Nine reasons to make more of an effort on climate change, PM

And if you can’t see the sense of this, then speak to your wife

Dear Prime Minister

Please take real action on climate change.
Please follow the advice of our best scientists, thinkers and institutions.

Yours sincerely

David Salt
Sustainability Bites

PS: Here are nine other groups who feel the same way.
If you feel able to dismiss this combined wisdom, maybe consult your wife [see item 10]!

1. The World’s brain trust

The Dalai Lama and Australia’s Peter Doherty are among 101 Nobel Laureates calling for real action on climate change and an end to coal and gas expansion. They believe that acts to invest further in the fossil fuel industry are “unconscionable” and have said so in an open letter to political leaders on the eve of US President Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate. The Nobel Laureates – including economics, physics, peace, medicine, chemistry and literature prize winners – are united on this. Please don’t dismiss the world’s brain trust.

Dalai Lama and Australia’s Peter Doherty among 101 Nobel Laureates Calling for End to Coal, Gas Expansion | The Australia Institute

2. Australia’s brain trust

If you’re in doubt about the world’s best scientists have to say (most of them are foreigners after all), maybe you’re more open to what Australia’s finest scientists are saying on the topic. And, indeed, the Australian Academy of Science has just released a landmark report exploring the risks to Australia’s future based on the current global trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions. And those risks are big to our economy, environment and society [and indeed, to your family, see item 10].

That report states that the world reaching net zero emissions by 2050 is an absolute minimum, if Australia is to avoid potentially insurmountable challenges to its cities, ecosystems, industries and food and health systems.

Prime Minister, please read this report compiled by Australia’s finest science brains.

https://www.science.org.au/supporting-science/science-policy-and-analysis/reports-and-publications/risks-australia-three-degrees-c-warmer-world

3. The Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE)

This is Australia’s technological brains trust. ATSE believes this is a critical and timely opportunity for Australia to demonstrate strong action and leadership on climate. The evidence is unequivocal that extreme weather events like the recent devastating bushfires, storms and floods in Australia will increase in frequency as the planet warms. Please listen to them.

Leaders summit opportunity for strong action on climate | ATSE

4. Our premier science agencies: the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO

These are Australia’s two leading scientific agencies. They’re telling us that climate change is real and present, and the evidence is incontrovertible. The continued warming of Australia’s climate, an increase in extreme fire weather and length of the fire season, declining rainfall in the southeast and southwest of the continent, and rising sea levels are some of the key trends detailed in their latest State of the Climate report.

So far Australia’s climate has warmed by around 1.4°C since 1910. Southern Australia has seen a 10–20% reduction in cool season (April–October) rainfall in recent decades, while rainfall during the northern wet season (October–April) has increased since the late 1990’s, especially for northern Australia, with a greater proportion of high intensity short duration rainfall events. This impacts all Australians. Please listen to our own government scientists.

http://media.bom.gov.au/releases/805/state-of-the-climate-2020-shows-continued-warming-and-increase-in-extreme-weather-events/

5. The Climate and Health Alliance

Climate change is impacting our health Prime Minister. Thirty-two health groups recently released a joint statement calling on the federal government to address climate change in its National Preventive Health Strategy, which is currently in development. The Strategy’s Consultation Paper does not include climate change in its six focus areas, nor even mention “climate change”. Thousands more Australians will suffer from infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, heat stress, mental illness, violence, food insecurity, poor water quality and poorer nutrition. Surely you have to acknowledge this Prime Minister?

https://www.medianet.com.au/releases/191785/ and https://chf.org.au/media-releases/win-win-win-health-and-consumers-climate

6. Emergency Leaders for Climate Action

Former senior Australian fire and emergency service leaders, have observed how Australia is experiencing increasingly catastrophic extreme weather events that are putting lives, properties and livelihoods at greater risk and overwhelming our emergency services. This call went out prior to the Black Summer of 2019/2020, our horror fire season. It vindicated every word of caution from the Emergency Leaders group yet you’re still not listening Prime Minister.

Australia Unprepared for Worsening Extreme Weather

7. The Australian Medical Association

The AMA and Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) recently called on the Federal Government to adopt a suite of key measures to help reduce the risk of further climate-related disasters. Everyone trusts their doctor, why can’t you Prime Minister.

https://ama.com.au/media/bushfire-anniversary-doctors-commit-work-together-health-impacts-climate-change

8. Farmers for climate action

More and more farmers are realising what the changing climate is doing to their security and their economic bottom line. 1.4 degrees temperature rise already is already pushing them to the limit. For example, broadacre crops such as wheat and barley have seen reductions in profitability by up to 22% since 2000. Decreasing farm profitability is leaving many Australians in rural and regional communities at risk of declining health and economic wellbeing.

Farmers want you to act now. As one farmer from Farmers for climate action puts it: “Over the last year, farmers have grappled with droughts, floods and some of the worst fires in living memory. Today we have a choice, but very soon that choice is going to be taken away. Will we choose to invest in a sustainable and profitable renewables-led recovery, or will we sacrifice our future and the futures of our children and grandchildren.”

You’re on the record saying you listen to farmers, that your respect them, Prime Minister; why are you ignoring them on this.

Farmers for Climate Action

9. Our biggest ally – the US

Last week, President Joe Biden announced the United States would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030, which is almost double Australia’s commitment (of 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030) that was announced back in 2015.

The US administration is already racing towards net zero with a $US2 trillion infrastructure plan, including $US100 billion in rebates for electric vehicles. It is also eliminating oil and gas subsidies and has placed climate action at the heart of its foreign policy.

We are not in lock step with our biggest ally on this Prime Minister, indeed we are trailing the world on climate change intention and action.

US Climate Plan Dwarfs Australia | Climate Council

10. Jenny Morrison

If you dismiss this chorus of pleas for greater effort (from world-leading and nation-leading scientists and institutions) then please have a chat with your wife, Jenny. You have repeatedly claimed she and your children are at the centre of your world yet your government’s inaction on climate change is destroying their future.

The summer bushfires of 2019–20 in a tinder-dry country, or the three severe coral bleaching events within five years that caused a loss of over 50% of hard coral cover in the shallow waters of the Great Barrier Reef, demonstrate some of the consequences of a warming planet for Australia’s people, economy and environment. The risks of extreme events such as heatwaves, severe storms, major floods, bushfires and coastal inundation from sea level rise continue to increase and will be more intense and frequent as temperatures exceed 2°C of warming.

Your children are now teenagers. As they mature into their 20’s and 30’s (and beyond) they can expect many more ‘Black Summers’, severe floods and punishing droughts. This will impact on the economy and society they will inherit; it will directly affect their quality of life.

Jenny, you’re a former nurse, you know what all this means. Even if you don’t follow the science, surely you must acknowledge what the health sector is saying about the growing risk of climate change [see items 5, 6 and 7] and what this means for your children. Your husband, as our Prime Minister, can make more difference now than anyone but he’s not listening. Please, for you children, help him listen. There’s a lot riding on it.

Image by sippakorn yamkasikorn from Pixabay

At last, an international standard for ecosystem accounting! Now what?

A backgrounder on the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounts

By Peter Burnett

Just last month the United Nations Statistical Commission adopted an international standard for ecosystem accounting. The new standard is the latest addition to the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) and is often known by its acronym, SEEA EA.

SEEA EA has been a long time coming. Countries agreed to pursue environmental accounting at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, but it took until 2012 to develop and adopt the SEEA ‘Central Framework’. There was a companion draft ecosystem standard at that point, but countries couldn’t agree on its content, so they adopted it as ‘experimental’.

Joyful family welcome new arrival

It’s taken another eight years to adopt the SEEA EA as a full international standard, so it’s not surprising that top international officials were enthusiastic in their media releases:

‘A historic step towards transforming the way how we view and value nature’ said UN Secretary General António Guterres. ‘No longer will we allow mindless environmental destruction to be considered as economic progress.’

‘This is a major step forward’, said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UN Environment. ‘The new framework can be a game changer in decision-making. By highlighting the contribution of nature, we now have a tool that allows us to properly view and value nature. It can help us bring about a rapid and lasting shift toward sustainability for both people and the environment.’

‘This is a giant leap towards measuring nature’s contributions to the economy’ said World Bank Global Director for Environment, Karin Kemper.

There were more quotes from more officials, but you get the drift. This is definitely good news.

Is this a big deal?

So will the SEEA EA be all that it’s cracked up to be?

Just having a standard is quite a big deal. It means authority and consistency. It should mean that national statisticians, treasury departments and other key government agencies will accept statistics derived from ecosystem accounts as being just as authoritative as mainstream economic statistics, which are derived from the National Accounts. (The SEEA and System of National Accounts, SNA, are designed to be compatible.)

It should also mean general government acceptance of the dependence of the economy on the environment, because the SEEA EA opens as follows:

1.1 It is well established that healthy ecosystems and biodiversity are fundamental to supporting and sustaining our wellbeing …

1.2 … there has been growing recognition that the degradation of nature is not purely an environmental issue requiring environmental policy responses. Thus, decision makers across all sectors need to consider their environmental context and the associated dependencies and impacts.

If that’s good enough for national statisticians, it should be good enough for government as a whole. While these statements may reflect old news in the academic literature; they could be new news for official analysis and government decision-making.

For starters, it certainly should mean that State of the Environment reports should be replaced by comprehensive ecosystem accounts. The resulting statistics on environmental degradation should then be just as authoritative as inflation or unemployment statistics. And a proposal for a new environmental program based on such statistics should be taken just as seriously by a Cabinet as a proposal for a program to support an emerging industry.

What’s in the box?

The SEEA EA is built on five core accounts:

1. Ecosystem extent accounts, which record the total area of each ecosystem, by type, within an ecosystem accounting area (eg, nation, political or natural region, river basin, protected area);

2. Ecosystem condition accounts, which record the condition of ecosystem assets in terms of selected characteristics (eg, physical and structural state, soil condition) over time;

3. Physical ecosystem services flow accounts, which record the supply of ecosystem services by ecosystem assets and the use of those services by economic units, including households;

4. Monetary ecosystem services flow accounts, as for physical flow accounts but measured, of course, in money;

5. Monetary ecosystem accounts record information on stocks of ecosystem assets and changes in those stocks (gains and losses).

The SEEA EA also supports ‘thematic accounting’, which organizes data around specific policy-relevant environmental themes, such as biodiversity, climate change, oceans and urban areas. Other important thematic accounts would include accounting for protected areas, wetlands and forests. It also contains a section on ‘applications and extensions’, such as using accounting data to support decision-making on biodiversity, or how to account for the oceans.

Is this a sell-out?

People often worry that environmental accounting means putting a dollar value on everything, the so-called ‘commodification of the environment’. Although the SEEA EA provides for ecosystem accounting in monetary terms, it does not require it. It is up to the user and could be a matter of horses for courses.

Where ecosystems provide direct ecosystem services to human economic activity, it might be both feasible and useful to keep monetary accounts. For example, a mountain native forest adjacent to both urban and horticultural areas might readily support monetary flow accounts for ecosystem services such as water purification, pollination and carbon sequestration, because it is possible to derive economic values for all of these.

Equally, it might not be feasible or useful to attempt monetary accounts for a remote island, little visited but providing habitat for listed threatened species. Here the benefits to humans are largely indirect, through biodiversity conservation. Monetary accounts would be very difficult to construct, because of the difficulty of valuing biodiversity for its own sake, but physical accounts would be very useful, offering the benefits of a standardised approach, not only to monitoring the extent and condition of the species concerned but for managing those characteristics.

What now?

I’d like to go on but I’ve run out of space! I think ecosystem accounts could have something in common with lasers: when first discovered, nobody knew quite what to do with them, but over time they have become indispensable.

Now that the hard technical work has been done, the big challenge is for governments to pick up this powerful new tool and put it to good use. That’s a much harder task than developing the SEEA EA. And we can’t wait nearly as long.

Image by Ronny Overhate from Pixabay

Dead in the water

Making more of the Royal Commission into ‘our greatest environmental catastrophe’

By David Salt

We all know the Murray Darling Basin is in trouble. We’ve all seen the graphic images of millions of fish gasping for air as they died and heard the desperate stories of towns running dry. But we also know the causes of this distress are complex and involve multiple layers of government, countless players and many vested interests. In an effort to uncover the truth behind this mess, the South Australian State Government set up a Royal Commission in 2018 to examine the effectiveness of the $13 billion Basin Plan, supposedly a blue print for saving the mighty Murray Darling River system.

Earlier this year Richard Beasley, Senior Counsel Assisting at the Murray-Darling Royal Commission, published a book, Dead in the water, on what the Royal Commission found. You should read it. It should also be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the failure of our environmental law and policy.

Many angry texts have been written about how our environment has been let down by government but this book stands head and shoulders above them all in terms of forensic rage. Dead in the water takes readers on a whistle stop tour of the ill-fated Basin Plan, one of our Nation’s biggest environmental investments. The Plan was supposed to repair the mighty Murray Darling River system but is instead enabling (and probably accelerating) its continued degradation and desecration.

If you want to read the full 756-page Royal Commission Report, please do. The Analysis & Policy Observatory has a neat summary of it here, together with a link to download the full report.

If you want to read a single plain-speaking, short article on the Report and what it found, you could do worse than scanning this story in The Guardian (summed up by its title: ‘Murray-Darling basin royal commission report finds gross maladministration’).

But if you want to experience the full rage of how bastard politics and corporate power was able to pervert science while despoiling some of our most prized natural and cultural heritage while having the audacity to claim the opposite, then read Dead in the water. It will leave you very angry. Indeed, Beasley subtitled his book – ‘A very angry book’. A bit of background helps you understand why.

An ill-fated Royal Commission

Beasley’s perspective on the management of the Murray Darling Basin was informed by his experience as Senior Counsel Assisting at the Royal Commission.

The Royal Commission was established in 2018 by the South Australian Labor State Government to investigate the Basin Plan and how it impacts on South Australia. South Australia has a keen interest in this as it sits at the end of the Murray River. Leading the investigation was Commissioner Bret Walker SC, often said to be Australia’s pre-eminent senior counsel.

Walker handed down a damning report at the beginning of 2019. Among other things, he found that Commonwealth officials had committed gross maladministration, negligence and unlawful actions in drawing up the multibillion-dollar deal to save Australia’s largest river system; that the Plan ignored potentially “catastrophic” risks of climate change and failed to make use of the best science available. He concluded that the Basin Plan needed a complete overhaul including reallocating more water from irrigation to the environment.

Unfortunately, politics dogged the Royal Commission at every step. The Commonwealth Government prevented public servants from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources from appearing at the Royal Commission (the two key agencies overseeing the Basin Plan); and when Commissioner Walker asked for more time to complete his investigation the South Australian Government, now a conservative Liberal Government after a recent election, turned him down. When Walker submitted his 746-page report (containing 111 findings and 44 recommendations) they were warmly welcomed by the SA Government and then politely ignored.

A very angry book

Richard Beasley witnessed all this, indeed was a central player in the Commission’s search for truth.

I can’t imagine how it must have felt to hear and see and read all the testimonies from multiple experts, stakeholders and witnesses on the degrading state of the Basin and the inadequacy of the Basin Plan to address this decline. To hear statement after statement that the Basin Plan clearly is not based on the best science available, is unlawful, probably unconstitutional, and definitely not fit for purpose.

And rather than have the bureaucrats, managers and public servants responsible for implementing the plan explain and justify why it is as it is, the Federal Government gags them, prevents them from speaking. And then the final report is effectively forgotten because there’s been a change in the South Australian state government.

If I were watching all this I think I’d whither with rage, shrivel with impotence. What would you do?

Richard Beasley walked away from the Royal Commission and wrote an angry book. And, because he’s a skilful writer with a lawyer’s sharp eye for detail and a wicked sense of humour, he laced his observations with wry humour, amusing anecdotes and personal asides. And his anger is palpable, and there are expletives aplenty.

Beasley didn’t want to simply serve up a slightly more plain-speaking version of the Royal Commission Report; he wanted to record his fury at the environmental disaster that is unfolding up and down our nation’s most important river systems. He wanted to enrage his readers about the deep injustices this disaster is propagating across the landscape (for starters the appalling dispossession of First Nations people). And he wanted to highlight the horrific failure in governance that has allowed this to happen.

We need more angry books

I wish there were more ‘Richard Beasleys’ out there who could capture so well the multi-dimensional nature surrounding poor governance, ecosystem collapse and the subsequent societal loss it brings. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are many like him around. Most scientists, for example, are scared to get too emotional or personal in order to tell stories that really move people (and I say this having worked in science communication and with scientists for over 30 years).

I’m sure part of Beasley’s intent with Dead in the water was to vent his own rage. But possibly the greater aim was to enrage the broader community to challenge our governments (at all levels) on their appalling mismanagement of our natural heritage. I know I finished the book feeling quite outraged at what has been allowed to occur.

Beasley’s book carries the subtitle: “A very angry book about our greatest environmental catastrophe… the Murray Darling Basin”. I think it’s possible to cast the Great Barrier Reef, our Box Gum Grassy Woodlands and many of our forest systems in the same light. If only we had more storytellers like Richard Beasley to get people angry enough to demand real action on all these catastrophes from our elected leaders.