Michael Green

Writer and producer

Climate adaptation plan: the devil is in the appendix

In Environment on

HERE it is at last, the good news climate story we’ve been waiting for: the synthetic turf industry is about to boom – a happy consequence of our inability to grow grass.

So says the Victorian government’s Climate Adaptation Plan, released last month. Sweet reprieve! Providence still smiles upon the (artificial) garden state!

Chris Simpson, from TigerTurf in Campbellfield, confirms the speculation: yes, he anticipates bumper growth in a hotter, drier future. “I would expect the industry will more than double each ten years from here on,” he says. In Victoria now, there are about 250 people working with synthetic grass at least one day per week, he estimates.

Out of town, farmers could benefit too, the government says. Where it no longer rains, those lucky landowners can take advantage of the opportunity to “switch to different enterprises or production systems”. Drought and dust bowl? Bah! Salad days!

The adaptation plan is a long document. Prudently, the government emphasises the “new opportunities” right up front. The risks? “Further details of the risks are provided in Appendix 1.”

Way back there, if you make it, you’ll find eight pages of frightening, cascading consequences: buckling train tracks, flooding of ports, algal blooms, water-borne illnesses, sewer failure, destruction of businesses’ assets, more pests and diseases in agriculture and fisheries, less farm output and income, pressure on ecosystems and threatened species, and more injuries, deaths and mental illness from bushfires, floods and heat waves. All health risks disproportionately afflict the vulnerable among us.

Never mind that. Our leaders will manifest a productive climate future by way of positive messaging: “In particular,” the plan says, “gradual changes in temperature potentially enable industries to transition and develop”.

***

On 30 November last year, only weeks before the legislated deadline for the adaptation plan, Professor Roger Jones and his colleagues held a workshop at Victoria University, in Melbourne. It was called ‘Beyond the mean: valuing adaptation under rapid change’.

Jones is a climate scientist at the university – he used to work at CSIRO, and is a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report, due in October.

His work challenges the idea that we face only gradual changes in temperature. Years ago, while studying the climate history of the crater lakes in Western Victoria, he found something puzzling. “The only way I could get the model to fit the history was to switch climate – to make the climate changes instantaneous. If I changed it gradually it wouldn’t work,” he says.

He researched past climate data from elsewhere around the world, and found similar “abrupt changes”.

Then, during the worst of the recent drought, he began analysing temperature and rainfall across south eastern Australia. After adjusting for natural variability, the temperature set showed a jump in 1997: “It took this step change,” Jones explains. Sea-surface temperatures and ocean heat content, too, tracked “like a staircase”.

A paper he published last year shows that most of Australia’s warming is anthropogenic and occurred in two blips, one around the late 1960s to early 1970s, and the other around 1997 and 1998.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that in climate modelling, smooth lines of best fit are an approximation,” he says. “They’re a good way to describe how the climate will change over a century or so. If you’re interested in shorter time scales you need to look at the variation – and the variation is not random.”

Here’s an example: at Laverton, west of Melbourne, before 1997 there were an average of 8 days per year above 35 degrees. Since then, the average has been 12. “Fire danger in Victoria over the same period has gone up by about 30 to 40 per cent,” Jones says.

The working paper for the ‘Beyond the mean’ workshop, co-written by Jones, directly contested the narrative of “gradualism”.

Step-changes, it concluded, “will produce clusters of extreme events… that are more frequent and larger than the statistics of gradual change would suggest”. In this scenario, the consequences and costs of climate change look very different: “extreme events can cause knock-on effects through several systems, leading to system failure and disaster.”

Given a jolting climate, adaptation is a matter of urgency, says Jones. “If the consequences are unknown, but you tell yourself change is gradual, then it’s ok – it makes it psychologically remote. Whereas, if it can change quickly and you need to respond, the threat is much closer.”

Most of the attendees were policy-makers, both state and federal. They discussed the other corollary of a step-changing climate: adaptation must be led by policy, not left to the market. Only policy can prepare for extremes, Jones says.

“If those increases ratchet above our critical thresholds, things change very quickly. If you have a sudden shift in heat waves, with a more exposed or growing population, the number of heat stress cases can jump significantly.

“You find what we had in the summer of 2009 – our capacity to handle the sick or the dying gets stretched to the point where we’re putting bodies in freezers.”

***

In its final months in office, the Brumby government passed the Climate Change Act 2010. It set a target for the state to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2020 (from 2000 levels) and required government to take emissions and climate impacts into account when making various decisions. It also required a climate change adaptation plan be produced every four years.

Before long, the new Liberal government ordered a review of the act; based on the recommendations, it scrapped the emissions target, but kept the adaptation plan.

After delaying as long as possible, the Minister for Environment and Climate Change, Ryan Smith, finally released the plan in mid-March. The headline announcement was a re-framed agreement with the state’s 79 local councils, called the Victorian Adaptation and Sustainability Partnership. It carries the only new funding on offer: $6 million. Two days earlier, Finnish driver Kimi Raikkonen had crossed the line in the Melbourne Grand Prix, a big carbon-burnout subsidised by $57 million.

I spoke to Professor Barbara Norman, chair of urban and regional planning at University of Canberra, both before and after the plan came out. Beforehand, she explained that unless planning documents are tied to budget, nothing happens. Afterwards, she noted that this plan wasn’t tied to budget.

The $6 million? “It’s going to require a lot more money than that.”

Even so, Norman praises its regional approach, its delineation of the roles of different tiers of government and its recognition of adverse health impacts. But besides the lack of money, she says, there other gaps between the rubber and the road.

The biggest: there’s no obligation to consider the climate change impacts of planning decisions.

“There are a number of acts listed where they must have regard to climate change,” Norman explains, “but notably, the one missing is the Planning and Environment Act 1987.

“This plan should also bind state government on major infrastructure developments – they must be required to demonstrate the impact in terms of climate adaptation, energy efficiency and water-sensitive urban design,” she says.

Many submissions to the review of the Climate Change Act argued the same thing: planning, infrastructure and transport decisions must be subject to climate considerations. But to no avail: the review noted that additional obligations “may impose further costs on decision makers and affected parties”. The next review will be held in 2015 – by which time billions of dollars may have been buried in the East-West Tunnel.

Smith, the environment minister, was not available to be interviewed for this article. His spokesperson said the planning system “already takes climate change into account in many ways,” such as zones and overlays.

But we already have evidence that the system isn’t doing enough. There’s an easy way to tell: the price of insurance has gone through the roof.

***

In February, The Age reported that a resident in South Caulfield had been denied insurance because of the risk of inundation and that some residents in Frankston had been asked to pay at least $5000 more for flood cover.

Throughout March and early April, the Municipal Association of Victoria has been consulting its regions: the cost of flood insurance has been a flashpoint in several meetings. “People are finding either they can’t get insurance or they’re facing massive premium increases,” says Bill McArthur, the association’s president and a councillor from Golden Plains shire, north west of Geelong.

Karl Sullivan, the risk and disaster manager at the Insurance Council of Australia, agrees: “In some regions we’ve seen some classes of insurance go up by 30 per cent or more in a year.”

This issue – the availability and affordability of insurance under climate change – is being examined by a Senate inquiry into our preparedness for extreme weather. (It will report in June.)

But in its submission, the Insurance Council said the current price hikes aren’t yet due to changing climate extremes. Largely, they are due to bad planning: most of the properties flooded in Queensland and Victoria in 2011 were located in high-risk zones on flood maps.

To limit the financial risk of a big disaster, insurance companies buy their own insurance from huge global “re-insurers”. Until recently, those rates have been low. Not anymore, Sullivan says. “The rest of the world has woken up and said, ‘Australia has a systemic problem – they’re building more expensively in more hazardous locations in a more brittle way’.

The Insurance Council argues for a national agreement on land use planning, together with better risk protection – levies or firebreaks, for example – and minimum durability standards for buildings.

Suncorp, the largest general insurance group in the country, was even more blunt: “As a basic concept, new homes and infrastructure should not be built in areas of high risk.”

“For some reason,” Sullivan says, “we lost our collective minds at some point, and started building these things in flood plains, on the ground.”

In other words, even now our planning system is allowing us to build the wrong homes in the wrong places. The extremes of climate change, abrupt and unexpected, only worsen our vulnerability.

***

Aside from the missing links to planning, infrastructure and budget, and beyond the distorted emphasis on the “opportunities” of climate change, there’s another reason it’s hard to believe the adaptation plan will beget action.

In the coming months, the state government will make an announcement about a tender for new brown coal allocations in the Latrobe Valley. In December, then Minister for Energy and Resources, Michael O’Brien, said the state had one of “the world’s great brown coal deposits” and that the government was “committed to maximising the opportunities” to develop it.

Last year, the International Energy Agency said the world must leave two-thirds of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground, if we want a 50-50 chance of keeping global warming to 2 degrees. Other analysts say four-fifths must go untouched.

Mitigating global warming and adapting to it are inseparable: if we don’t reduce emissions, the World Bank warned recently, “there is no certainty that adaptation… is possible”.

Yet the adaptation plan makes only one passing reference to cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Greenhouse gas reduction is “addressed primarily through the national carbon pricing mechanism”. That’s the same mechanism the federal Liberal party has promised to repeal, if it wins the election in September.

The thing about a step-change in climate is that we don’t know when it will shift. This year our record-breaking Angry Summer continued into mad March, in which Melbourne had nine days over 32 degrees. Then the old premier lost his job.

In Denis Napthine’s ministerial reshuffle, Nick Kotsiras took over the energy portfolio. The government has said that in deciding to allocate the brown coal, it “will be guided by the potential to secure long-term economic development, investment and employment benefits”.

Before he makes up his mind, the new minister would do well to refer to Appendix 1.

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website.

Read this related article on climate change adaptation.

Interview with Annie Leonard

In Community development, Environment on

Her Story of Stuff animations have been viewed over 36 million times. Now, in her latest short film, US environmental advocate Annie Leonard looks at social change itself. She argues that we need to do much more than alter our shopping habits.

There are so many complex problems with the way we live – how can we make sense of it all?

While the details are complicated, the big picture is not: we are using more resources than the planet can regenerate and creating more waste than it can assimilate each year. We’re simply using too much stuff. We’re stressing ecosystems’ ability to maintain the conditions conducive to life. That’s a pretty big problem; in fact, I can’t imagine a bigger one.

Globally, we’re now using 1.5 planet’s worth of productive capacity each year. We can’t use more than the planet can replace each year – especially with a growing population. It’s not a good trajectory. We need to use less stuff, we need to use less toxic stuff and we need to share more.

Can you explain your idea of the “citizen” and “consumer” muscles? 

Each of us today has two parts of ourselves – a consumer part and a citizen part. It is like we have two muscles to use to get things done. We are called on to use the consumer muscle many times a day, starting at a very young age. Our consumer muscle is spoken to, validated, nurtured so much that it has become our primary way of relating to each other and our primary identity. Media often uses the word “people” and “consumers” interchangeably as though that is our primary role. As a result, we’re really good at being consumers. We know how to find any products, where to get the best deal, and how to navigate today’s complex shopping options.

At the same time, our citizen muscles have atrophied. In the U.S. where I live, most people don’t even vote – the most basic act of engaged citizenship! We don’t know who makes decisions about issues we care about, or if we do, we don’t know how to influence them. Many of us have checked out of our democracies, leaving them open to the corporations whose political influence keeps increasing.

In this context, when we’re faced with problems as gigantic as disruption of the global climate or babies being born pre-polluted with 250 industrial chemicals already in their blood, many of us can only think to respond with our consumer muscles. So we stress about buying the least toxic products, driving fuel-efficient cars and changing our light bulbs. While those are all good things to do, they aren’t commensurate with the scale of the problem. The decisions that have the greatest impact are not those made in the supermarket aisles, but those made in the halls of government and boardrooms of businesses – and that’s where we need to be using our citizen muscles to work for bigger, bolder change. Because the moment sure merits it. We’re not going to be able to shop our way to sustainability.

People only have so much time and energy. How should we prioritise reducing our personal or household footprint with taking part in some kind of community or political action?

I do think it is important to make responsible choices at home, but I don’t recommend trying to living eco-perfectly because it is impossible in today’s society and economy that are set up to facilitate unecological choices.  Yes, we should each do what we can to reduce our impacts, but our time and energy have far bigger impact when applied to making policy or structural change.  For example, don’t beat yourself up for driving if taking public transport would take 4 times as long or isn’t available. Just drive, and then use that extra time to advocate for more public funding of efficient mass transit so people want to use it. We need to change our policies and infrastructure so that doing the right thing is the easiest immediate option. If our economy and community were set up to support environmental health, the polluters have to go out of their way to pollute.

The Story of Change is a big call to action. Can you give some examples of practical first steps that people can start with?

There are many immediate things we can do in our own lives: compost, share with friends instead of buy things we need, grow our own food. Those are all good places to start, but they are terrible places to stop. We need to then move from making change in our kitchens to making change in our communities. Pick an issue that excites you. Better bike lanes? Ending government subsidies for the super profitable coal industry? Figuring out how to reduce packaging? Investments in clean energy? It’s always easier – and more fun – to do things with others. So once you have figured out what you want to work on, join with a friend or call an organization working on this issue.

The most important thing is to choose an issue and engagement strategy that feels right to you. Some people prefer to organize protests in the streets, others to educate children, others to use art to share environmental messages. There are as many ways to get involved as there are people. If we choose the right one for us, working for a better world is an incredibly rewarding way to spend our days. If we try to force ourselves to do something that isn’t a good match, then this work is a chore. It is going to be a long hard struggle ahead, so chose something you love. If you’re not sure, try a few things, shop around!

Once you decide what issues light your fire, then connect with others who share this passion. There are lots of online platforms – such as wiserearth.org – to find others who share your concerns. Connecting with people already active on the issue can speed up your learning curve. And if you can’t find a group working on the issue you want to address, you may have to start your own.

Your movie talks about civil disobedience in the great social movements of the past. But a lot of people are wary about it. Can you explain a little about the history civil disobedience and its place in the environmental movement today?

I don’t advocate civil disobedience lightly. It’s not where I would recommend starting. First, try the existing avenues of democratic participation. Try education, persuasion, campaigns, collaboration and litigation. And if all else fails, it’s time for civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience has a long and noble history in social movements around the world, from Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence to Martin Luther King Jr. and the U.S. civil rights movement to the South African Anti-apartheid struggle.

Today we face the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.  Our use of fossil fuels has dangerously altered the entire planet’s climate, threatening millions and millions of people immediately and potentially destroying the planet’s ability to sustain life. That is a really big problem. It’s the kind of problem that everyone – citizens, elected leaders and business people – should be collaborating around to solve. Yet, in the decades that we have known about this risk, elected leaders have dragged their feet and fossil fuel companies have obstructed solutions. We have tried education, persuasion, campaigning and litigation. We are running out of both options and time.

There are many many things we can and should do, from promoting renewable energies to localizing food production. However, this problem is too big to solve with pockets of sustainability advocates living green. We need governments to lead and businesses to help – or at least get out of the way. If none of the conventional change tactics work, then we’re left with sitting back and watching our incredible planet deteriorate, or engaging in civil disobedience to force change. If any cause ever justified civil disobedience, preserving the ability to live on the planet is it.

Can you explain some of the changes in your thinking over time, as someone who’s been working on these issues for so long?

I’ve been working on these issues for 25 years, so my thinking has evolved in many ways. I’ll share one big one here: when I went to college to study environmental science – 30 years ago!! – I thought that being an environmental advocate was optional. It was one option among many. Some people would contribute to the world by making music, others by finding cures for horrible diseases, and some would work for the environment.

Over the past 3 decades, the environmental problems have gotten so much worse, that now I realize we all have to be environmentalists wherever we find ourselves; we all have to pitch in to help build a better future. If you’re a doctor, explore the environmental links to disease and make sure your hospital’s practices aren’t adding to the problem (for example, with polluting medical waste incinerators.) If you’re an artist, leverage those skills to inspire people to action.  If you’re an architect, design your buildings to be net energy producers, to recycle grey water, to be as ecological as possible. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment; we need to work together in every way we collectively can.

Read this article about Annie Leonard’s Story of Change.

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.

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

Doing the legwork

In Community development, Environment on

Modern jobs give us longer hours, more money and less life. But two bike riders are meeting the people pushing back.

Published in Smith Journal, Volume 4

WHEN you’ve been cycling for three full days in constant rain – and when you know that everything, everything, is wet, and you are 2000 kilometres into a monstrous 5000-kilometre adventure – well, by now, you’ve had plenty of time to contemplate how and why you got here.

For Greg Foyster and Sophie Chishkovsky, these are some of the reasons: catastrophic climate change, the cello, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau; a panic attack, a 30-year mortgage, and the biggest question of all – how can you shape a life that makes your soul sing?

The couple set off from Melbourne in March, marking the occasion by stripping off for the World Naked Bike Ride. Since then, they’ve cycled and camped through Tasmania and Victoria and interviewed three-dozen people along the way, from the founder of permaculture to a forest activist living at the top of a tree. It’s only the beginning. They’re on the slow road to Cairns.

As they go, Foyster is writing a blog, called Simple Lives, which will become a book called Changing Gears (to be published next year, by Affirm Press).

 

When we speak on the phone, he and Chishkovsky have just dried out from those interminable days of rain. They’re in the Bega Valley, in south-eastern New South Wales, staying with a couple who raise pigs and grow shitake mushrooms. “They’re downshifters. They used to work in IT in Canberra,” Foyster reports. “Now they’ve got a funny sign on the gate that says ‘Beware of roaming piglets’.”

The pair’s journey is a tour of tactics for simple living, documenting the alternative ways we can meet our needs, from food, water and shelter, to community, work and health.

“What we’re doing isn’t new,” he stresses. “There’s a long history of people choosing to reduce their reliance on material things and explore a more direct way of living.”

It’s true: way back in the 3rd century BC, the philosopher Diogenes spruiked simplicity through the streets of Athens (apparently he lived in a barrel).

Simple living is a thread that unites Eastern and Western philosophers, writers and religious teachers, from Buddha and Lao Tzu to Tolstoy and Gandhi.

Perhaps its most famous adherent is Henry David Thoreau. He was nearly 28 years old in 1845 when he ventured to the woods on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. He lived there for just over two years.

His book, Walden, partly written in his hand-built cabin by the lake, is the classic case for plain living and elevated thinking. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” he wrote.

Walden is dense and difficult reading, but it’s closely stocked with quotable wisdom. On the supposed connection between wealth and happiness, he wrote that we “labour under a mistake”; on material possessions, that people “have become the tools of their tools”.

Foyster and Chishkovsky’s quest, however, is also propelled by the crises of 21st century global capitalism. “By geological standards, humans have only been around for a short time, but we’ve already increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a third and multiplied the species extinction rate by as much as 1000 times,” Foyster says. “And the biggest and most damaging changes have occurred during the consumer boom of the last 60 years.”

The simple life is now a matter of moral necessity, not only spiritual wellbeing. But simple doesn’t mean easy. How can you afford a home? And what about kids and a career?

Foyster is 29 and, lately, he’s noticed those social expectations loitering in the corners of his mind. Chishkovsky, a cellist and music teacher, is 23 and already more accustomed than him to the idea of living differently. Soon after leaving home for university she became vegetarian. “When you think about animal rights issues, you start thinking about other social and economic issues and about the planet as well,” she says.

“I had a natural inclination towards it, whereas Greg has to intellectualise something before he adopts new habits. He needs a very specific motive, backed up with reason and statistics.”

***

Foyster never was a flowerchild. He was an ad man. His epiphany started slowly.

For five years after university he slaved over TV and print commercials for big brands such as Heinz, Holden, CUB and ANZ. Despite the creative thrills, the money and the corporate sheen, he couldn’t shake a niggling scepticism about his profession.

When he began moonlighting as an occasional environmental writer, the contradiction pressed hard on his mind. He’d learnt that overconsumption in rich countries was the main driver of climate change and other environmental crises. But he was writing ads for a car company.

At an industry awards night the hypocrisy finally cracked him. “Why are we congratulating each other for making the world a worse place?” he thought. Part way through dinner, he escaped the stifling self-celebrations and found himself sobbing next to a nearby pier instead.

That lucid moment was the easy part. Foyster tried avoiding the accounts he abhorred, but it wasn’t enough. Four months later, he quit. The following day, numb all over, and breathing fast and weak like a wounded rabbit, he admitted himself to hospital. It was a panic attack, the doctors told him.

In the next phase, the epiphany’s long tail, Foyster channelled his workaholism into freelance journalism, covering environmental and social issues. Still in his mid-twenties, he moved into a “hippy sharehouse” in Melbourne’s north. When they started going out, Chishkovsky introduced him to her more radical friends – artists and activists who lived another kind of existence, one where money was scarce but passion and free time were thick on the ground.

“It was a good time in my life,” he says. “I was making a small income doing something I loved and my environmental impact was very low by Australian standards. What I believed and what I did were finally aligned, and that made me happy. But the situation couldn’t last.”

***

Like many people who work in creative, interesting, low-paying jobs, Foyster and Chishkovsky are in a bind: renting doesn’t offer the secure tenure they want (unlike in some European countries), but buying is unaffordable. If they shackle themselves to a typical 30-year-mortgage, they’ll have to forgo doing what they love.

“Housing is definitely the biggest barrier to living a simple life in Australia,” Foyster says. “Homeownership is tied up with the accumulation of wealth and that means people see a home as an investment property, which pushes up prices.”

With this in mind, they’ve been pedalling between alternatives. Near Castlemaine, in central Victoria, they met a filmmaking couple who took three years off to build their own house and who emerged with a beautiful dwelling and without much debt.

Not far from there, they visited Peter Cowman, who trained as an architect, but now describes himself as “an itinerant shelter-maker” – he teaches people how to build tiny houses, measuring three metres by three metres.

“His idea is that we’ve forgotten what a house is actually for. We think it has to be a permanent structure that increases in value over decades, but in many other cultures a house can be a temporary dwelling you abandon when it no longer serves your purpose,” Foyster says.

So far, the tiny house is the idea that’s stuck. While their wheels turn, in their daydreams they see a mini-dwelling in the corner of one of their parents’ blocks. “We’d be putting the capital in that property to use, rather than letting it sit there. And then we can establish a life with variation – something physical and something mentally challenging each day,” he says.

Their vision mimics the elements of their journey: both the legwork and the new ideas they traverse as they pedal and greet.

In a typical day on the road, they spend about five or six hours in the saddle. To their surprise, it usually takes about that amount of time again just to secure their necessities: water, food and a safe place to camp for free.

More than ever before, they’re fronting the essential facts of life. And it turns out that the weather matters more than they thought. Just as the days of rain were cause for misery, so the sunshine brings joy. So much joy, in fact, that Foyster lists fine weather, along with flat roads and food, as their prime sources of daily exhilaration.

Above all that, however, are the people. They’ve interviewed so many folks with sparks in their eyes that it can’t be a coincidence.

“Everybody we’ve met has been happy and content and very much in control of their lives. They’re not the sort of people who complain about their lot in life – they’re all very proactive, positive and full of energy,” he says.

“The most inspiring moments have come after we’ve had a conversation with someone and Sophie and I lay down for bed and start talking about some of their ideas and how we’re going to apply them in our own lives.”

The day after we speak, the two are off to battle the high pass to Cooma, over Brown Mountain (if it rains, there could be snow and sleet). The road rises 900 metres in 17 kilometres and Foyster expects it might be the hardest stretch they’ll do in the whole trip. He is no athlete, he assures me, and expresses concern about being hit by a car.

I check in a couple of days later. “We made it up the hill in the record slow time of 3 hours, 53 minutes and 22 seconds, including a leisurely one hour lunch break at a look out,” Foyster writes, by email. “We’re soft-core.”

They’re already a month a half behind schedule, delayed by the flu, floods and Foyster’s gammy knee. They should make it to the tropics in time for the worst of the wet season. But no matter – today they’re warm, dry, well-fed and chipper. It’s simple, really. What more do you need?