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

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Residents can take urban planning into their own hands.

IS there a streetscape near you where no one goes? Somewhere ugly to look at, hard to walk, and too scary to ride?

Just go ahead and fix it. That’s what Jason Roberts did in Oak Cliff, a rundown part of Dallas, Texas.

In 2010, with a crew of volunteers, he staged a one-off community event, called Better Block. For a weekend, they widened the footpaths and brought in tables and chairs and trees in pots. They started pop-up cafes and shops, and painted temporary bike lanes on the street.

In the process, they broke all kinds of council rules. But people loved it. Their “guerrilla art” idea has spawned a movement: in the last two years there have been 41 Better Blocks held all across the United States.

Mr Roberts is visiting Melbourne this month as one of the keynote speakers at the Sustainable Living Festival, which began yesterday and runs until February 24.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

“By doing all those things, we created a more humane environment, and that made more people come out and use the space,” he says. They created permanent change, too. Many of the zoning rules have been scrapped, and some businesses have stayed on.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s Dallas or Australia or Bangladesh, we all enjoy sitting outside drinking a cup of coffee and watching a musician play. We all love strolling through outdoor flower stands,” he says. “They’re universal things.

Mr Roberts was an IT-consultant and musician. Then, ten years ago, he and his wife visited Europe. They were astonished by the vibrant life of the cities: the bike riders and buzzing markets, the street-side cafes and public plazas where old people lingered with their grandchildren.

He returned and saw with new eyes the concrete freeways and barren footpaths of his own city, and resolved to make them “more like Paris”.

His first project was an impromptu art show, called Art Conspiracy, in an abandoned, boarded-up theatre. It happened fast: the artists painted one day and sold their canvases the next. Unexpectedly, 700 people showed up to see the old theatre back in use.

Next he set up a website – the Oak Cliff Transit Authority – promoting the reconstruction of the old tramcar that used to run through town. He was the only one in the “authority”, but no matter. A journalist wrote about it, and other enthusiasts joined in. Their crazy plan has come true: the city is actually building the tramcar line. With the help of a large federal grant, construction should be finished by 2014.

Then, a couple of years later, Mr Roberts founded Bike Friendly Oak Cliff – even though he didn’t own a bike at the time. “We just said, ‘We’re the bike part of town’, and it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he explains. “With time, people started buying bikes, and people who liked bicycling started moving into the area.”

He’s got three tips for would-be urban activists: show up to your local community groups; give your event a name; and set a date and publish it – that way you’ll be forced to make it happen.

“The projects have been successful because we commit to quick action and get local people working together to make a better place,” he says. “Even if it’s temporary, people keep talking and they say, ‘Why don’t we fix this street permanently?’”

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Too much cooling is putting the heat in our bills.

AS the summer begins to sizzle and you reach for your air conditioner’s remote, there’s something you need to know.

A big chunk of rising energy prices is caused by surging demand on the hottest few days of the year.

In its report on electricity regulation, the Productivity Commission states that just 40 hours of peak use during the year account for a quarter of our bills.

“We invest in the capacity of the network – the poles and wires – so we’re able to turn on the air conditioning when it’s incredibly hot,” says Dr Lynne Chester, from University of Sydney. “But it’s used for a very small proportion of time.”

In the last few years, our overall demand for electricity has fallen, but the peak level continues to rise.

The reason? Air conditioning has gone through the roof. By 2020, it is forecast to double from 2000 levels.

The Productivity Commission (PDF) attributes the change to rising incomes, cheaper air conditioners, bigger new homes and the trend to install more than one unit, “particularly by higher income households”.

It’s an equity concern too: because everyone pays higher network costs, people who don’t use air conditioners at peak times are subsidising those who do.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

But Dr Chester says there’s a broader problem. “As our lifestyles change, we’ve taken things like water and electricity for granted. It’s there whenever we turn on the tap and the switch.”

If we’re to avoid excess investment in the network – and the inevitable higher prices – we need to reduce peak demand first. And that means a shift away from a “predict and provide” approach to electricity, to something more complex.

Householders can expect a more active role in the way we manage energy production.

Smart meters allow electricity retailers to charge more when demand is high. “Time-of-use pricing means that when demand goes up, the price will go up,” Dr Chester says. “The most expensive time will be late in the afternoon, when the kids are home, the TV is on and you’re preparing dinner – that’s when the daily peak is occurring.”

That’s the stick approach, but there’ll be carrots too. Some retailers will alert you in advance of a critical peak, and offer discounts or incentives for switching off, if you can.

In South Australia, distributor SA Power Networks has been trialling “direct load control”, which takes the day-to-day decision out of customers’ hands. If residents agree – in exchange for $100 – they install a widget on their air conditioner and, at critical times, remotely switch off the compressor (but not the fan) for about ten minutes every half hour.

The results are significant: among participants, they’ve been able to reduce peak demand by more than one-third without people noticing any loss of comfort. To make a dent in the overall spike, however, they’d need residents to sign on in large numbers.

Dr Chester says the problem will keep growing, unless our consumption habits change. For that, we need different norms and different buildings.

“We’re treating the symptom and not the cause,” she says. “We don’t build houses with eaves and verandas, or design them for natural breezes. We’re turning on air conditioning instead.

“We’ve got to improve the efficiency of existing stock. We could start by retrofitting public housing; what better way to help low-income households improve energy efficiency and reduce energy bills?”

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The carbon revolution is being advertised, but it’s not really happening.

APPLE has got the Earth covered. It’s even got a bright green slogan: “Bigger Picture. Better Products. Smaller Impact”.

But is that really so? The iPhone5, tipped to be the highest selling gadget of all time, has a greenhouse gas impact two-thirds higher than the old iPhone4.

In fact, the total carbon footprint of Apple’s products is rising very fast, says academic and author Guy Pearse, from University of Queensland. “It’s the world’s biggest company, it’s selling itself as green and its emissions have doubled in two years.”

He suggests Apple replace its slogan with “something closer to the truth, like ‘More Products. Bigger Impact’.”

This example is just one of scores uncovered by Dr Pearse in his new book Greenwash: Big Brands and Climate Scams.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Until now, the greenwash debate has spotlighted sins in the marketing of individual products. Dr Pearse took a different tack: he chose to investigate the companies’ total carbon footprint.

For four years, he subjected himself to mind-bending quantities of big business advertising material. He checked the fine print, trawled through hundreds of annual and sustainability reports and drew on documents lodged with the Carbon Disclosure Project. He analysed companies operating in all categories of consumer spending, from banks and beer, to sports and sweet treats.

His verdict is unequivocal. “When you look at the overall carbon footprint, almost none of these companies can claim their emissions will be falling anytime soon. It was a very depressing picture. The climate-friendly revolution being advertised is not really happening.”

Even worse, he says, most big businesses are using an identical greenwashing template to create the opposite impression.

Typically, a company will exclude the impact of the products they actually sell and, instead, only count the environmental impact of corporate headquarters. It’ll install low-energy lighting and solar panels, switch off for Earth Hour, and champion a glossy report.

“By narrowly defining your carbon footprint, you can give the impression the emissions of the brand are shrinking, when they’re growing,” he explains.

“The supply chains of these companies almost all lead back to the developing world, to countries that aren’t constrained by any carbon prices or emission caps. There’s a trail of emissions that’s being offloaded by the big brands.”

Another common tactic is to highlight a clean green product line, to the exclusion of the messy rest.

Take cars, for example. While some companies hype their hybrid or electric vehicles (the Holden Volt has just been released in Australia), they sell them in minuscule numbers, compared to gas-guzzlers.

“The growth that’s occurring in the market is such that the total emissions are going up dramatically,” he says. “Minor improvements in overall fleet efficiency will never lead to overall reductions in emissions from a growing industry.”

Or take Origin Energy, which got good coverage for its Green for Footy campaign with the Australian Football League. It’s the biggest retailer of GreenPower, but nearly half of its electricity generating capacity in Australia is coal-fired.

And, as Dr Pearse notes, it is part of a coal seam gas joint venture in Queensland’s Darling Downs, with a plan to export liquefied natural gas. He says Origin’s share of that scheme equates to “roughly eleven times the carbon footprint of the products [it] currently sells”, and dwarfs the emissions saved by all the renewable energy it has ever sold.

Dr Pearse says householders must understand that “we can’t shop the planet green”. But he argues that individual action – reducing consumption – isn’t sufficient either.

“Ultimately this book is all about why the politics matters and why we need to be angry and active. Real step-changes are the only things that will lead to the emissions reductions the scientists say are essential.

“They’re not going to happen while we’re kidding ourselves with greenwash. The incremental change being embraced by big business just isn’t going to cut it. It’s a reality check that consumers, governments and environmental groups need to have.”

Read this article at The Age online

Will our poles and pipes lead down the road, not out of town?

FOR generations, our essential services have come from afar. In cities, especially, our electricity, gas and water arrive from elsewhere and our waste goes away.

But it won’t necessarily stay that way.

Last month, at the Thriving Neighbourhoods conference held at the Melbourne exhibition centre, post-graduate students and industry types collaborated in a workshop on “decentralised district infrastructure”.

This was the scenario: what if E-Gate – the wedge of land between Docklands and North Melbourne station – was developed as a sustainable precinct? How could it generate electricity, treat wastewater, retain stormwater and deal with rubbish?

Peter Steele, from Moreland Energy Foundation, led the discussion on infrastructure. He says a big shift has already begun.

“At its most basic level, solar panels and water tanks are forms of decentralised infrastructure, and installations are taking off,” he says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

For a large-scale example, Mr Steele points to Hammarby Sjöstad, in Stockholm, Sweden. Its re-development began the late 1990s, when the inner-city land was converted from an industrial shantytown.

“They looked at the infrastructure as a sort of ecology, assessing the inputs and outputs and how they could be reused locally,” he says.

All the heating and cooling for the precinct, which is home to 26,000 people, comes from solar panels and heat extracted from waste treatment. Biogas captured from sewage is used to power local buses, and treated “sludge” is used as a fertiliser.

Mr Steele says we’re lagging behind Europe, but there’s potential to cut carbon emissions quickly and deeply by matching the needs of different buildings: say, heating a pool and powering nearby office blocks.

One way to do that is gas-fired cogeneration or trigeneration – producing heating, cooling and power together. “It makes sense for buildings to share infrastructure that provides their needs more efficiently and with a far lower carbon footprint,” he says.

“A lot of people question whether cogeneration is locking us into another fossil fuel. But it also has the potential to be used with renewables, such as biomass and biofuels.”

Tosh Szatow, from power services business Energy for the People, says much of our established infrastructure is getting old. “It’s time to overhaul it, but gee that’s going to be really expensive. Is there a better way?”

Mr Szatow was a co-author of CSIRO’s Intelligent Grid report, which assessed the prospects for distributed energy in Australia. He says the change will come first to new suburbs and infill developments, such as E-Gate.

“Cost is a big driver for doing it differently. And carbon emissions are part of that cost. Our system is premised on coal and gas being cheap, and it being okay to burn them. Now those premises are questioned we have to find alternatives,” he says.

He’s tipping a future where our low-density suburbs are off the electricity grid (courtesy of solar power and battery storage) and our high-density zones plug into large-scale renewables.

What would the neighbourhood look like? “It could be solar panels on the roofs, battery banks on the streets, local food gardens, and water catchments or waste management wetlands down the road,” he says.

But it won’t just happen – Mr Szatow says householders must demand change from governments and utilities, join community energy groups and install renewables at home. “We don’t have to sit around and wait for change; we can be active in bringing it about.”

Read this article at The Age online