Michael Green

Writer and producer

Planning for a climate disaster

In Community development, Environment, Social justice on

THE sky was black on February 4, 2011, and by late afternoon, Melbourne was teeming with rain. Over the clatter of the storm, John Richardson noticed the wail of car alarms and sirens.

Richardson – who leads Red Cross’s disaster preparedness program – had only just returned from Brisbane, where he’d been doing recovery work in the aftermath of the devastating floods. He had returned to his home in Elwood so he could drop off his daughters that morning, the first day of school.

At 7.30 pm, Richardson and his family walked into their street, which runs parallel to the Elwood Canal, and saw water rising toward them, up the road. They learned from a neighbour that high tide was due at 2 am, and that more thunderstorms were predicted before then.

They decided to evacuate. Richardson asked his daughters what they wanted to take: his older daughter chose a blanket she’d had since she was a baby, the younger one picked her skateboard and a giant teddy bear. As they were leaving, she burst into tears and asked, “Are we going to see our house again?”

***

Forget driverless electric vehicles, forget telecommuting from arty cafes, forget idyllic renderings by landscape architects. Forget vertical gardens.

In 2080, Melbourne’s future is in Leeton, western New South Wales.

Leeton is 550 kilometres west of Sydney, and the climate there is hot and dry – it’s about 4 degrees hotter than Melbourne on average, and it receives a third less rain.

This is CSIRO’s “analogue township model”: a way for people to understand immediately how our climate could change. But the analogy only goes so far. Lower rainfall and hotter days are just the unpleasant backdrops for the biggest risks we face: droughts, heat waves and bushfires; floods, storm surges and rising tides.

Last December, the state Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Professor Kate Auty, issued her Climate Change Foundation Paper, in preparation for the State of the Environment Report, to be released this year.

Here are a few points: global emissions are tracking higher than the worst-case scenario in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report; each decade since the 1950s has been warmer than the last; and disaster relief and recovery cost Victorians nearly five times as much between 2009 and 2012 than it did a decade earlier.

“In Australia we are vulnerable,” Auty concluded. “In Victoria our seaboard, our biodiversity, our infrastructure are all at risk. Native species and agricultural production are both exposed. The risk of extreme events is elevated.

“Impacts cascade and compound… To read them is to be deeply concerned.”

An intense storm can cut off communications, release sewage, and damage roads and houses. And in turn, it can send businesses broke, and render people sick and stuck at home. During heat waves, we can lose power – and therefore, air conditioning, refrigeration and phones – and that causes food spoilage, heat stroke and premature deaths.

The paper notes that if “the Eureka Tower in Melbourne lasts as long as the Royal Exhibition Building (1880) has already, it will have to deal with the climate of the year 2144”.

Planning for a city’s future involves many interconnected things: our food, water, power, waste and transport, our offices, homes, parks and gardens. Most broadly, it considers health and equity – the distribution of our ghettos and our Grollos.

It is not possible anymore to consider these things – to consider the present or future – without considering climate change. If we don’t prepare well, people will die. At the moment, we are not preparing well.

***

The Victorian government last year scrapped a requirement to plan for 0.8 metres sea level rise by the end of the century (except for new “greenfields” developments). The Minister for Planning, Matthew Guy, described his measure as “based on common sense”.

The previous government’s “extreme controls” had “locked many towns out of being able to grow sensibly,” he said.

Professor Barbara Norman, chair of urban and regional planning at University of Canberra, says all three eastern states have weakened their controls on planning for climate change.

“If you have flexibility in policy and flexibility in process then you really don’t have planning at all,” she says. “In the context of climate change, it means you open the door too widely for development on land that could be subject to environmental risks: to coastal inundation, extreme fire risk and floods.”

One of the biggest risks, Norman says, is a “coincidence of events”. In this year’s Brisbane flood, rising rivers combined with a king tide to create a disastrous inundation.

“We are not managing the impacts of current weather now, let alone being prepared for what climate change might bring,” she says.

“We need better discussions between scientists, planners and the emergency services to analyse those scenarios. What could be the consequences? What does that mean for planning today, and the next five years?”

Within the next two weeks, the Victorian government will table its climate adaptation plan in parliament. If its update on climate science – released in March 2012 – is any guide, we shouldn’t expect much. That document devoted only two-and-a-half pages to climate modelling and to the state’s future climate, and drew largely on the IPCC’s now outdated 2007 report.

A more up-to-date appraisal would have looked like the World Bank’s report from late last year, called Turn down the heat, which combined a review of recent climate science with analysis of the likely risks and impacts.

It stated that even if all nations fulfil their pledges to reduce emissions, we’re still on track for 3.5 to 4˚C warming by the end of the century. “The longer those pledges go unmet, the more likely a 4˚C world becomes”, it said.

And exactly what does a 4˚C world mean? “Extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” All of which adds up to this: “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4˚C world is possible”.

For citizens and governments alike, mitigating global warming – reducing carbon dioxide emissions – is inseparable from adaptation, because adaptation alone is not feasible. “The focus absolutely has to be on mitigation,” Norman says, “because we are not going to be able to survive in a four-degree world, so far as I can tell”.

And yet, Minister Guy’s recent 111-page discussion paper Melbourne – let’s talk about the future includes the word “climate” only four times. It refers vaguely to “a changing climate”, but not to climate change. This document will feed into our new metropolitan planning strategy.

“In Victoria, climate change is missing in action,” Norman says. “Whatever your views are, the solution is not to sweep it under the carpet. We have to deal with it, and we have to plan for it.”

Good planning, she adds, requires transparency and accountability, but also, a link to budgets.

Given the seriousness of the issue – one where many lives are at stake, here and now – a good adaptation plan will include specific measures, costings and timelines. It will set about strengthening natural barriers, investing intelligently in engineered systems, buying back the land most at risk, and empowering citizens to deal with some risks themselves.

It will focus on measures that mitigate climate change while also adapting: low-energy retrofits for low-income households; expanded public transport for the outer suburbs; more shade and open spaces to reduce the heat trapped in our city. It will steer away from maladaptations, such as desalination plants and the spread of air conditioning, which give temporary comfort at the cost of future pain. And it will do these things immediately.

If only we could rely on the Minister’s common sense.

***

On the night of February 4, 2011, the forecast second wave of thunderstorms passed over Melbourne. The floodwaters receded before they reached the Richardsons’ home. While thousands of residents nearby weren’t so lucky, the full coincidence of events, as Norman puts it, did not coincide – this time.

Even so, the storm resulted in insurance claims of $384 million across the city. This year, after another summer of flooding and extreme weather, insurers have hiked their Australian premiums, driven by higher costs for reinsurance. Last week, The Age reported “some residents of Frankston, bordering Carrum Swamp to the east, have been asked to pay at least $5000 more for flood coverage”.

Elwood was built on the Southern Swamp. The construction of the canal began in 1889, but before long, the developers’ dreams of a Venetian waterway had been replaced by a muddy, smelly “plague canal”.

If the tide is coming in, a rush of water has no place to go. The land is low-lying – vulnerable to sea-level rise, storm surges and flash flooding.

It is also vulnerable to infill development and poor planning. “In the past when it has flooded, the catchment has been fairly permeable,” Richardson says. “Now as more and more houses are bowled over and flats and apartments put on them, that is decreasing the permeability. And that only increases the potential for flooding.”

On the night of the floods, once his wife and daughters had evacuated, Richardson went out into the street. He checked on his neighbour Pat, who is in her eighties. “It’s a reasonably tight-knit community – we run street parties and stuff like that – which is really good because we knew who was here and who might need some help,” he says.

The next day, he went door-to-door and handed out information on flood recovery. A few weeks later, he and his neighbours held a barbeque for people from surrounding streets.

In the months that followed, residents established the Elwood Floods Action Group. The members meet once a month at the St Kilda RSL. They held a large community forum and attend local fetes. The group’s website includes local history and safety information, as well as a compilation of citizens’ suggestions for flood mitigation. There is a map with projections of the flooding risk associated with sea level rise and storm surges.

If our governments were to take climate adaptation seriously, this is the kind of neighbourhood they would be encouraging. American sociologist Eric Klinenberg studied the impacts of the 1995 heat wave in Chicago – the natural disaster that has killed the most people in the country’s history. In a recent article for the New Yorker, he described Englewood and Auburn Gresham, adjacent suburbs on the “hyper-segregated South Side of Chicago”. Both had similar proportions of elderly residents and high rates of poverty, crime and unemployment. But during the heat wave Englewood had one of the highest death rates, and Auburn Gresham, one of the lowest.

Auburn Gresham, it turned out, was the kind of place where “residents walked to diners and grocery stores. They knew their neighbours. They participated in block clubs and church groups,” he wrote. As the heat wore on, people knocked on each other’s doors. In Englewood, older folks were apprehensive about leaving home.

“During the severe heat waves that are likely to hit Chicago and other cities in the near future,” Klinenberg said, “living in a neighbourhood like Auburn Gresham is the rough equivalent of having a working air-conditioner in every room.”

Richardson says many Elwood locals have been calling for new drainage infrastructure and investment, to cope with more intense deluges. “That’s all well and good for the long term. But what happens if it floods again tomorrow?”

We are already experiencing weather extremes more often, and on a warming planet, they will only get worse. Left alone, this is the future of Melbourne. If our urban planning system does anything at all, it should be doing something about this.

“We’re looking at a completely new climate paradigm,” Richardson says. “We used to seriously flood here once every 25 years. If that’s changing, what does that mean for people?”

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre’s website.

Or this related article about scenario planning in Anglesea and Creswick.

Ready for disaster?

In Greener Homes on

Communities need to think about climate extremes before they come.

IT’S 2037 in Anglesea, on the Great Ocean Road. Jim Li, a tour operator, is describing the heat waves, bushfire threats and intense storms that interrupt his work, and which have doubled his insurance bills.

“I probably cancel or completely change five trips a summer because of the fire risk,” he explains. “I’m afraid I’ll get a bus caught along the road and we’ll all get cooked like that guide from Lorne did six years ago – and that was in November.”

The scenario comes from a project run by the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, at the University of Melbourne. It is working with two communities, Anglesea and Creswick, to explore the possible impact of climate extremes and the ways residents would best like to adapt.

Along with Jim Li’s account, they presented the fictional stories of a local surfer and a retiring viticulturalist.

Che Biggs, the program’s coordinator, says the scenarios were based on the upper end of projections for climate change within 25 years. “We were trying to translate that hard data so people in the community could really understand what it would mean for their town,” he says.

“It’s not about prediction – we don’t know precisely what the future will be like. But we’ve recently been hit by a number of extreme weather events in Australia and around the world, and with climate change we’re going to see many more.

“Our planning standards and institutions are based on an assumption that the world we live in is fairly stable. Climate change is already re-writing those standards. Uncertainty will be the norm.”

In Anglesea, residents brainstormed over 100 possible responses. Mr Biggs condensed these into several visions, which are open for comment online. They range from a community mentorship program, designed for younger and older people to share skills, to an inland rapid bus system, and flooding the existing coal mine for a lake.

In the second stage of the project, the Eco-Innovation Lab will work with authorities, such as the local council and emergency services, to figure out how they’d implement those adaptation plans – and if not, why not.

“Those scenarios and strategies become our test cases to ask relevant institutions: ‘Can this be put in place? What’s stopping us?’” Mr Biggs says.

“We need to get communities exploring beforehand how they would respond and still maintain their sense of identity. It’s no use just rebuilding things the way they were, because we’ll just become more vulnerable.”

But adaptation isn’t the only answer. A report released last November by the World Bank, called Turn Down the Heat, said our current trends put us on a path to a 4-degree hotter world within the century. That would mean a world stricken by “unprecedented heat waves, severe drought and major floods in many regions, with serious impacts on human systems, ecosystems, and associated services”.

One of the bright ideas from the Anglesea residents is for a green building cooperative, which would retrofit homes and protect them against fires and floods. It’s an example of reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and climate vulnerability.

“Clearly adaptation is only part of the response,” Mr Biggs says. “The level of change involved in a 4-degree hotter world would be untenable for civilisation. We need to cut our carbon emissions while we adapt. The good thing is, the solutions do exist.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online

Changing a whole system: racialised policing in Melbourne

In Social justice on

LAST week, the State Coroner began an inquest into the death of a young man whose body was found in the Maribyrnong River. The hearing didn’t make it halfway.

On Friday the Coroner, Ian Gray, suspended it, directed police to reinvestigate on his behalf, and requested that a more senior detective lead that search.

It is already over a year-and-a-half since Michael Atakelt disappeared. It will be many months yet before his family and friends learn more about what happened to him. After a week of public evidence, only one thing was apparent: the investigation by the Footscray police was woefully inadequate, at best.

***

Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on a Sunday evening, June 26, 2011. His body was spotted by a fisherman, and retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale, eleven days later.

Overland Journal contacted me in early August 2011 and asked me to write about the case. The editor said that while the details were unclear, Atakelt seemed “to have died either in, or directly after being released from, police custody”.

Before long, I learned the situation is not so simple, the institutional violence not so overt. In the early hours of the Saturday morning – more than a day before he disappeared – Atakelt was held in the Melbourne Custody Centre for drunkenness and then released without incident.

But the facts are still far from clear. The Coroner heard from crucial witnesses who had not previously been interviewed, and about whole avenues of enquiry that were not followed.

The most glaring error was this: the police brief said Atakelt had likely entered the Maribyrnong River near Smithfield Bridge, approximately 4 kilometres downstream from where his body was recovered.

On the fourth day of the inquest, Sergeant George Dixon from the water police gave evidence that it was “very unlikely” Atakelt’s body had entered the river near Smithfield Bridge. He said that although the river is tidal in its lower reaches, the body could only have entered the river “a very short distance” downstream from where it was found; it was more likely to have entered the river upstream, possibly as far as two kilometres.

Dixon has been in the water police since 1986 and he gave evidence for almost a whole day, about currents, tides, water flows and body recovery. Yet the investigator, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher, had not spoken to him before the hearing began.

It was an extraordinary omission. But even so, you shouldn’t need three decades working on the water to form a hunch on which way a river flows. The Footscray police had not looked into the possibility that Atakelt entered the river upstream of where he was found.

The Sergeant’s evidence cut the previous investigation adrift. The barristers clutched at improbable new theories until it became clear that there was no sure footing from which to continue at all.

***

Atakelt arrived in Australia in 2006, from Ethiopia. He was from the Tigray ethnic group, who live in the country’s north and in Eritrea.

A week after his body was found, over 250 people from several African-Australian communities attended a public meeting in North Melbourne. It was fronted by Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana, who was then responsible for the north-west metro area.

Among the speakers he heard that day were many young men who complained of constant harassment by police; and Atakelt’s mother, Askalu Tela, who said Footscray police hadn’t taken her missing person report for three days, despite repeated visits and phone calls.

Shortly afterwards, several young people started a group called Imara Advocacy, to help them speak out on issues such as racialised policing. When the inquest was suspended, one of the founders, Reem Yehdego said the community had been “demanding an independent and comprehensive investigation from the moment Michael Atakelt’s body was found”.

***

On Monday, I joined a swarm of journalists outside the Federal Court, where six young men had just settled a racial discrimination case with Victoria Police. It is five years since they first lodged the claim with the Australian Human Rights Commission, when they were all teenagers.

They say the police regularly stopped them around Flemington and North Melbourne for no legitimate reason, and assaulted and racially taunted them.

Despite the settlement, Victoria Police denies the allegations and maintains that the teens were stopped for legitimate policing reasons. But it has agreed to a public review of its cross-cultural training and the way officers deal with “field contacts”.

It also agreed to release documents prepared for the case. One document – statistical evidence based on police data – shows that young African-Australian men in the area were policed out of all proportion: they were two-and-a-half times more likely to be stopped and searched, even though they committed relatively fewer crimes than young men of other ethnic backgrounds.

Before the cameras, one of the men, Daniel Haile-Michael, said the courts alone wouldn’t be sufficient to put an end to racial profiling. “It’s going to take all Australians and the media and huge community support to get these changes to happen.”

An ABC journalist pressed him on why he’d settled the case, if police had really assaulted him. “I myself have been beaten up,” he said, “but it’s not a personal thing. We understand it’s a systemic issue and that’s why we’re trying to address it in a systemic way. It’s not about one police officer, it’s about changing a whole system.”

***

In the police force, the system starts at the top. Chief Commissioner Ken Lay had been subpoenaed to give evidence in the racial discrimination case, but when it settled, he was excused. “The Police Commissioner is off the hook,” said Justice Shane Marshall, to the amusement of the court.

Later, despite the statistics, Lay dismissed the idea that racial profiling is a problem within the force. He told The Age: “I do not believe our members would identify people and harass or continually check them simply because of their ethnicity.”

The case of Michael Atakelt goes just as high. In December 2011, Assistant Commissioner Fontana attended a second public meeting in North Melbourne. He assured the large gathering that the brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation” and that he had “total confidence” in the officer who prepared it.

At the same meeting, Detective Sergeant Sol Solomon, from the homicide squad, said he had overseen the investigation and that it was “first class” and “all possible leads have been explored”.

Later that month, Fontana repeated the same claim to me, over the phone: “We have had closer oversight of this particular case than we have of others,” he said. “The homicide squad were involved all the way through, in terms of a very close supervision, as were the Ethical Standards [Department].”

At the inquest, as I watched the police investigation unravel, it was difficult to believe those words could have been true – or if so, to accept what it implied about the quality of our detectives.

Worst of all, it was difficult to believe the investigation would have been so poor if it were me who had disappeared instead.

Something has gone badly wrong, whether wilfully or negligently. And because of that, Atakelt’s family and friends may never find out how and why he died.

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website.

For background, read the other articles I’ve written about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’, ‘Watching a hearing’ and ‘Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death’.

Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death

In Social justice, The Age on

THE State Coroner has adjourned a hearing into the death of a young man whose body was found in the Maribyrnong River, and requested that police reinvestigate the case on his behalf.

Michael Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on 26 June 2011. His body was retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale eleven days later, on 7 July.

Julian Burnside, QC, appearing as an assistant to the Coroner, applied for the hearing to be halted in light of evidence given by Sergeant George Dixon, from the water police, about the likely location the body had entered the river.

Dixon had not been interviewed by Footscray police investigator, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher, before the inquest began.

Burnside submitted that the investigation should be resumed with a senior officer. “It may be embarrassing for Mr McKerracher to be sent out to uncover things he has overlooked. It may be the evidence is no longer available. To avoid that embarrassment it is preferable that a senior officer be sent in.”

The State Coroner, Ian Gray, said it would be an independent investigation on his behalf and that new dates for the inquest would be set within two weeks. He said that the adjournment was not “intended to imply any criticism of Mr McKerracher”.

Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum, said he did not believe the investigation into his son’s death had been “thorough and rigorous”.

“The whole Ethiopian community does not have trust in the Footscray police investigation,” he said.

Reem Yehdego, from Imara Advocacy, a youth group that formed after Atakelt’s death, said the community had been demanding an independent and comprehensive investigation from the moment his body was found.

“Despite assurances to the community from Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana of the quality of that investigation, this has not been the case. The Coroner’s decision today to suspend the inquest and order that a more senior investigator step in is of profound significance.

“The community is delighted that as result of the State Coroner’s intervention Michael’s death is finally getting the investigation it deserves,” she said.

In December 2011, Fontana, who was then assistant commissioner for the north-west metro area, told a public meeting in North Melbourne that the brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation”. He also said that he had “total confidence” in Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher.

At the same meeting, Detective Sol Solomon, from the homicide squad, said he had overseen the investigation and that it was “first class” and “all possible leads have been explored”.

The police brief to the Coroner said Atakelt may have entered the Maribyrnong River at the Smithfield bridge, approximately 4 kilometres downstream from where his body was recovered.

On Thursday, Sergeant Dixon said that it was “very unlikely” that Atakelt’s body had entered the river near the Smithfield Bridge. He said it could only have entered the river “a very short distance” downstream and it is more likely that the body entered the river upstream, possibly as far as two kilometres.

The Footscray police had not investigated the possibility that the body entered the river upstream of where it was found.

Earlier yesterday, Mourad Mohammed, 21, from Footscray, gave evidence that on the evening he went missing, Atakelt was upset about being held in police custody two nights earlier. He was also upset about a dispute with his girlfriend and the death of his grandfather in Ethiopia, of which he had been informed that morning. Atakelt told Mohammed he was going to take a long walk.

The hearing was scheduled to last for ten days and hear evidence from 34 witnesses.

A spokesperson for Victoria Police said it would be inappropriate to comment because the matter is currently before the court.

Read this article at The Age online

For more information, you can read previous articles I’ve written for Overland Journal about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’ and ‘Watching a hearing’.

Bursting the carbon bubble

In Environment, The Age on

Energy analysts and activists are warning that most of the world’s fossil fuels must remain in the ground, and that it can’t be business as usual for the industry.

LAST Tuesday, at 2 pm in San Francisco’s city hall, the regular council meeting was called to order, as usual. But that afternoon, councillor John Avalos proposed a decidedly irregular resolution: the city’s retirement fund should withdraw its money from fossil fuels.

“San Francisco has aggressive goals to address climate change,” he said. “It’s important that we apply these same values when we decide how to invest our funds.”

He isn’t the first to say so. In December, Seattle mayor Mike McGinn declared that the city’s cash balances – the US$1.4 billion it uses to manage its daily operations – would no longer be stashed in fossil fuel stocks. He also wrote to the city pension fund, which counts Exxon Mobil and Chevron among its major holdings, requesting it do the same.

The deliberations in the two west coast cities made a media splash, adding momentum to America’s fastest growing social movement: ‘Go Fossil Free’, a nation-wide blitz calling for universities, governments and churches to freeze new investments in fossil fuel assets, and to sell what they’ve already got.

The impetus for the campaign is a set of simple numbers – a global carbon budget.

It is a way of framing the climate crisis that is uniting student activists and market analysts. The former use the numbers to prosecute a moral case that the fossil fuel industry has gone rogue; the later, for a cold-blooded calculation that trading away from carbon-heavy assets is in the self-interest of investors.

The numbers were set out in a report called ‘Unburnable Carbon’, released last year by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a group of analysts and environmentalists in the UK. It highlighted the work of the Potsdam Climate Institute, which in 2009 produced a set of emissions scenarios together with their likely influence on global temperatures.

These are the numbers: for a low chance – one-in-five – of exceeding 2-degrees warming, we can only emit another 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide by mid-century.

But proven fossil fuel reserves (held by listed corporations, private companies and nation-states) equate to 2795 gigatonnes; five times the carbon budget.

In Copenhagen in 2009, the world’s governments agreed to limit warming to 2 degrees. To do so, four-fifths of our fuel must stay in the ground.

James Leaton, Carbon Tracker’s research director, says this “huge overshoot” of reserves represents a “carbon bubble” in financial markets. We’re on track to exceed the budget by 2028. “Investors need to start questioning the wisdom of companies pouring more capital into developing even more reserves,” he says.

The International Energy Agency, in its World Energy Outlook for 2012, presented a similar case. Using the same research, but choosing a higher, 50-50 threshold for exceeding 2-degrees warming, it stated that two-thirds of proven reserves must stay in the ground, unless carbon capture and storage is widely deployed. (It observed that the pace of deployment of the technology “remains highly uncertain”.)

Bill McKibben, the author and activist who inspired Go Fossil Free in the US, explains that despite decades of advocacy, “the penny dropped” when he saw those numbers.

“I’ve followed this all pretty closely – I wrote the first book about climate change – but I’d never really understood in my gut that the end of this story was written. It’s utterly clear. There is no room for wishful thinking,” he says, on the phone from his home in Ripton, Vermont.

“These guys have five times as much carbon in their reserves as the most conservative government on Earth says would be safe to burn. Once you understand that, then you understand that this has become a rogue industry. This formerly socially useful thing is now the greatest threat the planet has ever faced.”

Last August, he published an article in Rolling Stone, called ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’. Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber was on the cover, but it was McKibben’s essay that went viral.

Spurred by its unexpected popularity, McKibben hit the road the day after the US election, on his ‘Do the Math’ tour. With support from Desmond Tutu, author Naomi Klein and others, he spoke to sold-out concert halls “in 24 cities in 26 nights”.

Just two months on, students on over 250 campuses have started campaigns for their universities to divest from fossil fuel companies. (Together, US colleges command over US$400 billion in endowments.) Already, three have agreed.

“It’s actually happening faster than we thought,” McKibben says. “These are hard fights. All these kids know that, but they also know that this is their future.”

The campaign is modelled on the anti-apartheid divestment movement. In the 1980s, 155 colleges sold their South African assets, and scores of cities, states and counties joined in economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime.

This time – and with the blessing of Tutu – the call for divestment is about undermining the fossil fuel industry’s legitimacy. “We’re not trying to bankrupt Exxon; colleges selling their stock is probably not going to do that,” McKibben says. “We’re trying to take away their social licence.”

The writer is scheduled to visit Australia in June, before his organisation, 350.org, holds its ‘Global Power Shift’ conference in Istanbul. But local activists aren’t waiting until then.

In January, Friends of the Earth began to promote Market Forces, a new campaign “to stop our money going into projects that would harm the environment and drive global warming”, according to its founder, Julien Vincent.

Likewise, the Australian Students Environment Network has started Lock the Campus, which targets universities’ investments, research and partnerships with the fossil fuel industry. They have a precedent: following a brief student campaign in 2011, ANU agreed to sell its million-dollar stake in coal seam gas company Metgasco.

As it turns out, the students have an unlikely ally – albeit one with a slightly different goal in mind.

John Hewson, the former leader of the Liberal Party, now fronts the Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP) and its accompanying social media campaign, The Vital Few, which is aimed squarely at superannuation funds.

The Vital Few website is set up for battle, rallying the public to “storm the castle” and “rewrite the future”. In practice, that means emailing your fund, requesting transparency about its interests in fossil fuels and calling for a bigger stake in renewables.

Hewson says the average pension fund invests about 55 per cent of its portfolio in “high-carbon intensive industries” and only 2 per cent in their low carbon counterparts.

“These asset owners have a long-term, not a short-term, horizon,” he says. “Their fiduciary responsibility is to maximise the returns to superannuates over time. How are they going to manage the risk of catastrophic climate change going forward? The best way is to put a higher percentage of their funds in low carbon intensive industries.”

In the finance world, “climate risk” translates as the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change. That could come by way of physical impacts – say, a flood that destroys infrastructure – or cheap clean technology, or tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing and regulations.

Alongside Hewson on the AODP board is Bob Litterman, the former head of risk management for Goldman Sachs in New York. He sees an analogy between the carbon bubble and the sub-prime crisis, in which financial institutions “piled up mortgages on their balance sheet, assuming they were safe”.

“Similarly, today, we’re piling up carbon emissions in the atmosphere. When there’s a recognition that it cannot absorb an unlimited amount of carbon, there’s risk that people will very quickly revalue all the assets producing those emissions,” he says.

Last year, the AODP – which has connections with the Climate Institute – launched an index of the world’s pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds. It ranked them on their management and disclosure of climate risk.

The highest rating fund was Local Government Super, based in New South Wales. It estimates that low-carbon assets comprise more than 10 per cent of its total holdings. Members can choose a coal-free shares alternative, which screens out BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers and Whitehaven Coal, among others.

CEO Peter Lambert insists this attitude to climate risk is pragmatic, not political. “Increasingly the blowtorch is going to be turned towards these issues and there will be a time when they’re priced into assets.

“You can say you’ll sit back and wait until that occurs and then start to adjust your portfolio. Our position is that we should be ready for it now, because by then it’s too late and it will cost our members money,” he says.

That view is not yet widely shared in the industry. Nathan Fabian is the CEO of the Investor Group on Climate Change, which covers more than sixty institutional investors. “I’m confident we’re heading in the right direction,” he says. “But the truth is that the process is going slower than what is necessary to address climate risk.”

For funds and analysts, the risk boils down to the likelihood of widespread carbon pricing. Most are betting against it – that is, they’re tipping we’ll exceed the budget and press on to a hotter world.

Even for the most concerned among them, it is difficult to translate knowledge into action.

Typically, super funds invest heavily in “passive funds” that track the market – deviating from that benchmark entails a risk of doing worse than everyone else.

The very nature of financial modelling is a barrier, Fabian says: a dollar today is worth considerably more than a dollar in a decade. When you factor in deep uncertainty about carbon policy, along with fund managers who are rewarded for meeting short-term targets, a systemic, long-term risk such as climate change slips off the computer screen.

“The risk is there,” he says. “It’s just hard for us to measure it.”

Nick Robins is the head of the climate change centre at HSBC Bank, in London. Over the past year, his team has tried to measure the risk by estimating the impact in Europe of a deflating carbon bubble. In their scenarios, it could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the value of oil and gas companies. And yet, he says, “at the moment this risk is not being priced at all”.

While the San Francisco and Seattle divestment proposals received a lot of press, the funds in question haven’t yet adopted them. In Seattle, a consultant’s report advised the board that doing so would be “costly”.

But just as the current patterns of world finance continue to reinforce the fossil fuel economy, so the movements for change – laid out by Carbon Tracker, McKibben and the Vital Few – weaken the walls of the carbon bubble. The more noise they make, the more exposed fossil fuel investments appear.

Robins says divestment is “not on the cards” for large institutional investors. “But people are recognising that over the next two years, they will need to come up with investment plans about how they’re going to be part of a 2-degree world, rather than the 4- to 6-degree world which they’re on at the moment.”

For his part, McKibben expects Go Fossil Free will spread rapidly and internationally, precipitated by citizens’ experiences of weather extremes.

“If anybody has a good sense of how important this is, it’s Australians right now. You guys broke every temperature record you had, day after day in January,” he says.

“Either we pay attention, or we engage in the most incredible collective denial that human beings have ever engaged in.”

Read this article at The Age online