From Bass Coast to the Murray Darling Basin, there’s a credibility gap in our response
to the climate crisis.
By Ken Blackman
THIS is about us but let’s start somewhere completely different: the Murray-Darling Basin – Australia’s biggest food bowl across a huge area, from northern Victoria to southern Queensland and into South Australia.
to the climate crisis.
By Ken Blackman
THIS is about us but let’s start somewhere completely different: the Murray-Darling Basin – Australia’s biggest food bowl across a huge area, from northern Victoria to southern Queensland and into South Australia.
Environment ministers and assorted stakeholders have laboured (or prevaricated) for over 10 years to stop waste and increase efficient use of its water. But in a drying climate there is no longer enough water for both the basin’s existing rural towns and production, and the minimum needed to keep the rivers alive. Desal plants in the sunburnt interior? This change is structural; it’s not just another drought. All the irrigation buy-backs and expensive engineering tricks won’t change that. What to do?
The South East Councils Climate Change Alliance’s (SECCCA) recently announced 2024-28 Plan will guide member councils’ shared responses to climate change. These actions – and the separate mitigation programs individual councils are all now running – bear comparison to the Murray Darling Basin Plan.
How so? Bass Coast isn’t the Inland, with vast irrigated crops, stagnant streams and stressed wetlands! But climate change impacts are coming here too: longer, more frequent and more intense heat waves, with a similar regime for storms and floods. Yes, the change will build incrementally, but it’s already happening. In Bass Coast, as in our Murray Darling Basin, we are not adapting to fundamental change with anything like appropriate urgency.
SECCCA’s “practical steps”, most of which target climate adaptation, appear carefully inclusive – but are still baby steps. Its Asset Vulnerability Assessment, Home Resilience Assessment and Small Business Climate adaptation programs (to select just three) are fiddling round the voluntarist edges. What we need are expensive, widespread upgrades to our urban drainage, for example, and hands-on heat protection rollouts across public and private buildings, starting with older folks in older homes.
The planet’s projected temperature will soon climb above the ceiling of a 1.5ºC increase above the 18th century pre-industrial norm set by the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 – certainly in this decade. The world is on track for an almost 3ºC rise by late this century. This year’s global average temperature is expected to be the hottest in 125,000 years – and Australia is not immune. Yet along with several major Western nations (and others like China and India) our fossil fuel production still expands. Despite innovation and publicity, the emissions savings from our expanding renewable energy programs – recently boosted with government underwriting – remain dwarfed by the pollution from our carbon exports. And where are the crash programs in reforestation, agri-emissions (methane) and more? Distributed, increasingly renewable, energy is not the whole picture!
At that level, local government’s paramount task is vigorous, sustained and public advocacy to state and federal leaders. SECCCA agrees, but announced coastal action and more $$$ for emergency services are peanuts compared with missing funding for urgent work by local government at the level it knows best.
The alternative is government reaching for emergency powers, as they did during Covid. Perhaps restrictions on vehicle use, aluminium plant temporary shut-downs or a minimum of 25 ºC for home cooling this summer? No elected government will plan for such interventions, and they struggle with expensive but vital preparedness, because such actions are totally at odds with our unexamined assumption that growth and the good life can continue unabated in countries like Australia. We’re still dishing out tax breaks for gas-guzzling 4WDs! No-one welcomes austerity, but some of it’s up ahead on our pathway to sustainability.
The huge Beetaloo gas field in the NT is ready to start up. To cancel is to forego prosperity, risk energy security. Go ahead and another river, somewhere, will die.
This is the credibility gap in our response to the climate crisis, global to local: we humans, Aussies included, will only accept doing what’s painful when disaster is upon us – as with Covid. Think Murray Darling Basin. Think Mallacoota ’19-’20, think Lismore ’22. Or Gippsland’s rivers, this year. On repeat, there or here.
We should face this wicked challenge now, starting with cancelling the moronic 2025 tax cuts for the wealthy. Be sure that we will have to face it sometime, with greater risk - when climate impacts rival a pandemic.
The South East Councils Climate Change Alliance’s (SECCCA) recently announced 2024-28 Plan will guide member councils’ shared responses to climate change. These actions – and the separate mitigation programs individual councils are all now running – bear comparison to the Murray Darling Basin Plan.
How so? Bass Coast isn’t the Inland, with vast irrigated crops, stagnant streams and stressed wetlands! But climate change impacts are coming here too: longer, more frequent and more intense heat waves, with a similar regime for storms and floods. Yes, the change will build incrementally, but it’s already happening. In Bass Coast, as in our Murray Darling Basin, we are not adapting to fundamental change with anything like appropriate urgency.
SECCCA’s “practical steps”, most of which target climate adaptation, appear carefully inclusive – but are still baby steps. Its Asset Vulnerability Assessment, Home Resilience Assessment and Small Business Climate adaptation programs (to select just three) are fiddling round the voluntarist edges. What we need are expensive, widespread upgrades to our urban drainage, for example, and hands-on heat protection rollouts across public and private buildings, starting with older folks in older homes.
The planet’s projected temperature will soon climb above the ceiling of a 1.5ºC increase above the 18th century pre-industrial norm set by the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 – certainly in this decade. The world is on track for an almost 3ºC rise by late this century. This year’s global average temperature is expected to be the hottest in 125,000 years – and Australia is not immune. Yet along with several major Western nations (and others like China and India) our fossil fuel production still expands. Despite innovation and publicity, the emissions savings from our expanding renewable energy programs – recently boosted with government underwriting – remain dwarfed by the pollution from our carbon exports. And where are the crash programs in reforestation, agri-emissions (methane) and more? Distributed, increasingly renewable, energy is not the whole picture!
At that level, local government’s paramount task is vigorous, sustained and public advocacy to state and federal leaders. SECCCA agrees, but announced coastal action and more $$$ for emergency services are peanuts compared with missing funding for urgent work by local government at the level it knows best.
The alternative is government reaching for emergency powers, as they did during Covid. Perhaps restrictions on vehicle use, aluminium plant temporary shut-downs or a minimum of 25 ºC for home cooling this summer? No elected government will plan for such interventions, and they struggle with expensive but vital preparedness, because such actions are totally at odds with our unexamined assumption that growth and the good life can continue unabated in countries like Australia. We’re still dishing out tax breaks for gas-guzzling 4WDs! No-one welcomes austerity, but some of it’s up ahead on our pathway to sustainability.
The huge Beetaloo gas field in the NT is ready to start up. To cancel is to forego prosperity, risk energy security. Go ahead and another river, somewhere, will die.
This is the credibility gap in our response to the climate crisis, global to local: we humans, Aussies included, will only accept doing what’s painful when disaster is upon us – as with Covid. Think Murray Darling Basin. Think Mallacoota ’19-’20, think Lismore ’22. Or Gippsland’s rivers, this year. On repeat, there or here.
We should face this wicked challenge now, starting with cancelling the moronic 2025 tax cuts for the wealthy. Be sure that we will have to face it sometime, with greater risk - when climate impacts rival a pandemic.