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.

Changing a whole system: racialised policing in Melbourne

In Social justice on

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website.

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

Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death

In Social justice, The Age on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read this article at The Age online

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