy from sunlight to “fix” carbon dioxide into organic biomass, producing oxygen as a by-product. The rate of this change in biomass is called primary productivity.

Phytoplankton primary production forms the base of marine food webs, making it a fundamental process of marine ecosystem dynamics and directly relevant to fishery yields.

It is also an important component of the carbon cycle, and therefore global climate dynamics. This is because through a process called the “biological pump” a fraction of the roughly 45 billion tonnes of carbon fixed by phytoplankton every year sinks out of the surface layer and is stored in the deep ocean, away from the atmosphere.

My colleagues and I are trying to improve our understanding of what controls the distribution of phytoplankton, the rates of primary productivity, and the variability in the biological pump in the Southern Ocean.

Unfortunately, even sending a shipload of scientist on a three-month voyage to the Southern Ocean to measure phytoplankton biomass, productivity, and other chemical and physical factors, can only provide a snapshot of what is really going on. Ideally, we need to monitor the whole Southern Ocean over seasons, years, and decades. And this can actually be done, with the help of a technique called satellite ocean colour radiometry.

The main focus of our research is the collection of so-called “bio-optical” data, which will improve our ability to interpret satellite observations and derive better estimates of phytoplankton biomass and productivity in the Southern Ocean. This, in turn, will allow us to use past satellite records to determine how phytoplankton biomass and productivity has changed over the past decades, and help to establish possible connections to ongoing climate change.

It also means that we will be able to use satellite data to monitor, essentially in real time, what is happening to phytoplankton biomass and productivity in the Southern Ocean, without having to rely on frequent and extensive expeditions. But in the meantime, I’ll be more than happy to be part of this adventure.

Nina Schuback is a research assistant in the remote sensing and satellite research group at Curtin University. Project ACE has been created with the support of Ferring Pharmaceuticals and contributions from the Swiss Polar Institute and the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne (EPFL).

A fifth of the Great Barrier Reef’s corals are dead after the worst bleaching event on record. Most of these deaths occurred in the northern part of the reef above Lizard Island.

Months after the bleaching event, research teams are now taking stock of the damage. Corals can recover from bleaching. But in a changing world they will have less time to do so before the next event.

Bleaching 101

Reef-building corals are animals that live symbiotically with one-celled algae (a species of dinoflagellate known as Symbiodinium, or colloquially as zooxanthellae).

The coral host provides safe habitat within its cells and supplies nutrients, while the algae in return feeds the coral with products from photosynthesis. This partnership is highly efficient. It allows stony corals that require a lot of energy to produce their skeletons to thrive in nutrient-poor tropical waters. But it is also a fragile balance.

Environmental stress, most commonly caused by increased water temperatures and elevated light conditions, can cause the zooxanthellae to produce too much reactive oxygen species, which is toxic to the coral. So the coral expels the algae.

This is what is actually happening when a coral “bleaches”. Expelling 90% or more of the algae, the coral’s skeleton becomes visible through its tissues.

A bleached coral can stay alive but is deprived of its primary food source and will begin to starve. Its metabolism suffers, the immune system becomes compromised, it becomes more susceptible to disease, and defence against coral predators, such as snails known as Drupella, is weakened.

Survivors of the bleaching are suffering from increased predation pressure. Drupella snails aggregate on the remaining live corals around Lizard Island following the 2016 bleaching event. Greg Torda

Depending on the intensity and duration of environmental stress, corals can die from the immediate impacts of a severe heat stress; starvation; disease or being eaten.

If conditions get better, corals can regain their symbiotic algae – and with it their brownish colour - from the surrounding water or from the multiplication of the remnant algae within their cells. In this way individual coral colonies can recover.

Corals weakened by heat stress are more susceptible to coral diseases. Here, skeletal eroding band disease is slowly killing a Pocillopora colony in the aftermath of the 2016 bleaching event. Greg Torda

Different coral species bleach at different stress levels, and some species are more likely to die directly from the conditions that cause bleaching.

For example, the fastest-growing corals are highly effective at capturing light to feed their algal fuel cells. Even under normal conditions they are living close to their maximum tolerance of temperature and light. These corals are far more susceptible to more light and temperature than other, slower growing corals.

Incidentally, these fast-growing corals are also the ones that provide the bulk of the intricate three-dimensional structure to the reef that is critical to most reef critters, including fish. Because of their enhanced metabolism, fast-growing corals also die in greatest numbers during bleaching events, therefore they have been considered the losers of coral bleaching.

Field of recently dead staghorn corals. These corals still provide habitat for some reef critters, but will soon erode to rubble. Greg Torda Reef recovery

Due to the variability in bleaching and coral deaths, even moderate bleaching events can decrease the amount of live coral on the reef’s structure and can dramatically alter the species composition.

The recovery of the reef after a disturbance, such as a bleaching event, happens when the amount of live coral covering the reef, the structural complexity, and the composition of the coral community all return to the levels prior to disturbance.

This requires the re-colonisation of the reef by coral propagules (larvae or fragments) that grow into large mature colonies over the course of years and decades.

In severe bleaching events, such as the most recent 2016 mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef and in parts of the remote Pacific Ocean, even the more thermally-tolerant, slow-growing corals severely bleached; several locations suffered large numbers of coral deaths.

The loss of slow growing corals is particularly alarming, because replacing these colonies will require decades, and in some cases centuries, to return the reefs to what they were just a short time ago.

It is unlikely that the reefs affected by the 2016 event in the northern Great Barrier Reef will recover for many decades.

Other symbiotic organisms such as this anemone can also bleach when stressed. Greg Torda Will there be a next time?

It is highly unlikely that reefs will get the decades they need to recover – in fact, the frequency of bleaching events is increasing.

Current trends in ocean temperature and future predictions suggest bleaching will occur each year within the coming decades. Some reefs around the world have just experienced consecutive years of bleaching, with barely any opportunity for colonies, let alone reefs, to recover.

Can corals adapt or acclimatise to elevated water temperatures over the course of a few years? Corals inhabiting unusually warm waters, such as the Persian Gulf and some areas of the Coral Triangle, demonstrate that long-term adaptation to a high temperature regime has been possible.

However, evidence to date suggests that these adaptive processes are unlikely to be able to keep up with climate change.

Action to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, and halt the associated warming, must be quickly and vigorously pursued to avert the predicted degradation of coral reefs. If this is not undertaken, the consequences for reefs will only be amplified from what we have seen this year.

Tracy Ainsworth receives funding from The Australian Research Council Discovery Program and the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

Greg Torda receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is also affiliated with the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

Scott Heron receives funding from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Satellites division (NESDIS) and Coral Reef Conservation Program, and is affiliated with James Cook University. The contents in this piece are solely the opinions of the authors and do not constitute a statement of policy, decision or position on behalf of NOAA or the U.S. Government.

Australia's oceans are heating up. Richard Rydge/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO have released their fourth biennial State of the Climate Report.

State of the Climate 2016 provides an update on the changes and long-term trends in Australia’s climate. The report’s observations are based on the extensive climate monitoring capability and programs of CSIRO and the Bureau, which provide a detailed picture of variability and trends in Australia’s marine and terrestrial climates. The science underpinning State of the Climate informs impact assessment and planning across all sectors of the economy and the environment.

One of the report’s key observations is carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. A key component of global CO₂ monitoring is the joint Bureau and CSIRO atmospheric monitoring station in Cape Grim, Tasmania, one of three premier global baseline monitoring stations in the world, along with Mauna Loa in Hawaii and Alert in Nunavut, Canada.

CO₂ concentrations at Cape Grim passed through 400 parts per million for the first time in May 2016, and global concentrations are now at their highest levels in the past two million years.

It takes time for the climate system to warm in response to increases in greenhouse gases, and the historical emissions over the past century have locked in some warming over the next two decades, regardless of any changes we might make to global emissions in that period. Current and future global emissions will, however, make a difference to the rate and degree of climate change in the second half of the 21st century.

State of the Climate focuses on current climate trends that are likely to continue into the near future. This acknowledges that climate change is happening now, and that we will be required to adapt to changes during the next 30 years.

While natural variability continues to play a large role in Australia’s climate, some long-term trends are apparent. The terrestrial climate has warmed by around 1℃ since 1910, with an accompanying increase in the duration, frequency and intensity of extreme heat events across large parts of Australia. There has been an increase in extreme fire weather, and a lengthening of the fire season in most fire-prone regions since the 1970s.

Annual mean temperature changes across Australia since 1910. State of the Climate 2016 Trends from 1974 to 2015 in annual 90th percentile of daily Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) at 38 climate reference locations. Trends are in FFDI points per decade and larger circles represent larger trends. Filled circles represent statistically significant trends. Trends are upward (in red), except for Brisbane airport (in blue). State of the Climate 2016

Observations also show that atmospheric circulation changes in the Southern Hemisphere have led to an average reduction in rainfall across parts of southern Australia.

In particular, May–July rainfall has reduced by around 19% since 1970 in the southwest of Australia. There has been a decline of around 11% since the mid-1990s in April–October rainfall in the continental southeast. Southeast Australia has had below-average rainfall in 16 of the April–October periods since 1997.

Australia’s oceans have also warmed, with sea surface temperature increases closely matching those experienced on land. This warming affects both the marine environment and Australia’s terrestrial climate, due to the large influence of surrounding oceans on our weather systems. Sea levels have risen around Australia, which has the potential to amplify the effects of high tides and storm surges.

Trends in sea surface temperature in the Australian region from 1950 to 2015. State of the Climate 2016 Estimates of the change in ocean heat content over the full ocean depth, from 1960 to present. Shading provides an indication of the confidence range of the estimate. State of the Climate 2016

The report has new findings compared to State of the Climate 2014.

Significantly, we report that warming in the global oceans now extends to at least 2,000 metres below the surface. These observations are made possible by the Argo array of global floats that has been monitoring ocean temperatures over the past decade. When we talk about the climate system continuing to warm in response to historical greenhouse gas emissions, that is almost entirely due to ongoing ocean warming, which these observations show is now steadily in train.

The other new inclusion is the science of extreme event attribution.

In the past five years, an increasing number of studies, using both statistical and modelling techniques, have quantified the role of global warming in individual extreme events. This complements previous science which partly attributes a change in the frequency of extreme weather, such as an increase in the number of heatwaves, to global warming.

In Australia, this includes studies that used the Bureau’s Predictive Ocean Atmosphere Model for Australia (POAMA) to essentially predict observed extreme events in a modelled climate with and without an enhanced greenhouse effect.

In particular, studies of record heat experienced during Spring in 2013 and 2014 have shown that the observed high temperatures received an extra contribution from background global warming.

These studies are an initial step towards understanding how climate change could affect the dynamics of the climate and weather system. In turn, this work provides greater intelligence for those managing climate risks.

State of the Climate 2016 can be read on either the Bureau or CSIRO‘s websites. The online report includes an extensive list of references and useful links.

Watch the State of the Climate 2016 summary video.

CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Department of the Environment and Energy have provided a comprehensive portal for climate projection science, data and information called Climate Change in Australia. This website includes regional climate projections, a publication library, guidance material and a range of interactive tools.

Karl Braganza is the manager of the Climate Monitoring Section in the Bureau of Meteorology's Environment and Research Division. The Bureau of Meteorology provides Australians with environmental intelligence for their safety, sustainability, well-being and prosperity. Our weather, climate and water services include observations, alerts, warnings and forecasts for extreme events.

Steve Rintoul works for CSIRO. He receives funding from the Australian Climate Change Science Program and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre.

Here’s a quick politics quiz. Who said this?

Australia has a major stake in the fossil fuel industries… Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and the fifth largest exporter of LNG. We have just below one-tenth of the world’s known coal reserves. Coal has been a major contributor to our nation’s prosperity and that of many of our trading partners.

And who said this?

Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world… Energy is what sustains our prosperity, and coal is the world’s principal energy source and it will be for many decades to come.

And what about this?

Coal is going to be an important part of our energy mix, there is no question about that, for many, many, many decades to come, on any view.

If you answered Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull (in that order), give yourself top marks.

Since John Howard, all Australian prime ministers have faced major challenges regarding the gap between Australia’s role as a major exporter of coal and its fluctuating ambitions to help tackle climate change.

Turnbull has now shown himself to be no exception, with yesterday’s comments about coal being important for decades to come marking a retreat from his previous rhetoric of policy change. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given how bloody the past few years of Australian climate policy have been.

Howard’s end

Howard spent the first decade of his prime ministership denying the urgency of the climate issue, blocking several proposals for emissions trading schemes (for the gory details see Guy Pearse’s High and Dry and Clive Hamilton’s Scorcher).

By late 2006, with the millennium drought and water restrictions affecting not just rural Australia but cities too, and with Al Gore driving a worldwide change in attitudes, Howard performed a spectacular U-turn, commissioning a high-profile review of an emission trading scheme. But it was too little, too late.

Rudd, using climate change to distinguish himself from Howard, memorably labelled the issue as the “great moral challenge of our generation” while still in opposition.

Kevin Rudd declaring climate change was “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

Later, he spoke of the “responsibility” that comes with mining fossil fuels. But when his 2009 legislation for a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was blocked twice, Rudd failed to call the expected double dissolution election, and the scheme was notably missing from the 2010 budget. Within a month, a weakened Rudd saw his personal approval ratings plummet from 50% to 39%, amid a growing perception that he did not believe his own fine words about climate policy.

His successor Julia Gillard found climate change just as tricky. Her problems began early in the 2010 federal election campaign, with the much-derided proposal for a citizens’ assembly to discuss climate policy.

Then came her infamous interview, three days before the election, featuring the immortal words “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”. (However she went on to say in the same interview that she would be “leading a national debate to reach a consensus about putting a cap on carbon pollution” – in other words, working towards an emissions trading scheme.)

Watch all of Julia’s Gillard famous pre-election ‘no carbon tax’ interview.

Gillard’s fate was effectively sealed by her decision in February 2011 not to challenge the characterisation of her new carbon pricing scheme as a “tax”. In her memoir, Gillard describes this as “the worst political mistake I have ever made, and I paid dearly for it”.

Abbott had declared himself a “weather vane” on climate change, but in late 2009, appropriately enough in a town called Beaufort, he found his new direction.

He challenged Turnbull for the Liberal leadership of the Liberal Party over the latter’s support for Rudd’s CPRS, and won by a single vote (one Liberal, never identified, had spoilt their ballot, with a simple “no”). He spent the next three years crusading against Labor’s “great big new tax on everything”, and repealed it within a year of becoming prime minister.

At least he had remained consistent all along, so it was little surprise when Abbott later declared that “coal is good for humanity”.

Malcolm in the middle

Turnbull is perhaps the most interesting case of all. In October 2009, with pressure building in the wake of the utegate scandal, he declared on talk radio that he would not lead a party that was not as committed to climate change action as him.

His party duly obliged him the following month. Days later, he branded Abbott’s “direct action” climate policy “bullshit”.

In mid-2010, while launching the 100% renewables plan for Beyond Zero Emissions, Turnbull declared that “concentrated solar thermal is a more proven technology than clean coal”.

A very different Malcolm Turnbull on climate and energy in 2010.

While he never set expectations as high as Rudd, and Liberal voters are generally less concerned about climate change than Labor’s, Turnbull’s turnaround puts him in just as perilous a position.

As both Rudd and Gillard discovered, once voters start to think you don’t mean what you say, your personal approval dips and trouble begins to brew. Fine words can land you in a fine mess if you don’t stick to them.

Why does the coal rhetoric never change?

The gap between what the scientists tell us we need to do to have any hope of avoiding catastrophic warming and what is politically possible seems to be growing daily. One way of explaining that is by looking at the power of vested interests.

It’s true that some resource industry advertising campaigns have fallen flat and been mocked. It’s also true that the climate denial lobby, while small, has recently gained some fresh power through the election of One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts to the Senate and the appointment of Craig Kelly as chair of the federal environment and energy committee.

But more important is the broader picture of policy failure and stasis globally. In truth, no country is doing a particularly good job on climate change, and climate change is hardly the only issue that has the gears of Australian governance grinding (along with the teeth of the populace).

Laura Tingle, in two recent Quarterly Essays, has looked at both the contradictory expectations Australians have of their governments, and also what institutional memory exists within the bureaucracies, the political parties and the media. Her conclusions are alarming and depressing.

Perhaps our best hope is that the amnesia deepens, so that in 30 years’ time young people with pitchforks will not remember that we did not act when there was still a chance.

Marc Hudson 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.

Can Australia achieve fair and open decision-making when big coal players are involved? The case of Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal mine suggests the answer is no, and Indigenous land owners are bearing the brunt.

The Queensland government’s recent decision to declare the mine “critical infrastructure” grants the Queensland Coordinator General extraordinary powers to progress the development.

Yet the highly contentious mine continues to face criticism for its environmental impacts, as well as financial woes, as well as active resistance from traditional land owners in the region, represented by the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners council.

Carmichael in court

The mine has now faced several court challenges, including lawsuits on the basis of groundwater and biodiversity, climate change (including the burning of coal and its impacts for global warming and the Great Barrier Reef), and questions over whether it is economically viable and in the public interest.

While the decisions have generally fallen in favour of the mine, they have provided a platform for experts to expose the project’s impacts and the current limitations of environmental laws. They have also secured additional environmental conditions for the project’s approval.

The Carmichael mine is also a battleground for human rights concerns and specifically the rights of Indigenous peoples. The Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners council are engaged in several legal cases that could impact on the licensing of the project, leading to further delays, investment risk, and leases and agreements being overturned.

Wangan and Jagalingou council say the mine will “tear the heart out” of their ancestral lands, which is why they remain resolute in saying no to a land deal with Adani and the atate. These challenges sit outside the current powers of the Coordinator General and are at the intersection of Australia’s native title system and the rights of Indigenous peoples under international law and conventions.

For Indigenous communities, the mine’s Indigenous Participation Plan would deliver the equivalent of a paltry A$5,000 for each person living in the region each year, a scenario described by one traditional owner as “not a future for Aboriginal people, it’s a scam”.

Sidelining dissenting voices

Besides championing coal, state and federal ministers have repeatedly called for significant winding back of environmental (and other) laws that regulate mining, thereby closing down options to oppose the coal industry’s expansion.

Eroding the rights of activists and watering down laws is part and parcel of the approaches to marginalise dissenting voices, and thereby eroding democracy.

These approaches include expediting court processes to constrain landholders’ rights to object to proposed mines, and reducing the scope and legitimacy of environmental and social impact assessments.

Meanwhile, those who challenge the growth of Australia’s coal industry - including environmentalists, Indigenous rights activists, progressive philanthropists and lawyers - are labelled “irresponsible” and economic saboteurs.

Recent news that environmental groups have received funding from donors in the United States are being used to misrepresent opposition to Australia’s coal industry as driven by foreign interests.

Yet what the array of environmental and Indigenous legal cases against Adani powerfully demonstrate is the tireless commitment of (often volunteer) local, regional, and in some cases national, organisations and groups, as well as public interest lawyers, seeking to engage in democratic legal processes to shore up sound decision making, as well as the future for the regions in which many of these activists live.

In response, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has indicated he may revisit laws to prevent environmental groups taking projects like the Carmichael mine to court, harking back to a debate started by Attorney-General George Brandis last year.

The Indigenous rights agenda

In the case of the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners council, this campaigning occurs despite severe disadvantages (as documented during a recent visit by the UN Special Rapporteur), including severe pressure from mining companies.

It is also curious to note that amid the flurry of recent media coverage of anti-coal activism, Indigenous opposition to the Carmichael mine has been largely whited out of the story, except where traditional owners are insulted as simply bit players under the influence of the environmental movement.

This is despite the sustained opposition to the mine from the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners’, who have said no to Adani three times. By ignoring them, government and media fail to acknowledge the Indigenous rights-based challenge to the Carmichael mine, and the campaign which could unravel the thin veneer of native title on which the state relies to sanction the project.

By saying no to Adani, Wangan and Jagalingou council are leaders in the global climate change and human rights movement. They are at the forefront in carving out a path that challenges Australia to meet its international responsibilities.

It remains to be seen whether Australia has the vision and courage to commit to a human rights agenda in grappling with the challenges of climate change and energy transition. Respecting Traditional Owners’ right to say “no deal” to Adani would be a great start.

Kristen Lyons is a member of the Australian Greens and policy think tanks the Oakland Institute and the Ngara Institute.

Earth is distinguished from all other known planets by the presence of a warm, salty ocean that covers over 70% of its surface. The ocean puts food on the table, provides jobs, and underpins trillions of dollars of economic activity worldwide.

In a new report for the WWF, we looked in particular at how Melanesia’s ocean economy is fairing. Melanesians - the people of Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu - have a strong social and cultural dependency on the sea.

Faced with looming global challenges such as climate change and food security, the region is a now at a crossroads.

Why is Melanesia’s ocean important?

Based on conservative estimates, the annual “gross marine product” of the Melanesian region – the equivalent of a country’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) – is estimated to be at least US$5.4 billion. This is broadly equivalent to the combined GDPs of Fiji and the Solomon Islands, making it the third largest economy in the region.

Melanesia’s ocean assets, including fisheries and marine habitats, as well as “services” such as coastlines and carbon absorption, are valued at a minimum of US$548 billion.

Ocean assets provide a range of valuable goods and services, including food and raw materials, income, energy, tourism, recreation, cultural practices, protection from storms, and climate regulation. Maintaining healthy ocean assets is therefore vital for the future of the Melanesian region.

However, it is becoming increasingly clear that Melanesia’s ocean and its precious assets are under mounting pressures. These changes will have implications for the environment, food security, employment and the well-being of human communities both within the region and beyond.

In some isolated circumstances, eroding the ocean assets of Melanesia may lead to short-term benefits for certain places and people. However, any positive changes are likely to be short lived and specific to one country or another. For instance, declining catches for some species of tuna are already predicted for Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands by 2035.

Climate change will add to the challenge. Future climate projections include rising air and sea surface temperatures, increases in annual and seasonal rainfall, increasing intensity of tropical cyclones, rising sea levels and increasing acidity of the ocean.

Reports of coral bleaching, fish kills and severe Tropical Cyclone Winston that affected the Melanesian region this year, coupled with high rates of sea-level rise are a clear reminder of the difficulties the region faces amid a rapidly changing climate.

Melanesia at the crossroads

Melanesian leaders are now faced with two pathways for the management of its marine resources and securing ecological and economic prosperity.

The first is the current trajectory of increasing pressure on ocean assets coupled with inadequate policy and/or action. This pathway will lead to a degraded future in which opportunities for the inhabitants of the Melanesian region will be significantly diminished.

The second trajectory is to move towards a sustainable and inclusive blue economy. Such an approach will ensure that coastal assets contribute to the true prosperity and resilience of the Melanesian region long into the future.

The oceans and coastal ecosystems are vital to life on Earth, and achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) without the services the oceans provide will be challenging, if not impossible.

While Goal 14 focuses specifically on the ocean, a sustainable and inclusive blue economy will incorporate and build strategies that are important to meeting many of the other SDGs. This priority is interlocked with other international priorities, such as achieving a safe climate through the recent Paris Agreement.

It would also provide social and economic benefits for current and future generations by contributing to food security, reducing poverty, livelihoods, income, employment, health, safety, equity and political stability.

In addition, it would also restore, protect and maintain the diversity, productivity, resilience, core functions and intrinsic value of marine ecosystems – the natural capital upon which its prosperity depends.

Ways forward

Pacific leaders have already generally acknowledged the importance of working together across the region.

Examples include work on inshore fisheries management and sustainable development.

There have been some successes such as the Vessel Day Scheme, which limits the number of days that fishers can fish, and community coastal management such as locally managed marine areas. These are helping to guide spatial planning and integrate conservation and sustainable use of marine resources.

In light of Melanesia’s eroding ocean asset base, the new report acknowledges the commitments already made and sets out a clear set of measures that Melanesian leaders can adopt. These build on traditional environmental stewardship to protect the region’s natural coastal and ocean assets.

While our new report puts the spotlight on Melanesia and presents an economic case for greater management, the perspectives are equally applicable to the Pacific region as a whole, given that the ocean connects the island nations, rather than separates them.

The economic analysis for this report was led by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

This article was coauthored by John Tanzer (Oceans Leader WWF International), Kesaia Tabunakawai (Representative WWF-Pacific), and Paul Gamblin (Oceans Communications WWF International).

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg undertakes research on coral reef ecosystems and their response to rapid environmental change, which is supported primarily by the Australian Research Council (Canberra), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Washington, D.C.), Catlin Group (London), and Great Barrier Reef Foundation (Brisbane). He not receive salary for writing this article.

Tyrone Ridgway 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.

Farmers markets are one way to find local produce. Farmers market image from www.shutterstock.com

Being a “locavore” means choosing food that is grown locally, and is one way that you can help ensure there is more food to go around.

To feed the predicted nine billion people in the world in 2050, the world will need to produce 70-100% more food. This unprecedented increase in food production will require substantial changes in soil management, land cultivation, and crop production.

This cannot be achieved without technological advances that increase crop yield and reduce the need to use nitrogen-based fertilisers. The question is how this can be achieved sustainably, while also tackling climate change.

This is where “eating local” comes in.

What is eating local?

The primary reason why eating local is good for the planet is the reduction in energy resources required for transport and storage. Generally, the further a food has travelled from “paddock to plate”, the greater its impact on the environment. This is because of fuel used in transport and increased greenhouse gas emissions used for refrigerated storage.

The mode of transport matters too. Transporting food by air generates 177 times more greenhouse gases than shipping it.

The global food system lets us eat food from all over the world, all year round. But food miles impact adversely on the nutritional quality of fresh foods, and on the environment.

Yet while eating foods grown close to where we live makes planetary sense, farmers markets and foods grown more sustainably (organically) often carry a price premium, and seem to be targeted to a trendy and wealthy demographic.

The lack of a definition of “eating locally” also raises questions of how to incorporate organic and fair trade produce within the larger sustainability movement, and how to support developing nations.

Global supply chains place great demands on ecosystems and natural resources, and large distances between where food is produced and consumed is often seen as evidence of an unsustainable food system. However, this is not always as straightforward as it appears.

Take the case of seafood. Australia is in the enviable position of having been ranked in the top five countries for fisheries management and the majority of commercial fish stocks in Australia are assessed as sustainable.

However, 72% of seafood consumed in Australia is imported. Surprisingly, there is little difference between the carbon footprint of meals made using imported seafood compared with those of three domestic wild-caught fish.

10 tips for eating local

So given that eating local can be tricky, here are 10 tips:

1: Become familiar with foods that are grown or produced locally and what time of the year they are available. Seasonal food guides are available from some fruit markets and online such as one developed for south-east Queensland.

2: Look for local farmers markets, community gardens, food co-operatives and community supported agriculture schemes. Green Connect is one example of a community-supported agriculture scheme operating in the Illawarra region of New South Wales. In some states such as Tasmania, a thriving food tourism culture may encourage consumers to eat locally but this concept has not been replicated in other parts of the country.

3: Grow your own fruit and vegetables and keep chickens in your own backyard, or get involved in your local community garden, and trade produce with neighbours.

4: Read the labels of packaged foods. The new “Made in Australia” labelling on foods makes it easier to determine where the food (and its individual components) has been grown, processed and packaged.

Australia’s origin labelling can help choose food produced closer to home. Australia government

5: Choose less processed foods. Generally, the more processed a food is, the more energy and water it requires in the production process. Replace junk food with fresh fruit, nuts and vegetables.

6: Take the Eco Friendly Food Challenge and get some friends to join you.

7: Cook meals using fresh ingredients rather than purchasing ready-made meals.

8: Ask your food retailers and manufacturers about the origin of the food you are buying. Locate fruit and vegetable retailers, butchers, delicatessens and fishmongers who sell food produced locally.

9: Limit your intake of alcohol and purchase locally-grown alcohol with the lowest food miles possible. If you enjoy a particular beer or wine, contact the manufacturer to learn about their environmental policies and to advocate for more environmentally friendly production methods.

10: The Fair Food Forager app allows you to search for food outlets that adhere to fair and sustainable practices.

Creating consumer demand for more locally and sustainably produced food is being led not only by food champion Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, but also by our very own Australian Youth Food Movement, whose organisers are passionate about improving the food supply for future generations.

Karen Charlton receives funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, University of Wollongong, Illawarra Health and Medical Research Institute, and has completed consultancies for the Australian Meals on Wheels Organization.

Amy Carrad receives PhD funding support from University of Wollongong. Amy is a volunteer for the Youth Food Movement.

Putting a price on carbon would benefit the Australian gas industry, at least in the short term. It is therefore in the interests of gas producers to lobby for the emissions trading scheme proposed for the electricity industry by the Climate Change Authority.

At first a sight this might seem a paradoxical suggestion. Isn’t carbon pricing meant to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels after all?

But with gas prices high, coal-fired generation has been increasing. Coal produces about twice as much carbon dioxide as gas when it is used to generate electricity. This is bad news for our emissions, which have increased in the electricity sector recently.

A price on carbon would help to reverse this trend and enable gas to play the role it sees for itself as a stepping stone to a decarbonised future.

So how might this work in practice?

Less gas means more coal

In Australia, electricity demand is relatively flat, so we are not likely to see an increase in the number of fossil fuel power stations. Nor are we likely to see new gas-fired power stations built to replace existing coal-fired power stations – that makes little economic sense at the moment.

This is where the current price of gas is important. Because the newly-completed liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals in Queensland are sucking up so much gas for export, the domestic price for gas has risen to the point that gas-fired power stations in the eastern states are increasingly unable to compete with coal.

As a result the amount of coal-fired generation has been steadily increasing over the last couple of years while gas-fired generation has been cut back “very substantially”. Some gas-fired power stations have been mothballed. So there is now considerable, unused gas-fired generation capacity.

From the point of view of gas producers, this is therefore a perfect time to introduce a price on carbon, since it will drive up the price of coal-fired power, relative to gas. This will slow to decline in gas use and ultimately reverse it. Gas-fired generators will be able to meet this increased demand from existing, under-used capacity.

In this scenario, gas-fired generators would buy gas at the current relatively high prices. This means that electricity will be more expensive to produce. Whether this means that consumers end up paying higher prices is another matter and depends critically on the design of the carbon-pricing scheme.

Policy hotchpotch

The government’s Climate Change Authority recently proposed a carbon-pricing scheme for the electricity industry, known as an emissions-intensity scheme. It is designed to be as palatable as possible to both sides of politics, so that if implemented it would not suffer the fate of the Labor government’s carbon tax, which the Liberal opposition abhorred and abolished as soon as it gained power in 2014.

One of the features of the Authority’s proposal is that it is not a tax paid to government. Rather it involves a subsidy paid by high-emissions, low-cost generators, such as coal-fired power stations, to low-emissions, higher-cost generators such as gas-fired power stations. This means that gas-fired generators will not need to pass on their full production costs to consumers. This will minimise the impact on electricity prices.

Of course, if the government were to accept the Authority’s recommendations for the electricity sector, it would presumably accept its recommendations for other areas of the economy. This is significant, because gas producers don’t just feed into the electricity sector.

Exported LNG would not be subject to any carbon price in Australia because it is not consumed here. However, converting natural gas to its liquid form consumes a large amount of energy. Indeed, 8% of the gas supplied to LNG terminals is used in the production process. This makes LNG an emissions-intensive industry.

Any price imposed on such emissions would drive up the price of Australian LNG relative to countries with no similar carbon price, to the detriment of Australia’s producers. In short, LNG is a “trade-exposed industry”. In particular, in the language of policy makers, it is an EITE (emissions-intensive and trade-exposed) industry.

The Authority considered the case of EITE industries carefully and expressed sympathy with the submission on this point made by the peak oil and gas producers association – APPEA.

It recommended that policy for EITE industries should include a suite of measures designed to protect them from this kind of competition. The LNG industry therefore has little to fear from the implementation of the Authority’s recommendations in this respect.

The Climate Change Authority did not recommend that existing polices be dismantled and replaced with a single coherent, economy-wide policy. Instead it recommended additions to the patchwork of existing polices, with a particular focus on the electricity sector.

This was criticised in some quarters as unprincipled, but defended by the Authority on the grounds that it was vital that we find a way forward that was as bipartisan as possible, so as to provide maximum certainty for investors. APPEA’s submission to the Authority was clearly against this “hotchpotch” approach.

But the Authority’s proposals offer the best chance for achieving bipartisan support. The government intends to review its climate policies in the coming year. APPEA should be lobbying the government to implement the Authority’s proposals, both in its own interests and in the interest of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

Andrew Hopkins has been a consultant to various petroleum companies on ways to reduce major accident risk.

Right whales have been shown to be affected by noise pollution. FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

The sounds of the sea are associated with tranquillity and relaxation. People go to the beach to enjoy the soothing crash of ocean waves. But beneath the surface of the ocean, there is no peace and quiet for whales and dolphins.

The increasing use of the sea for human activities has resulted in a dramatic rise in noise levels. A new film, Sonic Sea, screening at the Environmental Film Festival Australia, shows that the ocean is not at all silent. It highlights our emerging understanding of the consequences of human-produced noise pollution in the ocean.

The documentary, directed by Michelle Dougherty and Daniel Hinerfeld, brings together beautiful cinematography and audio effects that draw viewers into this ethereal underwater world.

When mammals returned to the sea, they evolved to use sound as their primary way to navigate through their environment. This is because sound travels further and more efficiently through water than air.

For marine mammals, using sound to communicate, and to see (echolocate), is invaluable. But this dependence by marine mammals on underwater sound is now a trap; they have nowhere to escape the increasing underwater noise.

Where does the noise come from?

The film presents three major sources of human-produced noise in the ocean: shipping, seismic exploration, and military sonar.

Shipping noise is acoustically overwhelming the ocean, doubling every decade with no hint of slowing. Not only is the number of ships increasing, but they are also getting bigger and carrying more containers.

This noise reduces the distance over which animals can communicate with one another, forcing them to compete with increasing background noise.

Finding mates would become more difficult meaning whales may miss out on the opportunity to breed.

Alarmingly, this increasing noise has been shown to cause stress in the northern right whales, one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals. The situation can be likened to being in the audience at a rock concert without being able to leave.

Mass stranding events of beaked whales have been linked to the use of military sonar. It appears that these whales have a marked behavioural response to some types of sonar. This may be why the whales strand at times when military sonar has been used. This has raised serious concerns for the navy about whether, and where, this type of sonar can be used.

Even though seismic explosions, used by oil and gas companies, do not cause direct harm to whales, the blasts do drive them away from the area. Fish, on the other hand, are deafened by these detonations and we have seen a long-term drop in numbers with the prolonged use of seismic air guns.

Turning down the volume

The film presents various solutions to help reduce the amount of noise that is generated and the impact caused to these vulnerable animals.

Our heavy reliance on ships for the transport of goods means we cannot simply stop their movement. But it is possible to implement quieter and more efficient engines and propellers to reduce noise.

Critical habitat such as feeding and breeding grounds, as well as migratory routes, need to be identified and protected.

When whales are present, harmful activities such as seismic blasts and sonar need to stop.

The film concludes by leaving viewers with the question: what would the world look like if we don’t reduce our impacts? It raises the question of sustainability and the legacy we will leave for future generations once we are gone.

Sonic Sea is screening at the Environmental Film Festival Australia in Sydney on Saturday October 22, 2016.

Gary Truong is affiliated with UNSW Australia.

Tracey Rogers receives funding from Australian Research Council. She is affiliated with UNSW Australia.

Wind farms are pushing down the price of electricity in the electricity market. Chris J Stewart, Starfish Wind Farm, Cape Jervis, South Australia., CC BY-SA

While Australia’s energy market operator continues its investigation into South Australia’s recent state-wide blackout, there are important questions being asked.

For instance, was extreme weather the only cause? Has South Australia replaced fossil fuels with renewables too quickly?

And is the Australia’s Renewable Energy Target (RET) too ambitious all together?

It is impossible to find answers without understanding how the energy market works, and how replacing one source of energy with another actually happens.

How does the market work?

Most Australians (barring the Northern Territory and Western Australia) get their electricity through the National Electricity Market.

Suppose all the energy users, at a particular day and time, switch on lights, computers, industrial machinery, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, traffic control equipment and more. Added together, they determine how much energy is needed or demanded at that very point in time.

On the other side of the poles and wires, different independent electricity generators – thermal, hydro, wind, solar – are offering energy to the market, each at a price enabling them to recover costs and make a reasonable profit. This is called bidding.

Contemporary electronic technology allows for the wholesale market to take electricity and bids every five minutes, and allocate amounts accepted from the successful bidders. And who are those successful bidders?

All current bids are ranked by unit price. Allocation starts from the lowest-price bidder, then the second lowest one, and continues on until the current demand is met. The last accepted bidder’s price becomes the spot market price, and allows other successful bidders to make more or less profit.

How do renewables affect the market?

The main incentive policy for wind farms in Australia is the Renewable Energy Target (RET), which legislates that 33 gigawatt hours of electricity must come from renewable sources by 2020. As part of the RET, large-scale renewable energy generators (solar and wind farms) receive credits (certificates) for electricity they generate, which are then purchased by retailers to meet the target.

This market is separate to the National Electricity Market (NEM) and acts as a second income source for renewable energy generators.

With this in mind, we have modelled what happens when wind energy is phased into the market based on five minute electricity market data for several years.

The running (marginal) cost of wind generators is zero (because wind is free), unlike traditional thermal technology (which has to pay for coal and gas). Subsequently, wind generators recover their fixed costs and obtain profit in the difference between marginal cost and market price based on “more expensive” bids.

In the long run, wind generation decreases the market price through the bidding process. So with an increase in the energy volume generated by wind, the traditional sources are pushed out from the market. The chart below illustrates this process for South Australia.

As more wind enters the market, other players are pushed out. Gennadi Kazakevitch

Because their fixed costs can be recovered through the RET, wind generators can bid at near zero prices and completely eliminate traditional competitors. Therefore, wind generation can only naturally exist in the market if there are other, more expensive forms of generation to set the price. Otherwise wind farms could not recover their costs without the RET.

This means that there is an optimal proportion of wind energy in the market, where more expensive thermal generators set the market price.

If there is an optimum amount of wind energy in the market, this has important consequences for the RET. The target artificially increases the proportion of wind energy that can be sustained in the grid. While this may be the goal of the RET, without the incentive, wind capacity would eventually fall back to the market optimum.

In practice, this would occur as wind farms reach their natural life of about 20 years and aren’t replaced. So the RET won’t maintain or increase wind energy in the market in the long term, unless the incentives continue indefinitely.

The current RET is legislated to 2030, with a target set for 2020. To encourage wind energy in the long term, it would be required, then, to support the RET by an ongoing financial inducement without a closing date.

Without any financial inducement, wind farm developers would not increase capacity beyond the optimal point, and some thermal generation will continue to exist. Thermal generation can be completely excluded only if all the fixed costs of wind energy can be recovered through the RET. This is impractical and beyond the intentions of the policy.

So as it stands, our modelling suggests the RET is not a good way to increase the amount of wind generation in the electricity network. However our conclusions are different for other renewable energy sources such as hydro, which also have near zero marginal costs but have much longer lifetimes.

Therefore, where and if possible, we need to use a mix of technology, rather than overemphasising wind generation technology.

This article was co-authored by Henry McMillan, masters candidate at Monash University focusing on regulatory and energy economics.

Gennadi Kazakevitch 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.

According to data released by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this week, September 2016 was the second-hottest September on record globally. Until then, every month since April 2015 was the hottest for its month on record (the hottest August, the hottest July, and so on).

Back in April 2015, Donald Trump was still considering whether to run for US president while Malcolm Turnbull was still five months away from becoming Australian Prime Minister. Since then we’ve also seen two new versions of the iPhone come out.

So our 16-month streak of record heat is a long one. In fact it’s the longest in NOAA’s 137-year records of global temperatures. Other global temperature series have slightly different records but the general story is the same – the last couple of years have been very hot.

Rising temperatures

Heat records are a clear sign that temperatures are rising. If they weren’t, you wouldn’t expect too many new records after more than a century of measurements. For example, to get a record-hot September now means that it has to be hotter than all the other Septembers that have gone before, all 136 of them.

Statistically we might expect record hot or cold months about only once a decade if temperatures were flat. Records are often clustered, one hot month is usually followed by another one.

Of course we do have a trend in global temperatures and this makes breaking heat records much more likely. Without the effect of climate change it’s very unlikely we’d be experiencing so many records.

In contrast, we haven’t experienced a cold record in a very long time. The last record-cold year globally was in 1911, but there have been 20 record-hot years since then up to 2015.

Several studies have shown that even on more local scales we experience far more hot records than cold records, including in Australia where we’ve experienced 12 times as many hot records as cold ones. The increase in hot records has been attributed to climate change.

The El Niño after the ‘hiatus’

The last couple of years have been strongly influenced by El Niño. The expulsion of heat from the ocean into the lower atmosphere (where most of our temperature measurements are made) means that these periods are about one-tenth of a degree more than average.

In comparison, human-caused climate change has warmed the planet by about one degree Celsius. Combining the warming signal of climate change with the El Niño has led to the record warmth over the past 16 consecutive months.

Global temperature anomalies for 1950-2016 (from a 1901-2005 average) with red bars marking El Niño years and blue bars marking La Niña years. The 2016 estimate is the difference between the years of the last strong El Niño (1997 and 1998) added to the 2015 anomaly. The warmth of the last three years follows the early-2000s Benjamin Henley, data from NOAA

The 2015-16 El Niño came off the back of the so-called warming hiatus. From about 2000-14 the Earth experienced very little warming. This has been linked to decade-length variability in the Pacific Ocean. Since 2014, the warming has restarted and this has meant that record heat across the globe is now more likely.

Australia avoids the heat

If you’re reading this in Australia you might be thinking, where’s all this heat? After a warm summer and a record-hot autumn the winter was pretty wet with cities such as Melbourne feeling cool compared to previous winters. But across Australia, this winter past was the sixth warmest and second wettest on record.

September was warmer than average for most of the globe but not southwestern Australia. NOAA

More recently, September was actually cooler than average (one of the few spots across the globe to not be abnormally warm) as well as the second wettest since 1900. The wetter-than-normal conditions were associated with very warm waters to the west of Australia feeding in more moisture across the continent. The wet weather prevented heat from building up.

Australia only represents a small part of the globe though, and overall the world is still experiencing near-record warmth. Over the next few months we’re less likely to see global heat records fall. Now that the El Niño has well and truly disappeared, replaced by cooler waters in the central Pacific, the record warmth is likely gone. For now.

This won’t prevent 2016 as a whole almost certainly becoming the hottest year on record. This will make it the third consecutive record-breaking hot year globally.

And when the next big El Niño comes, combining with a growing human-induced climate change effect, we can be confident more heat records will fall.

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

Benjamin J. Henley receives funding from an ARC Linkage Project and is associated with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Companies have been caught off guard by campaigns to divest from fossil fuels. Kamyar Adl/Flickr, CC BY

Climate change poses a major threat to the future of humanity. Extreme weather, rising seas, ocean acidification and biodiversity collapse will undermine many of the systems on which we depend. We’ve even seen a recent example of this, with South Australia’s storm and blackout illustrating the vulnerability of our society to extreme weather.

Risk has become a central construct for how businesses should respond to climate change. As Hank Paulson, former Secretary of the US Treasury has argued, “climate change is not only a risk to the environment but it is the single biggest risk that exists to the economy today”.

The G20 is currently investigating how companies are exposed to climate risk, and how they disclose that risk to consumers.

However, instead of dealing with the larger problem of rapid and systemic decarbonisation, most businesses construct climate risk solely through the lens of profitability and market opportunity.

As part of a broader study into corporations and the climate crisis, we recently published an article in the journal Organization exploring how corporations have responded to climate risks.

What is risk?

Risk management has become a central feature of corporate language. Risk was translated into management in the 1990s after catastrophes and scandals such as the collapse of Barings Bank and the Brent Spar controversy at Shell.

The core assumption here is that risk is somewhere outside the company: it just has to be found and captured. The perception is that corporations are exposed to a variety of objective risks that can be managed through rational decision-making. This might include cost–benefit analysis based on probabilities and consequences. The aim is to make uncertainty manageable.

How companies construct risk involves a number of processes. In relation to climate change, companies seek to break up a complex concept into smaller parts that can be addressed by specific corporate practices and policies. These include:

• physical risks such as the potential for extreme weather events such as storms, droughts and fires to impact upon business operations (most evident amongst resource, energy and manufacturing companies with vulnerable infrastructure and supply chains)

• regulatory risk, including the potential for governments to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and implement carbon taxes and cap and trade mechanisms

• market risks, such as new disruptive, low-carbon technologies that challenge established business models (such Tesla’s reinvention of electric vehicles and mass production of battery storage)

• reputational risks, such as the threat of negative customer or community perceptions of companies’ environmental impacts (such as growing consumer awareness of environmentally harmful products such as palm oil or fossil-fuel based energy).

To address these risks, companies seek to minimise the threats and maximise the opportunities. These include practices such as scenario planning and retrofitting infrastructure for extreme weather events, engaging politically and lobbying for better regulation, scanning the market for competitive threats, investing in R&D for new “green” products, and actively marketing and branding themselves as “green” businesses.

However, for corporations to prosper from climate change, the risks associated with it have to be meaningful in a business sense. They have to be able to be valued in monetary terms. For instance, putting a price on carbon means emissions can be factored into business strategies, which then stimulate investments in “green” energy and technologies.

As one manager in a financial services organisation confided to us: “The easiest thing to do, is to go carbon trading. There’s a way to make money!”

These risk framings are then institutionalised through corporate roles and practices (such as pricing carbon internally, restructuring activities to identify new products and markets, and actively managing customer and employee perceptions of corporate activities).

As another sustainability manager outlined: “My job is to keep their risk as low as possible … from regulatory right through to perception and reputation.”

But risk is more complex than that

However, these risk constructions often fail to fully account for the physical and political complexities of climate change.

In insurance for example, the reliance on historical climate models often fails to account for new and extreme weather events. As one senior manager explained:

I mean most people didn’t think it hailed in Melbourne until last year (2010). There was another one in Perth, you know it was classic. It was known in the industry as “unmodelled risk”, which means there isn’t a detailed model of the risk that you can use to price it. Perth – hail in Perth was unknown. I mean completely unknown.

Moreover, consumers, employees and communities often surprise companies and wrong-foot corporate risk modelling.

For instance, despite the claims by financial institutions that they are “sustainability” leaders by reducing their carbon emissions and encouraging corporate clients to adopt more climate friendly practices, NGOs and critics have emphasised how these statements conflict with continued investments in fossil-fuel based energy projects.

This has culminated in a global movement of fossil-fuel divestment which undermines the social legitimacy of these investments.

Corporate risk constructions also exclude non-market understandings which underpin personal and social identity. For example, energy companies which promote coal-seam gas as a cleaner energy source have been caught off guard by vehement political battles with agricultural landholders and communities objecting to fracking as a harmful activity. Here, community and environmental concerns collide with corporate risk calculations, which focus on profitability and the opportunity of increasing commodity prices.

By ignoring these factors, and constructing risk in a way that maximises opportunities and profit, corporations emphasise a vision of human mastery over nature. Like latter-day wizardry, corporate risk calculations suggest that markets and capital can, not only control the natural world, but somehow anticipate it.

These risk calculations downplay the need for radical change and emphasise “business as usual”. Ironically, the devastating environmental change that is supposedly being anticipated and managed by corporate risk management is locked in to an ever more terrifying degree.

Christopher Wright has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Daniel Nyberg has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Australians are becoming more aware of where their meat comes from, but it's still and ethical minefield. Vicki/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Australia has a long-standing history as a country that loves its meat. Meat production and processing in Australia occupies over half of the land mass, makes an important contribution to the Australian economy and employs over 53,000 people.

Meat also has deep cultural and social significance, as seen through Meat and Livestock Australia’s most recent campaigns.

Debates around eating meat are not new. But a new SBS documentary starting tonight, For the Love of Meat, examining where Australia’s beef, chicken and pork comes from, will spark more questions about if and how we should eat meat.

For the Love of Meat host Matthew Evans takes viewers on a tour of his pig farm. Ethical, or just a label?

In most cultures, including Australia, omnivory (eating a combination of meat and other foods) is the norm. Although it’s clear our preferences for different types of meat have changed over time, we are still one of the biggest meat-consuming countries in the world. But some recent statistics suggest Australians are choosing to eat less meat, particularly red meat.

One factor linked to this decline is increased concern about farm animal welfare. Our research group is interested in how consumers and producers think about farm animal welfare and how it relates to broader ideas of ethical food production.

Research tells us that people care about farm animal welfare, and a number of consumers are willing to pay more for meat that is produced in a “more humane” way. But much of this research assumes that there is a clear and shared understanding of what “good” animal welfare is.

We know a lot about how animal production scientists think about animal welfare: health, pain relief and how production animals are affected by interactions with people and their environment.

We know less about how livestock producers think about animal welfare: they generally care about the welfare of their animals because welfare is closely linked to productivity and their livelihoods, in addition to wanting to treat their animals well.

However for most consumers, price and taste are key drivers for purchases. Our ongoing research suggests consumers think about animal welfare in a much broader way than scientists and producers.

For the general public, high animal welfare standards are closely linked to ideas of food quality – taste, nutritional value and food safety. Recent research by others showed that the “humane” label alone was enough for people to rate one sample of meat as “tastier” than another, when in fact the two had been produced in exactly the same way.

For those who wish to purchase and consume meat and other animal products produced in ways that align with their values, current labelling and regulations present a minefield. “Humane” and “ethical” are very broad terms that can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, and are not explicitly regulated; various private certification regimes exist but rely on diverse measures.

Standards were recently adopted for “free-range” eggs, but several groups argue that this does not go far enough and thus does not reflect what the community expects free-range to be.

Other terms in widespread use which potentially confuse consumers include sow stall free (which refers to the housing for pregnant sows before they have piglets, not the housing system for piglets and sows together), grass-fed, grain-fed, green, and sustainable, to name just a few.

Many types of ‘ethical’ meat choices

Sustainability and the impact of meat production on the environment have also become key reasons to reduce meat consumption. We have met people who call themselves “kangatarians”; eating kangaroo meat because they feel that its consumption has less negative impact on the environment. Others only consume wild-caught meat, mainly from feral species such as deer and goat.

We have also had other participants in our research who view hunting for their own meat as “ethical” consumption in order to have direct connection with the source of their meat and to know that it has been killed “humanely”.

Even when an animal has a good life, meat-eaters obviously must accept the idea of animal death in order for them to eat meat. For some, the dissonance this creates leads them to reduce or cease eating meat. Omnivores use a number of strategies to reduce this discomfort. For some, the idea of only consuming meat from an animal that, in their view, had a good life and a good death may also be a way of reducing their own discomfort.

We need more open discussion

We encourage more open conversations about meat production and consumption, and hope that the new documentary can contribute to this.

But it is also important to recognise that most conventional producers argue that they already produce safe, nutritious and affordable meat and other animal products in humane and sustainable ways.

We need more reflection and discussion about our shared values surrounding animal consumption and production practices, and to resist simple, and potentially elitist, solutions that ignore the complexities of this debate.

For the Love of Meat begins Thursday October 20 on SBS.

Heather Bray's salary is partly funded (50%) by an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP130100419) which includes contributions from industry partners Coles Group Ltd, Elders Limited, Richard Gunner’s Fine Meats Pty Ltd, and the South Australian Research and Development Institute. She received scholarships from the Pig Research and Development Corporation (now Australian Pork Limited) between 1991 and 1997. The University of Adelaide is a partner in the Animal Welfare Science Centre.

Rachel A. Ankeny receives funding from the Australian Research Council for grants relating to food consumption and production, including a Linkage Project (LP130100419) which includes contributions from industry partners Coles Group Ltd, Elders Limited, Richard Gunner's Fine Meats Pty Ltd, and the South Australian Research and Development Institute.