Climate and environment: both sides of the coin are tarnished
Oct 1, 2024
The most important role of government is to protect its citizens. In Australia this is usually taken to mean military defence, alliances with other countries and considerable expenditure. However the governments of many countries including ours have not yet grasped the fact that we are facing defeat in the current battle against the advancing threats of climate change and environmental demise.
Current policies and our democratic system are inadequate to this task in their ability and recognition of the urgency. There will be no second chance.
In November this year, the UN Climate Change Conference COP29 will convene in Baku, Azerbaijan. Thousands of delegates from governments, industry, science and technology will prepare a factual report which will be modified by governments for their own political needs.
Many believe that COP29 should be followed immediately by an independent COP conference of scientists and technologists. This conference could deliver The Light, the Miracle of Baku.
This year there is another International Conference COP 16 in Cali, Colombia with a focus on biodiversity. The President will be Colombia’s Environment Minister Susana Muhamad prominent in curtailing deforestation in her country.
The Cali meeting follows a 2022 UN agreement between more than 190 countries to the effective protection and management of 30% of the World’s land, fresh waters and oceans by the year 2030.
President Muhamad has said,
“The climate has much more awareness and political investment, but we are not seeing the other side of the coin, and it’s dangerous for humanity. One of the main purposes for Cop16 in Cali is to make biodiversity and the global biodiversity framework as politically relevant as the climate agenda.”
She said that focussing on reducing carbon emissions while failing to restore and protect natural ecosystems would be “dangerous for humanity” and risk societal collapse.
“Both sides of the coin” is relevant to both the world and to Australia’s situation, the two topics are the same issue and cannot be separated; they represent one value, the two facets of survival.
The World’s climate change situation is grim.
We approach COP29 with the promises to reduce fossil fuels given at COP 28 broken by petro states some of which are the wealthiest democratic countries in the world including Australia. These countries hide their sins with their success with renewable energy.
There is a likelihood of one of several tipping points leading to unstoppable warming; emission targets of 2030 and 2050 being missed and the implications of existing emissions becoming more potent in raising temperature. The role of methane in this scenario is concerning because of its much higher warming potency and its incomplete measurement.
Recent optimistic reviews from Bloomberg NEF and the international Climate Analytics Institute indicate a possibility of the world reaching a peak for emissions soon. This will be taken out of context by governments to avoid their obligations on fossil fuel reduction.
The other side of the coin, the World and Australian environments, is even more tarnished than the climate side. Its greatest destructor is the World’s rising temperature together with increasing floods, drought, storms and fires. According to our most recent State of the Environment report, our losses of mammals, deforestation and our naturally poor soils are deteriorating further.
The effect of rising temperature from climate change on the Australian environment is decided by the combined effects of emissions from all world countries. However the possibility of survival for Australia will also depend on whether we change from damaging environmental practices to the enhancement of the resilience of ecosystems.
If world temperature in a few decades peaks at 2.5 or perhaps 3.0 degrees C, will we still have some functioning ecosystems?
Our members of parliament do not understand the role of ecological services in our survival and those who do, ignore the facts in favour of measures to provide electoral success based on economic growth for ever; our fate will then be decided by rising temperature and the death of ecological services.
Currently the Biodiversity Council and other organisations document high public support for much more environmental protection. However this is low on the list of public needs of cost of living, housing etc. and as a result funding for the environment is pitiful.
Soil, our ecological life support system for food production, consists of species of bacteria, fungi, viruses, nematodes, mites, worms and insects, in fact two thirds of all species on the planet, to maintain its resilience and service. Many are declining significantly including insects.
Soil and its constituent species are damaged by current farming practices to enhance food production, by current water policies and by land and forest clearance. We have to reform intensive farming and if necessary provide a legal framework to do so.
Clearly soil needs to retain its health by receiving organic matter to break down to service the food needs of plants but in much farming today it is replaced by fertiliser to maintain and increase crop yields. The living soil deteriorates and is more easily blown or washed away by increasing extreme storms.
Those in our governance systems have not considered that we are already deeply into environmental demise of which rising temperature is just one factor. However this possibility is in the mind of many scientists observing the current rise in epidemics of disease in human and other species, the ongoing failure of laws preventing loss of vegetation, and the mismanagement and pollution of water resources.
Where is the government education of the public on the essential causes of the biodiversity demise? The total number of people, the “population” of a nation, is the leading factor in the demise of its biodiversity. Australia still doesn’t have a population policy.
Currently a biodiverse forest in Manyana NSW has been given national permission to be felled to build 153 houses under a 25 year old Environmental Act, irrelevant to the current biodiversity crisis, and facilitated by state and government ignorance.
This month an eminent organisation Environmental Justice Australia used the following words “This is a betrayal of our environment. A betrayal of our children. A betrayal of all that we hold dear” when reacting to government permission for extension to three NSW coal mines.
Together with increasing gas production this indicates a failure to support the World initiative to reduce fossil fuels as the most important climate initiative and to continue to ignore the thousands of deaths caused worldwide by our policy.
The more we examine the two sided coin the more we realise that it is now severely clipped and devalued.
David Shearman is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Adelaide University and previously held senior academic positions at Edinburgh University, where he qualified in Medicine and Biological Science, and at Yale University. He is author of many books on climate change and related issues. He has served on the IPCC, has been President of the Conservation Council of South Australia. With the late Professor Tony McMichael he founded Doctors for the Environment Australia in 2001. He is author and co-author of several hundred scientific and medical papers.
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