Michael Green

Writer and producer

Smarter urban water

In Environment on

After the drought, there’s a quiet revolution in the pipelines.

This article was published by the Guardian UK

TWO blue glass boxes rise from the grass next to the Melbourne Cricket Ground. If you glance at them – on your way to an Aussie Rules game, of course – you’ll notice some pipes inside.

Nothing special, really. Only a sewer mine.

Or, as the officials prefer: the Yarra Park Water Recycling Facility.

Below ground, a large pipe snakes uphill, avoiding tree roots. It taps into the main vein below the snooty suburb of East Melbourne, and sneaks off with its shit.

In summer, the large parklands around the ground are irrigated entirely with recycled water. In the winter, it flushes the loos of tens of thousands of spectators each weekend.

The facility supplies cheaper water than the gigantic Victorian Desalination Plant, which was built with considerable cost and controversy one hundred kilometres south-east of the city. Both were completed in 2012. But the desalination plant, unlike the sewer mine, has never produced a drop.

The Yarra Park Water Recycling Facility. Photo by ARUP

Something strange and remarkable has happened in Melbourne. Five years ago, the city of over 4 million inhabitants nearly ran out of water. Now it is regarded among the most innovative, water-smart cities in the world.

From 1997 to 2009 southern Australia suffered through the “millennium drought”, its longest dry spell on record. “The drought was a huge wake-up call,” says Dr Cathy Wilkinson, an executive director at the Office for Living Victoria, the government body now in charge of water policy. “The way water was managed had a huge impact on people everyday. Waterways were drying up, junior sports clubs couldn’t play on their ovals because they were too dry and dangerous.”

The government issued tight water restrictions. Newspapers reported on neighbourhood water vigilantes; people using rainwater tanks feared being seen with green lawns. Water consumption dropped 40 per cent, per person per day. Without that shift, drinking water supplies would have run out.

In panic, the then Labor government ordered a mammoth desalination plant – with a top capacity of half the city’s water consumption – and a pipeline to bring water from the north of the state.

The imminent threat concentrated minds elsewhere. Local councils, unable to water outdoor space, began to seek alternatives.

Professor Ana Deletic, associate dean of engineering at Monash University, explains that research flourished, especially into reclaiming stormwater – the polluted rainfall that flows off roads and car parks, into the bay.

“The same amount of runoff goes into Port Phillip Bay as we use in Melbourne each year,” she says. “We were talking about how we could capture some of that water and reuse it, but also save our streams in the process.”

The university now hosts the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities, which has over 70 researchers and a budget of over $100 million. It’s a multi-disciplinary body, with programs looking at social drivers, planning, technology and, importantly, how to get it all adopted in real life.

Professor Deletic’s speciality is green walls that treat greywater. “It’s a technology that cools your city, makes it beautiful but also produces water,” she says.

Enter a conservative state government in 2010. It mothballed the desalination plant and the pipeline and established the Office of Living Victoria, with an holistic mandate – much like what the academics had ordered.

Dr Wilkinson says that, historically, water planners sought to predict and provide. The city was a drain; waterways just pipes to the bay.

Now the vision is decentralisation. Catch and store water where it falls. Treat stormwater and wastewater locally, where possible, and reuse it to irrigate parks and gardens. Use drinking water for drinking, not for everything.

“When we do our long-term water planning, we need to think about the complete range of sources, and match the right water for the right job,” Wilkinson says. “At its heart it’s about how Victoria can be resilient and liveable in the face of a whole heap of changes that are going to happen.”

Chief among these changes are a fast growing population – up to 7 million by mid-century – and a harsher climate. Droughts are projected to become more frequent and severe. Rainfall is likely to decrease, but when it does rain, it’s more likely to pour. The millennium drought was followed by two dangerously wet years, including the wettest summer on record, which flooded a third of the state.

The government has begun funding suitable projects and “whole-of-water-cycle” management plans are being drawn up across the city.

The office’s modelling anticipates an astonishing range of gains by 2050: nearly halving mains demand, cutting one-third from wastewater volumes, reducing stormwater runoff by 40 per cent, and saving one-third of the electricity used in the system. All at a tidy saving of up to AUD$7 billion.

What makes this all the more peculiar is that otherwise, the government has been environmentally backward. This March, the state’s commissioner for environmental sustainability quit early, claiming the government was advising bureaucrats not to use the term “climate change”. The Office of Living Victoria has been the subject of controversy too. An investigation by the Ombudsman into its procurement practices is expected within weeks. There are also rumblings about a lack of transparency in its modelling.

Michael O’Neill, senior environmental consultant at ARUP, was part of the team for the MCG sewer mine. He says Melbourne’s approach is internationally renowned, “not just in academic and policy circles, but also in the multinational engineering firms”.

The Yarra River, which winds through the city, is infamously brown. It was clear when the colonists started the city on Wurundjeri land, but now it’s said to run upside down. So, when American tennis player Jim Courier dived into the river after winning the Australian Open in 1992 and 1993, the rest of the city shuddered.

“One day,” O’Neill says, “maybe, one day, we’ll get the Yarra back to a situation where we can to swim in it. Anything is possible.”

Read this article at The Guardian online

Little fox, big problem

In Environment, The Age on

In some parts of the city, there are as many as 20 foxes per square kilometre. Are they friend or foe?

IN Melbourne, even foxes like footy. Or, rather, they like football grounds.

Last year, the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology used GPS technology to track foxes from Melbourne’s outer east.

One pair lived at Lloyd Park, home of the Langwarrin Kanagroos, throughout the winter. The week after the grand final, the foxes moved on: there were no more sausage rolls to scavenge.

“They were there on game days, within 50 metres of hundreds of people – and no one knew,” says the centre’s deputy director, Dr Rodney van der Ree. “They’re able to live in very close proximity to us without getting spotted.”

The European or red fox – Vulpes vulpes – is a handsome animal. It has a pointed muzzle, auburn coat and bushy tail. In Quentin Blake’s famous illustrations for Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox, the titular mammal wears a waistcoat.

But they are one of the worst invasive species we’ve got. Foxes are considered a threat to 76 kinds of native birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, including the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot, spotted quail-thrush and western swamp tortoise.

“The fox and the cat, between them, have been responsible for the decline and extinction of many species of native mammals,” Dr van der Ree says.

Fox using the Calder freeway animal underpass near Bendigo. Credit: Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology 

Never mind! We are still fascinated by them; fox mad, even. Our championship winning netball team is called the Melbourne Vixens (last month, for the 2014 flag, they made mincemeat of Queensland’s Firebirds).

Search the internet for foxes in Melbourne and you’ll see the city declared “the fox capital of the western world” on the authority of the RSPCA, no less. Contacted by The Age this week, the RSPCA could not confirm it had ever made such a claim.

In fact, we can’t be sure how many there are. The last estimate came from CSIRO research in the early 1990s.

John Matthews, from the Department of Environment and Primary Industry, says there’s no reason to think numbers have changed significantly. But there are more than you think: in country Victoria, foxes number between 1 and 4 per square kilometre. But in the city, where the living is easy, there are four times as many.

Around the wharves and wastelands of Port Melbourne, the vulpine population is at its peak: as many as 20 foxes prowl every square kilometre.

Most sightings happen in autumn, when naïve pups leave the den in search of food and territory. On the citizen science website Foxscan, where people can list glimpses of foxes, the number of reports has been steady.

“They’re quite timid and shy, and they do whatever they can to avoid any interaction with humans,” says Matthews, who manages the state’s control programs for feral foxes, pigs, goats and rabbits from Casterton, in the Western Districts.

Nevertheless, sometimes we glimpse their secret lives at night: stalking along the train tracks in Elsternwick, slinking across a road in Box Hill, or padding over the flatland by a bridge in Essendon.

Sometimes, we even spy them in the day. Recently, two foxes were photographed on a rooftop in Mount Waverley after lunchtime. More often, however, we see them as roadkill in the morning: in the absence of urban predators, cars are their biggest threat.

Fox using the Calder freeway animal underpass near Bendigo. Credit: Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology

Greater Melbourne may or may not be the fox capital of the western world, but it is the first place they called home in Australia.

The new colony’s gentlemen brought them out for sport. In 1860, Edward Wilson, the owner of the Argus newspaper, lauded the benefits of fox hunting for youth. It “tends to prevent them from sinking into mere dawdlers in an opera box or loungers in a café”, he wrote.

A recent historical study by zoologist Ian Abbott contends that it took several attempts over decades before a fox population took hold.

He believes the successful culprits were the wealthy Chirnside brothers – Thomas and Andrew – who were among the largest landholders in the colony. They had already established a herd of deer, and by 1870, began importing foxes for hunting expeditions on their Werribee estate, where, soon after, they began constructing the mansion that still stands today.

Within two decades, foxes were declared a pest species in Victoria, and within four they pawed all the way into Western Australia. They’d long since conquered NSW and Queensland. Now, the red fox ranges over three-quarters of the continent.

Surprisingly, however, there were no recorded sightings in the centre of Melbourne until the middle of the 20th century. In 1948, a fox den was spotted at the cemetery in Parkville.

Now, they’re thought to occupy the entire metropolitan area. “There’s ideal habitat in the city,” says Matthews. “There’s ample food – lots of bins – and there’s really no predation.”

They’re deterred by dogs, but if there are none around, they’ll hide under houses or in tight gaps between buildings, in rock heaps, culverts or up cypress trees. They dig dens in parks or coastal scrub.

Foxes want warmth, security and good shelter, and they don’t want to give it up. They mark their territory with urine and scat.

“It’s a unique smell. But don’t ask me to describe it!” pleas Matthews. “Farmers know it. They’ll get out to the gate post in the morning and say: ‘Hmm, a fox was here last night.’”

Despite the stench, the animals pose little threat to humans – other than as a carrier of worms or, in the case of an outbreak, rabies. They are, however, a mortal danger to suburban chickens.

Many a suburban homesteader has woken to a grisly crime scene, after the one-and-only night they forgot to shut the henhouse gate. Often, the dead chooks remain uneaten. “Foxes are thrill-killers,” Matthews explains. “It’s instinctive. With the clucking and feathers going everywhere, they can get into a frenzy.”

In the countryside, foxes exact a toll on farmers’ flocks. But their impact on native species is far greater than their cost to agriculture.

In the city, there are now very few threatened species – largely because foxes and cats have already wiped them out. But on the city fringe, foxes are still eating endangered species, including southern brown bandicoots, eastern barred bandicoots, growling grass frogs and swamp skinks.

For the authorities in cities and towns, it’s very hard to control their numbers – some municipalities try trapping, or netting and fumigating dens. Citizens can help reduce fox numbers by making sure pet food isn’t left outside, clearing fallen fruit from trees and using a secure compost bin.

Elsewhere around the state, the Department of Environment and Primary Industries and Parks Victoria conduct an extensive baiting program, using the poison known as 1080. And in 2011, the state government introduced a $10 bounty for fox scalps. Since then, 285,000 have been accepted from hunters.

Neither method has escaped criticism. Many landholders are wary of 1080. For its part, the RSPCA states that 1080 “is not a humane poison”. It argues we must conduct more research into alternatives, so the technique can be phased out.

The bounty, meanwhile, has been roundly criticised by experts, who argue it’s a waste of money because foxes breed too quickly. Control programs need to wipe out two-thirds of a fox population over a large area to have a lasting effect.

In any case, if foxes were once the universal bad guy, now their role is much more ambiguous, especially in the city.

“Even in modified ecological systems, top order predators are still important to keep prey populations in check,” explains Dr van der Ree from the centre for urban ecology.

In urban areas, native predators are missing: the quolls have gone, there are no goannas and few powerful owls. That leaves the fox to help limit the populations of feral cats, rats and mice, and even possums.

“If you get rid of all the foxes then feral cat numbers can increase. You need to control foxes, cats and rabbits together. It’s got to be done strategically, over a large scale, otherwise they’ll just reinvade the area.”

It’s a controversial, but increasingly prevalent question: do we need foxes in our cities?

“No one would argue that foxes are not a damaging species, but sometimes they may help us as well,” says Dr Euan Ritchie, an ecologist from Deakin University whose speciality is the role of predators in ecosystems.

We need to rethink the way we deal with pest species more generally, he says. “A lot of the things we do now are expensive and they’re not working,” he says. “Are there ways to better coexist?”

Part of the answer, he says, is encouraging predator species, but doing so in conjunction with guardian animals on farms. Alpacas or Maremma sheepdogs are increasingly used to protect livestock from dingoes.

Dr Ritchie advocates for the re-introduction of Tasmanian Devils to Victoria, beginning with Wilson’s Prom. They’d help threatened species and improve biodiversity, he says, by controlling the numbers of foxes, cats, swamp wallabies and wombats.

“The way people often describe it is: My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

It’s an argument made famous in 1949 by the pioneering American ecologist Aldo Leopold in his classic book, A Sand County Almanac. He wrote that he’d seen “state after state extirpate its wolves”, and subsequently, observed their landscapes overrun and defoliated and eroded by deer. “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer,” he wrote.

Dr Ritchie says the scientific community is only just catching on. There’s now a growing push for ‘rewilding’: restoring habitats by introducing or reintroducing key species.

He is coordinating the Australian Mammal Society’s annual conference, at the Melbourne Zoo from 7-10 July. One whole day will be devoted to the ecological roles of predators.

“In the last 200 years, Australia has arguably the worst record in the world for mammal conservation. And globally we’re in the midst of a biodiversity extinction crisis comparable to some of the biggest mass extinction events we’ve had in geological history.

“If we can find any way to start reversing that, then we should prioritise it,” Dr Ritchie says. “We really need to be more bold, because if we keep going down the same path, many more species will disappear.”

A fox captured on camera near the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne. Credit: RBG Cranbourne

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne has a feral-proof fence: it’s 9 kilometres in circumference and 1.8 metres tall, with a floppy top to prevent foxes climbing over. At the base, wire was laid below ground level and set back from the fence line, to stop foxes digging under.

“Once a week, we drive right around the perimeter to make sure there are no new holes,” says Ricardo Simao, the gardens’ land and infrastructure manager.

“The danger is that, sure, we might be keeping the foxes out, but we’re also stopping all other animals from moving through.”

So the fence has another trick: allowing native animals to pass. Simao’s team have crafted gates for bandicoots, wombats and tortoises. Now they’re working on one for swamp wallabies, whose numbers have risen fast in the absence of predation.

The bandicoots’ gates consist of PVC piping with flaps at either end: foxes can’t fit and rabbits aren’t curious enough to brave the flaps, Simao explains.

Southern brown bandicoots were abundant in the south-east when Melbourne was colonised. “Everyone used to see them – the animal wasn’t particularly shy,” he says. But gradually, the animals lost their habitat to urbanisation and their heads to foxes.

In the decade since the fence was built, however, the bandicoots’ numbers have increased and become “quite healthy”, Simao says.

“The next phase is to make sure it’s not an isolated population.”

Read this article at The Age online

Flirting with disaster

In Environment, The Age on

Big business is calling for increased spending on disaster prevention. But with climate change set to cause more fires, floods and heatwaves, are we doing enough?

AFTER the deadly summer of 2010-2011, executives at Insurance Australia Group made a decision. Floods had swept through the eastern states, killing more than two-dozen people and causing billions of dollars of damage. 

“We have a whole ‘natural perils’ department made up of scientists and engineers who constantly model risk,” says Mike Wilkins, IAG’s managing director. “But it’s bigger than us. We needed to be part of a coordinated national conversation.”

The team began planning a “risk summit”, with 60 invitees from the business world, community groups and government. Together, they took aim at Australia’s record on disaster prevention. They identified two key problems: not enough spending on mitigation and poor land-use planning. Out of that summit, the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities was formed. It comprises a handful of very large and influential corporations: IAG, Westpac, Optus, Munich Re and Investa Property, as well as Australian Red Cross. 

The big end of town seems an unlikely champion for the cause, but Wilkins says each of the members sees the consequences first-hand when disasters hit. And above all, so do taxpayers.

The group’s research shows that for every $10 the federal government spends on post-disaster recovery, it spends less than $1 to reduce the risks beforehand.

In a joint statement released last year, the six CEOs said the economic cost of disasters will nearly quadruple by mid-century, rising to $23 billion annually. Wilkins says the costs of disasters could be halved with smart precautionary spending. His group wants the federal government to appoint a national resilience advisor and commit to long-term, pre-disaster spending.

However the roundtable’s figure of $23 billion annually does not even factor in the future impact of climate change. Statistics from Munich Re show that the number of extreme weather “loss events” for insurers in Australia has risen steadily over the last three decades. But Alexander Allmann, the company’s head of Geo Risks, says while anthropogenic climate change has had an impact on losses from weather catastrophes, it’s  not yet quantifiable. 

Yet last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released two new reports. The first details the impacts of global warming. Among the biggest risks for Australia are more deaths and damage caused by heat waves and wildfires, and increasing frequency and intensity of floods. 

It warns of diminishing agricultural production, less fresh water and increasing threats to coastal infrastructure caused by rising seas. A 1.1-metre sea level rise – possible by the end of the century – “would affect over $226 billion of assets” including nearly 300,000 homes.

The IPCC’s other new report says global greenhouse gas emissions rose nearly twice as fast in the last decade than during the 30 years before, and current reduction targets aren’t enough: we’re still on course for 4 degrees of global warming by the end of the century.

The World Bank has warned that if the worst comes to pass, “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4 degree world is possible”. 

The Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research was established by the state Labor government in 2009. In last week’s budget, the Napthine government did not extend its funding. It will close at the end of June.

The state Environment Minister Ryan Smith declined to be interviewed for this article. 

Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s controversial response to the recent IPCC report meanwhile, was this: ‘‘Australia is a land of droughts and flooding rains,’’ he said. ‘‘Always has been, always will be”.

*

Earlier this year, the federal attorney-general’s department sounded a similar alarm to the business roundtable. “Existing funding arrangements for natural disasters present a significant fiscal risk for the Commonwealth,” it wrote, to an inquiry into public infrastructure. 

Those warnings have now been heeded, in part. On April 28, the federal government issued the terms of reference for an inquiry into the way we spend money on natural disasters. It will be conducted by the Productivity Commission, with a final report by the end of the year.

However, there’s no mention of climate change in the terms of reference for the inquiry.

The risks are not just borne by the Commonwealth. In Victoria, state treasury estimates that the government has spent $4 billion in the last decade responding to bushfires, floods and droughts. 

A recent report by Friends of the Earth suggested an even higher figure, at over $6.7 billion, as well as private insurance payouts of more than $13 billion over that decade. 

The biggest challenges lie within existing neighbourhoods, according to the roundtable’s research. It says our existing buildings must be retrofitted or, if necessary, relocated, with monitoring done by councils. 

In a worst-case scenario, it says, a bushfire could hit the suburbs of Melbourne’s northern fringe, cutting critical electricity lines and contaminating some of the city’s drinking water supplies. We should, it says, be equipping those homes for bushfire resilience – sealing gaps and vents, installing sprinkler systems, clearing around houses – and electricity wires should be buried.

For now, however, it seems we’re only making things worse. When disasters do strike, we build back the way things were. Reconstruction to a higher standard is known as “betterment”. The term has been included in the national disaster relief programme since 2007. But according to the attorney-general’s department, only one betterment project has been funded since then.

Meanwhile, the federal government poured $5.6 billion into reconstruction after the Queensland floods.

 “Those billions of dollars have largely been wasted because there was no requirement to spend in a way to reduce the risk of those impacts happening again,” says Dr Jamie Pittock, a flooding and climate change expert from Australian National University.

In comparison, the federal government’s  spending on preventing disaster – through the National Disaster Resilience Fund – totals only $52.2 million over two years. 

Pittock says the mistakes of early settlers are being repeated. “Across Australia we’re seeing poor state government regulations allowing local governments to develop land that should never be developed,” he says.

Climate change makes this problem much, much worse: many of these threats are beginning to come harder and faster. We’ve built homes, towns and suburbs in locations at risk of disaster, and those risks are rising.

The outgoing director of the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research , Professor Rod Keenan, says we’ve made progress adapting to some aspects of the climate threat. The long drought and the scorching Black Saturday summer prompted gains in water efficiency, along with better heatwave warnings and bushfire responses.

But overall, we’re still beset by the “notion that ‘she’ll be right, we’ve always had disasters and we’ll deal with them when the time comes’,” Keenan says, “rather than anticipating and planning to avoid the worst impacts”.

Even when we do consider the threat of floods and fires, we’re neglecting to account for the way global warming alters the risks. When Pittock and his colleagues analysed four major reviews commissioned after the 2010-11 floods, they found that the documents “virtually ignored the issue of climate change and its impact on flooding; some reports didn’t refer to it at all”.

Pittock says our estimates of flood frequencies are already unreliable and climate change makes them even less certain. This matters, because it makes hard defences such as levees, which are often favoured by governments and insurers, more risky. 

“If you miscalculate or are over-optimistic about flood frequency, you can make the situation far worse,” he says. The better alternative is to allow rivers room to flood, while relocating or raising infrastructure and homes. “Countries like the United States, the Netherlands and China are pulling down levee banks,” he says.

“It’s about time Australia learnt from that. There’s an upfront cost, but once you’ve invested in a more resilient strategy, the benefits accrue over decades or longer.”

Professor Keenan says he’d like to see communities holding informed discussions to pinpoint local risks and responses. Governments could fund their adaptation ideas by bringing forward recovery spending. 

“This matters because we can save lives,” he says. “We can reduce the impact of disasters on people’s livelihoods. And we can reduce the financial impact on the state government, so it can continue to spend money on hospitals and schools and public transport services.

“It’s far more sensible to invest a smaller amount of money now, rather than pay out more down the track when disasters happen.” Keenan says while it’s disappointing that the state government hasn’t allocated funding to his centre, he’s hopeful it might have a change of heart.  

 But Professor Jean Palutikof, the head of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility – which is funded by the federal government and based at Griffith University – cautions that its very hard to put money into preparation for a disaster, ‘‘because no government can easily justify the expenditure on something that hasn’t happened’’. 

Her words are borne out by the state government’s Climate Change Adaptation Plan, released just over 12 months ago. It allocated only $6 million in new spending, mostly in grants to local councils. The plan also failed to impose any requirement that climate change be taken into account in planning or infrastructure decisions. It won’t be revised until 2016.

*

Creswick flooded three times in the disastrous summer of 2010 and 2011. The deluge took the small town, north-east of Ballarat, by surprise. But its predicament – both before and afterwards – illustrates the challenges replicated around the country.

 In the 1850s, settlers had diverted the creek so they could extend the main street. “The lower end of town is built just about entirely on the flood plain, and no one realised,” says Don Henderson, the Mayor of Hepburn Shire, and a local builder in Creswick. The council was “totally unprepared” for the floods, he says, as were the catchment management authority and emergency services. Years on, the floods’ consequences have lingered. Some insurers no longer offer policies for low-lying homes. 

A council flood recovery office, opened on the main street, has only just closed its doors. It guided reconstruction works worth $30 million across the shire, including levee banks along the Creswick Creek, only just completed. 

For the council, the influx of federal cash has seemed like an act of god. Although only required to rebuild as things were, it has made a point of lifting its standards, Henderson says. For instance, it could have never have afforded to rip out the drains under local roads and replace them with bigger ones. ’’With the recovery funding, we were able to say ‘Yes this caught us with our pants down, but into the future we’re designing this town to be resilient’.”

Even so, the new level of flood protection – decided in consultation with the community – leaves some townsfolk exposed. 

Like so many of our disaster inquiries, the new Creswick flood modelling and mitigation plan doesn’t mention climate change, or take the increasing risk of extreme weather into its rainfall predictions, or cost-benefit analysis.

Russell Castley lives at Semmens Village, a pocket of 32 public housing units across the creek from the main street. They’re vulnerable to rising waters from three directions. During floods, the road becomes submerged, blocking both ways out. 

“Really, these units should never have been built here,” Castley says. He climbs the low mound near his home and points at the gaps. The levee system is designed to guard against a 1-in-50 year flood, without accounting for the shifting climate. 

“I’m 74 now,” he says. “I don’t know whether we’ll have another flood here in my lifetime. But I think the floods will become more frequent and possibly more violent, and I don’t believe this levee bank will protect this complex.”

After consultation on the town’s flood plan finished, a team from the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, at University of Melbourne, arrived with a different approach: scenario planning.

They presented locals with three stories outlining the livelihoods of different people in Creswick in 25 years time, based on plausible but severe climate projections. Then, they asked how residents wanted to adapt.

The responses were distilled into a series of future visions, and displayed online and in shop windows on the main street. 

In one, the creek is returned to its original course by 2025. Low-lying land becomes a commons and flood-prone homes and businesses are moved uphill to the railway station. In others, the town converts its historic post office to a ‘Resilience Centre’ and constructs a water storage network to guard against drought. 

“When you’ve got an uncertain climate and radical changes in the pipeline, our old planning standards become a liability,” says Che Biggs, who led the research project. “We don’t know the exact likelihood of extreme events in the future and we never will. It’s time to stop asking for certainty before we begin to adapt. 

“It makes more sense to explore what can go wrong by using worst-case scenarios tailored for different regions. With the right process, communities and agencies can have these conversations without pointing fingers. “Otherwise, we’ll wait and see what hits us, then start the blame game afterwards.”

Read this article at The Age online

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Into the wind

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Planning restrictions and false health fears have stalled Victoria’s wind industry. But this may be changing.

GWENDA Allgood is a no-nonsense local councillor, five times a mayor, from Ararat. In mid-November she travelled east to Seymour to speak about wind farms at forum on energy held in the bowls club hall.

“We did not have one objection,” she told the audience, explaining the benefits of the Challicum Hills wind farm, built in 2003. “I can only speak as I find: there is no noise [from the turbines]. I don’t know why, but there isn’t. And they’re our best ratepayer – they pay well, they really do.”

There were about 50 people in the hall; almost all were renewable energy supporters. The event was hosted by a local environment group, with speakers on the topics of home retrofitting, community solar power and the campaign against coal seam gas.

But there was one key reason for the afternoon’s proceedings: the Cherry Tree wind farm, 16 turbines planned for a nearby ridgeline above the Trawool Valley.

The wind farm, proposed by Infigen Energy, was before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The project had become controversial in late 2012, following a meeting held by the anti–wind farm activist group, the Landscape Guardians.

After receiving 117 objections, the local council delayed and finally denied the permit, against the advice of its planning officers. The company appealed; the matter had already been before the tribunal for ten months.

When Allgood finished speaking at the meeting, a man named Gary Morris put his hand up. Sounding slightly nervous, he read from his notes about a survey criticising another wind farm. “I’m just concerned about the noise aspect,” he said.

“Instead of getting on the internet,” Allgood replied, “you need to go out and visit them. I invite you to Ararat, and I will personally show you around.”

Afterwards, Morris explained that his home was within 3 kilometres of the proposed turbines, but Infigen had never met with him. “My concerns aren’t just about noise. It’s about health, and it’s about this company,” he said.

*

Like the rest of the world, Australia urgently needs to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to avoid runaway climate change. A recent report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance says new wind turbines are already cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power stations, even without carbon pricing. And yet, the forecast for wind power is remarkably mixed.

In 2009, the South Australian government set a target for renewables to cover one-third of its energy production by 2020. It has nearly met the mark already. Wind power alone now accounts for 27 per cent.

But in Victoria, the industry has stalled. In August 2011 the state government stiffened its planning rules, giving people who live within two kilometres of wind farms the right to veto, and prohibiting turbines in several regions.

A new report from Victoria’s Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Professor Kate Auty, says wind power comprises less than 3 per cent of the state’s electricity generation.

The report strongly criticises the planning restrictions, arguing they discourage a shift to low-carbon energy, make it more difficult and costly to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and damage the local economy.

“Many proposals for new wind farms in Victoria have been withdrawn. Lost investment has been estimated at $4 billion and 3,000 jobs,” the report says, quoting figures from the Clean Energy Council.

The Labor party has promised to repeal the restrictions if it wins government in next years’ state election. In the meantime, the new federal government appears unlikely to encourage the industry.

A spokesperson for Industry minister Ian Macfarlane says the government will commission a study into “the potential health effects of wind farms”, and confirms that it will go ahead with a scheduled review of the federal renewable energy target, due next year. It has already tabled legislation to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which would otherwise invest $5 billion in renewable energy over the next 5 years.

*

Two weeks after the forum in Seymour, VCAT finally approved the permit for Cherry Tree. It is now only the second wind farm to win planning permission in Victoria since August 2011.

The tribunal said the Victorian and NSW heath departments had expressly stated “there is no scientific evidence to link wind turbines with adverse health effects”, and that view was backed by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

It rejected the survey evidence of health concerns tended by anti-wind groups, the Waubra Foundation and the Landscape Guardians.

“To be of any real value such surveys need to be carried out by qualified professionals on respondents selected by accepted random selection methods, and subjected to an analysis that yields statistically valid results,” it said.

The tribunal had earlier ruled that the visual and noise impacts of the project were acceptable, and that the turbines would not cause problems with bushfire, salinity, erosion, aviation or loss of wildlife habitat.

It was a comprehensive victory, both for the company and the wind industry at large.

On the same day, the South Australian Environment Protection Authority released the results of its study of noise from the Waterloo wind farm. Nearby residents who had previously complained were asked to keep noise diaries; in them, they noted “rumbling effects” even at times when the turbines had been shut down. The authority’s recordings showed the turbines meet local and international standards for both audible and low frequency sound.

Ketan Joshi, from Infigen, says his company understands that this evidence, and the VCAT decision, won’t change everyone’s minds. “We’re aware that a lot of these concerns don’t magically vanish as soon as you get approval.

“The industry really depends on good community engagement. People need to be deeply involved in the development, otherwise you’re likely to face opposition.”

Joshi confirms that Infigen hasn’t met individually with Gary Morris. “It’s hard to talk to everybody one-on-one, because there are a large number of people around our projects,” he says.

For Cherry Tree, the company had held two public meetings, as well as stalls at a local festival and a tour of the Hepburn wind farm. But for future projects, it is considering ways to give locals “a much bigger stake in the shape a wind farm takes”, Joshi says.

The anti–wind farm push in Seymour began with a public meeting coordinated by the Landscape Guardians. One of the speakers was Max Rheese, executive director of climate change denial groups the Australian Environment Foundation and the Australian Climate Science Coalition.

At a council meeting held in October 2012, just two days before the local elections, nearly 40 people spoke against the wind farm. Among them was Peter Mitchell, the chairman of the Waubra Foundation. Subsequently, the foundation, which has tax-deductible charity status, sought donations to fund its case against Cherry Tree before VCAT.

In response, BEAM, the local environment group, distributed a “myth-busting” flyer supporting the turbines, together with Friends of the Earth.

“They’d managed to scare the pants off a lot of people,” says Leigh Ewbank, from Friends of the Earth. “There’s no way developers can compete with a political campaign of that nature. And it isn’t dying down, despite all the evidence showing that wind energy is clean and safe.”

The “contemporary health panic” about turbines has drawn the attention of public health academic Professor Simon Chapman, from University of Sydney. Chapman, who is renowned for his work on tobacco control, has traced the health and noise complaints made about Australia’s wind farms.

In a paper published in October, he revealed that only 129 people have complained – a tiny proportion of the population who live near turbines – and almost all of them did so after 2009, when critics began publicising the alleged health worries.

There have been no health complaints in Western Australia, which has 13 wind farms.

“A majority of wind farms, even big ones, have no history of complaints at all,” he says. “The complaints line up with half a dozen wind farms that have been targeted by the anti–wind farm groups. That’s the ‘nocebo’ hypothesis: if you spread anxiety you’re going to get anxiety.”

“If you tell people that something is going to happen to them and you demonstrate people who are worried, then it becomes a communicated disease.”

The final speaker at the Seymour forum was Doug Hobson, a farmer from Waubra with a thick goatee beard. He has eight turbines on his property. “The wind turbines have helped underlay what we’re doing as a farming community,” he said. “It takes the lows out of farming.”

He explained that almost all the people of Waubra do not want their town’s name to be associated with the anti–wind farm group, the Waubra Foundation. In November they mailed a petition with 316 signatures asking it to change its name.

“Niney-five per cent of the people in Waubra are in favour of the wind farm,” he said. “Country people don’t like change, but it does just become part of the furniture.”

*

The only other wind farm approved in Victoria in more than two years is at Coonooer Bridge, a small farming community north-west of Bendigo. Its story is very different.

The project is being developed by Windlab, a spin-off company from CSIRO founded in 2003. It has since built turbines in Australia, Canada, USA and South Africa. Soon after it began, Windlab identified that the hills near Coonooer Bridge were particularly windy: in fact, their steady, strong winds offer a renewable resource among the best in the world.

But in 2012, when Windlab began to consider building turbines there, Luke Osborne, the project’s director, knew that wind energy was becoming controversial in rural areas. He knew from personal experience, because he has turbines on his family farm near Canberra.

“It had become clear that we needed to work on gaining a ‘social licence to operate’,” he explains. “It wasn’t good enough just to get it approved. It needed to have a much better level of local acceptance.”

His team began a series of town hall–style meetings with everyone who owned land nearby, as well as one-on-one conversations, in which they devised the ownership model for the project. “We said, ‘We not only want people living nearby to share in the financial benefits, we also want you to help guide how we do this’,” Osborne recalls.

In less than a year, the five-turbine project had been approved by the local council. It will produce enough electricity to power 11,000 households.

Thirty landholders are shareholders. The farmers with turbines on their properties agreed to take lower rent, and the company, slightly lower profits; those returns are shared among the neighbours. As with many other wind farms, it will donate money to the community – in this case $25,000 each year. Everyone within 5 kilometres of the turbines will get a vote on how it’s spent.

“We haven’t had any outsiders come in opposing the project,” Osborne says. “I hope that’s because we haven’t given anybody a reason to invite them in.”

Osborne modelled his approach on the research of Dr Nina Hall, from CSIRO, who is studying the idea of “social licence to operate” for wind farms.

In interviews with rural residents, her team has found “strong community support for the development of wind farms”, including from those who don’t speak out through the media or political forums.

Hall concluded that people’s attitudes to the local impacts are shaped by the way a project is run.

She noticed that people opposed to wind farms would initially talk about technological worries. “When we dug a little deeper, we often found their opposition was based more on concerns about process,” she explains. “Things like how they found out about the development, and whether they felt they had influence over the design, location and the final decision about whether it would go ahead.”

Ian Olive is one of those people. He has been farming near Coonooer Bridge all his life, continuing the work of his parents and grandparents. Now the 69-year-old tends his crops and merino sheep with the help of his two sons, whose young families live on the property too.

Although he supports renewable energy, Olive is not pleased by the prospect of turbines near his farm. His family would prefer “to keep the status quo”, he says. He expects the turbines, standing on the low mountain range on the south-western horizon, will be “a stark monstrosity against the natural beauty” of his skyline.

But equally, Olive says, Windlabs couldn’t have conducted its consultation any better: the scheme has created no resentment between neighbours. He says “the company has done a good job in helping the community” through its annual fund and the shareholdings for surrounding landowners, including his family.

For Osborne, gaining the trust of families like the Olives represents the project’s biggest triumph. “We’ve tried our best to make sure the benefits for the local area are real and well understood,” he says. “It’s not a silver bullet – not everyone wants to live near turbines – but for the majority it has made a difference.

“I’m a big believer in the fairness of this model. I hope what we’ve done here will help the industry.”

Read this article at The Age online

The Great Barrier Reef: just unwell or terminally ill?

In Environment, The Age on

Starfish, chemicals, climate change. If things continue the way they are, the reef won’t be great for much longer.

AT 3 pm on July 16, 1928, Charles Maurice Yonge and his team of scientists sighted the Low Isles, north of Cairns, from their boat. His wife Mattie, a doctor, described “a circular mound of sand about 250 yd. diameter”. That mound would be their home for the next year.

So began the first modern research expedition on the Great Barrier Reef.

As Professor Iain McCalman, from University of Sydney, describes in his new book The Reef – A Passionate History, they were an industrious group of young scientists from Cambridge University, both men and women.

Marine science was in its early stages and they’d been assigned one of the Earth’s uncharted treasures.

Their findings were published in seven large volumes; among them were revelations about the interdependence of corals and algae and the growth rates of corals – which had rings like trees, they noticed – as well as the first observation of coral bleaching.

In the 1970s, more than 40 years later, septuagenarian Sir Maurice – who by then had been knighted – returned to the Low Isles. He was dismayed by what he found; or more precisely, by what he didn’t. For all the silt from agricultural run-off, he couldn’t locate the places he’d conducted his experiments.

Sir Maurice may have been appalled, but scientists now yearn for the days of his disappointment, so badly has the reef deteriorated in recent decades.

In 1985 the Australian Institute of Marine Science began monitoring more than 100 locations on the reef. In the years since, coral cover has diminished by half, on average. At the current rate of decline, it will halve again by 2022.

The relentless degradation of one of the seven natural wonders of the world has not gone unnoticed. Next June, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee will convene in Qatar for its annual meeting. It has foreshadowed that “without evidence of substantial progress” it will classify the reef as “in danger”.

Queensland’s tourism industry nervously awaits UNESCO’s verdict. The reef is estimated to create up to $6 billion dollars annually for Australia’s economy, supporting 50,000 jobs.

Daniel Gschwind, from the Queensland Tourism Industry Council, believes a downgraded classification would deter visitors and could put his industry in danger. “Regardless of the actual health of the reef, the damage to our reputation as a destination of natural wonders would be serious,” he says.

In early November, in response to warnings issued by UNESCO, the reef’s management authority produced a 650-page, draft strategic assessment report.

It stated that the northern third of the reef is in good condition, but south of Cooktown, its health has “declined significantly”.

Biodiversity is deteriorating. While humpback whales are increasing in number, the populations of dugongs, turtles and some seabirds are diminishing. Coral reefs and seagrass meadows are “in serious decline”.

The authority declared that climate change is “still the most serious threat facing the reef”. The ocean is increasing in temperature and becoming more acidic, and sea levels are rising. “More frequent and severe extreme weather is also predicted,” it said.

Until now, the major cause of damage has been poor water quality. Wherever the land has been cleared for farming and settlement, polluted water drains into the inshore reef, laden with fertilizer and silt. In the last decade, cyclones and floods have battered the coast and consequently, rivers have clogged the reef with plumes of mud visible from space.

The authority noted another “key concern” caused by the development and operation of ports: the dumping of dredge spoil at sea. Overall, it concluded, “a business-as-usual approach to managing these impacts will not be enough”.

*

Dr Peter Doherty, from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, began studying the reef in the 1980s. He helped create the long-term research program that revealed the loss of half the reef’s coral cover since monitoring began.

He says cyclones and the crown-of-thorns starfish are each responsible for more than 40 per cent of the damage, while coral bleaching currently accounts for about one-tenth.

Coral bleaching and cyclones are matters of extreme weather, Doherty says. Locally, we can do nothing to prevent them, but “we probably can do something about crown-of-thorns”.

Since it was first observed as a problem in the 1960s, there have been four outbreaks of the coral-eating starfish, roughly 15 years apart.

The cycle is too fast to allow the corals to recover naturally. “In the 1960s, there was a large-scale increase in the application of inorganic fertiliser to sugarcane fields,” Doherty explains. “It’s likely that this is a major driver in the frequency and severity of the current outbreaks of starfish.”

In 2003, the federal and state governments adopted Reef Plan, a ten-year strategy to reduce water pollution. Updated in 2009, it included targets to halve nitrogen and pesticide runoff, and dramatically improve the land management practices of graziers, sugarcane growers and horticulturalists.

Doherty sits on the scheme’s independent scientific panel. “In recent times we are putting 5 times more sediment, up to 8 times more nitrogen and 6 times more phosphorous into the reef than we should be. Turning that around is a very large task.”

So far, the results have fallen well short of the targets, which have been deferred until 2018. Both levels of government have committed more funding.

Doherty describes Reef Plan as “a substantial response”, which is beginning to show small gains. But it may not be enough. “Like anything, it’s going to get harder and harder to make deeper gains.”

Right now, just as the reef is in the most precarious condition we’ve known, the crown-of-thorns starfish is on the brink of its worst infestation.

Heavy rains in the last five years have flooded the continental shelf north of Cairns with “nutrient-enriched plumes”, creating what Doherty describes as “the perfect broth for feeding larval starfish”.

A large female starfish can produce tens of millions of eggs at each spawning. Carried on southerly currents, they’re causing cascading outbreaks in the central reef that could last for ten years.

The tourism industry is attempting triage. Funded by the federal government, teams of divers are killing starfish by injecting them one-by-one with bile salts. In the last 18 months, the program has culled more than 100,000 starfish, mainly around popular tourist sites.

It is a Sisyphean undertaking. “The target is in the millions, distributed over more than 1000 kilometres of reef perimeter,” Doherty says. “It’s extremely unlikely we’ll be able to effectively control the starfish population using divers with poisons.”

Instead, the reef is suffering death-by-report.

Dr Colin Hunt, an ecological economist from University of Queensland, was one of the authors of the first 25-year plan for the reef, released in 1994. Entitled The Great Barrier Reef – Keeping it Great, it called for the effects of runoff to be studied and targets set to reduce their impacts.

In practice, the goal of improving water quality has proven strictly aspirational.

Likewise, the marine park authority’s new strategic assessment stresses the need to measure “cumulative impacts”, rather than the narrow effects of each project or use of the reef. The Keeping it Great report made the same recommendation two decades ago.

More recently, the authority’s Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report declared the reef ecosystem was “at a crossroad” in 2009. “It is decisions made in the next few years that are likely to determine its long-term future,” it said.

Since then, there’s been a port-building boom along the coast, paving the way for increased coal trade and the beginning of a gas export industry.

These developments have alarmed UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee. In June, it noted “with concern” that the impacts of “ongoing coastal development on the reef continue and progress towards addressing them is limited”. It requested that ports not be permitted outside existing locations.

In December, federal environment minister Greg Hunt will decide on applications to expand the Abbot Point port, north of Bowen, and a fourth gas export plant at Curtis Island, near Gladstone. Three further coal terminals are going through Queensland’s environmental approval process.

Colin Hunt expects UNESCO will watch those decisions closely. He says the impact of dredging is limited compared to agricultural runoff and climate change, but the cumulative effects of industrialisation are clear.

“These port developments are impacting wildlife and destroying part of the reef, there’s no doubt about it,” he says. “The coal and gas companies are responsible for doing their own environmental impact statements – the system is flawed because of conflicts of interest.”

Hunt believes polluters must bear the true costs of both runoff and port development. Farmers should be fined if they don’t meet water quality targets, and resources companies should pay for dredge spoil to be disposed on land, not within the reef’s waters.

“If we really want to tackle this problem, we have to make the polluter pay,” he says. “It is time to have a proper reckoning. The reality is extremely serious: unless these trends turn around, we’re going to lose the reef.”

*

In the early 1970s, when Sir Maurice returned to visit the location of his 1928 expedition, he was chaperoned by a knockabout young Australian scientist, Dr J. E. N. ‘Charlie’ Veron.

Granted a post-doctoral scholarship by James Cook University, Veron was the reef’s first full-time researcher.

“Sir Maurice was very formal and dignified – a real jacket-and-tie guy – but I got to like him a lot,” recalls Veron, who is rather less formal. (Years later, the young scientist found himself “in strife” for showing a nude photo of an expedition leader during a presentation at the Royal Society in London.)

The visit was a changing of the guards; subsequently, Veron became the world authority on corals and reefs. He devised a new taxonomy for corals and discovered one-fifth of all known species.

“In the 50 years I’ve been diving, I’ve noticed a heck of a lot of change,” he says. “The drop off in shark numbers because of overfishing is the most dramatic.”

One coral, Montipora – which grows like overlapping plates on a waiter’s arm – was once the most common species near the coast, but has now all but vanished.

“On the outer slopes of the far northern Great Barrier Reef, the corals look much the same as always,” he says. “There are now very few places on the reef I would say that about.”

In 2008, Veron published A Reef in Time: The Barrier Reef from Beginning to End, a book on coral reefs and climate change. He wrote that the prognosis for the world’s reefs “does indeed seem bleak, but it is not yet hopeless”.

Every summer, he becomes nervous about the risk of mass coral bleaching – a risk that worsens as the oceans warm. During the El Niño weather cycle, warmer currents pulse into the reef’s lagoon. With clear skies for a few weeks, the water temperature can increase beyond the corals’ ability to cope.

Energised by global warming, El Niño cycles will become more extreme. Humans have already created the conditions for more intense storms and floods, droughts that trigger erosion, and frequent mass coral bleaching.

Veron is also fixated by the threat of ocean acidification – a lesser-known consequence of carbon dioxide emissions – which causes a kind of coralline osteoporosis. If it goes unchecked, the reefs will eventually erode.

He considers the health of the world’s reefs an early warning of a broader collapse. If they fail, other ecosystems will follow, rapidly.

“We’re driving the Earth into conditions for the sixth mass extinction and we’re doing it very, very quickly,” he says. “I’ve got teenage children and it terrifies me to think what they’re going to face in their later life.”

In this context, the environmental impact statements for the new coal and gas ports are dangerously incomplete. Dredging may cause localised damage, but the ports’ very reason for being – to expand fossil fuel exports – exacerbates the Great Barrier Reef’s gravest existential threat.

The emissions associated with proposed coalmines in Queensland’s Galilee Basin alone would dwarf Australia’s total carbon footprint.

“We’re making money out of doing the things that drive climate change, which will destroy the reef,” Veron says. “We are a wealthy country – we have a moral obligation to future generations to keep coal in the ground. I can’t see any rational argument against that.”

Threats to the reef

Fertiliser runoff causes plankton blooms, which promote outbreaks of the coral-killing crown-of-thorns starfish.

Sediment blocks the light required by corals, sponges and seagrass and starves marine life of normal sources of nutrition.

Pesticides poison coral larvae, even at trace levels.

Climate change sets the conditions for more frequent and intense storms, cyclones, droughts and floods, which contribute to plumes of polluted runoff. Ocean warming increases the likelihood of coral bleaching. Ocean acidification weakens coral skeletons and slows coral growth.

Dredging causes plumes of silt and disturbs local habitats.

Overfishing and illegal fishing threaten important predators such as sharks and coral trout.

 

Read this article at The Age