The Conversation

The recent battles over the budget of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), and before that over the size of the Renewable Energy Target, are the latest skirmishes in a long-running war over support for technologies that harvest Australia’s abundant wind and solar resources.

Perhaps surprisingly, the conflict even predates the popular awareness of climate change, which is generally dated to 1988.

UNSW Australia’s Mark Diesendorf has described how in early 1983 he and his colleagues had identified an ideal site in northern Tasmania for a wind farm. They presented their proposal to Labor’s newly appointed resources minister, Peter Walsh.

We submitted a proposal that the federal government fund a demonstration wind farm and assist in establishing a local wind generator manufacturing industry in the region, which was suffering from high unemployment. The next day, Senator Walsh announced that a northwest Tasmanian wind energy project could be a part of a development package, if the Commonwealth was successful in the High Court challenge to the construction of the Gordon-below-Franklin dam.

The Commonwealth won its High Court battle, but the wind industry did not get its windfall. As Diesendorf recalls:

The federal government did not implement our proposal. It was soon obvious that the coal lobby, which was already very strong in the Department of Resources, had succeeded in turning the minister against wind power.

At the same time, CSIRO, a world leader in several areas of renewables, closed down all of its renewable energy research. In Diesendorf’s view this was brought on by “powerful coal and nuclear energy interests within the CSIRO". In the absence of deathbed confessions by those who made the decisions, Diesendorf’s suspicions can’t be proved correct, but renewables did indeed disappear from CSIRO’s research agenda and annual reports from that time.

Once climate change hit the headlines, things changed – a little. In 1990 the Hawke government established the Energy Research and Development Corporation (ERDC) and launched a National Energy Efficiency Program. Meanwhile, research commissioned by the Victorian government found that renewable energy, paired with energy-efficiency measures, could save A$3.14 billion a year by 2005, create almost 14,000 jobs, boost economic productivity by A$800 million a year, and cut greenhouse emissions into the bargain.

But privatisation took hold in Victoria, and the Keating government in Canberra seemed indifferent at best. In 1994, green groups including the Australian Conservation Foundation called for a carbon levy to provide funds for renewable energy. Their request was ignored.

Renewables back on target

In 1996 the new Howard government disbanded Bob Hawke’s ERDC and energy efficiency program. In late 1997, in the run-up to the Kyoto climate summit, John Howard announced a new Renewable Energy Target (RET).

Greens leader Bob Brown was underwhelmed. He pointed out that the scheme’s A$65 million over five years was less than the A$75 million that had been axed the year before, while the target of an extra 2% of electricity from renewables (making a total of 11% including existing large-scale hydro electricity generation) fell short of the ambition shown by other nations. Britain, for instance, was aiming for 20% by 2010.

The RET finally came into place in 2001, after the fossil fuel lobby succeeded in getting it watered down, and was subjected to constant reviews.

Infamously, at a secret meeting whose minutes were leaked, the then energy minister, Ian MacFarlane, lamented to the chief executives of companies like BHP and Rio that the RET was working too well – renewables were growing too fast.

In the run-up to the 2004 Energy White Paper, the renewables industry had hired well-connected lobby firm Crosby Textor (yes, Crosby as in Lynton Crosby) in a bid to get the RET raised to as much as 10%.

According to Age journalist Richard Baker, a Liberal backbencher warned the renewables advocates that “you guys are stuffed". And so it came to pass – the white paper spruiked carbon capture and storage, not renewables.

In the white paper’s aftermath, CSIRO boss Geoff Garrett announced that the organisation would be reducing its renewables research and instead focusing on “clean coal” technologies such as coal gasification and carbon capture and storage.

Months later, a draft copy of an August 2005 CSIRO report describing solar thermal technology as “the only renewable technology that can make deep cuts in greenhouse emissions” was leaked to The Canberra Times. Before the leak, sources claimed the report had been “passed around like a political hot potato” with no date set for its release. It was eventually released to the public later that year.

Bloody public battles

Since 2007 the battles have been more public and even bloodier. An attempt to harmonise (and perhaps increase) different state and federal targets (all with different baselines, target years and amounts) was a dispiriting process. This was due in part, it seems, to federal bureaucratic intransigence and arrogance.

The major changes have been an increase in the renewables target, split into large-scale (wind farms, solar farms and the like) and small-scale (mostly rooftop solar). That increased target was of course subjected to significant watering down by the Abbott government.

Meanwhile, the two agencies that were set up to support renewable energy have also come under attack. The Greens, whose support was a life-and-death issue for the Gillard government, had managed to insist on the creation of ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Between them, these two organisations were designed to ensure funding both for basic research and development and for commercialisation of the resulting technologies, thereby smoothing the path for renewables to enter the electricity sector.

The attacks on these organisations have helped create investor uncertainty in renewables. Efforts to close them down ultimately failed, so the Abbott government switched to changing their terms of reference. The Turnbull government has continued this, along with salami-slicing ARENA’s budget.

This investment uncertainty, deliberately created, is a kind of “divestment campaign” against renewables. It can also be seen as a way of provoking an “investment strike”.

Whereas the mining industry threatened to take its investment dollars elsewhere while fighting Kevin Rudd’s proposed Resources Super-profits Tax in 2010, in this case, the supporters of the status quo energy system are hoping to dissuade external investors from coming to Australia. Thus do incumbents defend their patch.

Australia is famously the “lucky country”. But of course, Donald Horne meant it ironically, believing that the country was richly endowed with resources but “run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”.

Given what we know of the trajectory and probable impacts of climate change, nobody, surely, will be able to be claim surprise as the future arrives.

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.

The Earth’s last intact wilderness areas are shrinking dramatically. In a recently published paper we showed that the world has lost 3.3 million square kilometres of wilderness (around 10% of the total wilderness area) since 1993. Hardest hit were South America, which has experienced a 30% wilderness loss, and Africa, which has lost 14%.

These areas are the final strongholds for endangered biodiversity. They are also essential for sustaining complex ecosystem processes at a regional and planetary scale. Finally, wilderness areas are home to, and provide livelihoods for, indigenous peoples, including many of the world’s most politically and economically marginalised communities.

James Watson and James Allan explain their recent research.

But there’s another important service that many wilderness areas provide: they store vast amounts of carbon. If we’re to meet our international climate commitments, it is essential that we preserve these vital areas.

Many of the world’s biological realms now contain very low levels of wilderness. www.greenfiresciene.com Climate consequences

Large, intact ecosystems store more terrestrial carbon than disturbed and degraded ones. They are also far more resilient to disturbances such as rapid climate change and fire.

For instance, the boreal forest remains the largest ecosystem undisturbed by humans. It stores roughly a third of the world’s terrestrial carbon.

Yet this globally significant wilderness area is increasingly threatened by forestry, oil and gas exploration, human-lit fires and climate change. These collectively threaten a biome-wide depletion of its carbon stocks, considerably worsening global warming. Our research shows that more than 320,000sqkm of boreal forest has been lost in the past two decades.

Similarly, in Borneo and Sumatra in 1997, human-lit fires razed recently logged forests that housed large carbon stores. This released billions of tonnes of carbon, which some estimate was equivalent to 40% of annual global emissions from fossil fuels. We found that more than 30% of tropical forest wilderness was lost since the early 1990s, with only 270,000sqkm left on the planet.

Deforestation of Sumatra’s lowland rainforest. Bill Laurance How do we stop the loss?

All nations need to step up and mobilise conservation investments that can help protect vanishing wilderness areas. These efforts will vary based on the specific circumstances of different nations. But there is a clear priority everywhere to focus on halting current threats – including road expansion, destructive mining, unsustainable forestry and large-scale agriculture – and enforcing existing legal frameworks.

For example, most of the world’s remaining tropical rainforests are under an onslaught of development pressures. Much of sub-Saharan Africa is being opened up by over 50,000km of planned “development corridors” that criss-cross the continent. These will slice deep into remaining wild places.

In the Amazon, plans are being made to construct more than 300 large hydroelectric dams across the basin. Each dam will require networks of new roads for dam and powerline construction and maintenance.

In northern Australia, schemes are afoot to transform the largest savannah on Earth into a food bowl, jeopardising its extensive carbon stores and biodiversity.

We need to enforce existing regulatory frameworks aimed at protecting imperilled species and ecosystems. We also need to develop new conservation policies that provide land stewards with incentives to protect intact ecosystems. These must be implemented at a large scale.

For example, conservation interventions in and around imperilled wilderness landscapes should include creating large protected areas, establishing mega-corridors between those protected areas, and enabling indigenous communities to establish community conservation reserves.

In Sabah, Borneo, scientists from the UK’s Royal Society have been working with local government to establish networks of interlinked reserves stretching from the coast to the interior mountains. This provides a haven for wildlife that migrate seasonally to find new food sources.

Funding could also be used to establish ecosystem projects that recognise the direct and indirect economic values that intact landscapes supply. These include providing a secure source of fresh water, reducing disaster risks and storing vast quantities of carbon.

For example, in Ecuador and Costa Rica, cloud forests are being protected to provide cities below with a year-round source of clean water. In Madagascar, carbon funding is saving one of the most biodiversity-rich tropical forests on the planet, the Makira forest.

We argue for immediate, proactive action to protect the world’s remaining wilderness areas, because the alarming loss of these lands results in significant and irreversible harm for nature and humans. Protecting the world’s last wild places is a cost-effective conservation investment and the only way to ensure that some semblance of intact nature survives for the benefit of future generations.

James Watson receives funding from Australian Research Council. He is the Director of Science and Research Initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. He is the director of the JCU Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science, and founder and director of ALERT--the Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers & Thinkers.

Brendan Mackey receives funding from the Australian Research Council

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

The Guardian newspaper recently hit a wall of non-response when it raised concerns about the possibility of an oil well blowout in BP’s proposed drilling operations in the Great Australian Bight.

The facts are that bolts on drilling rigs used in other parts of the world have been found to be defective, with the potential to fail catastrophically. When asked whether its operations were at similar risk, BP referred The Guardian to its subcontractor, Diamond Offshore, which reportedly failed to respond to emails and phone calls.

Whether or not these technical concerns are justified, this is a public relations disaster for BP, Diamond Offshore and even for the Australian industry regulator, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority.

BP, in particular, can ill afford such bad publicity. Six years ago it suffered a disastrous blowout of its Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 men and caused more than US$40 billion of environmental damage along the US coast.

It’s perfectly understandable that people will ask whether the same thing can happen in the Great Australian Bight.

Lessons learnt?

BP claims to have learnt the lessons from the Gulf of Mexico incident, and to have incorporated them in its drilling plan for the Bight (as outlined in section 6 of its environmental overview). However, the lessons it refers to are drawn from its own report on the accident, which dealt primarily with technical issues rather than the underpinning organisational factors.

Other major reports and commentary have identified a range of organisational failures that contributed to the blowout. BP has not shown that it has learnt these bigger lessons.

One of these organisational causes was the system of bonus payments made to employees at all levels, which created continual pressure to minimise costs and maximise drilling speeds. A key performance indicator when calculating employee bonuses was “days per 10,000 feet of well drilled”.

These incentives generated pressure to ignore anomalies or warnings that things might be amiss, and to just get on with the job. Of course, BP is not alone in this – these are industry-wide practices. But to satisfy a sceptical public, BP needs to show that it has addressed this issue.

Second, BP was using the wrong indicators of risk, which meant that it was systematically misleading itself and others about the risk of blowout at the Macondo well.

Its primary indicator was the number of cases of “loss of containment” – that is, incidents when oil was spilled into the sea from a hydraulic hose or other piece of equipment. Of course these spills are environmentally undesirable, but the number of these relatively minor incidents does not in itself indicate a risk that the well will blow.

Far more significant is the number of “kicks” – incidents in which operators temporarily lose control of the well and high-pressure fluids begin forcing their way towards the surface. If operators do not act quickly to control kicks, they can develop into blowouts, and indeed this was one of the contributing factors in the Gulf of Mexico blowout.

Here is another relevant indicator. Drilling wells involves pumping cement down at various times to seal joints, and to plug the bottom of the well when drilling is complete but the well is yet to begin production. Cementing jobs sometimes fail, and in fact the regulator in the Gulf of Mexico found that half of all blowouts were initiated by a cementing failure.

The number of cementing failures would therefore seem to be an important indicator of risk. BP again needs to show it has developed a list of key risk indicators for its proposed drilling operations in the Bight, and that things such as employee bonuses will not work to counteract this system.

Bending the rules

One of the most insidious processes that contributes to many major accidents is the “normalisation” of substandard practices. Typically, this happens when people start taking shortcuts with no penalty, which gives the impression that strict compliance with safety regulations or standard engineering practices is unnecessary. Eventually, however, an unusual set of circumstances may catch them out.

Some companies have a formal process for authorising deviations from the standard practice, in cases where strict compliance seems unnecessary or onerous. In isolation, such deviations may seem to involve a negligible increase in risk, but if the number of such authorisations is not controlled, the cumulative increase in risk may be considerable.

After the Gulf of Mexico disaster, BP itself proposed that the number of authorised deviations from approved engineering practices be treated as an indicator of risk, and that this number should be kept as low as possible. It would be good to know if this principle will be applied to its drilling activities in the Bight.

Another critical lesson from the Gulf of Mexico spill is that senior managers should ask the right questions when they visit operational sites, as they routinely do. Senior managers were actually touring the rig that was drilling the Macondo well at the time of the blowout. But they failed to ask any questions about how well the rig was controlling the blowout risk. Had they done so, the accident might never have happened. Has BP learnt that lesson? It is not one that was identified in its own report, so we cannot be sure.

Accident prevention depends on understanding and counteracting the human and organisational factors that lead to accidents, as well as the technical ones. The documents that BP has publicly released about how it intends to drill in the Bight describe how it has learnt the technical lessons, but are silent on the human and organisational lessons.

Spelling out these lessons, and whether BP really has learnt them, might give the public more confidence in the drilling proposal.

Andrew Hopkins is the author of Disastrous Decisions: The Human and Organisational Causes of the Gulf of Mexico Blowout_.

Andrew Hopkins is the author of a recent article published by (but not funded by) the Australia Institute, titled "From climate pariah to climate saviour? What the petroleum industry can do about climate change".

Can Kangaroo Island's pioneering spirit be harnessed in the push for renewable energy? Dider B/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

South Australia’s iconic Kangaroo Island, the site of Australia’s first free settled colony, could pioneer a new age of renewable energy, according to our new research.

The first hardy settlers in 1836 had to decide whether to go it alone with a settlement on the island or revert to the mainland. Today, the 4,400 or so people who call the island home face a similarly stark choice: energy independence, or continued reliance on the mainland.

On one hand, the ageing existing cable could simply be replaced, at a cost of between A$22 million and A$50 million. This is the “preferred network option” proposed by the local electricity distribution network, SA Power Networks (SAPN).

On the other hand, SAPN is also currently considering an alternative mix of local wind, solar and biomass generation, complemented by diesel generation, battery storage and demand management.

Simple vs smart?

The new cable option is straightforward and well understood, if a little uninspiring. The local renewable power supply option means energy independence, more local investment and economic activity, and a boost for the tourist mecca’s clean, green brand. But it also requires solutions to a series of tricky technical and regulatory issues, at a scale never before attempted in Australia.

To help inform this crucial decision by SAPN and the Kangaroo Island community, I and my colleagues at the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) at the University of Technology Sydney yesterday published a study of the feasibility of renewable energy for the island.

We conclude that Kangaroo Island could be powered by 86-100% renewable energy for about the same cost as replacing the cable to the mainland.

We examined ten different electricity supply scenarios for Kangaroo Island. The direct costs of the three most interesting scenarios are shown below.

Kangaroo Island electricity supply scenarios: direct costs (net present value over 25 years). Institute for Sustainable Futures

The most cost-effective alternative to a new cable is local supply of wind, solar photovoltaics and diesel generation, complemented by battery storage and “demand management”. This hybrid solution could supply the island with 86% renewable energy for only A$10 million more than a new cable option. This option would also meet SAPN’s tight deadline of being able to meet the island’s entire electricity demand by December 2018.

For a further A$13 million, 100% renewable power could be provided by displacing the diesel with biomass generation technology fuelled by local, currently unharvested plantation wood. We estimate that this system could be established within five years.

Both the hybrid and 100% renewable options could actually cost Kangaroo Islanders less than the new cable over a 25-year period, if we factor in indirect impacts such as savings in local network charges.

Kangaroo Island electricity supply scenarios: direct and indirect costs (net present value over 25 years). Institute for Sustainable Futures

So with the cost of the different options roughly comparable, the choice of power supply will probably depend on other factors. These include the preferences of the local community; how the costs, benefits and risks are shared; and the level of support from key stakeholders including SAPN, government and regulators.

For local generation to be cost-competitive, SAPN’s funds earmarked for the new cable would need to be redirected to support local generation and demand management. However, the current regulatory system creates barriers to SAPN providing this support.

For example, SAPN can earn a net financial return on investment in network assets such as a new undersea cable over their 30-40-year life. But if, instead of investing in a new network asset, SAPN spends money on supporting local supply options, then at best it can only retain a few years' savings by deferring capital investment.

Another challenge for local electricity supply is ensuring that local electricity suppliers do not abuse their monopoly by price-gouging customers if and when the existing cable eventually fails. Two possible ways to guard against this are by sharing community ownership of generation assets, and by periodic tendering of retail services.

For a local electricity supply solution to proceed it requires strong support, from both the Kangaroo Island community and SAPN. It would also require a major third party, such as the SA Government or the Australian Energy Regulator, to help reduce the barriers to SAPN adopting a more innovative non-network solution.

Renewable future

A balanced local electricity supply solution and a transition to 100% renewable power could deliver a range of economic development and other benefits to the local community. But it will require market testing to confirm the costs, and stakeholder and community consultation to develop a suitable regulatory and business model.

It is unclear who would provide the time and resources for such leadership, but the SA Government and the Kangaroo Island Council are two possible candidates.

Addressing such barriers in the context of Kangaroo Island would provide not just an inspiring local solution, but a powerful precedent for supporting local renewable energy initiatives throughout Australia.

Within months of their arrival in 1836, most of the original Kangaroo Island settlers had left to set up the new mainland colony of South Australia. But a few enterprising souls stayed on. We will soon see if that pioneering Kangaroo Island spirit prevails when it comes carving out Australia’s clean energy future.

A community forum will be held on September 22 in Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, to share the study’s findings and canvass community views about future power supply options.

Chris Dunstan is a Research Director at the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) at the University of Technology Sydney. ISF undertakes paid sustainability research for a wide range of government, corporate and NGO clients. The Towards 100% Renewable Energy for Kangaroo Island study was funded by ARENA and RenewablesSA with assistance from the Kangaroo Island Council.

Tasmania has had a damaging year, with the island state hit by a series of bushfires and floods.

Now a comprehensive new assessment of Tasmania’s exposure to natural disasters shows that bushfire remains the number one hazard to people and property, while also highlighting a range of new threats. These include coastal flooding, pandemic influenza and – despite being Australia’s most southerly state – an increasing likelihood of heatwaves.

The 2016 Tasmanian State Natural Disaster Risk Assessment (TSNDRA) aims to provide emergency services with key information to help prepare for and reduce the impact of disasters.

It is the first state-level assessment in Australia that adheres to the recently updated National Emergency Risk Assessment Guidelines. All states and territories are required to produce their own risk assessments by June 2017. Given Tasmania’s unprecedented recent run of natural disasters, it is fitting that it should be the first state to publish a comprehensive roundup of the risks.

The assessment of natural disaster risk took place over 12 months from March 2015. It involved a series of workshops and online surveys of experts in each hazard area.

For the first time, the process was led not by state government agencies, but by a close collaboration between researchers at the University of Tasmania, RMIT University and the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, together with members of the State Emergency Service and related agencies, and other stakeholders including the Bureau of Meteorology, Australian Red Cross and Engineers Australia. The process aimed to allow a range of different voices to inform the identification of priority risks for Tasmania.

Each workshop considered the underlying risk of different natural hazards, as well as considering the consequences of worst-case scenarios for each hazard, such as the 1967 bushfires or the 1929 Launceston floods.

The use of a “confidence” rating – a new addition to the assessment process – allowed for uncertainty in data, or disagreement between experts. This enabled us both to identify gaps in overall knowledge about different natural hazards and to weight the advice of different stakeholders appropriately.

Bushfire is the highest risk, but Tasmania’s hazard profile is changing

Perhaps not surprisingly, our results showed that the risks of bushfires, floods and severe storms continue to figure prominently in Tasmania. Bushfire remains the greatest aggregated risk, as illustrated below.

Such “catastrophic” scenarios could result in one in 10,000 deaths, or an economic loss of greater than 4% of gross state product. Furthermore, the likelihood of a catastrophic bushfire event is increasing as our climate changes.

Three new “emerging” risks were added to this 2016 assessment. These additions reflect either improvements in information availability or shifting likelihoods of an event occurring. The emerging risks are heatwaves (now acknowledged as the most dangerous hazard in Australia in terms of deaths caused), pandemic influenza (which can potentially affect a large area for a prolonged time), and coastal inundation (which will grow more likely as sea levels rise).

Better prepared for disaster

The report updates and builds on an earlier assessment published in 2012. This allows the state’s risk profile to be tracked over time as conditions continue to change. The improvement in hazard knowledge, changes in socio-economic and environmental conditions, and the implementation of new treatments or controls by state authorities as new disasters occur mean the risks we face will need to be continually re-assessed into the future.

Based on the new risk registers for each hazard, a separate expert workshop developed a portfolio of potential treatment options for the most at-risk sectors. These include, for example, recommending the continuation of the successful fuel-reduction program and the updating of flood-evacuation plans for at-risk communities, as well as putting forward new or enhanced treatment options such the creation of a state-wide flood hazard map and the expansion of existing disaster preparedness programs.

The treatment options also highlight key research gaps around such topics as coincident extreme events or the impact of heatwaves on Tasmania’s population. This portfolio is being refined to help prioritise new risk-reduction actions across Tasmania.

While the report is mainly aimed to inform the State Emergency Management Committee, its findings are also relevant to a range of authorities, agencies and individuals with responsibilities for emergency risk management. Hazard fact sheets and a summary document to inform Tasmanian communities are available via the report links below.

The TSNDRA 2016 report, summary report and hazard fact sheets are available for download from the Tasmania State Emergency Service or the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre.

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

Alexei Trundle previously received funding from the Tasmanian State Government, and currently receives an Australian Postgraduate Award from the Australian Government.

Darryn McEvoy receives funding from a variety of research funding organisations.

Stuart Corney receives funding from various Tasmanian State Government research funding programs and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC.

Tomas Remenyi receives research funding from Wine Australia and various Australian State Government agencies and research programs.

But in Australia we are seeing a very significant change. We’ve seen eight out of our 12 most emission intensive power stations close in the last five years. All of those have been coal. – Environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg, interview, September 5, 2016.

When discussing Australia’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg said that that eight out of the nation’s 12 most emission intensive power stations have closed in the last five years. All were coal, he said, describing the pace of change as “very significant”.

Is that right?

Checking the source

When asked for data to support the minister’s assertion, a spokesperson referred The Conversation to the following table:

tCO2-e/GWh means tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per gigawatt hour of energy produced. It is a way of expressing emission intensity. This table lists eight emission intensive power stations that have closed in the last five years and four emission intensive power stations that remain open. Office of Josh Frydenberg

Let’s test his statement against publicly available data.

Power station closures

Emission intensity is a measure of the greenhouse emissions produced per unit of energy. If a power station produces a lot of greenhouse gases per unit of energy generated, then it is a high emission intensity power station.

It’s true that eight emission intensive power stations have closed in recent years. Sticklers may say that change occurred over six years, not five (depending on when the process of closure began), but it’s close enough.

These power stations closed at a time when electricity demand was falling, although it has picked up again recently.

Are those eight among the most emission intensive power stations in Australia?

They’re in the ball park – although it depends a bit on which power stations you include on the list of “most intensive power stations in Australia”.

Frydenberg’s table includes 12, but his list doesn’t mention two Western Australian power stations – Worsley and Muja AB – which are among the most emission intensive power stations in Australia.

There could be good reasons for omitting these two from the top list. Worsley, for example, is a cogeneration plant, meaning that some of the energy it produces is fed into the electricity network and some is diverted for industrial use by a local alumina refinery in the form of steam energy. Or that list may only be considering the averaged combined emission intensity of the three power stations at Western Australia’s Muja facility (not just the Muja AB station), which would bring the emission intensity down.

The list may also have not included any Western Australian power stations because when people talk about Australian power generation, it’s quite common to use data for the National Electricity Market - which covers all states except Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

In summary – the eight listed as having closed in the last five years are definitely among the top 14 most emission intensive power stations in Australia. They may also be among the top 12, depending on which Australian power stations you include in the list of the nation’s most emission intensive.

How do we know they’re among the most emission intensive power stations?

We know that’s true because of data contained in a recent report commissioned by the Australian Energy Market Operator and undertaken by consulting firm ACIL Allen.

The Australian Energy Market Operator is responsible for operating Australia’s largest gas and electricity markets and power systems. It runs the National Electricity Market, the power system that covers the eastern states of Australia and South Australia. It also runs the Wholesale Energy Market.

We can check Frydenberg’s statement against the most up-to-date data from the ACIL Allen report, which details the emission intensity of various power stations in Australia.

This chart, using the ACIL Allen data, shows the capacity and emission intensity of Australian coal generators with high emission intensity.

Has there been ‘very significant change’ in Australia?

That depends on what you understand by the phrase “very significant”. What we do know is that the closure of these eight power stations hasn’t put a significant dent in Australia’s overall greenhouse gas emissions.

Using publicly available data, we can calculate how many million tonnes of emissions these eight power stations produced back when they were all operating – around five or so years ago.

To do that, you multiply the electricity produced by a power station (measured in gigawatt hours and sourced from here) by that station’s emission intensity (sourced from here and here).

The result? The eight powers stations that closed down produced about 12.7 million tonnes of emissions in 2010-11, and about 10.06 million tonnes of emissions in 2011-12 (after some had either closed or reduced their output).

Australia’s total emissions for 2011 were 544.9 million tonnes. So the eight power stations contributed roughly about 2% to Australia’s 2011 emissions, back when they were all still in operation.

For 2011, the emissions produced by Australia’s electricity sector was 200.5 million tonnes. So as a proportion of emissions caused by electricity generation, the eight power stations were responsible for about 5-6% of Australian electricity emissions in 2011.

The eight plants that closed were all quite small, and consequently made a smaller contribution to the electricity sector’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

The aggregate capacity of the eight closed power stations totalled about 2550 megawatts, and produced 9670 gigawatt hours of energy in 2010-11. In contrast, one of the plants still operating, Loy Yang A, has a capacity of 2210 megawatts and produced 16,880 gigawatt hours in 2010-11.

Verdict

Josh Frydenberg got his figures right on power station closures – but it’s a matter of interpretation whether that represents “a very significant change”.

The minister got it right that eight emission intensive power stations have closed over the last five or six years.

Frydenberg also got it right that these eight were among the top 12 (or top 14, depending on how you measure it) most emission intensive power stations in Australia.

But to put that in perspective, the eight powers stations that closed down produced about 12.7 million tonnes of greenhouse emissions in 2010-11 – or roughly about 2% of Australia’s overall emissions in that year. – Dylan McConnell

Review

This is a thorough and well-explained analysis, using impeccable sources to reach a very fair conclusion. – Hugh Saddler.

Review

This is a comprehensive FactCheck. There are a couple of additional points worth noting here.

The eight closed coal plants were certainly amongst the most emissions intensive in our electricity industry. However, beyond the question of the two West Australian coal plants raised in the FactCheck, the ACIL Allen report highlights the actual uncertainties in calculating plant emission intensities. It also flags the very high emissions intensity of several small distillate (liquid fuel) generators. However, these are used for only peaking duties so make a very minor contribution to overall electricity sector emissions.

Why did they close? A range of reasons, no doubt. Beyond the falling demand for generation over this period and small size of the plants noted in the FactCheck, all but two of the stations were over 40 years old. Their closure might also well be linked to the introduction of a carbon price on the electricity sector in mid-2012 (its removal only two years later was rather unexpected by industry participants).

Finally, there is the question of what replaced the output of these eight emissions intensive generators. Renewable generation has certainly increased over this time under the Renewable Energy Target. Unfortunately for emissions, the last two years have also seen falling gas-fired generation including the temporary closure (cold storage) of one of the National Electricity Market’s most modern and lowest emission fossil fuel plants, Swanbank E. The key reason is much higher gas prices driven by the start of liquid natural gas (LNG) exports from Queensland.

Finally, it is interesting to see that the owners of one of the remaining high emissions coal plants in operation, Loy Yang B, have just applied to upgrade the plant and hence extend its life and generation output. – Iain MacGill

Have you ever seen a “fact” worth checking? The Conversation’s FactCheck asks academic experts to test claims and see how true they are. We then ask a second academic to review an anonymous copy of the article. For complex topics, we sometimes ask a third academic to be an additional blind reviewer. You can request a check at checkit@theconversation.edu.au. Please include the statement you would like us to check, the date it was made, and a link if possible.

Dylan McConnell has received funding from the AEMC's Consumer Advocacy Panel and Energy Consumers Australia.

Hugh Saddler is a member of the Board of the Climate Institute

Iain MacGill is a Joint Director of UNSW Australia's Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets. The Centre has received funding from a range of government sources including the Australian Research Council, Energy Consumers Australia and ARENA. Iain is a member of the ARENA Advisory Panel which provides advice to support the development and selection of projects and initiatives for funding by ARENA. He also contributes unpaid expert advice to a number of government organisations, industry associations and not-for-profit groups in the clean energy area within Australia and internationally. Iain's share portfolio includes AGL which owns a range of coal, gas and renewable generation in Australia.

Perth is not known as a model for suburbia and its suburban condition is similar to that of developed cities the world over. However, it does stand out in one respect: it sits in an exceptionally biodiverse natural setting. A strong, informed vision for this setting’s relationship with the city could help Perth become an exemplar for similarly positioned metropolises everywhere.

The greater Perth region has been designated the Southwest Australia Ecoregion (SWAE). This is one of only 35 “biodiversity hotspots” in the world.

Reconciling future growth with biodiversity is a key issue for urban design and planning this century. Indeed, if current trends continue, global urban land cover will increase by 1.2 million square kilometres (equivalent to half the area of Western Australia) by 2030. Much of this will happen in biodiversity hotspots.

This is important because it is estimated we will lose nearly half of all terrestrial species if we fail to protect the hotspots. We will also lose the ecosystem services upon which human populations ultimately depend.

“Ecosystem services” may sound like abstract jargon, but it’s actually a term used to describe the services nature provides – such as clean air, water and food, and heatwave and flood mitigation. Without these, human life would be extremely unpleasant, if not unviable.

Perth has a reputedly strong planning system and is comparatively wealthy. If it can’t control its city form to protect biodiversity – compact cities generally being recognised as the best model for protecting land for conservation – then city administrators elsewhere, particularly in the developing world, are likely to struggle.

Misreading the land

The current treatment of the Australian environment has its roots in the European annexation of Australia, which has been characterised by catastrophic misreadings of the land. Governor James Stirling, who was singularly responsible for the European annexation of Perth, was the kind of man who saw what he wanted to see rather than what was there. In The Origins of Australia’s Capital Cities, Geoffrey Bolton writes:

…arriving at the end of … an uncommonly cool, moist summer, [Stirling was] misled by the tallness of the northern jarrah forest and the quality of the alluvial soils close to the river into believing that the coastal plain would offer fertile farming and grazing. It was, Stirling wrote, equal to the plains of Lombardy; and he persuaded himself that the cool easterly land breeze of these early autumn nights must originate from a range of snowy mountains.

Vegetation of Southwest Australia Ecoregion near current-day Perth at the time of European settlement. Based on statewide mapping by John Beard between 1964 and 1981. DPAW

The results of such misinterpretations of the land were generally less poetic. Stirling sited the settlement of Perth on a narrow, constrained strip of land between swamps to the north and marshy river edges to the south. These low-lying areas fuelled plagues of mosquitos and, once polluted, deadly typhoid outbreaks.

In time, due to a lingering discomfort with Perth’s “unsanitary” wetlands, more than 200,000 hectares – an area equivalent to 500 Kings Parks – were drained on the Swan Coastal Plain. These biologically productive areas directly or indirectly support most of the coastal plain’s wildlife, so the effects on biodiversity have been catastrophic.

Furthermore, a perception of the Banksia woodland and coastal heath on Perth’s fringes as unattractive and useless has seen much of it cleared for the expansion of the city. Between 2001 and 2009, suburban growth consumed an annual average of 851ha of highly biodiverse land on the urban fringe.

The lesson from this experience is that any future growth in a biodiversity hotspot, or indeed elsewhere, has to be founded on the understanding that we cannot continue to bend nature to our will. We must learn how to work with it.

Within this humbling process, we need to recognise that working with the land is not an entirely pure or noble act; rather, it is imperative for humanity’s survival. As species and ecosystems become threatened and vanish, so too do the ecosystem services that support human wellbeing.

Perth’s Green Growth Plan

The release of the state government’s long-anticipated Perth and Peel Green Growth Plan for 3.5 million may herald a shift in the relationship between the city and the biodiversity hotspot. The plan encapsulates two broad goals:

• to protect fringe bushland, rivers, wetlands and wildlife in an impressive 170,000 hectares of new and expanded reserves on Perth’s fringe

• to cut red tape by securing upfront Commonwealth environmental approvals for outer suburban development.

While ostensibly positive achievements, a question remains as to the implications of clearing a further 45,000ha (3% of the Swan Coastal Plain) of remnant bushland which is not protected by the conservation reserves.

Furthermore, the typically disconnected conservation reserves proposed in the Green Growth Plan lack overall legibility. This stymies the public’s ability to conceptualise the city’s edge, which leads them to care about it (like London’s greenbelt, for instance).

Finally, a question remains about how a plan that places restrictions on outer suburban development will accommodate the powerful local land development industry over time. This is a concern given the frequent “urban break-outs” – where urban development occurs outside nominated growth areas – between 1970 and 2005.

In 2003, the ABC asked revered Western Australian landscape architect Marion Blackwell, “Are we at home now in the land we live in?” She replied, “No, we’re not. We don’t know enough about it, and not enough people know anything about it.”

We still have work to do on our engagement with biodiversity in Western Australia, and Perth specifically, before we can become a model for future cities.

The Conversation is co-publishing articles with Future West (Australian Urbanism), produced by the University of Western Australia’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts. These articles look towards the future of urbanism, taking Perth and Western Australia as its reference point. You can read other articles here.

The Australian Urban Design Research Centre, whom employs Julian Bolleter, receives funding from the Western Australian Planning Commission for undertaking specific research projects however these projects are not directly related to the content of this article.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) will suffer a A$500 million funding cut, after being saved from a far worse fate during negotiations over the government’s proposed budget savings package. So does this mean the ARENA funding glass is half full, or half empty?

The 2014 Abbott/Hockey budget aimed to destroy ARENA altogether. Thankfully it was blocked by Labor, the Greens and the crossbench in the Senate. In March this year the Turnbull government claimed to have saved ARENA but intended to divert most of its funds and prevent it from offering grants. The ALP supported that position before the election.

The government’s omnibus savings bill, which in its original form would have chopped A$1.3 billion from ARENA, would have doomed Australian renewable energy research and development (R&D) – despite our country’s recent pledge “to double government clean energy research and development investment by 2020”.

The Greens and Nick Xenophon Team opposed the cuts to ARENA. Labor compromised with the government, allowing A$500 million to be diverted elsewhere and leaving ARENA with A$800 million over the next five years.

The axe that previously hung over ARENA’s granting process has been lifted. So to answer the earlier question, our glass is now half full, because substantial funding will still flow to renewable energy R&D, this time with bipartisan political backing which hopefully confers greater funding stability. But it is also half empty, because clean energy innovation has taken another huge cut.

International support

Two weeks ago, some 200 Australian solar energy researchers signed a letter of support for ARENA, amid a groundswell of community support for the agency – not just here but from abroad too.

Australian solar energy R&D is held in very high regard within the international community. Nearly 300 overseas scientists, engineers and company executives signed a petition calling on Australia’s parliamentarians not to axe grants for renewable energy research, innovation and education. Many included complimentary comments, such as:

The Australian renewable energy program is an international treasure. It would be a disaster worldwide for the Australian government to end the program. These are world-renowned scientists.

For decades Australian scientists have been world leaders in the critical area of renewable energy research and development … the legacy of Australia’s great scientific contributions must be saved and their future excellent work supported.

The ARENA funding program has helped Australia lead the world in photovoltaics for decades, which enabled the worldwide economic boom from manufacturing and installing solar panels.

The quality of the work done by Australian researchers in this field is outstanding… to cut back on funding for ARENA is to cut back on the future of Australia’s science and Australia’s economy.

I have been involved in solar research for 35 years in the United States. Solar technology, including advances made at UNSW and ANU in Australia, have made [a] great impact on the world’s energy infrastructure.

Australia has some of the finest PV research on the planet and has been an inspiration to us all.

Where next for ARENA?

ARENA’s role is to support a rapid transition to renewable energy. So what should it do with its reduced funding of A$800 million over the coming five years?

Given that energy use accounts for three-quarters of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, with the electricity sector the biggest contributor, the fastest way to make deep cuts to emissions is to accelerate the introduction of renewable energy into the electricity system. This is the route successfully pioneered by the ACT government, which will reach 100% renewable electricity by 2020.

Other important energy goals will be to electrify road vehicles and trains, and to encourage the use of electric heat pumps in place of natural gas for building heating and hot water systems.

Reducing the emissions from other sectors such as shipping, aviation and high-temperature industries will be more difficult. But these sectors are less important in terms of overall emissions, and if we can push ahead with decarbonising electricity, transport and heating, that will give us more time to devise low-cost solutions for these remaining sectors.

It is important for ARENA to provide strong support at the grassroots level; help universities support undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoctoral training as well as research itself. These young people are the future of research, education, engineering and start-up companies.

Consistent grant support for new companies allows entrepreneurship to flourish, encouraging bright people in universities to commercialise their ideas. With the right backing, these people can often cycle back and forth through universities, completing a virtuous circle.

Success stories

Efficient silicon cells have been by far the greatest success story of Australian renewable energy research. With silicon cells now making up 95% of the worldwide solar market and likely to dominate for at least the next decade, improving their efficiency still further should be a prime research focus.

ARENA’s new large-scale solar energy program announced last week represents an outstanding success: A$92 million of ARENA funding has leveraged A$1 billion of investment to construct 0.5 gigawatts of solar farm capacity in three states. Another A$100 million to bring the total capacity to 1GW would give this nascent industry a great start.

Solar PV and wind now constitute virtually all new generation capacity in Australia and half of new generation capacity worldwide. They are being installed at more than 100 times the rate of the other non-hydro renewables because of their lower cost, and are growing much faster.

Soon PV and wind will constitute more than half of annual generation in many states and regions, and so attention has to be paid to managing their variability. Options include detailed integration studies, demand management, mass storage (using both the 99% market leader pumped hydro and the newcomer, batteries), and high voltage powerlines to move energy between regions – all of which will benefit from ARENA support.

It is time for all politicians to recognise that the faster we move to renewable energy, the cheaper it will be to cut emissions and adapt to climate change. ARENA has an important role to play in a rapid and sustained shift to renewable energy – and we look forward to a doubling of ARENA funding before the next election.

Andrew Blakers will be online from 9.30-10am AEST on Thursday September 15. Leave him a question in the comments below.

Andrew Blakers works for the Australian National University, which receives research grants from ARENA.

Richard Corkish is the chief operating officer for the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, which is primarily funded by ARENA.

Sometimes plants are obvious, but often they slip under the radar Wildflower image from www.shutterstock.com

Turn away from your computer screen for a moment and try to remember what you saw in the image below.

All images from www.shutterstock.com

The image has an equal number of plants and animals, but chances are that you remembered more animals than plants. This bias in memory is part of a phenomenon known as “plant blindness”. Research shows that people are also generally more interested in animals than plants, and find it harder to detect images of plants compared with images of animals.

Plant blindness is more than an interesting quirk of human perception. It impacts on our efforts to care for and understand plant species. Figures from the United States show that while most federal endangered species (57%) are plants, less than 4% of money spent on threatened species is used to protect plants. Botanical education has been declared under threat in the UK.

In a recent essay, Mung Balding and I argue that overcoming plant blindness requires more than plant education. Instead we need to help people connect with plants emotionally.

Why does it happen?

We aren’t sure why plant blindness occurs. One theory suggests that because plants generally grow close together, do not move and often blend together visually, they often go unnoticed when animals are present.

Another possibility is that we learn plant blindness. For example, biology textbooks give much less space to plants compared with animals, potentially leaving schoolchildren with the impression that plants don’t matter.

But we also know many societies have strong bonds with plants. Among some Aboriginal Australian, Native North American and Maori communities, plants are understood to be different from humans but also to share a common ancestry that brings kinship relationships of mutual responsibility.

Overall, research suggests that while plant blindness is common, it is not inevitable. Here are three strategies that we believe could make a difference.

Identify with plants

Plants can seem very different from humans. Research has shown that animal conservation support is biased towards species that are most like humans.

Unlike humans and many other animals, plants don’t have faces, don’t usually move locations and don’t seem to have feelings. One way to start valuing plants is to notice ways that we actually are alike.

Science can help us see how plants have similarities with humans. Plants are alive, have sex, communicate and take up food. Some young plants share the root system of their parent plant – a “protective” behaviour that many human parents will recognise.

Rituals are another way of identifying with plants. For example, for people living on the island of Nusa Penida near Bali, the coconut palm is an important plant. Early in a child’s life, the father will plant a tree for the child. The tree’s development and life span then parallels the child’s and in ceremonies it is clothed and presented with food.

Coconut palms are an important part of ritual on some Indonesian islands. Coconut palm image from www.shutterstock.com Empathy with plants

Actively imagining the experiences of plants and animals is another way people can connect with plants. In a psychological experiment, participants were shown images of either a dead bird on a beach, covered in oil, or a group of trees that had been cut down.

Half the participants were told to view the image objectively, while the rest were asked to imagine how the bird or tree felt. The researchers found that people who actively empathised with the bird or tree not only expressed greater concern but also donated more money to protecting the species.

Art, imagination and ritual can all help people to imaginatively empathise with plants. So too can tending plants, as one experiences the joys and sorrows of plant life and death.

Make plants human

A third – and more controversial – way to connect with plants is through anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism means attributing human characteristics to plants, like describing a drooping plant as sad, or a sunflower as turning its face toward the sun.

Facing the sun: these sunflowers look very happy. Sunflower image from www.shutterstock.com

Anthropomorphism of animals is common in entertainment and conservation campaigns but rarely used for plants. Some writers consider anthropomorphism to be unhelpful: it can misdirect thinking about plants, or sentimentalise plants in ways that belittle them. But experiments show that making or reading anthropomorphic pictures and stories can also help people to empathise with nature and want to act to protect nature.

Want to test this out for yourself? Try a thought experiment by watching this 1932 animation from Walt Disney. The dancing, courting and fighting trees are rather bewildering, but do you feel a twinge of anxiety when the trees are threatened by fire, or relief as the woodland recovers?

Feeling anxious?

Plant conservationists view plants as having value in their own right, so it might seem odd to suggest that we promote plant conservation by thinking about the ways plants are like humans. The strategies we suggest draw on theory that proposes that people are more likely to act in the interests of nature if we think about nature as being part of us. Appreciating our connections with plants may be the best way to begin respecting their amazing differences.

This article was written with Mung Balding, a graduate of the University of Melbourne’s Master of Environment program.

Kathryn Williams works in the School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, University of Melbourne, which offers education in horticulture and ecosystem science and management.She receives funding through the Australian Research Council, the National Environmental Science Program, the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, however the research reported here was unfunded.

Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten have reached a compromise on the Renewable Energy Agency: it will see survive, but with reduced funding. AAP Image/Lukas Coch

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has been granted a funding lifeline of A$800 million over the next five years, after the federal government and opposition came to an agreement that will save the agency.

ARENA had faced being wound down as a result of the government’s earlier proposal to strip A$1.3 billion from the agency. This was part of a wider package of measures designed to save the federal budget more than A$6 billion.

Renewable energy researchers had reacted with dismay to that proposal. An open letter to the government in defence of the agency attracted 190 signatures.

Below, our experts react to the news.

Nicky Ison, Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney

Today the Coalition government and the Labor Party struck a deal to:

• slash half-a-billion dollars from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency; and

• save the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

These statements seem like a contradiction, but both are true. However, it is also true that the need to save ARENA exists because of the Coalition government’s efforts over the past three years to dismantle Australia’s renewable energy policy.

If the benchmark is that we keep our existing renewable energy institutions, today was a win. However, if the benchmark is that we have institutions and policies that have sufficient funding and scope to tackle the policy challenges of climate change, our changing energy system and driving innovation, then today was a loss.

Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University

The Australian research community is pleased that the government’s proposal to debilitate ARENA by removing A$1.3 billion and ending its granting function will not go ahead. At the same time, we are disappointed that yet again ARENA is subject to huge funding cuts.

The fastest and surest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to accelerate the introduction of renewable energy into the electricity system. ARENA has focused heavily in this area (among others), covering the full gamut from support for early-stage research, through grants to young renewable energy companies, to acceleration of deployment of large-scale solar photovoltaic systems.

ARENA will need to heavily prune its activities to cope with a A$500 million budget cut. We look forward to restoration of ARENA funding, and to a concerted effort at the national level to move rapidly to 50-100% renewable electricity.

Tony Wood, Energy Program Director, Grattan Institute

The silver lining amid the cloud of the political compromise on ARENA funding represents a welcome return to the art of the possible. Of course it is a pity that ARENA has been cut again, given that among Kevin Rudd’s climate change children this one had bipartisan support, at least until the 2014 budget.

Grant funding to drive down the costs of renewable technologies with real potential has been ARENA’s model and the funds now secured will allow this to continue. The next challenge is to create an integrated model that connects grant funding with the recently announced Clean Energy Innovation Fund, which will provide debt and equity funding to emerging renewable technologies, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s role of developing innovative financial models to commercialise clean energy.

Living for another day is never a bad outcome.

Companies are weighing up whether investment in a coal mine is worth the risk. from www.shutterstock.com

The divestment movement is gaining momentum – and is just one of the emerging risks from climate change that businesses face. The Paris climate agreement not only signalled social change but also sent the market a strong signal to move away from carbon-intensive investment.

The divestment movement may be seen by some businesses invested in fossil fuels as a risk. But it is not the only force shaping how companies address climate change. So, what are some of the other factors in rethinking climate risk?

Evolving social norms

The Paris Agreement recently gained more steam with ratification by the United States and China. This signalled the intent of these leading global economies to commit to helping to limit global warming to 2℃. Achieving this will require a transition to a low-carbon or decarbonised economy. China, for example, has been aware of how important this is since 2008.

Since the launch of the Low Carbon Economy Index by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2009, companies have been better equipped to understand and measure private sector climate risk. This has flow-on effects to just about all human behaviours, and has had a particularly significant impact on private equity investments.

In particular, pension funds and the insurance sector are among the leading sectors in considering future climate risk within and across their portfolios. This is facilitating evolving social norms around climate change. These changes have long been recognised as critical for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

The role of law

Liability risk remains at the forefront in current trends. The acceptance of legal responsibility demonstrated by global leaders' ratification of the Paris Agreement is all the more interesting when we consider recent developments in climate litigation.

Some argue that, in future, there will be parallels between tobacco and asbestos tort litigation and climate litigation, given that the consequences of a changing climate have been well known for decades, and widely cited by scholars and practitioners alike. It is therefore difficult for a legal entity to claim ignorance of climate risks.

Internationally, a decision in 2015 held Dutch public officials legally accountable in reducing emissions. In the United States, instances of litigation have increasingly focused on companies' disclosure of known future climate risk. Pressure has also been building on Exxon Mobil as evidence emerges that the company may have lied to shareholders about this known risk.

In Australia, some recent interesting developments in coastal planning law are contributing to a more coherent body of climate law.

Fiduciary duties are an important aspect of rethinking climate risk. In law, they can require companies to disclose future risk. A failure to disclose on “the business strategies, and prospects for future financial years” under the Corporations Act may be considered a breach of the law and subject to ASIC enquiry.

While some regulatory guides exist for how to achieve general compliance, recent submissions to the Senate inquiry into carbon risk disclosure have argued that specific regulatory guidance for future climate risk is needed. Arguably, disclosing future risks includes future climate risks to assets and company investments.

The courts are moving where regulation and policy may be slower to act. In April 2016, the New South Wales Supreme Court relaxed the hurdles for shareholders to bring action against a company in a case where an insurer, HIH, led the market to believe it was trading more profitably and had greater net assets than was the case. This artificially inflated the HIH share price, resulting in shareholders suffering a loss because they bought overpriced shares. This case is important for shareholder class actions because it is the first time the court has accepted the principle of indirect market based causation.

In a similar way, a failure to disclose known future climate risk in required disclosure documents could potentially amount to misleading and deceptive conduct. This is particularly the case where companies may fail to disclose their asset exposure to climate change impacts.

Technological risk

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2016 noted that the number-one risk to the global economy was a failure to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Some argue that technological responses, including carbon capture and storage, continue to require research and development input. Others suggest that investing in renewable energy, particularly for developing countries, will lead to more sustainable global outcomes including, importantly, social equity.

While mitigation technologies continue to compete for long-term success, investors need to be increasingly aware of where and how they prioritise their mitigation efforts.

Where to now for Australian companies?

The 2016 carbon risk disclosure inquiry was due to publish its report in June 2016 but lapsed due to the federal election. This Senate inquiry ought to recommence as a matter of priority.

Additional legal mechanisms that will have flow-on effects for evolving social norms and for rethinking climate risk could include legislative change to require the inclusion of reporting asset exposure risks, under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act.

Climate risk, the transition to a low-carbon economy, evolving social norms and the continued growth of climate law evidence a need to ensure coherence across economic, social and governance frameworks.

Tayanah O'Donnell receives funding from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility and the ACT Government. She is the principal of PlaceAdapt Consulting.

Climate action by Australia affects all of Sustainable Development Goals, including those on water. Pushpendra Maheshwari

Australia will join the 71st United Nations General Assembly in New York this week. Some of the discussion will focus on progressing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as agreed at the UN last year.

Australia is a signatory to the goals, but it is difficult to know where to begin, as the goals are further broken down into 169 targets. These range from eradicating extreme poverty to developing measurements of progress on sustainable development.

But new research from the University of Queensland reveals that actions on climate change (SDG 13) and global partnerships (SDG 17) are likely to influence all other efforts by Australia to achieve the other SDGs.

Australia’s role in sustainable development

The SDGs form part of the UN development agenda, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, released in September 2015.

Unlike the preceding UN Millennium Development Goals, which ran until 2015, the SDGs apply to all countries and citizens to create a common outlook, irrespective of the country’s level of development. The new goals are to be achieved by 2030.

The Australian government has emphasised the role of the SDGs in reinforcing economic growth, development and investment in the Indo-Pacific region, and has assigned the SDGs to the portfolios of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and Environment.

Australia’s support for the SDGs is laudable. But the focus on international trade and investment, with responsibilities placed in only two portfolios, limits Australia’s potential for significant social, economic and environmental improvement on the SDGs at home and abroad.

But where do we start?

Part of the challenge of the SDGs is their complexity and the way they link together. This may explain Australia’s limited approach to date.

To help navigate this web of goals, we mapped the most influential goals. We found the goals that affect all the others are climate action (SDG 13) and global partnerships (SDG 17), as shown in the figure below. Without these, the other goals are very difficult to attain.

Proposed relationships between 17 UN Sustainable Development Targets Global Change Institute, UQ

For example, the increased intensity of extreme weather events due to climate change will likely make it harder to achieve clean drinking water under SDG 6. In droughts, less water is available, and in floods, the water is often contaminated. Both events result in the proliferation of diseases.

These findings also identified that the goal for health and wellbeing (SDG 3) is the ultimate goal: every other SDG contributes towards this outcome. For example, a woman who has given birth to a daughter cannot achieve optimal physical, social and mental wellbeing for herself and her child without proper nutrition (SDG 2), access to clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), gender equality (SDG 5) and adequate financial resources (SDG 1).

We also found that within SDG 6, implementing the integrated water resources management target (6.5) enables the other SDG 6 targets to be met. Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin is a good example of this type of approach. There, states negotiated across borders to reduce salinity, minimise extractions and improve water quality.

Can we do it?

Linking together these goals will require high-level government co-ordination beyond merely the DFAT and environment portfolios.

Our policy analysis found that no single portfolio can take responsibility for the entire set of 17 SDGs – and that all 21 government departments have more than one SDG relevant to their responsibilities.

Australia’s ability to progress the SDGs in Australia and overseas is likely to be more attainable with the involvement and cross-collaboration of other portfolios.

Damaged and polluted waterways affect the ability to attain the Sustainable Development Goal for water and sanitation (SDG 6). Sanjog Chakraborty

The UN SDGs are an opportunity for Australia’s efforts towards sustainable development to be recognised on a global stage. To achieve progress on this complex agenda we have to understand that climate action and global partnerships are crucial to sustainable development and ultimately to health and wellbeing.

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

Fossil fuel divestment is gathering pace around Australia and the world. More and more individuals and organisations are pulling their investment assets out of companies involved with the exploration, extraction, production or financing of fossil fuels.

The underlying reason is the brutal maths of climate change: to keep global warming within 2℃ of pre-industrial levels – as both scientists and the Paris climate agreement say we must – around 80% of declared fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground.

So far, 580 institutions, controlling assets worth about US$3.4 trillion, have divested from fossil fuels. The top four types of divest institutions are faith-based groups, foundations, governments and educational institutions. The pattern in Australia is largely the same.

Local governments have been some of the most active organisations in the Australian divestment scene. Last week Sydney’s city council pledged to divest its A$500 million portfolio, regardless of the outcome of the forthcoming mayoral and council election.

It will join a list of 27 Australian local governments that have divested since 2014. This includes other significant investors such as the City of Melbourne and the ACT government. Sydney is the tenth Australian local government to have made a divestment pledge in 2016 alone.

Australian universities have joined in. In May, La Trobe University pledged to divest its A$40 million portfolio from fossil fuels. Swinburne University, with a portfolio of some A$150 million, agreed to pursue a similar goal last December. And last week Queensland University of Technology (QUT) agreed to pull its A$300 million fund out of fossil fuels.

Many financial institutions have also joined the movement. So far 52 banks and credit unions in Australia have publicly divested and will no longer fund fossil fuels. Among these are comparatively major players such as Bendigo Bank.

Why now?

Beyond an underlying recognition of a need to move to a low-carbon economy, the trends driving the current flurry of divestment are manifold.

Part of the impetus is due to the growing financial case for divestment itself. This means that divestment, far from being a decision made in spite of lower financial returns, can actually lead to better returns.

International events are probably also driving this year’s prominent moves. The negotiation of the Paris Agreement late last year, and its recent ratification by both China and the United States, may make continued investment in fossil fuels seem riskier.

But the strongest force behind divestment seems to be simple public pressure from concerned citizens, investors and students. At every Australian university that has announced plans to divest, the decision has been made after lengthy “fossil-free” campaigns by students and academics. It has been a bottom-up phenomenon, rather than top-down, proactive actions by the administration.

Different approaches

The exact approaches to divestment have varied across institutions. Different organisations have adopted contrasting timelines and extents for their divestments, as well as differing approaches to transparency.

La Trobe University has pledged to divest from the “top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies ranked by the carbon content of their fossil fuel reserves within five years”. This will be coupled with full carbon disclosure and annual reports on the state of divestment.

Similarly, Swinburne’s responsible investment charter says that it will divest from companies that earn significant revenues from fossil fuel extraction or coal power generation. This will be backed by full disclosure of investments and carbon exposure.

Others have been more ambiguous. QUT has directed its external fund manager to ensure that it has “no fossil fuel direct investments” and “no fossil fuel investments of material significance”. Sydney’s council has agreed to put coal, gas and oil extraction on its list of environmentally harmful activities that are to be avoided when investing.

Others have taken even more unconventional approaches. Both Monash University and the Australian National University (ANU) have taken first steps partially divested by targeting coal. The ANU, which blacklisted seven specific resources firms in 2014, has made a point of reducing the “carbon intensity” of its portfolio. This appears to have been done with view to reducing its carbon risk exposure. This is financially prudent, but it is not full divestment, and therefore not real moral leadership.

To draw a parallel with a previous campaign, it’s hard to imagine universities during the apartheid era bragging about reducing their “racism intensity” while stopping short of a full embargo.

It would be intriguing to compare the reductions in carbon intensity from full divestment to that of the ANU’s current approach. For now that is impossible since the ANU has not made details about its externally managed investments publicly available.

Given the diversity of actions there is a need to clarify what exactly constitutes full divestment. At the very least, transparency and carbon disclosure should be considered as necessities for accountability.

Truth to power

The main aim of fossil fuel divestment is not what many people tend to think. It’s not about reducing carbon risk. It’s not even primarily about financially wounding the fossil fuel industry. It’s about taking away its social licence – turning fossil fuel firms into social pariahs, just like big tobacco.

There is also a curious element to the movement: it is not the powerful who are typically taking action.

Among government it is the local branches such as the ACT government and Sydney council that are taking action. No Australian state government has yet joined the ranks, while the federal government seems intent on making its climate policies as friendly as possible to the fossil-fuel industry.

Among universities, too, smaller institutions such as La Trobe, Swinburne and now QUT have led the charge. So far none of the Group of Eight elite universities has fully divested. It is odd, given their cherished status as “thought leaders” and drivers of national policy debate.

Among banks it has generally been the smaller players who have responded to climate science and investor concerns. None of the “big four” banks – Westpac, ANZ, NAB and the Commonwealth Bank – has divested. Instead they funded the fossil fuel industry to the tune of A$5.5 billion last year.

But as divestment gathers pace, powerful institutions will soon have no choice but to jump aboard the juggernaut or be left behind. Once national governments, major banks and superannuation and pension funds divest, the financial bottom line of the fossil fuel industry may actually take a hit.

Destroying a social licence can eventually lead to financial losses. Markets, like movements, often operate by critical mass.

In historical hindsight the first movers of divestment will be viewed fondly. The laggards, meanwhile, will probably be seen by future generations as 21st-century Neros, fiddling with their money while the planet burned.

Luke Kemp has received funding from the Australian and German governments. He is an active member of the Fossil Free ANU campaign.

Ever had a gut feeling that you have something in common with a coral reef? Well, you do. Both humans and corals rely on microorganisms to function normally.

Across all species, microbiomes – the communities of microorganisms that live with us – support ecosystems by cycling nutrients, fixing nitrogen and breaking down detritus.

In the human gut, our microbiome helps extract nutrients from ingested food, as well as influencing the immune system. We are also beginning to understand how this internal ecosystem can affect our physical and mental health.

Corals are also influenced by their microbiome. Like the human gut, the microbiome is thought to contribute to the success of coral and coral reefs through roles in nutrition, nutrient cycling and protection against diseases.

However, in comparison to the human microbiome, the processes by which coral bacterial populations influence the health and functioning of these important ecosystems are not well known. Some of these bacteria could be the source of new human drugs, or help us understand how bleaching affects corals.

A major challenge is the sheer complexity of coral microbiomes. This makes it difficult to identify the bacteria playing these important roles or to decipher how they interact with the coral.

An unexplored underwater microworld

Corals harbour a microbiome comprising hundreds of thousands of microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, archaea and fungi) organised on a microscale imperceptible to the human eye. A coral colony offers many different spaces for microbes to live in. This array of microhabitats helps make corals one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world.

One coral species can host more than 100,000 different bacteria, and a gram of coral can harbour more than 30,000 bacteria of thousands of different types. The number and types of these bacterial communities can vary across coral colonies, species and reefs.

These communities also change when corals are stressed, such as when they experience changes in environmental conditions, become diseased, or face competition from algae for space. But these relationships are complex, so how can we figure out what’s going on?

Microbes for every purpose

As with a human microbiome, the study of coral bacteria first involves collecting samples (though requiring scuba divers rather than swabs) to collect DNA. The bacterial genomes are then sequenced and the DNA sequences compared against databases of sequences from known bacteria. This comparison has allowed us to classify the microbes.

Through these analyses, it has been possible to identify bacteria present at different stages of corals’ lifespan. These include species involved in cycling nitrogen and sulfur, and rare bacteria that could play a role in transporting nutrients from the photosynthetic algae that live within corals (known as zooxanthellae).

We’ve also identified bacterial species that produce antimicrobial and antibacterial compounds, which help prevent disease and overgrowth of the immobile coral.

However, thousands of the bacterial DNA sequences don’t match anything in current databases. These anonymous bacteria have not been reported in any other ecosystem and are likely to be entirely new bacterial species.

New medicines

The diversity of the coral microbiome is not only fascinating but also offers the tantalising prospect of new medicines and new biologically active compounds.

For example, we urgently need new antibiotics to fight the rapid acceleration of resistance. Almost all of our current antibiotics were first isolated from bacteria. Importantly, no clinically useful antibiotic with a completely new mechanism for fighting infection has been discovered since the 1980s.

New bacterial species offer untapped resources for the discovery of new antibiotics, as well as other bioactive products, if they can be cultured successfully. Cultivating coral bacteria is a huge challenge, but is also an opportunity to understand antimicrobial compounds that exist in nature.

Culturing these bacteria could also enrich resources like the Griffith University Nature Bank, which collects biological samples and shares them with researchers looking for new drugs around the world.

Mine canaries and invisible helpers

It is clear that we have only scratched the surface of the complex ecosystem of coral reefs and their unexplored microbiomes. We are continually learning just how diverse coral systems are, and evaluating how unique and unexplored they remain.

Advances in DNA technologies are enabling us to explore ever more dimensions, but a long and exciting path still lies ahead. Continued analysis of coral reefs and coral microbiomes is important to understand the ecology and biology of corals and coral reefs – and crucially how these are changing, particularly in response to external events such as bleaching and coastal pollution.

Preserving untapped and unexplored resources is also vitally important for the future discovery of new and improved antibacterial compounds.

Alejandra Hernandez receives funding from Australian Awards and ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

Roisin McMahon receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Tracy Ainsworth works for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University. She receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

Jenny Martin is Director of the Eskitis Institute for Drug Discovery at Griffith University and Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland. She receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia.

Our EcoCheck series takes the pulse of some of Australia’s most important ecosystems to find out if they’re in good health or on the wane.

The Grampians National Park is a large conservation reserve, sprawling across 168,000 hectares embedded in western Victoria’s agricultural landscape. With a rich cultural heritage and regionally important flora and fauna, it is a hugely significant area for conservation. But in recent years it has been subjected to a series of major wildfire events, a flood, and long periods of low rainfall.

Our research shows that this has sent small mammal populations on the kind of boom-and-bust rollercoaster ride usually seen in arid places, not temperate forests.

The fire and the flood

We began studying the Grampians in 2008, investigating how small mammals had responded to a catastrophic wildfire that burned half of the national park in 2006. What started as a one-year study has turned into a long-term research program to investigate how the past few years of hypervariable rainfall and heightened bushfire activity have affected the animals that live in the park.

Fortunately (for our study, at least), the beginning of our research in 2008 was in the middle of a long run of very poor rainfall years, as the Millennium Drought reached its height. The drought was broken at the end of 2010 by the Big Wet, which led to well-above-average rainfall and floods in the Grampians.

But soon after, rainfall rapidly dipped back to below average. It has stayed there ever since. We also saw two more major fire events, in 2013 and 2014, which together with the 2006 fire burned some 90% of the Grampians landscape.

The reason this is fortunate from a scientific point of view is that this sequence of events has mimicked almost exactly the predictions of what climate change will bring.

We believe the Grampians is offering us a lens through which to look at future climate conditions and at how ecosystems will respond.

Animals on the wane

We have monitored small mammal communities at 36 sites throughout the Grampians each year since 2008. The system exhibited extremely slow recovery after the 2006 wildfires, with the mammal community dominated by the introduced house mouse.

Then all of a sudden, in 2011 and particularly 2012, the system went boom. Mammal numbers almost trebled. We were seeing species in areas where we had never found them before, and populations were flourishing.

It was amazing. But almost as fast as the system went up, it crashed back to low numbers again by 2013 and has stayed that way since.

This boom and bust is not something we would expect to see in a temperate forest ecosystem such as the Grampians. It is more like what you would expect to see in arid ecosystems.

It is clear that rainfall is incredibly important for the region’s small mammal communities. If the rain turns off, mammal numbers decline and they retreat to areas that offer enough resources for them to survive.

The rain is a critical bottom-up driver of this ecosystem, because it sparks plant growth, which in turn encourages invertebrates. Mammals depend on both for food.

The climate question

How can these findings inform us about the potential impacts of climate change? Maybe we need to look at what the broad predictions are for future climate conditions in southeast Australia. What we can expect is a general reduction in rainfall, with rainfall in many years falling well below long-term averages, punctuated by extreme rainfall events and floods.

We can also expect to see much more fire activity, with more frequent, bigger and more intense bushfires.

Our research suggests that places like the Grampians, which we thought would be fairly resilient to climate change, may be in far more trouble than we thought. We could potentially lose species entirely if the dry periods continue for too long.

Possibly more troubling is the potential interplay between flood events and subsequent fires.

Effectively, the flood events could be promoting fires. While this sounds counterintuitive, floods drive rapid vegetation growth and recovery, effectively priming the landscape for severe fires once rainfall dwindles again.

We saw this in 2013 and 2014, with major fires following on the heels of the 2011 floods. While fire is not a bad thing for ecosystems, our research has highlighted the critical importance of having a lot of long-unburnt vegetation in the system to promote the best conditions for mammal communities.

Unfortunately, the system has extremely limited long-unburnt vegetation. If climate change pans out in a similar way to what we have seen in the Grampians, the capacity for ecosystems to maintain such vegetation will be compromised, with worrying implications for native wildlife.

At this stage, the long-term prognosis for the health of the Grampians ecosystem is mixed. With very little long-unburnt vegetation, many small mammals will struggle until the vegetation ages. They may be waiting a long time if future rainfall and bushfire projections are accurate.

We commented earlier on how lucky we have been in getting such hypervariable rainfall conditions across the duration of our research. We could not have shown that a system like the Grampians is acting like an arid boom-bust system if we had not decided to take a long-term approach.

Long-term studies like this, however, are rare in Australia and most of our knowledge is thus limited to mere snapshots. If we had conducted typical short-term studies looking at the response of mammals to fire in 2009 versus 2012, we would have missed the intervening boom.

In the face of emerging climate change, we need to foster more long-term ecological research programs around Australia in different landscape types.

You can follow this research project on Twitter at @Wild_Gramps.

And if you’re a researcher who studies an iconic Australian ecosystem and would like to give it an EcoCheck, get in touch.

John White receives funding from Parks Victoria for some of the research discussed in this article.

Dale Nimmo receives funding from the Hermon Slade Foundation, the Australian Academy of Science, Parks Victoria, the Department of Land, Water and Planning, and the Department of Parks and Wildlife

Susannah Hale 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.

Connecting renewable energy across Australia will help generate reliable electricity. Wind farm image from www.shutterstock.com

The stars are aligning for Australia to transition to 100% renewable electricity. Our fossil fuel infrastructure is ageing, which means we will soon need to invest in new power generators. New technologies such as battery storage could revolutionise long-standing business models. With care, the transitions away from fossil fuels could offer greater job opportunities.

Our latest research, which corroborates previous work, shows the technology already exists to solve many of the remaining questions around technological capability. For instance, the fact that wind and solar don’t generate electricity when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining can be dealt with by installing a network of diverse generators across a wide area, or by increasing our use of energy storage.

One of the biggest remaining barriers to transition is cost. But this is also rapidly changing. Much work is going into reducing the cost of renewable energy, including the latest funding announcement from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) of A$92 million for 12 solar projects.

The cost of building renewable energy

The cost of renewable energy is highly variable across the world and even within Australia. The picture is not simple, but it does help to start by looking at the big picture.

Average capital costs of constructing new wind, solar PV and ocean/tidal generators are already lower than equivalent coal generation infrastructure.

Research suggests that, overall, the cost of moving to 100% renewable energy is not significantly higher than the cost of hitting a lower target.

The capital cost of investment in renewable energy generation technologies is also falling rapidly. In its 2014 report on global renewable power generation costs, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) showed that the total cost of installation and operation over a lifetime of small-scale residential PV systems in Australia has fallen from US$0.35 to US$0.17 per kilowatt-hour between 2010 and 2014.

In part this has been because of reduced installation costs, together with our exceptional abundance of sunshine.

As a result, Australian new residential solar installation has soared to the fifth highest in the world. Installed capacity accounts for 9% of national electricity generation capacity and 2.8% of electrical energy generation.

The historical reductions in installation costs for wind energy are similar globally and in Australia. Recent 2016 reverse auctions in the Australian Capital Territory have received Australia’s lowest known contract price for renewables with bids at A$77 per megawatt-hour.

Beyond building

But the capital cost of building generation infrastructure is not the whole story. Once the generator is built, operations and maintenance costs also become important. For most renewables (biomass excluded) the fuel costs are zero because nature itself provides the fuel for free.

Other costs that we must consider are variable and fixed costs. Fixed costs, such as annual preventative maintenance or insurance, don’t change with the amount of electricity produced. Variable costs, such as casual labour or generator repairs, may increase when more electricity is produced.

The variable costs for some renewables (biomass, hydropower and large-scale solar PV) are lower than coal. For other renewable technologies they are only slightly higher. Fixed costs for almost all renewable technologies are lower than for coal.

We also need to think about costs beyond individual generators. The vastness of our Australian continent is a bonus and a challenge for building 100% renewable energy.

It can be used strategically to give a 100% renewables supply reliability by using an interconnected network of generators. For instance, it may be very sunny or windy in one region. Excess electricity produced in this region can fill a gap in electricity demand in less sunny or windy places elsewhere.

But this also poses challenges. To take advantage of the reliability that a highly distributed renewable electricity system can provide, we must also consider the costs associated with expanding the transmission network.

For example, in our research we investigated one possible 100% renewables electricity scenario. This was conservatively based on current technology and demand (conservative because technology is likely to change, and electricity demand has been unexpectedly falling). The scenario required a transmission grid two-and-a-half times larger than our current grid, including new cross-continental linkages between Western Australia and the Northern Territory, which currently stand alone from the well-integrated eastern Australian networks.

The challenges of transitioning to a renewable electricity sector are no doubt great, but our ageing generator infrastructure means that an overhaul will soon be due. Even though the price of electricity from old coal power plants is currently cheaper than that from many new renewable plants (because the former are already paid off), cost reductions mean a strong business case now exists for renewable technologies investment.

In a recent article on The Conversation, John Hewson wrote that “renewable energy is one of our most ‘shovel ready’ business opportunities”.

Now is the time to pre-empt the looming deadline for infrastructure overhaul to ensure future economic resilience for Australia.

Bonnie McBain 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.

If leaves can do it, why can't we? Leaf image from www.shutterstock.com

When we burn a fossil fuel – coal, oil or gas – it produces energy that we use, and byproducts such as water and carbon dioxide. It’s the CO₂ that’s proving to be a problem – humans have increased the amount of it in the atmosphere by about 40%, causing the planet to warm by around 1℃ so far. This means we must act quickly, given that the Paris Agreement aims to limit temperature increases to 1.5℃.

The desire for sustainable, low-carbon energy is driving a global boom in renewable energy. But alternative energy sources – particularly wind and solar – come with their own challenges.

What if, instead of burning ancient fossils fuels, we could put the ingredients back together to reassemble the fuel? If we could do so using sustainably sourced energy, we would have a clean, and potentially infinite, fuel supply.

It sounds mad, but actually scientists have made significant advances in recent years. And surprisingly, they are doing so by imitating plants.

Mimicking nature

The amount of solar energy striking the Earth is 5,000 times greater than human demand (around 100,000 terawatts versus 20 terawatts). One problem with solar energy is its reliability. Solar cells don’t produce energy at night or when the sun isn’t shining. This can be fixed by storing solar energy, with the help of several emerging storage technologies.

But we could also use the energy to produce other fuels, which we can burn later to provide a predictable and constant power supply. If we are using solar energy, this process forms a closed, sustainable cycle.

A large amount of research is being carried out in this area, known as artificial photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process carried out by plants to store solar energy, indirectly creating fossil fuels, so the name reflects humanity’s attempts to mimic nature.

The electrical energy provided by solar cells can be used to split water and produce a fuel, hydrogen. When hydrogen is burned, water is formed and energy is released. Water is the only byproduct.

Researchers across the globe are working on this process, and recent developments have shown how to make it more efficient. My recent work has reached 22% efficiency, which is double the predicted values for the process to become viable.

The next step

But a gaseous fuel does present practical handling problems. So hydrogen is easier to store than electrical energy, but it’s not our ideal fuel.

Liquid fuels are preferable, because existing fuel pumps, cars and coal power stations would need only minor changes in order to use these carbon-based non-fossil fuels.

Taking inspiration from photosynthesis again, the next step is clear: combine hydrogen with carbon to produce artificial fossil fuels. Work to make this process efficient is already under way across the globe, with impressive results.

The efficiency isn’t as high as for hydrogen yet, but progress is impressive. Liquid fuels are being produced with the systems working more efficiently than plants.

This concept provides a supply of fuel that is limited only by the Sun. It does use carbon-based fuels, but is overall carbon-neutral. All of the carbon dioxide produced when burning the fuel will be used to produce fuel again, by collecting the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to react with hydrogen.

All of the water being split to make the hydrogen will be released as water vapour when the fuel is burned, and will eventually become rain.

Replacing fossil fuels

Existing technology cannot replace fossil fuels. This is an important point when considering necessary investment in solar panels or wind turbines. Replacement of existing energy supplies with an intermittent power source requires storage.

Humanity must be ready for fossil fuels to run out, and because the move away from fossil fuels must happen eventually, it would be wise to focus on researching the necessary technology to allow for a smooth transition so that society is ready.

Fossil fuels are finite, but solar energy is almost infinite, and typically things that are very abundant end up being very cheap.

So can this really work? Well, this process has been carried out for more than 3 billion years. There is literally nothing more extensively tested!

Shannon A. Bonke receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES).

We've filled our oceans with concrete. Sea wall image from www.shutterstock.com

Feng shui is the ancient Chinese philosophy of rearranging built structures in the environment to generate qi or “energy”. But it may have increasing relevance for when, where and how we build into our oceans.

This month 1,500 delegates from 80 countries gathered in Montpellier, on France’s Mediterranean coast, for EcoSummit 2016, to devise sustainable solutions on how to cross the boundaries of ecology and engineering. At the heart of these discussions was marine spatial planning, an important element in the harmony and balance, or feng shui, required in our oceans.

Fragmented seascapes

Globally, we have a long history of building into the sea, dating back to the first Roman seawalls and breakwalls. Down the road from the conference centre, the coastline is armoured with stone laid down in the 17th century during the reign of King Louis XIV.

Japan has been adding artificial reefs to enhance fish production since the 18th century. This practice continues today, ranging from opportunistic sinking of ships to specially constructed installations.

Modern construction has overcrowded our oceans with energy platforms, the most densely constructed of which are often located in the smallest water bodies. The result is a fragmented seascape that creates barriers to important ecological migrations and processes.

The pace of this marine development is rapid and global, but remains fairly unregulated in time and space. Imagine how you would feel in a house where all the furniture was placed in one room, or where the doors to your dining room were nailed shut?

This is occurring in our oceans, where developments may be concentrated in just one area and hard structures block or modify natural water movements. Like our houses, we need to “feng shui” our oceans to achieve a state of equilibrium between societal needs and the environment.

The future of our oceans isn’t set in concrete, but can be a balance between hard and soft engineering – as we heard from speakers from around the world.

Balancing yin and yang

Our oceans are becoming crowded. Marine spatial planning is the feng shui that can balance the needs of different ocean users – energy and aquaculture, for instance. But we need to make sure that the resources we receive from our oceans are matched by the efforts we invest in conservation and restoration.

Often the need to defend valuable commercial property from ocean forces overrides the ecological considerations, unbalancing the ocean’s yin and yang.

Some of the best examples of marine spatial planning for ecology are the networks of marine protected areas in many countries.

However, where conservation is not considered, developments remain relatively randomly spaced without thought for important principles of ecological connectivity. Marine feng shui is best supported by continuity and connectedness, principles that are crucial if our oceans are to continue delivering ecosystem services that we rely on, such as food provision.

Spatial planning relies on mapping to identify where and how the ocean is used in relation to natural resources and habitat. We now have the tools to do this at the large scale relevant to ecological processes.

At the most basic level, Google Earth provides a high-resolution picture of the built environment that can be translated for management. At a more advanced level, global observation platforms can generate information about the earth’s ecosystems with unparalleled detail. With these tools literally raining down information from above, we are now best placed to make important decisions to conserve the integrity of our oceans.

Offsetting our ocean footprint

We can look to principles already used in landscape ecology. In many parts of Asia, ecology is combining with the practical considerations for human habitation to create “healthy buildings” with natural temperature regulation, lighting and noise control. In fact, even strategies such as the Building with Nature program appear to have roots in feng shui.

With better planning and forethought about when, where and how we build into the ocean we can have more positive ecological outcomes. Encouraging multi-purpose developments, such as those increasingly used in aquaculture for economic benefits, could benefit ecosystems by constraining environmental impacts.

We can retrospectively feng shui built habitats with targeted conservation of threatened species, but also avoid building new structures in locations where they might impact on migrating birds, turtles or sea mammals. The spatial arrangement of structures might also be used to future-proof warming oceans and provide corridors of movement for ecological climate migrants.

Achieving all the necessary elements for good feng shui in our oceans will be difficult without investment in spatial planning and sustainable developments. Despite the global interconnectedness of our seascapes, their management is largely uncoordinated across territories and economic responsibilities remain uncertain.

What is clear is that our oceans are becoming a jigsaw of human-made structures, but with ecological forethought we have the potential to fit these pieces together for the greatest benefits.

Katherine Dafforn receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is affiliated with the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

Mariana Mayer-Pinto is affiliated with the Sydney Institute for Marine Science

Nathan Waltham is affiliated with TropWATER (Centre for Tropical Water & Aquatic Ecosystem Research), James Cook University Australia. Dr Waltham receives funding from: Australian Government, Queensland Government, Industry, Natural Resources Management Groups, Local Government and external funding grant bodies.

The European Commission’s latest Quarterly report on electricity markets makes sobering reading down under.

Over the last year wholesale electricity prices have been falling just about everywhere across the developed world except here in Australia, where they are skyrocketing.

Figure 32 from European Commission’s Quarterly report on electricity markets analysing wholesale market price trends to the end of Q1 2016, in Euros per megawatt hour. The Platts PEP is the Pan European Power price index. Note that as recently as early 2015, Australia had the cheapest prices, now it is heading rapidly towards the most expensive. European Commission Quarterly report on electricity markets, see https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/documents/quarterly_report_on_european_electricity_markets_q4_2015-q1_2016.pdf

Australian prices are now above European prices, well above the US prices and rapidly converging with Japan, which is still recovering from the shock of Fukushima in 2011 when prices rose to over eight times Australian.

With Japan now reactivating nuclear power production, and Australian LNG exporters putting the squeeze on domestic gas markets, it can be anticipated that Australia will soon be top of the price tree. Indeed, with 2016 Q2 and Q3 Australian prices rising at unprecedented rates, it probably already is.

Combined with exorbitant power distribution costs, the alarming trends highlighted by the EC’s report will be exercising the mind of our new Federal Minister for the Environment and Energy, Josh Frydenberg.

Comparison of wholesale electricity prices shown in the figure above as percentage of Australian prices. Note logarithmic scale. Data sourced from European Commission's Quarterly report on electricity markets, see https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/documents/quarterly_report_on_european_electricity_markets_q4_2015-q1_2016.pdf How fast are Australian prices rising?

The trends highlighted by the EC’s report are expressed in Euros, so they somewhat obscure local dynamics. In reality, Australian wholesale prices are rising more steeply than ever before, having risen by around 45% over the last year. Prices over the last six months are now higher in aggregate than at any comparable time during the carbon tax period, which added around 50% to wholesale prices in the period 1/07/2012 - 17/07/2014. When the impact of the carbon tax on 2014 prices is removed, prices are up by more than 65% in just 2 years.

Wholesale prices averaged by season, on the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) from spring 2009 through to winter 2016. For the carbon tax period 1/7/2012 through 17/7/2014, filled coloured bars show the prices with the carbon tax component subtracted, assuming an emissions intensity of 0.85 tonnes per megawatt hour. Actual prices for this period are shown by the open lines. Data sourced from AEMO half-hour aggregated price and demand datasets.

Compared to the same period one year earlier, wholesale prices have risen across all seasons and all jurisdictions in the last year, excepting summer in Queensland. The rate of increase has risen steadily from the spring 2015 through to the winter 2016. For the winter period of 2016, prices were up by an average by 85% compared to the previous winter, with the increase ranging from 65% in Queensland to 115% in South Australia.

Annual percentage changes in wholesale electricity prices on the National electricity market. The prices are calculated for the Spring of 2015 through Winter of 2016, compared to the same period one year earlier, for each of the mainland regions comprising the NEM. Data sourced from AEMO half-hour aggregated price and demand datasets. Why are electricity prices falling everywhere but Australia?

The reasons for wholesale electricity price falls in Europe and Japan are straightforward.

Both are dependant on imported gas, and with the oil-linked price for gas falling, so too are electricity prices. In the US market, the flood of shale gas greatly exceeds export capacity, so there is a continuing glut of cheap gas [1].

The story in Australia is quite different. Despite a three fold increase in gas production in the last few years, due to the opening up of new coal seam gas (CSG) fields in Queensland, the Australian domestic market is being squeezed as LNG exporters struggle to meet supply contracts.

In the Australian CSG industry it is an open secret that some exporters agreed punitive clauses in contracts should they fail to fill their LNG trains. Despite strong opposition from former industry champions such as John Ellice-Flint, exporters such as Santos stretched themselves on production by committing to two LNG trains. Now gas is being diverted from domestic markets to avoid industry collapse. The consequence is that Australian gas consumers are increasingly subject to scarcity pricing when domestic prices can rise to many times that which international buyers have contracted for the same gas.

Not surprisingly, steep rises in the cost of gas is causing a reduction in gas use in domestic electricity markets. In Queensland gas fired power output in winter of 2016 was down about 250 megawatts, over 20% on the year before. Meanwhile black coal generation was up 450 megawatts, with Queensland’s CO2-production from the electricity sector increasing by 5%.

An illustration of the impact of the rising cost of gas on the Australian electricity market are summarised in the figures below, which show how market prices varied with gas dispatch in Queensland over the winters of 2015 and 2016, respectively. In winter 2015, when gas dispatch averaged 1076 megawatts, there was no correlation between wholesale prices with the amount of gas dispatch, consistent with gas generation being a price taker. Then the average price of electricity was $39.6 per megawatt hour.

By winter 2016, when gas dispatch averaged 833 megawatts, a strong price correlation had established as gas generators increasingly set the price. Average prices had risen to $65.2 per megawatt hour with spot prices increasing on almost $100 per megawatt hour for each additional gigawatt of gas dispatch in winter 2016.

Pattern of market prices with gas dispatch in Queensland in winter, 2015. Abundant ramp gas during this period meant there electricity prices were decoupled from gas use. The grey points represent individual 5-minute dispatch intervals. The violin plots shown the distribution of price event for 8 gas dispatch bins, while the black circles show the means for each of the 8 bins. The red shade shows the linear fit to the 5 minute data at the 95% confidence level. Data sourced form AEMO 5-minute dispatch tables. Pattern of market prices with gas dispatch in Queensland in winter, 2016. Gas scarcity in the domestic markets during this period meant there electricity prices were strongly coupled to gas use, with prices rising on average $92/MWhour for each additional gigawatt of gas dispatch. Data sourced form AEMO 5-minute dispatch tables. We really need to talk about gas

In 2015, the availability of “ramp” gas made Queensland settings somewhat analogous to the US, where cheap gas increasingly fuels electricity generation. By winter 2016 when more LNG export trains had been commissioned, scarcity pricing was manifesting in our domestic gas markets impacting our electricity market, big time.

As the EC’s quarterly market report flags, this is a terrible outcome for Australia, obliterating our competitive advantage as a cheap provider of electricity in a little over a year. And it is hurting like hell, most severely in South Australia which has always been more exposed to gas prices than other states by virtue of its limited coal reserves.

While several compounding factors have played out in extreme price rises in South Australia, as discussed in my last post, the broader rises across Australia have their underpinnings in the rising gas prices as well as contractual arrangements in the gas market, including piping. The smoking gun is the steep rises in Queensland - a market that to this day remains essentially a renewable free zone.

The damaging reality of the situation is highlighted by a recent post on the tech website Whirlpool

• “We are a business in SA [South Australia] with high usage (use up to 14MW), on spot pricing since June 1st – and are turning everything off when a spike hits – but the last 5 minute spike was at the end of the half hour pricing cycle (price is averaged in half hour periods). We just chewed through $75,000 worth of power in a half and hour! (we are used to paying $1000). This period while the interconnector is down could effectively burn about 3 years of profits in 4 working days if the forecast prices come to fruition.”

One might ask why such energy users exposed themselves to spot (wholesale) pricing (the norm is via the contract market). Whatever, the cautionary is that 14 MW represents 1% of average South Australian power consumption. Ten such business at threat of going under would be devastating, with potential to reduce South Australian electricity demand by 10%.

The horse has bolted, so what next?

The EC’s quarterly market report was already flagging in Q1 2016 that Australian electricity production was expensive by international standards. Since then, further steep price rises across the NEM in autumn and winter 2016 have further exacerbated price differentials, surely now placing Australia amongst the most expensive producers of electricity in the world.

No doubt the gas lobby will absolve the gas industry from any responsibility for the recent events that have transpired on our electricity markets, arguing the solution lies in even more gas production, and that renewable energy policies are more to blame.

To be sure, eastern Australia is short on supply of cheap conventional gas from the offshore Gippsland Basin and a few other locations. Expanding the gas base by exploiting unconventional resources such as CSG was always going to come at a price, since such resources are inherently more expensive.

But developing the new CSG fields at such scale was always going to risk that production would fall short of targets. As much was acknowledged by the joint Department of Industry and Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics study into Eastern Australian gas markets

The current development of LNG in eastern Australia and the expected tripling of gas demand are creating conditions that are in stark contrast to those in the previously isolated domestic gas market. The timely development of gas resources will be important to ensure that supply is available for domestic gas users and to meet LNG export commitments. Such is the scale of the LNG projects that even small deviations from the CSG reserve development schedule could result in significant volumes of gas being sourced from traditional domestic market supplies

The hope is that the events of 2016 are transients, related to temporary development schedule difficulties. If they are not, then god help domestic consumers. A broader question for our gas exporters is why should so much risk from such development schedule difficulties be defrayed onto domestic consumers?

In prosecuting the case to deliver more of our national gas resources to market, perhaps it is not too much to ask that domestic consumers are offered some insurance against any further development schedule difficulties incurred by our exporters? After all, it is our gas.

Domestic reservation, anyone?

Notes

[1] Shale gas economics in the US is linked to co-produced liquids, and thus differs markedly from the CSG fields in Australia where there is no liquid hydorcarbon production.

Disclosure

Mike Sandiford receives funding from the ARC for geological research.

Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will have some explaining to do when he attends the Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting in Pohnpei, Micronesia, this week.

Australia’s continued determination to dig up coal, while refusing to dig deep to tackle climate change, has put it increasingly at odds with world opinion. Nowhere is this more evident than when Australian politicians meet with their Pacific island counterparts.

It is widely acknowledged that Pacific island states are at the front line of climate change. It is perhaps less well known that, for a quarter of a century, Australia has attempted to undermine their demands in climate negotiations at the United Nations.

The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – organised around an annual meeting between island leaders and their counterparts from Australia and New Zealand – is the Pacific region’s premier political forum. But island nations have been denied the chance to use it to press hard for their shared climate goals, because Australia has used the PIF to weaken the regional declarations put forward by Pacific nations at each key milestone in the global climate negotiation process.

In the run-up to the 1997 UN Kyoto climate summit, Pacific island leaders lobbied internationally for new binding targets to reduce emissions. However, that year’s PIF leaders’ statement was toned down, simply calling for “recognition of climate change impacts”.

Likewise, in the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen talks, Pacific island countries called for states to reduce emissions by 95% by 2050. But at that year’s PIF meeting in Cairns, the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, convinced leaders to scale back the proposed target to 50%. Pacific media branded the outcome “a death warrant for Pacific Islanders”.

Ahead of last year’s Paris summit, Australia again exercised its “veto power” over Pacific climate diplomacy. Over the preceding years Pacific island leaders had made their climate positions quite clear, both at UN discussions in New York and in a string of declarations including the Melanesian Spearhead Group Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change, the Polynesian Leaders' Declaration on Climate Change, and the Suva Declaration on Climate Change.

Nevertheless, the official climate declaration issued after last year’s PIF in Port Moresby was significantly weaker in several key areas. Most notably, it failed to call for global negotiations to limit global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels. This is a threshold that Pacific island states have consistently argued should not be crossed, because that would threaten the very existence of low-lying states such as Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands.

These countries are understandably very unwilling to compromise on this position. At the Port Moresby meeting, Kiribati President Anote Tong suggested that Australia should leave the forum altogether if it was not prepared to back the islands' positions in global climate negotiations.

There is little doubt that Australian attempts to gag its Pacific island neighbours in these negotiations have aroused anger in the region. This has been compounded by the fact that Australians are among the world’s highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters and the Australian government is committed to increasing exports of the dirtiest source of emissions – coal.

Pacific perspectives on Australia’s coal addiction

If Pacific islands are to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, there is little doubt that most of the world’s coal must stay in the ground. No serious policymaker disputes the basic fact that our carbon budget is severely limited. There is no scenario in which building new coal mines, and expanding existing ones, is compatible with effectively tackling climate change.

Pacific island governments are calling for a global move away from coal. In September 2015, the Pacific Islands Development Forum (a new regional body that meets without Australian representation) called for an urgent international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil-fuel-extracting industries, particularly new coal mines.

Leaders from the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu issued a similar statement on the sidelines of the Port Moresby summit. President Tong wrote personally to world leaders before the Paris talks, asking them to support the moratorium.

Australia’s view could scarcely be more different. It is the world’s largest coal exporter, and both major political parties are financially backed by the coal lobby. Rather than move away from coal, the government is seeking to expand exports dramatically, with public subsidies and taxpayer-funded infrastructure.

Australia wants to keep its coal rolling. CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

These exports are still largely shielded from discussions about Australia’s contribution to climate change. Because Australian coal is burned in China, Japan and elsewhere, the emissions are ascribed to those nations.

In 2016 Australia will export around 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, embodied in coal. By some estimates, over the next five years Australia’s “carbon exports” will overtake those from Saudi oil.

Australia’s coal addiction has implications for its relations with Pacific island neighbours. For a start, it has undermined any claim that decisions made at the Pacific Islands Forum represent the “true” Pacific voice on climate change.

The ramifications may go deeper still. While Pacific leaders still accept the need to meet with their wealthier and more powerful neighbour – Australia is a crucial partner in times of natural disaster and a key source of development aid – joint decisions made at the PIF are beginning to ring hollow. Island states are increasingly using other multilateral forums to pursue their interests.

Pacific leadership and global climate diplomacy

To be sure, Pacific island states have long pursued independent diplomatic strategies to tackle the root causes of climate change. The first UN proposal for multilateral climate action – which later became the Kyoto Protocol – was proposed in 1994 by Pacific diplomats working through the auspices of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

Twenty-one years later, Pacific leaders were again crucial in securing the Paris Agreement, the first truly global agreement for tackling climate change. Last week US President Barack Obama told Pacific island leaders in Hawaii that agreement would have been impossible “without the incredible efforts and hard work of the island nations”.

Pacific island states have been able to exercise global climate leadership despite Australia’s efforts. How Pacific island countries pursued recent climate diplomacy is instructive. In the lead-up to the Paris talks, Pacific ambassadors to New York met regularly as the Pacific Small Island Developing States (P-SIDS) grouping, where previously they were more likely to meet under the auspices of the PIF.

Last year, the P-SIDS ambassadors wrote a “zero draft” of a Pacific island declaration on the global climate change negotiations, which ultimately became the strongly worded Suva Declaration on Climate Change. It had been finalised at the 2015 Pacific Islands Development Forum leaders’ meeting and released just days before the watered-down Port Moresby statement. Unsurprisingly, Pacific states pursued the Suva position once they arrived in Paris.

These tactics proved crucial to the advancement of Pacific islands' position in the global climate talks. But Pacific states also acted on their own. Remarkably, the Marshall Islands was almost single-handedly responsible for the successful negotiation of an ambitious Paris Agreement.

Six months before the December Paris conference, the Marshall Islands government convened a series of private meetings that paved the way for the formation of a “high-ambition coalition” of climate-progressive states. By the second week of the summit, this group had swelled to include the United States, the European Union and more than 100 other countries. This coalition ultimately had a crucial say in formalising the agreement’s 1.5℃ goal.

In the months before the Paris talks, Australia was not invited to join the high-ambition coalition. It attempted to join right at the summit’s tail end, but was later snubbed by coalition members at the Paris deal’s signing ceremony in New York in April.

There seems little doubt that Australia was left out in the diplomatic cold precisely because its climate “ambitions” are so dismally low. Indeed, when Australia announced its intended emissions targets for the Paris Agreement, the Marshall Islands' foreign minister, Tony de Brum, complained that if the rest of the world followed Australia’s lead, his country, and other vulnerable nations on Australia’s doorstep, would disappear.

The contrast could not be starker. While Pacific leaders are praised for their efforts to develop global climate solutions, Australia faces ignominy. Unless Australia changes direction, it will continue to be seen as an irresponsible middle power – a rogue state undermining global efforts to tackle climate change.

Australian governments will also find it increasingly hard to convince Pacific island countries they are a friend as well as a neighbour.

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