The Conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gold standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the review says

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smoke and mirrors

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

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

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

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

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

Where to from here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rough ride

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

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

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

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

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

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

Productive research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bleaching 101

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the State of the Climate 2016 summary video.

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

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

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

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

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

And who said this?

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

And what about this?

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

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

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

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

Howard’s end

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malcolm in the middle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does the coal rhetoric never change?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carmichael in court

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

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

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

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

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

Sidelining dissenting voices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Indigenous rights agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is Melanesia’s ocean important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melanesia at the crossroads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ways forward

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

Examples include work on inshore fisheries management and sustainable development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is where “eating local” comes in.

What is eating local?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 tips for eating local

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how might this work in practice?

Less gas means more coal

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

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

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

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

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

Policy hotchpotch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where does the noise come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning down the volume

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Truong is affiliated with UNSW Australia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does the market work?

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

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

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

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

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

How do renewables affect the market?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rising temperatures

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

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

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

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

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

The El Niño after the ‘hiatus’

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

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

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

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

Australia avoids the heat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is risk?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But risk is more complex than that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Wright has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Daniel Nyberg has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many types of ‘ethical’ meat choices

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

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

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

We need more open discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Echidnas may not seem the most active of animals. Waddling around, they spend much of their time dozing and hiding. But in research published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology, we show that echidnas dig huge amounts of soil, and play a crucial role in Australia’s ecosystems.

By attaching miniature GPSs and accelerometers to echidnas in Western Australia, we found that these mammals move on average 200 cubic metres of soil each year. For the 12 echidnas we studied, this is the equivalent of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Attaching tiny tracking devices to echidnas is harder than it sounds. Zoology gets small

Short-beaked echidnas are one of few surviving species of monotreme; unique mammals that reproduce by laying eggs. As well as a strange anatomy, they have an unusually low body temperature and metabolism.

We were interested in how the echidna’s unusual limbs influenced their walking and digging, and how this in turn was related to patterns of activity and their potential ecosystem impact.

So we attached tiny custom-made accelerometers to the spines of wild echidnas at Dryandra Woodland, in Western Australia. We also attached GPS units to monitor their location, and radio-transmitters so we could find them again.

The miniaturisation of electronic devices has changed the way we study wildlife. We can get details about wild animals’ behaviour in their natural habitat that we couldn’t previously. This is now revealing more information not only about the biology of these species, but the roles they play in ecosystems.

Echidna fitted with an accelerometer and GPS unit, and a radio-tracking transmitter Christine Cooper

The accelerometers were about the size of a wrist-watch, hand-soldered with a microscope and tiny soldering iron. These let us determine exactly when and for how long echidnas were resting, walking and digging.

Our biggest challenge was getting to the echidnas again so we could remove their tracking devices. Echidnas spend much of their time sheltering in inaccessible caves, rocky crevices and hollow logs and are mostly active at night, especially during summer. We studied echidnas during the hot West Australian summer, when temperatures rose to 45℃, and during spring when it was 25℃ cooler.

Tracking an echidna to a rock cave at Dryandra Woodland William Parkinson Walk like an echidna

Our data revealed that echidnas take shorter and slower strides compared with similar-sized mammals. Unlike most other mammals, they take more strides rather than increasing the length of their strides to walk faster. This reflects the anatomy of the limbs, which are adapted to digging rather than rapid movement and as a consequence, echidnas cannot walk very fast, with a maximum speed of 2.3 kilometres per hour, and have a characteristic waddling gait.

But their covering of sharp spines offers good protection from predators. Indeed you don’t need to be able to run quickly if nothing can eat you. This armour of spines and the echidna’s ability to dig rapidly into the ground or roll into a tight, spikey ball is one reason that echidnas have not suffered the same dramatic decrease of many other Australian mammals.

Echidnas are also not as vulnerable to the ravages of introduced predators that are often the final straw for native mammals already threatened by increasing aridity, land clearing, altered fire regimes and competition with introduced herbivores.

Removing the accelerometer and GPS from an echidna to download the data and re-charge the batteries. Kellie McMaster

When echidnas were active, they spent most of the time digging and looking for food. Compared to many other animals, echidnas have longer activity times, presumably due to the time required to find their food of ants and termites; echidnas eat about 40,000 individual ants and termites a day.

Echidnas spend a similar amount of time foraging in both spring and summer, but during spring they move more slowly and are more likely to ramble, at a leisurely 1 kilometre per hour, from their rest sites to foraging areas. But in summer, they sprint at their top speed directly to and from feeding sites, presumably to minimise activity during hot weather.

The importance of digging

The considerable time that echidnas spend digging and the area over which they dig means that they act as important “bioturbators”. They turn over the soil which reduces compaction, improves soil mixing and water penetration, incorporates leaf litter and other organic matter into the soil, and reduces run-off and erosion.

Therefore, bioturbators such as echidnas are “ecosystem engineers”. They play a crucial role in the environment as their digging can make for better soils, and in turn influence plant growth and species diversity.

Echidna digging for termites, Dryandra Woodland Christine Cooper

Echidnas are particularly important ecosystem engineers in Australian landscapes, as many of the other native mammals that once performed this function are rare or have become extinct, and so are no longer doing this essential role. Echidnas have one of the widest distributions of any native Australian mammal.

Their persistence in almost all Australian habitats means that their extensive digging is a critical component of maintaining ecosystem function throughout the Australian continent.

Christine Cooper receives funding from the Australian Research Council

Christofer Clemente received funding from Australian Research Council, DECRA fellowship.

As scientists become more gloomy about keeping global warming below the allegedly “safe” limit of 2℃, the issue is disappearing from the US presidential debates. There was a brief mention in the second debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton debate, with climate change treated as an “afterthought”.

Trump has previously (in 2012) suggested that climate change “was created by and for the Chinese”. Clinton has put forward a detailed climate and energy plan.

Even former Vice President Al Gore joining Clinton on at a campaign rally in Florida didn’t particularly help.

So why has climate change gone AWOL?

Early days

It’s an odd phenomenon, because awareness of the threat of climate change goes back more than half a century, well before its sudden arrival on public policy agendas in 1988.

While John F. Kennedy (president 1961-63) had been aware of environmental problems generally (he’d read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), it was his successor Lyndon Johnson (1963-69) who made the first presidential statement about climate change. The words were written for him by pioneering climate scientist Roger Revelle.

“Tricky” Dick Nixon (1969-74) received a warning on the topic from Democratic senator Daniel Moynihan in September 1969.

A Nixon bureaucrat replied:

The more I get into this, the more I find two classes of doom-sayers, with, of course, the silent majority in between… One group says we will turn into snow-tripping mastodons because of the atmospheric dust and the other says we will have to grow gills to survive the increased ocean level due to the temperature rise.

Nixon created the US Environmental Protection Authority in an age when conservatism meant conserving things, or at least paying lip service to the concept, but climate change was still a very niche concern.

Ronald Reagan’s (1981-89) hostility to all matters environmental is infamous, with attempts to abolish both the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, but with the credibility of atmospheric scientists high thanks to their discovery of the ozone hole, moves towards a climate agreement could not be completely resisted.

1988 and beyond

A combination of growing scientific alarm about the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a long hot summer in 1988 made climate change an election issue. On the campaign trail, then-Vice President George H. W. Bush announced in his presidential compaign:

Those who think we’re powerless to do anything about the “greenhouse effect” are forgetting about the “White House effect”. As President, I intend to do something about it… In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House… We will talk about global warming… And we will act.

They didn’t get on with it, of course, with Bush, then president (1989-93), insisting that targets and timetables for emissions reductions were removed from the proposed climate treaty to be agreed at the Rio Earth Summit, before he would agree to attend. The targets were replaced, and with the younger Bill Clinton making climate an issue, Bush felt it sensible to go to the summit.

It was 2000 before presidential candidates debated the issue. George W. Bush (2000-09) said:

I think it’s an issue that we need to take very seriously. But I don’t think we know the solution to global warming yet. And I don’t think we’ve got all the facts before we make decisions. I tell you one thing I’m not going to do is I’m not going to let the United States carry the burden for cleaning up the world’s air. Like the Kyoto Treaty would have done. China and India were exempted from that treaty. I think we need to be more even-handed.

In 2004 Democrat candidate John Kerry landed a blow on Bush at a debate:

The Clear Skies bill that he just talked about, it’s one of those Orwellian names you pull out of the sky… Here they’re leaving the skies and the environment behind. If they just left the Clean Air Act all alone the way it is today, no change, the air would be cleaner than it is if you pass the Clear Skies act. We’re going backwards.

The peak year for climate concern was 2008, with climate rating a mention in all three presidential debates.

Obama framed climate change as an energy independence issue, arguing that:

…we’ve got to walk the walk and not just talk the talk when it comes to energy independence, because this is probably going to be just as vital for our economy and the pain that people are feeling at the pump – and you know, winter’s coming and home heating oil – as it is our national security and the issue of climate change that’s so important.

Despite a petition with 160,000 signatures, the debate moderators for the 2012 debate did not put the issue on the agenda.

The Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, was accused of recanting early climate change positions arguing:

My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO₂ emissions is not the right course for us.

As Governor of Massachusetts he had “spent considerable time hammering out a sweeping climate change plan to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions”.

Why the silence?

I would argue that there are two reasons for the silence in the debates. One is simply down to the politicisation around the issue. As shown above, as recently as 2008 Republican candidates could admit that climate change was happening.

In 2012 only one contender, Jon Huntsman, was willing to do so, and he soon dropped out, with his views dramatically unpopular among Republican voters.

What happened? In two words: Tea Party. The emergence of the hyper-conservative Tea Party Republican faction was the culmination of a longer-term trend of what two American academics call “anti-reflexivity”.

For example, Marco Rubio, from Florida – a state that is already being hit by climate impacts – cannot take a position on it.

The second reason is more gloomy, because it is more intractable. Those who have denied climate change for so very long will find it very costly – both politically and psychologically – to reverse their position and admit that they have been wrong. Climate change denial has become a cultural position, as academics like Andrew Hoffman have noted.

Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide accumulates, and the impacts pile up.

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.

Many of the iconic coastal villages of Australia have a close association with professional fishing. In New South Wales, towns up and down the coast historically supported fishing fleets which supplied the seafood needs of locals, Sydney and the broader state community.

But the NSW fishing industry has changed significantly in the past 30 years, in response to a range of environmental and community concerns. People are more worried about the number of fish, habitat impacts, and how access to fish should be allocated.

There have been changes and restrictions on licences and fishing gear, quotas for some species and fisheries, and a substantial reduction in fishing areas through the expansion of marine parks and the creation of recreational fishing havens (where all professional fishing is banned). The number of current fishing licences in NSW is just a quarter of what it was during the industry’s peak in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Estimated NSW fishing licence holders 1881-2016 Wilkinson, 2013, Wilkinson, 1997 and NSW Department of Primary Industries

The industry is currently going through more management changes and an expansion of existing marine reserves into Commonwealth waters.

There will be more challenges in the future. As populations grow, there will be more competition for resources, and pressure from recreational fishers to close more of the ocean to professional fishing. Similar campaigns in Queensland and Victoria have prompted changes to the professional fishing industry, with unknown impacts on local communities. This has led to serious concerns about the ongoing viability of the industry in some regional centres.

How much is fishing worth?

We recently carried out a two-year assessment of the ways professional fishing contributes to the social and economic lives of NSW coastal communities. We assessed how the industry contributes to seven key dimensions of community well-being.

We traversed the NSW coast speaking to the breadth of the community, through interviews and surveys. We found that the industry remains a vital ingredient for maintaining the economic, social and cultural richness of coastal communities.

In particular our approach highlighted the importance of considering both social and economic factors, and the interdependence between sectors, when judging the value of professional fishing to communities.

The economic assessment revealed that the industry contributes more than A$436 million in revenue annually to the NSW economy and accounts for about 3,290 full-time jobs. This includes the fishers, service industries, sales and marketing.

This is a significant increase over previous estimates of the industry’s value, which did not include the “flow on” economic impacts to other businesses that rely on the fishing industry. These contributions are especially valued in smaller, regional communities where fishing still plays a central role in local economies.

For instance, Kari Esplin, secretary of the Eden Chamber of Commerce and a local business owner, told us:

Economically I see the fishing industry as a baseline in our community … it’s something that’s been there for a hundred years providing a steady economic benefit to the town and the region … It also has the benefit of being a sustainable fishery, not only from the point of view of its fishing practices, but also from a family point of view. So it’s the type of business that can be handed down through families if they choose, which builds a sense of tradition in the town, and also gives those families a feeling of self-worth that they’re a second, third or even fifth generation family business.

Looking beyond economic data gave us an insight into role the industry plays in other areas of community life. Professional fishers, for example, regularly participate in search and rescue.

Seafood is central to many cultural celebrations such as Christmas and the Lunar New Year. And fishing and long standing fishing families are part of the cultural heritage of many communities.

Seafood tourism

The research also revealed sometimes hidden or unrecognised relationships between different sectors. In particular, professional fishing and tourism support and sustain each other in NSW coastal communities.

We found that 89% of NSW residents expect to eat local seafood when they visit the coast and 64% indicated they would be interested in watching professional fishers at work while on holidays.

Grahame Lewis, the Nelson Bay Co-Op manager, told us:

People love watching – they come down and watch the boats unload, they see what sort of fish are coming in, they see it getting wheeled over to the shops and they know there’s stuff going in there from the local fishermen. It’s a drawcard really. People love going to seaside ports and just watching – not only here but everywhere along the coast.

Recreational fishers were much more likely to be interested in both buying fish from local professional fishers and watching professional fishing. This seems at odds with the messages of conflict between recreational and professional fishers commonly seen in public debate. Likewise 78% of recreational fishers across the state prefer bait caught by NSW professional fishers.

Professional fishing is also economically and culturally important in many coastal Indigenous communities. Indigenous fishers have a long history in the industry. Fishing still plays an important role in providing income, employment, a nutritious food source, independence and pride. This extends into the broader Indigenous community with fishers sharing a proportion of the catch and important cultural knowledge with kin.

Efforts to improve the environmental sustainability of the industry have been largely successful, and this is continuing to improve. Studies like ours give us an insight into how we can also ensure the economic and social sustainability of the industry, given its integral role in many coastal communities.

Nearly all (94%) of NSW coastal residents believe the fishing industry should be maintained in NSW. Our research gives us insights into how we can achieve this. And what we stand to lose if we don’t get it right.

This article was also co-authored by Nicole Mazur, visiting fellow in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.

Michelle Voyer has been involved in a number of projects that have received funding from the Commonwealth Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, the NSW Recreational Fishing Trust and the NSW Department of Primary Industries. This project was funded by the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation.

Alistair McIlgorm has received funding from The Commonwealth Fisheries Research and Development Corporation and The Department of Primary Industries, NSW for commercial and recreational fishing research. He is Director of Dominion Consulting Pty Ltd.

Kate Barclay receives funding from the Australian Commonwealth Fisheries Research and Development Corporation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She has previously received research funding from a range of organizations including Greenpeace, TRAFFIC, the World Bank, the European Parliament Committee on Fisheries and the United Nations Development Programme. She is affiliated with the International Pole and Line Foundation.

Peak hour making you hot under the collar? It's not just you. Traffic image from www.shutterstock.com

Do you ever feel that the weather is worse on the weekend? Well you might be right!

Our research, published in Environmental Research Letters, shows that in Australia’s biggest cites, the temperature is on average up to 0.3℃ cooler on Sundays compared to Thursdays and Fridays.

Not only are humans affecting the temperature on a global scale, we’re also doing it in our own backyards.

There is nothing in nature that occurs on a weekly cycle. Therefore any weekly pattern seen in weather (such as temperature and rainfall) must result from human activity, such as generating electricity, powering motor vehicles and using air-conditioners.

Most of these activities deposit waste heat and pollution into the atmosphere, and weekly cycles in temperature provide valuable insights into the consequences of such activities on the urban environment.

Our study shows that weekly cycles in daytime temperature occur in almost all Australian major cities. Sundays are often the coolest and Thursday or Friday the hottest due to human activity. This differs according to the time of day, with early mornings showing a much stronger signal than the afternoon.

Rush hour weekly cycle

Early mornings are often associated with cooler air temperatures, which can trap any waste heat near the surface. By contrast, in the afternoon the temperature has warmed and the local surface heat can be carried away to higher levels. So we see less of a strong relationship between human activity and temperature.

Hence the 9am temperature is higher during the week (coinciding with the morning rush hour) and much cooler on the weekend (when the traffic volume is quieter).

Melbourne 1955-2013 average midnight and morning (9am) temperature

Melbourne and other major Australian cities are cooler at the weekend during the day, because they’re less busy. But what about night life?

In western cultures, with Saturdays and Sundays being days off work for a large proportion of the population, Friday and Saturday evenings have become popular with people going to restaurants, pubs, and theatres. This means there is more traffic and human activities in the city centres on these evenings through to the early hours of the following day.

Melbourne’s midnight temperature is warmest on Saturday (Friday night) and Sunday (Saturday night), which is the opposite to what we see for 9am.

Islands of heat

Cities are also generally warmer than their surroundings, a phenomena known as the “urban heat island” effect. Don’t rush off to the beach though – it’s only hotter in the city. We can see this in weekly temperatures by comparing city centres to surrounding suburbs.

When we compare Melbourne city temperature to the airport temperatures at Tullamarine, Laverton and Moorabbin, the city is a lot warmer than the airports, especially at night time. This difference is largest on Saturdays and Sundays, showing that Melbourne’s active night-life is increasing the urban heat island effect.

1972-2013 average difference between Melbourne city temperature airport temperatures at midnight and 9am.

The difference is less in the morning, especially on Saturdays and Sundays. There is even a small urban cool island on Sunday mornings compared to some suburbs.

Temperatures are closely linked to traffic volumes within cities. These can be used as a good indicator of the overall level of human activity.

Traffic volume at a typical Melbourne CBD junction during October 2014.

Consistent with traffic volumes (at a typical busy inner-city intersection), temperatures on Sunday mornings are much less than weekday mornings. It’s this difference in morning traffic that allows us to measure the difference of the city without cars (Sunday) and with cars (Monday to Friday) at the same time of day.

Figures show that traffic congestion costs about A$4.6 billion in Melbourne each year. Reducing this is high on the agenda for Infrastructure Victoria and the state government, putting forward numerous traffic reducing strategies including peak-time penalties for motorists and a London-style congestion charge for central Melbourne.

Beyond Victoria, the Australian government is concerned with the need to create cooler, greener and more liveable cities in the face of climate change.

Reducing traffic has obvious benefits for travel time and sanity, but our study shows that Melbourne is significantly cooler when traffic levels (and general human activity) are low, based on the weekly cycles of urban temperatures.

Nick Earl receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Don't write it off just yet. american_rugbier/Flickr, CC BY-SA

A recently published obituary for the Great Barrier Reef has drawn ire from reef scientists. While obituaries, even satirical ones, are undoubtedly premature, they are part of a long and complicated history of death on the reef.

The obituary comes after this year’s record bleaching event in the northern section of the reef, where more than 50% of coral has died on some reefs.

Since settlement, dead reefs along the Great Barrier Reef have been celebrated as an economic resource, criticised as a scientific misnomer, and now seemingly embraced by conservationists as a shock tactic.

A coral reef flat near Port Denison. William Saville-Kent, The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities (London: W.H. Allen, 1893). A dead reef is a good reef

In the 19th and 20th centuries, settler Australians did not grieve the abundance of dead coral they found; they celebrated it. Live coral was praised for its aesthetic beauty and natural charms but dead coral could be crushed, burned down, and turned into building materials or fertiliser. Dead coral had a use and potential for economic development.

When the colonial government was considering a site for settlement in Cape York, one of the appeals of Somerset was the abundance of coral lime on nearby Albany Island.

In 1872, the sub-collector of customs and police magistrate at Cardwell, Charles Eden, wrote that Cardwell’s bay was “one mass of dead coral”, lying loose and easily collected in minutes. The use of coral lime as building materials or fertiliser continued into the 20th century.

Historical geographer Ben Daley claims that between 1900 and 1940 licensed coral mining took place at at least 12 different locations, largely between Townsville and Cairns.

Despite the odd protest the reef’s endless supply of dead coral continued to be viewed as an economic asset. In 1951, marine zoologist Frank McNeill wrote that the reef was a “wealth in coral gravel”.

He compared the reef’s coral with “a dead reef” in Moreton Bay, Brisbane. There a company had been milling the dead coral for cement manufacturing but the coral was “not nearly the quality of that from the Great Barrier Reef deposits”. He wondered when the reef’s limitless supply would be “turned to account”.

Frank McNeill’s article on the Reef’s coral debris drew attention to a latent economic resource awaiting mass development. Dead, or just rocky?

In the postwar era, as the impacts of western economic development on the environment became more clear, the idea of exploiting an environment such the Great Barrier Reef for minerals became less socially acceptable.

The issue came to a head in 1967 when a Cairns cane grower, Donald Forbes, lodged an application to mine Ellison Reef (35km northeast of Dunk Island) for limestone. Forbes believed the area he wanted to mine was “dead”.

He told reporter Patricia Clare, author of the 1971 book The Struggle for the Great Barrier Reef, that “the lime he wanted to take was not living coral but coral … that was lying all over the place out there, just waiting to be gathered up”.

Forbes’ application prompted one of longest environmental campaigns in Australian history, which ended with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

The conservationists’ main objection to Forbes’ application was the idea that Ellison Reef was dead. To prove that it was alive, members of the Queensland Littoral Society (the original name for the Australian Marine Conservation Society) completed surveys of the reef.

Their survey constructed an image of Ellison Reef which contrasted sharply with its supposed demise. While to outward appearances it seemed dead, it was in fact a complex living community.

The Innisfail mining warden, who recommended that the lease be rejected, announced that “the term ‘dead reef’ is a misnomer … the reef is in fact not ‘dead’ but very much alive”.

Wanted: alive

In the 1960s the idea of the reef being dead was anathema to conservationists and scientists alike. Conservationists foresaw a future in which dead reefs would be plundered for their remaining useful qualities. Scientists saw a misunderstanding that needed to be rectified.

Today, claims of a dead reef are still criticised by scientists. In contrast, conservationists are more willing to embrace the notion both to draw attention to their cause and to shock the public into activism.

The Great Barrier Reef’s future is clearly uncertain, but we can learn many things from its past. I wonder if conservationists should stay on the message established in 1967: that the Great Barrier Reef is very much alive. That in itself might be enough to shock folks into action.

A living reef offers hope and opportunity for change. As tourist operators lamented earlier this year, dead reefs could deter visitors who have no interest in visiting a coral graveyard. It is unlikely that concerned citizens would organise to save a dead Great Barrier Reef.

Rohan Lloyd is a member of the Australian Labor Party.

The Montreal Protocol has successfully reduced the use of chemicals that destroy the Earth's ozone layer. Atmosphere image from www.shutterstock.com

Over the weekend, international leaders meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, agreed to a remarkable deal to phase-out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), used as refrigerants and propellants. HFCs are potent greenhouse gases.

The agreement ended a decade of negotiations under the Montreal Protocol, established in 1987 to protect the ozone layer. Under the new agreement, developed nations will reduce HFCs 85% below current levels by 2036.

So how will the deal work?

Fixing the ozone hole

The Montreal Protocol was established under the Vienna Convention for the protection of the ozone layer. It followed evidence that chlorine atoms were damaging the stratospheric ozone, which protects the Earth from the most energetic ultraviolet radiation coming from the sun.

These chlorine atoms came from refrigerant and propellant gases, the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), that we were releasing into the atmosphere.

By 1990, nations had agreed to restrict production and consumption of CFCs and a timetable for their eventual phase-out over the next two decades. More time was allowed for developing countries and a multilateral fund was established to help them meet their targets.

With just a few exceptions, complete phase-out has been achieved. As well as ozone protection, there was a climate benefit from phasing-out the CFCs because they are much stronger greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.

Related gases that were less damaging to the ozone layer, the hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), were next targeted and they will have been phased out by about 2020.

In developed countries such as Australia they have largely disappeared already, although there is still a lot of one HCFC, R-22, in older air-conditioners. Other ozone-depleting substances such as the fumigant methyl bromide and a number of solvents were also targeted for elimination under the Montreal Protocol.

New villain

Major replacements for the CFCs were the hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). Their molecules contain no chlorine so they are “ozone friendly” but like the CFCs these substances are serious global warmers.

HFCs are not manufactured in Australia but we import several thousand tonnes each year, which is a small proportion of world production. Our imports will be capped from 2018 following a recent government decision.

Nations under the Montreal Protocol realised that by using HFCs to replace ozone-depleting substances they had contributed to another environmental problem – global warming and climate change.

Despairing of any action under the climate change-centred Kyoto Protocol, the representatives of developed countries began to push for addition of HFCs to the Montreal Protocol where production and consumption data could be monitored and there was potential for an agreement to phase them out.

The process was fractious. Some parties argued that the Montreal Protocol could not be extended to cover substances that were not ozone-depleting. Others pointed to a clause in the preamble to the protocol that would allow HFCs to be covered.

This was a practical view, but perhaps it also contained an element of guilt: “we created the problem so it’s up to us to fix it”.

Resistance came from developing countries that were struggling financially to achieve the phase-out of HCFCs and did not want the expense of retooling for whatever would replace the HFCs.

In the corridors one could hear cynical voices saying that the phase-outs of CFCs and HCFCs would leave delegates and officers with nothing to do, so an extension to HFCs was needed to keep the “Montreal Club” alive.

Send in the replacements

Sensing that change was likely, the chemical industry in the US had already produced HFC replacements that are neither ozone-depleting nor global warming - the hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs).

These substances are designed to rapidly degrade in the lower atmosphere so that releases would not contribute to environmental problems. Other industrial players, strongly backed by environment groups, opted for natural refrigerants such as ammonia (already coming into widespread use in Australia), carbon dioxide (yes, the villain in new clothes!), and low-boiling hydrocarbons such as isobutane that can be “dropped in” to air-conditioners to replace the HFC R-134a.

Last week in Kigali, countries agreed to a phase-out schedule they could live with. Reductions will occur in steps: developed countries have until 2036 to reduce HFC consumption to 85% of current levels, while developing countries have until the mid-2040s. This is too slow for some observers but the experience of the last decade’s negotiations showed that measured pace would be important in securing the agreement.

Australian delegates had been involved all along in the group pushing for the extension of the Montreal Protocol to cover the HFCs. More than that, our lead delegate, Patrick McInerney (Department of the Environment) was co-chair of the working group that fashioned the Kigali consensus and enabled the 197 parties to bring the matter to conclusion.

Even the most pedantic observer, while questioning the validity of extending the Montreal Protocol, would have to agree that it was the right thing to do.

Ian Rae is was co-chair of the Chemicals Technical Options Committee and a member of the Technology and Economic Advisory Panel for the Montreal Protocol 2005-2013.