The Conversation

In June 2007, Australia was pummelled by five East Coast Lows. The most significant of them, which struck on June 8-9, is still referred to as the “Pasha Bulker” storm, after the 76,000-tonne bulk carrier that ran aground near Newcastle. The storm caused major flooding, strong winds, high seas and A$1.6 billion in damage, making it Australia’s eighth most expensive disaster in the last 50 years.

East Coast Lows (ECLs) have been important features of the eastern seaboard for centuries, with the first case studies published back in 1954. But by June 2007 it had been ten years since the last serious scientific look at these storms. The damage suffered that month made it clear how much we still didn’t know about these weather systems, let alone about how they might behave in the future.

Instead of a whole bunch of scientists going off and doing their own thing, we formed the Eastern Seaboard Climate Change Initiative, in which local universities and state and federal governments could work together to identify the biggest scientific questions for the eastern seaboard, and start to solve them.

Nine years and a slew of research papers later, we know a lot more about ECLs than we once did. We have built a strong research network that can expand our knowledge still further and put it into practice. Today, a special issue of the Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science highlights some of the things we’ve learned.

What do we know?

There are seven papers in the special issue, covering a broad range of topics.

Danielle Verdon-Kidd and her colleagues look back at the Pasha Bulker storm and reflect on the scale of the impacts, as well as issues for future flood planning, such as improved education about the dangers of entering floodwaters.

A group from the Bureau of Meteorology (including myself) has also developed a new online database of East Coast Lows over the past 60 years, to help emergency managers look back on the impacts of past storms or find out how many of the big events they remember were actually ECLs.

Going back still further, Stuart Browning and Ian Goodwin have looked at what sorts of ocean and atmospheric conditions influence East Coast Lows, as these storms tend not to be as strongly affected by big climate drivers such as La Niña. This research has helped to extend the record of East Coast Lows back to the 19th century and found that the numbers of ECLs can vary quite a lot over decades and longer. Interestingly, the past few decades (up to 2014) have been a period of relatively low activity.

Anthony Kiem and his colleagues have delved into the question of how coastal rainfall patterns and impacts can change, depending on the “type” of ECL that happens. This work, as well as the work by Browning and Goodwin, highlights how important it is to consider the different types of East Coast Lows – a storm that causes heavy rain in the Northern Rivers looks very different to one that brings downpours to Gippsland, and these might also change in different ways over time. This teases out important detail that can be washed out in studies that lump all storms in together.

Before we can use climate models to assess how East Coast Lows and their impacts may change on the eastern seaboard, we need to know whether our models are doing a good job. So Alejandro Di Luca and colleagues have assessed how well the NARCliM regional climate model ensemble is able to represent East Coast Lows. They found that regional models have real benefits over global climate models, particularly for the most extreme events.

Despite these promising results, studies led by Nadeeka Parana Manage and Natalie Lockart found that there is still a way to go before the regional models produce data of the quality needed for simulating river flows and dam levels, and how future changes to storm patterns might affect these.

So what’s next?

We know a lot more than we did nine years ago about things like how the upper atmosphere influences East Coast Lows, and how severe floods and East Coast Lows have changed over the past century. We are also starting to get a handle on how they may change in the future. Climate change is expected to reduce their frequency during the cool months May-October (which is when they currently happen most often), but potentially make them more common during the warmer months.

But there are still a lot of things we don’t know. The papers in this issue are a start, but research continues and our group has many more questions left to answer. These include how ECLs have changed in the more distant past; how sea surface temperatures influence their frequency and impacts; and how changes in ECLs and other climate processes can affect our water security.

A whole bunch of research is also about to start into how ECLs interact with other climate extremes now and into the future, as part of the NSW Government’s Climate Change Impacts and Extreme Climate Events research programs and the Australian government’s National Environmental Science Program.

So read the articles, have a taste and watch this space: there are still many more questions and researchers from around the country are working together to answer them, to help us better understand the special, complex climate of the eastern seaboard of Australia.

Acacia Pepler receives funding from the Australian Research Council. The Eastern Seaboard Climate Change Initiative is spearheaded by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, and involves researchers from the Bureau of Meteorology, the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University and the University of Newcastle. The research was funded in part by the NSW Environmental Trust, NSW Department of Finance and Services, Hunter Water, and the Australian Research Council.

Can undersea oil rigs become homes? US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

The global offshore oil and gas industry has installed a wide variety of infrastructure throughout our oceans, including tens of thousands of wells, thousands of platforms and many thousands of kilometres of seabed pipelines.

Many of these structures have been in service for several decades and are approaching retirement. The North Sea, for example, has more than 550 platforms and undersea production facilities, virtually all of which are set to be decommissioned in the next 30 years.

In Southeast Asia, the issue is even bigger: almost half of the region’s 1,700 offshore installations are more than 20 years old and approaching retirement.

What happens to old offshore oil and gas infrastructure?

After decommissioning and cleaning a platform, seabed structure or pipeline, its operators are faced with a choice: dismantle and remove it completely; leave it in place; or remove some of it while leaving the rest behind.

The choice depends largely on what is technically feasible, as well as what is desirable from an environmental, economic and societal perspective, and of course what is legally allowed.

The earliest relevant international law, the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf, requires the complete removal of disused marine infrastructure. But the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which has largely superseded it, is more lenient. It states that decisions should take into account “generally accepted international standards established … by the competent international organisation” – in this case the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).

The IMO’s 1989 guidelines allow structures to be left in place on a case-by-case basis. Due consideration must have been given to safety of navigation, rate of deterioration, risk of structural movement, environmental effects, costs, technical feasibility and risks of injury associated with removal.

The guidelines also refer to the possibility of “new use or other reasonable justification” for in situ disposal. This opens up some possibilities for how offshore platforms might take on a new life without being removed.

Is complete removal worthwhile?

Europe has so far tended to favour complete removal of offshore infrastructure, in line with international law. Safely recovering these ageing and vast structures from harsh environments is technically challenging, and the industry has developed some impressive technology such as the Pioneering Spirit, a specialised vessel constructed to lift steel platforms from the North Sea.

Impressive… but also expensive. kees torn/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Complete removal is expensive, both to oil and gas companies and the taxpayer. It also leaves operators facing the problem of what to do with the recovered material. While some parts of the topsides of platforms can be refurbished if structurally sound, most of the material is not reusable. Some elements can be recycled, but much of it will inevitably end up in landfill.

From an environmental perspective, the notion of returning the seabed to its original state is undoubtedly born of the right intentions. But when engineered structures have been part of the marine environment for several decades, might it do more harm than good to remove them?

A new life for platforms

Artificial reefs are often deliberately placed in our oceans to provide habitat for marine life or sites for recreational diving. But many offshore oil and gas structures also fulfil these functions – for instance, by providing breeding sites for fisheries. Removing them might therefore harm these ecosystems.

Despite this, European law only allows artificial reefs to be created from new materials, rather than decommissioned infrastructure.

The United States, which has national laws that allow offshore infrastructure to be left in place, has an established a “rigs to reefs” program administered through the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Under this program, more than 400 decommissioned rigs have been converted to permanent reefs since 1986.

Rigs cannot simply be left to rust in the ocean; projects like this require rigorous assessment before being approved. But the assessment criteria are different and typically less stringent than for the earlier production phase of the rig’s life, largely because there is no longer a risk of spills after decommissioning.

During their initial operating life, marine structures and pipelines must meet strict criteria that limit movement or deformation. This is to ensure that machinery operates correctly and containment systems do not release hydrocarbons into the marine environment. Strict regulations also apply to the removal of hydrocarbons and residues from the system during decommissioning and cleanup.

But once decommissioned, all that is required is that the structure is sufficiently stable on the seabed and will not break apart in ways that would harm the environment or pose a danger to shipping.

Leaving disused infrastructure in the ocean also raises the critical question of who bears ultimate responsibility for it. Should ownership stay with the original operator, or be transferred to the government? This raises issues of liability for any damage that might occur in the future, and who should bear that risk remains a live question for debate and discussion.

Will it have a role after retirement? CSIRO, CC BY-NC-SA What should Australia do?

Australia’s offshore oil and gas industry is less mature than those in Europe and the United States. As a result, the fate of decommissioned offshore infrastructure is still an emerging issue.

Australia’s current regulations favour complete removal. But the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority is exploring the possibility of supporting an in situ decommissioning policy.

This would involve amending the law to allow certain new uses, as well as to resolve issues of decommissioning standards, safety and risk, liability and ownership. The lack of any established practice gives Australia a unique chance to show innovative leadership on this issue.

Developing an Australian version of the “rigs to reefs” policy would require input from engineers, natural scientists, environmental managers, oil and gas economists, lawyers and others, to work out precisely what is possible and preferable in different locations.

There is little doubt that pressures on the ocean environment will only increase. Growing populations will increase demand on fisheries and probably lead to the development of large offshore aquaculture projects, as well as escalation of shipping and ocean-based transport. Similarly, the demand for energy may drive broad implementation of wave energy and other marine renewables.

With the growing variety of industries set to use the oceans in future, now is the right time to take a wide-ranging look at how best to handle the structures that are already there.

Susan Gourvenec works for a research centre that receives funding from the State and Federal governments as well from as a range of oil and gas operators and contractors through joint research projects or contract testing.

Erika Techera receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a joint project related to marine species and oceans governance. She is a member of the Oceans Science Council of Australia (OSCA).

Land-clearing laws are being fiercely debated in both Queensland and New South Wales. These two states are responsible for the majority of cleared land in Australia’s recent history.

The latest assessment from Queensland shows that 296,000 hectares of vegetation was cleared in 2014-15. More than a third of this is remnant vegetation that has never been cleared before.

To put this in perspective, around 580,000ha of forest was cleared in Brazil over the same time. While this is twice the area recently cleared in Queensland, it’s worth remembering that the rate of clearing has been much higher in the past, before legislation first came into effect more than a decade ago.

Land-clearing rates were higher before laws were introduced. Queensland government, Land cover change in Queensland 2014–15, CC BY

In NSW, around 23,000ha of vegetation has been cleared for cropping and pasture since 2010 and 59% of this is “unexplained”: clearing of regrowth vegetation, for routine agricultural management, exempt from legislation, or illegal.

The science is clear about the detrimental effects of land clearing on the climate, native wildlife and soil health. More than 400 international and Australian scientists recently signed a declaration highlighting their concern about the rate of forest loss in Australia. Such a degree of coordination between scientists hasn’t been seen since the original Brigalow Declaration in 2003.
How to address effectively the issue of land clearing remains fiendishly complex. Land clearing is such a political issue in Australia, as any policy changes affect many people in the community.

Recently proposed policy changes in both NSW and Queensland have proved to be contentious. Farmers and environmental groups in NSW have highlighted concerns with Premier Mike Baird’s proposed Biodiversity Bill. Last week, Queensland farmers unhappy with Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s proposal to re-strengthen land-clearing laws marched on Parliament House to protest the changes.

Australia has the ability and resources to reduce land clearing, if it chooses. How might we do it?

1. Stop the policy flip-flop

Since the 1970s, state and federal governments have introduced at least 40 regulations, incentive schemes and policy frameworks related to vegetation management. One of the key concerns reported by farmers is the “policy flip-flop”, in which successive governments introduce land-clearing laws that are strong, then relaxed, then strong again.

These frequent policy changes create huge uncertainties for farmers who want to make long-term business decisions. It also means that government resources are almost constantly devoted to designing new policies, rather than ensuring that existing policies are effective.

For land clearing to be controlled over the long term, more resources need to be allocated to encouraging, supporting and enforcing compliance with vegetation laws.

2. We do need regulation

Strict controls on vegetation clearing are often deeply unpopular with landholders. Relying too heavily on regulation can also lead to poor compliance and unnecessary costs. However, the reality is that some form of “top-down” regulation will always be needed to protect native vegetation in the long term. History has shown this to be the case.

Before it introduced land-clearing controls in the 1980s, the South Australian government provided landholders with financial incentives to conserve native vegetation. Unfortunately, clearing did not decline, as the scheme attracted only landholders who had already planned not to clear their vegetation.

A combination of regulation and long-term financial incentives is needed. Unfortunately, most incentive schemes are small compared to the value of farming, and are usually short-term – such as the five-year package announced as part of the NSW Biodiversity Bill.

3. Put a price on carbon

Encouraging long-term protection of native vegetation requires a market signal, and a carbon price would do this. The federal government’s Emissions Reduction Fund doesn’t provide bang for buck, and there’s evidence it is being used to conserve vegetation that would never have been cleared anyway.

Increased clearing in Queensland may have effectively cancelled out the carbon emissions saved under the Direct Action plan.

We know it is possible for carbon farming to be a win-win for the climate and wildlife. Many parts of Australia need only a moderate carbon price to make restoring and conserving native vegetation a profitable business enterprise. Long-term policy certainty and a consistent message from federal and state governments are needed.

4. Self-regulation where appropriate

Over the past decade, there has been trend towards self-regulation of vegetation management. For low-risk activities, it makes sense for landholders to be able to manage vegetation by simply notifying the government, rather than applying for a permit. This reduces costs for the landholder, and frees up government resources to monitor for compliance and regulate high-risk clearing (where the proposed area to be cleared is large, or may impact threatened species habitat).

Self-assessable vegetation clearing codes been introduced in New South Wales and Queensland, but have been criticised for enabling broad-scale clearing. Clearly, more work is needed here to get the balance right between managing environmental risks and minimising regulation costs.

5. Rebuilding trust

The debate over land clearing in Australia is so heated and highly polarised that it can be difficult to see a path forward. There appears to be very little trust between some landholders and state governments, leading in some cases to tragic consequences.

Providing some long-term policy certainty and consistency between federal and state government messages will go a long way in helping to rebuild mutual trust. A price on carbon would allow landholders to generate income from sequestering carbon alongside farm businesses.

Reducing regulation in circumstances where the environmental risks are low while ensuring resources are devoted to supporting compliance can reduce costs for both landholders and governments without jeopardising the environment.

Australia needs to get land-clearing policy right, and soon. While the debate rages on, more vegetation is lost – and ultimately we all lose.

Megan C Evans receives funding from the National Environmental Science Programme (NESP) Threatened Species Recovery Hub, an Australian Postgraduate Award and a CSIRO top-up scholarship. She is a signatory to the recent Scientist's Declaration on Accelerating forest, woodland and grassland destruction in Australia.

Female dingo in Oxley Wild Rivers NP, New South Wales Guy Ballard, CC BY-NC

From cats and foxes to goats and cane toads, invasive animals are one of Australia’s biggest environmental problems. Over the past few weeks, one Queensland council has been trying a new approach to controlling goats on an offshore island: introducing dingoes from the mainland.

But since dingoes were moved to Pelorus Island to kill goats, passions have overflowed for and against.

Queensland RSPCA chief executive Mark Townend was notable among the opposition. He stressed that his organisation is not against feral animal control, but opposes the “very cruel method” of using dingoes to achieve it.

Some people have also strongly objected to the implantation of poison capsules, containing sodium fluroacetate, into the Pelorus Island dingoes. This is intended to kill them after they have killed the goats.

In a rapidly changing world, people are trying new ways to save wildlife and help the environment. These strategies are forcing us to ask new, and sometimes difficult, ethical questions.

Changing world

Humans have created a global patchwork of degraded environments. Australia has the world’s worst mammal extinction record, as well as booming populations of invasive herbivores and ongoing problems with native habitat loss.

When it comes to managing invasive animals, Australians have often been quick to use lethal “pest” control. Methods include poisoning, trapping and shooting for livestock and wildlife protection, in attempts to reduce populations until impacts reach acceptable levels.

This approach does not sit well with many Australians and it has become common to see vocal opposition to wildlife culling programs that are perceived as indiscriminate, unnecessary or unacceptably cruel.

At the same time, there is increasing support for reintroducing native predators to help fix environmental problems.

Some experts in Australia have suggested that Australia should use dingoes to control invasive herbivores, red foxes and feral cats, following the example of our North American counterparts.

Some call it “rewilding”. Others simply see it as biological control. Regardless, a range of private and public land managers believe that dingoes should be Australia’s primary agents of ecosystem restoration.

Putting aside the debate about the likely success of such schemes, the issue of public acceptance remains. Proponents claim that using dingoes for environmental benefit is both “virtuous” and “free”. But the objections to the use of dingoes for feral goat control shows that there is still widespread dissatisfaction with getting dingoes to do our dirty work.

The ethics of killing

Every control technique has a welfare impact on wildlife, causing some pain and suffering.

We can measure objectively how well a technique works, but assessments of humaneness are always subjective. When people choose lethal control, we condemn animals to death.

Although it has been marketed as “compassionate conservation”, using dingoes for pest control means that other animals will be hunted, maimed and killed. This applies to the animals we want removed, such as goats, as well as to other wildlife that shares the habitat.

The future of using dingoes and other predators as pest controllers hinges on whether or not the public finds it acceptable. Do people draw a line between “natural” ways of killing invasive animals (with dingoes), and more artificial means (such as poison)?

We know, for instance, that dingo attacks can be extremely distressing for livestock producers.

Queensland RSPCA’s opposition to the Pelorus Island trial doesn’t mean an end to rewilding, but it is significant. It reminds us that welfare is an important issue for invasive animal control, regardless of whether humans or animals are doing the killing.

Some people find the notion of dingo-based pest control acceptable, even appealing, but others do not. Just as society expects that we carefully assess the use of poisons, traps or bullets, so too we should consider the welfare impacts of outsourcing death to dingoes and making them our tools for ecosystem management.

Guy Ballard is Project Leader for the Wild Canids in Agri-Ecosystems project, funded by the Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre.

Peter Fleming receives funding from Australian and NSW Governments, and the Invasive Animals CRC. He is not affiliated with any political or industry organisation or think tank.

Ecosystem services – the natural processes that allow Earth to sustain life and provide us with everything we have and see – are facing an uncertain future.

Between 1997 and 2011, the global value of ecosystem services declined by up to US$20 trillion per year as a result of changing land use. To put that in context, the world’s entire GDP is currently just under US$74 trillion.

Our research shows that, in the Asia-Pacific region, this downward trend is likely to continue unless there are significant policy changes. By 2050, we predict that ecosystem service values could drop by 34% from their 2011 base value of US$13 trillion.

But, more optimistically, we also forecast that ecosystems could grow in value by 24% by mid-century, if policies are put in place to safeguard these crucial environmental values.

An Asian century (of ecosystems)

The Asia-Pacific region has historically followed the global trend in ecosystem depletion. But the future doesn’t have to be like the past. The decisions we make as a society will determine what our world will look like in that future.

With that in mind, our research focused on a range of land-use scenarios to try to forecast the consequences of various social, environmental and economic policies.

We used these scenarios to derive estimates of land-use change (urban, cropland, forest, grassland, wetland, desert), population, GDP and other variables such as inequality up to the year 2050. Changes in total value of ecosystem services in these scenarios were estimated to be due to two factors: the change in area covered by each ecosystem type; and the change in the “unit value” – the total value of all the marketed and non-marketed ecosystem services, per area, per year of each ecosystem type due to degradation or restoration.

In the Asia-Pacific region, Afghanistan shows the greatest potential losses and gains, as do other countries that are more susceptible to desertification. At the same time, these countries also have the greatest potential for reversing land degradation.

On the other hand, in this region, countries like Japan and New Zealand have the least potential for fluctuations in their ecosystem service values. This is because they are already highly developed and potentially have more stable climates.

Australia’s prospects

Australia, second only to China in ecosystem services value, also shows an extensive range of values among our four scenarios. Starting with a terrestrial ecosystem services value of US$3.4 trillion per year in 2011 (roughly three times Australia’s GDP that year), we forecast that by 2050 ecosystem services could grow in value by as much as 21%, or decrease by up to 29%.

This translates to either a gain of US$700 billion per year or a loss of US$980 billion per year – a figure that’s not far short of Australia’s current annual GDP.

The scenarios used incorporate a range of world views and policies, and the impacts of these on the entire, integrated system, including population, energy use, equity, environmental change, climate change and more. Our research features a country-by-country breakdown of the outcomes of each scenario, although it is impossible to separate out the impact of individual policies, especially given the differences in each country.

The consequences and solutions

The loss of ecosystem services will be felt most strongly by the poorest in any society, as they depend most directly on ecosystem services. They are the first to feel the effects when those services begin to disappear, and the least able to replace or ameliorate the loss. Increasing ecosystem services, on the other hand, would increase sustainable human well-being.

Around the world, the focus on ecosystem services has been growing quickly. Recent major policy reforms in this direction include a White House memo directing US federal agencies to incorporate ecosystem services into their planning, investment and regulations.

Other countries have also begun to incorporate ecosystem services in their policies. The European Union has mandated all member countries to produce national ecosystem service assessments, for use in policy and decision-making.

At the international level, the United Nations has set up an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, analogous in structure and function to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The international Ecosystem Services Partnership has also been established to co-ordinate and facilitate the exchange of information and expertise across the world.

We have taken ecosystem services for granted for far too long. The UN Sustainable Development Goals, adopted last year by all UN countries, include specific calls to promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, to halt and reverse land degradation, to ensure clean water and food security, as well as to safeguard life both on land and in the oceans.

If we are taking these goals seriously, we need to put natural capital and ecosystem services “on the books” as a major contributor to sustainable well-being.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The State of the Climate in 2015 report, led by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was released yesterday. Unfortunately, it paints a grim picture of the world’s climate last year.

For a second consecutive year the globe experienced its hottest year on record, beating the 2014 record by more than 0.1℃. From May 2015 onwards, each month set a temperature record for that particular month, a pattern that has yet to end.

The record-breaking temperature anomaly in 2015 (around 1℃ higher, on average, than what would be expected in a world without humans) was in large part due to human-caused climate change. A small fraction of the heat was because of a major El Niño event, which developed midway through 2015 and ran into this year.

During El Niño events we see warmer sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. A resulting transfer of heat from the ocean into the lower atmosphere causes a temporary warming effect. In La Niña seasons, the opposite happens.

Overall, about 0.05-0.1℃ of the global temperature anomaly for 2015 was due to El Niño. The bulk of the remainder was due to climate change. So even if we hadn’t had an El Niño last year, 2015 would still have been one of the hottest years on record.

Of the 16 hottest years ever recorded, 15 have happened this century.

Extreme events around the world…

At regional scales we also saw many extreme events last year. The downward trend in Arctic sea ice continued, with the lowest annual maximum extent on record. Alaska’s winter was almost non-existent, with many Arctic mammals and fish being forced to change their behaviour and shift their habitats.

Many extreme heatwaves occurred in 2015. These included a deadly hot spell in India and Pakistan and severe heat events in Europe and North America. Combined, these events killed thousands of people.

In Europe, various summer heat records were set in Spain, the Netherlands, France and Britain, while Germany posted an all-time record temperature.

Seasonal-scale extreme heat occurred over many parts of the globe. There were many more warm days and nights than normal over much of Europe in summer, and in Russia and North America in spring.

Extreme events occurred around the world in 2015. NOAA NCEI

Across the world there were more tropical cyclones than normal, mainly due to increased cyclone activity across the Pacific basin, and many significant flood events. On the other hand, large areas suffered severe drought (14% of the land surface, up from 8% in 2014).

The Ethiopian drought devastated crops and affected millions of people. Parts of South America experienced the worst drought in 80 years. The western US drought continued, despite the fact that El Niño events usually bring this region some reprieve.

…including in Australia

In Australia, probably the most significant climate extreme we had was the record heat in October.

The country experienced its biggest monthly temperature anomaly on record – almost 3℃ above the historical national average. The frequency of very warm days was also well above average. This unusual early heat triggered bushfires across the southeast.

Even given the El Niño event (which normally warms up Australia in spring and summer), the maximum temperature records that were set were, for example, at least six times more likely in Melbourne than they would have been in the absence of human-caused climate change.

For 2015 as a whole, Australia experienced its fifth-warmest year on record. Nine out of 12 months were warmer than average.

A continuation of climate change trends

Besides the record heat, the world saw many other unwanted records tumble in 2015, providing ever more extensive evidence for the effect that humans are having on the climate. Greenhouse gas concentrations (the primary cause of our changing climate) rose to record high levels, with carbon dioxide concentrations passing the 400 parts per million mark at many sites. The year’s margin of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations was also the largest on record.

Our influence on the climate can also be seen through record high globally-averaged sea levels and the highest globally-averaged sea surface and upper ocean temperatures on record.

The trend towards more heat extremes and fewer cold ones also continued. In fact, 2015 had about three times as many very warm days as very cold ones globally compared with the historical average.

A plethora of records was broken, with a human fingerprint being clear in many cases.

What’s next?

We already know that 2016 is very likely to overtake 2015 globally as the hottest year on record. As the El Niño peaked earlier this year we saw many extreme events around the world and in Australia. This included the devastating coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, which would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.

Unfortunately, in many ways, the climate of 2015 is not likely to stand out as especially unusual in a few years’ time. More record hot years are likely, with associated extreme weather events, as greenhouse gas concentrations continue to climb.

Only with rapid and substantial cuts to these emissions will it be possible to limit global warming to well below 2℃, a key aim of the Paris climate agreement, and reduce the likelihood of yet more climate records tumbling.

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research Council

How does Peter Singer's figure of 750 million fit within the range of estimates on 'climate change refugees'? Q&A

The Conversation is fact-checking claims made on Q&A, broadcast Mondays on the ABC at 9.35pm. Thank you to everyone who sent us quotes for checking via Twitter using hashtags #FactCheck and #QandA, on Facebook or by email.

Excerpt from Q&A, August 2, 2016, watch from 1.12.

PETER SINGER: That is going to basically inundate every coastal city around the world, including, of course, all Australian major cities are coastal. It is going - estimated to cause something like 750 million refugees just moving away from that flooding. Never mind those who also because refugees because (indistinct)…

VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Some of those claims are contested, of course?

PETER SINGER: Well, they are contested but do you want to take the chance, right? – Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University, speaking on Q&A with host Virginia Trioli, August 2, 2016.

Ethicist Peter Singer told Q&A that climate change-related sea level rises are “estimated to cause something like 750 million refugees just moving away from that flooding”.

It is beyond the scope of a FactCheck to say with any certainty what will happen in the future. And there is no single official data source on the numbers of people who migrate because of the impacts of climate change, partly because there is no legal definition of a “climate change refugee”. Furthermore, most such displacement occurs within countries, not across international borders, and is always due to a number of different factors. Finally, there is no systematic monitoring of such movement.

That said, we can check how Singer’s figure of 750 million fits within the range of estimates that exist on this question.

Checking the source

When asked by The Conversation for sources to support his statement, Peter Singer said:

Factchecking always welcome! My source for the figure is Climate Central and in terms of the possible extent of sea level rises, please see this paper by Hansen et al.

The figure I gave is near the top end of the Climate Central range, but remember that I agreed with Virginia Trioli that this is contested. I argued that if it is even a small chance, the stakes are too high to be worth taking the risk.

Climate Central is a group of scientists and journalists researching and reporting climate change and its effects. In 2015, the group said that:

Carbon emissions causing 4°C of warming — what business-as-usual points toward today — could lock in enough sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people, with unstoppable rise unfolding over centuries.

Predictions vary and uncertainties abound, but climate scientists say it is possible we may reach 4°C of warming by 2100 if insufficient effort is made to reign in emissions.

As Singer acknowledges, his figure of 750 million is at the upper end of estimates – and he readily agreed that estimates are contested.

Without detracting from Singer’s broader point about the human consequences of climate change, it is worth taking a closer look at the context, assumptions and methodologies behind some of these alarming-sounding figures.

What does Singer’s source say about climate refugees?

When Climate Central released its Mapping Choices report in 2015, the headline it used on its website was “New Report and Maps: Rising Seas Threaten Land Home to Half a Billion”.

But to be clear, Climate Central’s full report did not say that 750 million people would need to move away due to rising sea levels – in fact, unlike Singer, it didn’t use the term “refugees” at all.

Instead, it said only that under a 4°C warming scenario, there could be “enough sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people” (emphasis added).

Many people would indeed move in that scenario – but past experience from around the world means we can be confident that many would also stay and try to live with a changed environment.

The Climate Central report acknowledges that its estimates do not take adaptation strategies into account, noting:

Results do not account for present or future shoreline defences, such as levees, that might be built, nor for future population growth, decline or relocation.

A vast range of estimates – and plenty of guesswork

Some of the numerical estimates on climate-related displacement are based on crude methodologies, as explained in my 2012 book, Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law.

For example, in 1993 social scientist Norman Myers wrote a paper suggesting that 150 million people could be displaced by climate change by the the mid-21st century. He had identified areas expected to be affected by sea-level rise, and then calculated the anticipated population of those areas in 2050. In subsequent work and interviews, he said the figure could be closer to 200 million or 250 million. Estimates ranging from 50 million to 600 million to even a billion have been cited by some.

The Observer published an article in 2010 headlined “Climate change will cost a billion people their homes, says report”.

However, that report misconstrued a paper by Dr François Gemenne – whose work is empirically based and well-reasoned – that referred to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) comment that freshwater availability in a changing climate may adversely affect more than a billion people by the 2050s. That’s a different story from the one told in The Observer’s headline.

Many of these upper end estimates – and the methodologies used to calculate them – have been criticised by other researchers, who note that very big estimates often fail to account for adaptation.

The IPCC itself has said that:

Estimates of the number of people who may become environmental migrants are, at best, guesswork.

How much weather-related displacement of people have we seen so far?

Peter Singer’s comment was about future impacts of climate change. But what do we know about current and past climate-related movement?

The best statistics on this are published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the leading source of information on internal displacement whose role has been endorsed by the UN. It said in its Global Estimates 2015: People displaced by disasters report that:

Since 2008, an average of 22.5 million people have been displaced by climate- or weather-related disasters [each year].

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC)

These figures were also recognised in the Nansen Initiative’s Agenda for the Protection of Cross-Border Displaced Persons in the context of Disasters and Climate Change, endorsed by 109 States (including Australia) in late 2015, and by the UN Secretary-General’s report on refugees and migrants prepared for a high-level summit on large movements of refugees and migrants to be held in New York in September 2016.

Verdict

Are rising seas “estimated to cause something like 750 million refugees” to have to move, as Peter Singer said? Not according to the source he provided, which actually found that sea level rises under a 4°C warming scenario could submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people; the report didn’t say that all or most would subsequently become refugees.

As Singer acknowledged, his figure of 750 million people being affected by climate change-related flooding in future is at the upper end of estimates – and is contested. The methodologies and assumptions underpinning some of the upper end estimates have been critiqued by scholars, as they often do not adequately account for adaptation. – Jane McAdam

Review

In general, I and others in the migration field would strongly agree with the author’s sound critique of Singer’s assertion.

Human mobility in the context of climate change is complex. Limits to a more nuanced understanding of this issue may be due to a lack of agreement on the legal definitions and the methodological choices made to project numbers of environmental migrants, as well as - importantly - an understatement of the agency and adaptive capacities of people.

Communities in coastal and low-lying areas that may be affected by sea-level rise in the future are affected today by recurrent natural hazards, coastal erosion, land subsidence, and saltwater contamination of arable land.

Empirical studies, including from the United Nations University, have explored how migration contributes to livelihoods and household adaptation strategies.

Experts tend to agree that the types of movements that might fall under that moniker “climate migrant” are varied and complex. Robust estimates by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre fall short of accounting for people living in prolonged displacement, displaced across borders (generally agreed to be a minority), or migrating away from their homes due to the long-term effects of climate change (erratic weather, droughts, and the gradual loss of land). The last grouping may be the largest – and would be considered labour migration under current definitions.

The author’s section on weather-related displacement rightly adds an important dimension to a focus on sea-level rise, which is by no means the only cause of movement. An additional important point: climate change experts have largely been reluctant to attribute any individual weather event to climate change, thus making it difficult to attribute displacement due to climate- or weather-related disasters to climate change. – Julia Blocher

Have you ever seen a “fact” worth checking? The Conversation’s FactCheck asks academic experts to test claims and see how true they are. We then ask a second academic to review an anonymous copy of the article. You can request a check at checkit@theconversation.edu.au. Please include the statement you would like us to check, the date it was made, and a link if possible.

Jane McAdam receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Research Council of Norway.

Julia Blocher has previously received funding through the project “High-End cLimate Impacts and eXtremes” (HELIX - http://helixclimate.eu/home), funded by the EU Seventh Framework Programme for research (FP7). She is an associate member of the Hugo Observatory at the University of Liege, an interdisciplinary research group exploring migration phenomena related to environmental factors and climate change. The Hugo Observatory is directed by Dr. François Gemenne, who is referred to by the other author in this article.

Public funding is vital for programs like CSIRO's research vessel RV Investigator, which is too expensive for universities to run. CSIRO, CC BY

The new instruction from Science Minister Greg Hunt to restore climate science as a “core activity” at Australia’s peak science body, the CSIRO, is a ray of hope for public good science.

Yesterday, Hunt told Fairfax Media he had issued a directive to CSIRO executives to add 15 jobs and A$37 million over ten years to CSIRO’s climate science research program.

The move follows months of uncertainty over CSIRO’s climate research capability, after chief executive Larry Marshall announced in February that 350 jobs would be lost from CSIRO, including cuts to the oceans and atmosphere division.

After widespread condemnation, losses to climate science capacity have reportedly been significantly reduced, although it is still unclear exactly how many and where the losses will be felt.

So what does the new development mean for CSIRO and Australia’s climate science?

The role of CSIRO

Reinstating 15 jobs is certainly a step in the right direction, even if they don’t make up for the previous cuts. But perhaps even more significant is the statement of intent – that the government wants climate science, and wants it to be done by CSIRO.

This is important because these government-funded agencies are well placed to carry out sustained observations and the accompanying development of climate models. Here in the university sector we focus mostly on “blue sky”, discovery-based research and training the next generation of researchers and PhDs. These are very important roles, but we can’t run marine research vessels or decades-long observation programs, because university research generally relies on three-year grant cycles.

The minister’s announcement is a very important cultural acknowledgement from the government that it needs to ensure that its publicly funded agencies underpin those important areas of climate monitoring and modelling.

Key investments

There are two key areas in which Australia needs to invest.

The first is sustained observations of the southern hemisphere’s oceans and atmosphere. As one of the few nations in the region with the capacity to monitor this vast area, Australia arguably has an obligation to make these measurements.

The second is developing next-generation climate models for Australia and the world. Northern hemisphere modelling groups, even though they do global modelling, have pressures from their own governments to focus on high-quality simulations of their own regions. Without Australia doing the same, there’s not the same pressure to have superbly accurate forecasts for this part of the world.

These two areas need to be secured via an appropriate scale of investment in climate science. Where this new money should go depends on exactly where the cuts have been made and what needs to be restored.

Government steps up

For some time now, CSIRO’s executive has been making moves away from public good research and towards an agenda of “innovation”.

While investment in public good climate research might not make you money this year or next, it can save vast amounts of money by, for example, avoiding poor investment in infrastructure. It is vital science that is needed to secure a resilient economy, a resilient environment and social well-being for all Australians.

This type of research is often undersold. Unfortunately, the culture in CSIRO over the past year seems to have been to sacrifice some of that public good science and focus on more lucrative research. This is important and beneficial science as well, but you can’t drop the public good.

Hunt’s new comments are important because they show the government is taking renewed responsibility for how CSIRO invests in research that helps the public.

This isn’t just about climate science; it’s about any area of public-good research that delivers what the community needs for societal well-being.

Restoring reputations

This is an important step towards restoring Australia’s international reputation in climate science. The science is always judged by the excellence of the work being done and papers published, which will take a while to materialise, but this announcement will be applauded around the world.

The cuts were condemned by thousands of international researchers as well as the World Climate Research Program of the World Meteorological Society and the director of a NASA-led atmospheric monitoring network.

CSIRO’s international reputation in climate science has been going down the gurgler ever since Royal Society Fellow Trevor McDougall, one of the most influential oceanographers Australia has produced, was cut in 2012 to worldwide condemnation. The recent cuts went further.

We often criticise ministers for what they do wrong, but the latest announcement is a real cause for hope. Until now the government had taken a hands-off approach, arguing that CSIRO is an independent statutory body that shouldn’t be interfered with.

That’s now been thrown out. This is public money, and the government is saying we need to get public-good value from it.

Matthew England receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Gas exports are driving massive growth in Australia's gas demand. Ken Hodge/Flickr, CC BY

Concern about higher and more volatile gas prices in southern and eastern Australia is spreading. Recent gas price spikes in South Australia have impacted on electricity prices and raised concerns about future prices for industry and households.

Average gas prices for large industrial consumers rose by 60% between 2010 and 2015, while household prices climbed by 20%. But prices vary a lot from state to state.

In industry, most gas is used for process heat, while in homes, space and water heating are the big gas consumers.

Gas also provides around 22% of Australian electricity, and around 45% in South Australia. The dramatic increase in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports from Queensland has provoked fears of much bigger future price hikes. It has also made it difficult for major industrial users to negotiate reasonably priced new contracts.

Many are proposing the obvious, but wrong, solution: develop more gas production resources. But this path fails for several reasons.

We don’t need more gas

First, as global citizens, we must recognise that most of our existing economic fossil fuel resources must stay in the ground. Developing more gas supply will just make it harder for Australia to transition to low-carbon energy over the next few decades.

Second, the problem is not about gas supply. It is about the allocation of gas and management of demand for gas and electricity. The recently opened Queensland LNG export plants are tripling eastern Australian gas demand.

What industry could cope with that scale of change without a few hiccups?

Eastern Australia has plenty of gas. The problem is that most of it is being exported at prices lower than some Australians are paying. And the price volatility resulting from the present shambles is making life difficult for some Australian industries.

gas consumption AEMO

Third, this approach would involve falling into the trap set by the gas industry, to force governments to override community opposition to coal seam gas projects. This would be socially divisive and is unnecessary.

We also need to protect our gas industry from its own shortsighted and narrow world view. Gas companies are already facing financial challenges.

Winds of change

Our responses to the problems with gas need to be carefully considered, to recognise a reality that has evolved over many years and to factor in the global context.

Consider a few facts facing the gas industry in Australia.

Australian gas users are, on the whole, very inefficient in the way they use gas. Sustained low prices have meant we still have inefficient 50-year-old boilers, outdated process technologies and wasteful management of gas use. Gas hot water services still have pilot lights (which waste energy) and poor insulation. One study has suggested that east coast gas demand could decline if we focused on efficient gas use.

Gas demand peaks in cold weather, due to the combination of gas and electric heating, which adds to higher gas use in industry and households. This drives higher prices in winter.

Improving energy efficiency, particularly high-efficiency electric technologies, combined with renewable energy and storage, means it is increasingly attractive for households and some businesses to disconnect from gas, or at least shift significant gas demand.

The electricity industry has also discouraged gas-fired cogeneration plants (plants that produce electricity and heat for industrial processes) by undercutting prices and using its market power to make it difficult to connect and sell electricity into the grid.

This is despite cogeneration being more than 25% more efficient than our most efficient large gas-fired power generators, as it produces process heat as well as electricity instead of letting heat escape into the atmosphere. It is more than twice as efficient as many of our gas turbine power stations and coal power stations.

In the recent South Australian electricity and gas crisis, the state’s most efficient gas power station was not even used until the government intervened, because it was relatively too expensive under the current market structure.

Finally, LNG export plants have locked themselves into long-term gas export contracts linked to the price of oil. The decline in oil prices has slashed their returns, and their share prices have fallen heavily.

They have created a serious problem for themselves and the Australian economy by failing to predict global oil price trends.

So what should we do?

In the short term, the government could help our gas industry to free up some of the gas now being exported.

There is a global glut of gas, so it should be possible to buy back some gas from the buyers of our LNG. Since this would not need to go through the LNG plants and shipping, it could be made available at a significantly cheaper price than its export price.

I don’t really think this is necessary if we are smart, but it provides a way of stabilising gas prices for local industry.

It is interesting to note that the government strongly rejected suggestions that some of our gas be “quarantined” for local use when concerns were emerging.

The core strategy will be multi-pronged.

First, an aggressive gas-efficiency and fuel-switching strategy must be implemented as quickly as possible. Some gas retailers are already moving, as they have realised they would be better off with efficient customers that still use some gas, instead of losing those customers if they shut down.

State energy efficiency schemes, such as the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target and NSW Energy Savings Scheme, have recently been broadened to include gas, as well as small to medium businesses, so they could be expanded.

Storage of gas, electricity and heat can smooth demand to reduce price volatility. Pumped hydro and mini-hydro systems in water supply pipes between large dams and local storages can generate electricity at times of high demand, rather than relying on gas-fired power stations.

Electricity market reform could reduce electricity demand and gas use by encouraging gas cogeneration (as well as renewable energy). This is because cogeneration is a very efficient way to use gas.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has recently published a major report on options for renewable energy to replace gas in industry. This could also be implemented.

Energy policymakers have made it clear they consider the gas market to be in serious failure mode. Rapid action could break the market power of old players.

It is really time that the gas industry developed and published a roadmap showing how it can be part of a zero-emission Australian economy.

The Council of Australian Governments Energy Council meets on August 19. Let’s hope it considers effective options, instead of band-aid solutions that will make the wounds fester.

Alan Pears has worked for government, business, industry associations public interest groups and at universities on energy efficiency, climate response and sustainability issues since the late 1970s. He is now an honorary Senior Industry Fellow at RMIT University and a consultant, as well as an adviser to a range of industry associations and public interest groups. His investments in managed funds include firms that benefit from growth in clean energy.

Australia is lagging far behind other rich countries in dealing with the growing mountain of “e-waste” from discarded electrical and electronic products.

My research, carried out with my student Ashleigh Morris, shows that in comparison with leading nations like Japan and Switzerland, Australia’s management of e-waste is ineffective and poorly implemented. This means that precious metals are not being recycled and hazardous materials are going into landfill instead of being properly dealt with.

E-waste is growing in Australia. Fewer than 1% of televisions and around 10% of computers and laptops are recycled, while the consumer-driven culture and planned obsolescence of many electronic products have resulted in millions of tonnes of e-waste entering the waste stream.

Computers, televisions, smartphones, washing machines, air-conditioners, freezers, hairdryers, electric toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners – the list is huge.

Lots of e-waste contains valuable (and finite) metals such as gold, indium and palladium, as well as hazardous ones like lead, arsenic and mercury. Sending it to landfill is not just a threat to the environment – it’s also a significant waste of valuable resources.

Despite this, many Australians still throw their e-waste into their general waste wheelie bin. Their local council then takes the bin’s contents to landfill.

Those who do make an effort to recycle their e-waste face the challenge of not knowing which products can be recycled and where. The services on offer vary greatly between different local governments, and not everyone is within reach of a drop-off point.

Contrast that with Switzerland, which recycles 16 times more e-waste per person than Australia, recouping 75% of recoverable material. Recycling and recovery targets have been subject to significant debate in Australia, yet the Swiss system doesn’t have targets.

Recycling targets are pointless without measures to ensure that e-waste is properly handled and audited. Both Switzerland and Japan (another nation that performs impressively on e-waste) have multiple levels of independent controls to ensure recycling companies maintain high environmental and quality standards, and to check for theft or “free-riding” – companies that refuse to comply with recycling regulations.

If we want Australian households and businesses to take e-waste seriously, we first have to put some serious systems in place to handle the problem.

Fixing the problem

My research has identified five key issues faced by the Australian system:

• recycling laws don’t cover the full scope of e-waste

• poor services and public engagement

• outdated recycling and recovery targets

• weak auditing and compliance measures

• neglect of key stakeholders such as local governments.

Local governments are crucial here: they manage the most e-waste and have the closest and most influential relationship with the public when it comes to recycling. But they are neglected in the system, receiving no direct funding for the collection, recycling, and recovery of e-waste.

Meanwhile, there is no responsibility on consumers to recycle their e-waste. This reinforces the “out of sight, out of mind” attitude that many Australians have to their rubbish.

Another key problem is that recycling legislation does not even mention many types of e-waste. Televisions and computers have a dedicated national recycling collection scheme, but millions of other items simply end up in landfill or are shipped illegally to developing countries.

Hazardous materials are some of the most attractive items to ship illegally, because they tend to have the highest recycling costs. This problem threatens to undermine Australia’s obligations under the Basel Convention, which outlaws the unauthorised international shipping of hazardous waste.

If Australia is to be effective in managing e-waste, it needs to expand its National Waste Policy to include the recovery and recycling of a much wider range of electrical products. It needs better compliance and auditing. Key players such as local governments must be given the power to manage e-waste much more responsibly.

That would be a good start. Of course, to get right to the heart of the issue, Australia ultimately needs to move away from the linear “take, make, dispose” economic model, and embrace the circular economy.

As you finish reading this article on your phone, tablet or laptop, have a look at it and ask yourself where it will be in a few years' time. Let’s hope it’s not in your local landfill.

This article was co-written by Ashleigh Morris, an honours student in environmental management at UNSW Australia.

Graciela Metternicht receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the NSW Environmental Trust

Since the 1960s, environmentalism in Australia has largely focused on defending "wilderness". yophotography/flickr, CC BY-SA

This is part of our Reimagining New South Wales (NSW) series. For this series, vice-chancellors in NSW asked a select group of early and mid-career researchers to envisage new ways to tackle old problems and identify emerging opportunities across the state.

NSW finds itself contemplating life after the mining boom.

It’s a moment of significant challenge but also an opportunity to reflect on the environmental impact of the industry at the heart of Australia’s recent economic growth – and how we can change our relationship with the land for the better.

We envisage a NSW where necessary industrial innovation is coordinated in ways that are environmentally sustainable and socially just. Critical here will be the state’s capacity to drive knowledge-led and low-carbon innovation.

But we also need to rethink the way humans relate to the environment.

The legacies of past mining enterprises and the impacts of mining waste will likely be felt for many years to come. The NSW landscape is now pockmarked by the environmental traces of the mining boom. Its social and economic effects in local communities live on – and that’s before we even get to the broader global impacts of the carbon emission from coal mines.

What values might guide our future relationship with the NSW environment?

Beyond ‘wilderness’

Since the 1960s, environmentalism in Australia has largely focused on defending “wilderness”. Conceptualising nature as a pristine place devoid of humans has underpinned the establishment of many protected areas in NSW and around the world.

While this worldview is being challenged in academia, the notion that we’ve done our bit to protect the environment and biodiversity by declaring a protected area persists in the political realm. And too often areas are declared protected without recognition of, or agreement by, the Aboriginal custodians of the land.

However, protected areas in themselves are not stemming the destruction of biodiversity, and cutting humans out of the picture altogether is not realistic nor helpful.

It is also important to remember that the majority of protected areas are marginal or “leftover areas” that were simply too hard to farm, mine or log. So congratulating ourselves on conserving one chunk of land, while intensively farming or developing another piece of land in environmentally unsustainable ways is not only unhelpful – it’s hypocritical.

A fresh approach

Instead of clinging to an old-fashioned view of “wilderness”, we should recognise that areas used intensively by humans can support significant biodiversity. We can also improve the design of these places to allow humans to better connect with their environment.

Recent work is re-valuating cities as sites of significant biodiversity. For example, studies on bee biodiversity suggest that cities may support more pollinators than was once thought.

And there is growing interest in the possibilities of urban agriculture as a source of local food production. The greening of cities brings with it huge possibilities: increased connection with nature, mental and physical health benefits and opportunities for engagement with food production.

At the same time, a move toward more sustainable agricultural practices can produce impressive yields while providing habitat for plants and animals. Production and biodiversity need to be treated in tandem in policy-making and practice, rather than presented as a binary choice.

Urban planning agencies could help by boosting the focus on creating green spaces that allow for humans to connect with nature in urban and rural environments – prioritising parks, green spaces and food production grounds close to homes and other buildings.

We could also consider a fresh approach to environmental impact assessments. Traditionally, these are written by consultants funded by developers; in the future, we could consider funding and even peer reviewing such assessments independently.

Inclusive and creative participation

We will need fresh ways to boost public participation in planning for the way humans relate to their environment.

After Hurricane Sandy hit the US in 2012, US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Rebuild By Design coalition in Northeast United States forged a collaboration between designers, researchers, community members, and government officials.

Through a series of design competitions, participants helped rebuild disaster-struck areas in ways that best suited their needs and relationships with local environments.

Sydney is collaborating with other global cities in building urban resilience, but more could be done to foster social inclusion and community participation – particularly Indigenous participation – in shaping our environments. We need to include people in the early design stages of urban planning, rather than just asking for feedback on preconceived proposals.

It won’t always be easy, but we envisage a future NSW where community participation is regarded as a vital asset rather than a problem to be overcome.

Further reading:

Reimagining NSW: how the care economy could help unclog our cities

Reimagining NSW: four ways to boost community well-being and why it matters

Reimagining NSW: how good governance strengthens democracy

Pascal Scherrer chairs the Northern Rivers Region National Parks Advisory Committee and is a member of IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas.

Emily O'Gorman receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She works for Macquarie University.

Hannah Power has received funding from the NSW State Government under the NSW State Emergency Management Program Scheme.

Matthew Kearnes receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Sandie Suchet-Pearson receives funding from the ARC.

Tanya Latty receives funding the Branco Weiss Society in Science fellowship, the Australian Research Council, Commonwealth of Australia and the City of Sydney. She participates in the Australian Pollinator Think Tank.

How can we get Australian electricity heading down the right road? CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

The past three weeks have seen considerable discussion of Australia’s wholesale electricity market, driven largely by severe price spikes in South Australia. Hugh Saddler, writing last week on The Conversation, and the Climate Council, in a report released yesterday, have each done a good job of busting the myth that this is all because of SA’s relatively large share of wind energy.

After outlining the growing lack of competitiveness in the SA electricity sector, Saddler called for “a fundamental rethink" of the National Electricity Market (NEM). What would this involve?

Wholesale prices

Wholesale electricity prices are determined for each half hour, and in the NEM are capped at A$14,000 per megawatt hour. Prices very rarely hit these stratospheric levels and, in any event, the wholesale price spikes do not directly or immediately filter down to households and other small consumers. However, industrial customers are beginning to complain about the strain.

One factor that seems largely to have escaped comment is that temporary high prices are a deliberate design feature of our electricity market. Occasional price spikes are precisely how the market attracts new investment, because in theory high prices represent tightening supply and therefore signal a gap in the market for new generators.

Certainly, this isn’t the only time that prices have spiked. In response to high prices in South Australia in 2008 (before most of the state’s wind farms were built), industrial consumers tried unsuccessfully to introduce rules preventing certain generators putting high price bids into the market. More recently, Queensland saw high prices in the summer of 2014-15, as did Tasmania earlier this year.

A market in transition

But while price spikes are neither unprecedented nor unexpected, there are nevertheless changes afoot in the electricity sector. The falling cost of renewable energy, and policies such as the federal Renewable Energy Target (and similar state and territory schemes), are encouraging new entrants into the market.

With one of the most emissions-intensive electricity sectors in the world and an ageing fleet of coal-fired power stations, traditional generators are spending increasing amounts on maintenance, upgrades and closures.

Wind and large-scale solar, meanwhile, are now the cheapest new-build generation technologies. This promises to turn the energy market on its head.

UNSW research on the implications of moving to 100% renewables has shown that to do so we will eventually need to ditch the idea of “baseload generation” (as delivered by 20th-century thermal power stations) in favour of “peaking generation” that is more responsive to changes in supply.

This might mean using a mixture of renewables such as solar and wind, backed up by gas-fired power stations that can be rapidly switched on and off, as well as “dispatchable” energy solutions such as storage, bioenergy and concentrating solar thermal.

As seen in the chart below, sourced from the UNSW report, with enough rapid-response options built into the system, traditional baseload generators would not be needed at all.

Obviously, moving seamlessly to this new approach will require changes to the way the market is run. One option might be to change the pricing window from 30 minutes to five minutes, which could entice a wider range of participants into the market.

Other fundamental changes also need to be made. Three deserve particular consideration:

• incentivising dispatchable energy solutions to enter the market;

• increasing access to markets for decentralised energy; and

• increasing the alignment between energy and environmental considerations.

Dispatchable energy

Besides “traditional” renewables such as wind and solar farms, renewable energy schemes could specifically tender for “dispatchable” solutions such as demand management, concentrated solar thermal, sustainable bioenergy or storage. The SA government last week announced plans to do just this, by targeting these solutions for 25% of the government’s energy use.

If this is to happen more broadly, it should be done in alignment with the outcomes of the reviews that the Australian Energy Market Commission and the Australian Market Operator are undertaking on the security of the market.

Decentralised energy

One of the most exciting areas of investment in the NEM over the past decade has been the hundreds of thousands of homes installing their own solar systems. Technologies such as batteries, smart homes and improved load management mean that individual consumers are increasingly willing and able to get involved with the energy market, rather than just being consumers.

Yet the link to wholesale electricity markets is currently just as tenuous for a small generator as it is for a small consumer. Any market reform must therefore ensure that groupings of such small-scale producers can supply the market’s needs in a meaningful way.

For inspiration we can look to New York state, which is designing an energy market geared towards decentralised options such as solar panels. To encourage decentralised systems, New York is embarking on the Reforming Energy Vision plan to lower the financial and environmental costs of power and make the market more resilient.

Environment and energy

Energy and environment policies have been too separate for too long, which is why the appointment of a single federal environment and energy minister is a welcome move.

However, the National Electricity Objective, which forms the basis of energy policy decisions, does not include an environmental component. It emphasises “price, quality, safety, reliability and security”, but not emissions. This means that regulators cannot consider the climate or environmental implications of their decisions.

Unless the objective is amended, we are likely to see perverse outcomes of energy decisions. One previous example was the four-year delay in introducing the Demand Management Incentive Scheme, despite the fact that it is likely to save money and cut carbon emissions.

With Australia’s electricity at a technological crossroads, it is important that we make sure we are going in the right direction.

Alex Fattal is affiliated with the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures which undertakes paid sustainability research for a wide range of government, NGO, community and corporate clients.

The UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures undertakes paid sustainability research for a wide range of government, NGO, community and corporate clients. Nicky Ison is also a Founding Director of the Community Power Agency, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to growing the community energy sector in Australia.

The Ord River was targeted for agricultural expansion in the 20th century. isthatdaves/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

In May, the Northern Territory government granted a major water licence for a cattle station near Pine Creek, west of Kakadu National Park, to use almost 14 million litres of water a year to irrigate crops.

In response, the Northern Land Council, which represents Aboriginal landholders, called for a moratorium on all further water allocations in the Territory, claiming the government had not fully consulted the community about the licence.

As we document in a new paper, this kind of debate has been happening ever since the colonisation of northern Australia, often on the premise that the north’s water resources are “wasted” without more economic development and subsequent increases in settler populations.

Since the early 20th century, huge amounts of public money have been invested in large-scale water infrastructure projects in northern Australia, such as the Ord River Scheme.

But the viability of this program has been widely critiqued on economic grounds since the mid-1950s. Prominent agricultural economist Bruce Davidson coined the phrase “the Northern Myth” to describe the widely held, but misplaced, belief in the north’s capacity to accommodate vastly expanded agriculture and irrigation because of its abundant water and land.

These developments also largely occurred without consulting Aboriginal people. Water was allocated to other users without taking account of traditional owners' longstanding cultural and economic practices with regard to land and water, stretching back thousands of years.

A colonial history of exclusion

After Britain acquired sovereignty of Australia, water use was regulated according to English riparian rights. Under this law, legal rights to use water, for example for farming, were given to whoever owned the land where rivers flowed. The link between water use and landholding remained in place, in one form or another, until the late 20th century.

This meant that Indigenous Australians, whose traditional ownership of land (native title) was only recognised by the Australian High Court in 1992, were largely denied legal rights to water.

Around the same time that native title was recognised, reforms (known as the National Water Initiative) were being pursued to increase the environmental sustainability of the Murray Darling Basin.

Unfortunately, however, these reforms largely failed to make substantive change in Indigenous water rights or to engage Indigenous people effectively. Today, Indigenous Australians have land rights and/or native title rights and interests over some 30% of the Australian continent, but own only 0.01% of water entitlements.

Problems continuing

In June last year the Commonwealth government released the latest version of its plans, the White Paper on Developing Northern Australia, which calls for yet more significant expansion of irrigation. Strong concerns have been expressed about the plan’s failure to incorporate environmental water reserves.

Aboriginal rights and interests still do not seem to be adequately catered for. In a speech at the Garma Festival, Northern Land Council chief executive Joe Morrison claimed Aboriginal people had again been largely absent from the process, saying:

Aboriginal people have an essential stake in the future of northern Australia … Aboriginal people must be front and centre in planning processes for the north. This is a fundamental gap in the national discourse about northern development … I’m not one to despair, but I do wonder when the day will come that we have a seat at the planning table.

Aboriginal people are a significant demographic group in northern Australia, with extensive landholdings. In the Northern Territory, for example, Aboriginal people represent more than 25% of the population and own more than 50% of the land. Any major reform proposal that does not adequately include Aboriginal people risks its own legitimacy.

To give Aboriginal people fair representation in northern water development, they must be accorded a fair share of the water. At the turn of the century, the Northern Territory government developed promising proposals to include “strategic indigenous reserves” in northern water resource plans. However, the policy was discontinued after a change of government in 2013.

Experience recovering environmental water in the Murray-Darling Basin has taught us that it is much easier to set aside a share of water while resources are still plentiful than embark on a process of buyback.

By and large, Aboriginal people recognise the case for economic development, not least because of the employment opportunities it creates for their own communities. But they also know the importance of protecting country, particularly sacred sites.

This is not to say that Indigenous water rights must be purely for cultural purposes. On the contrary, Indigenous people deserve commercial water rights too, especially given that they have been sidelined from agricultural expansion for so long.

Righting that historical wrong will mean giving Aboriginal people the same water rights that have been given to non-Indigenous users ever since colonisation.

Liz Macpherson has received funding from the University of Melbourne (including the Human Rights Scholarship) and International Bar Association Section on Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law. All views expressed in this article, alongside those of her coauthors, are her own.

Lee Godden was the Australian Law Reform Commissioner in charge of the Inquiry into the Native Title Act 1993 between 2013 and 2015. She was also recently a Chief Investigator on the Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements (ATNS) Project, which was partnered by the Australian Research Council, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Australian National University, Griffith University and the University of Melbourne. It received funding from the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Rio Tinto, Santos and Woodside.

Lily O'Neill was previously a PhD student with the Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements (ATNS) Project. The ATNS Project is a project partnered by the Australian Research Council, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Australian National University, Griffith University and the University of Melbourne. It receives funding from the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Rio Tinto, Santos and Woodside.

Erin O'Donnell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Lichen is made up of two types of fungus and an algae, that's one more species than previously thought. wikimedia

There is big news in the world of lichens. These slow growing organisms have long been known to be a collaboration between a fungus and a photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria. A recent publication in Science may have changed all that.

Researchers have discovered another fungus living in the tissues of lichens. Unlike the dominant fungal type, also known as Ascomycetes, the new fungus is a Basidiomycete that exists as single cells, more closely related to yeast. A survey has found these new fungal cells in 52 genera of lichens, raising the prospect of a previously undetected third partner in the ancient symbiosis.

Interestingly, despite many attempts, it has never been possible to synthesise lichen in the laboratory by combining the two known partners, and now we might know why. Lichenologists have always recognised a mycobiont (fungal partner) and a photobiont (the photosynthetic organism that makes food) and now we may have to find a word for the new fungal component.

Toby Spribille of the University of Graz in Austria and his colleagues were trying to understand why two species of lichen that were made up of the same species of mycobiont and photobiont were differently coloured and contained varying levels of a toxin known as vulpinic acid.

Using an approach that examined the messenger RNAs produced by the organism, they tried to find the genes that produced the toxin, but neither the mycobiont or the photobiont had genes that matched the transcript. By broadening their search to include other types of fungi, they found genes belonging to a rare fungus called a Cystobasidiomycete.

Unable to see the cells responsible for this unusual finding, they used fluorescent in situ hybridisation (FISH) to light up cells containing genes for the algae, the ascomycete and the cystobasidiomycete. By linking different colours to each organism, they produced videos showing the distribution of each cell type. The new fungus existed as single cells inside the cortex, where it may play a structural role as well as providing chemical defence.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this discovery. Spribille was quoted in the New York Times as saying that lichens are as diverse as vertebrates. And yet we did not know until now that the symbiosis that allows lichens to exist has more than two partners.

The authors have described a new order of fungi called the Cyphobasidiales. It is not everyday that scientists are able to add new taxa at such a high level. It is like discovering the Primates. By creating a phylogenomic tree and applying a molecular clock, they found that this group has been around for 200 million years, probably since the beginning of lichens.

The 52 genera that have been examined thus far are widespread (on six continents) but are still a small portion of lichens, so there may be more to discover. Interestingly, the continent that is not included is Australia. Perhaps we do not have enough lichenologists to provide samples to the international community. It is possible that some lichens do not contain this new order of fungi. What is not in doubt is that now scientists will be looking at lichens more closely.

Lichens grow very slowly. Individuals can be hundreds or even thousands of years old. Now it seems that our knowledge of this ancient symbiosis has also grown slowly, as it has taken 150 years to find the third partner.

Given the sophisticated techniques required to untangle this conundrum, I suppose it was not possible to know about the silent partner, the yeast in the mix, until now. But it certainly gives rise to some exciting science.

Australians are often taken aback to discover that we import about 75% of the seafood we consume. Yes, that’s right – in a nation girt by sea that vaunts its love of a shrimp on the barbie, three-quarters of our fish and shellfish comes from overseas.

Wander over to your local supermarket and look at the seafood on offer. Barramundi, the iconic Australian fish, is usually there but it is typically from Vietnam, having been farmed and frozen. The processed products – crumbed prawns or garlic prawns – are also usually from Asia, and bright yellow-dyed smoked cod is seemingly always from South Africa.

Then there are the truly “glocal” (local-global) items, such as crumbed products made using Australian fish that has been sent to Thailand for processing and then shipped back again. This type of practice is set to become more common, as the family-owned Australian seafood company Kailis Bros this year sold 90% of its seafood processing, wholesale and export business to a Chinese conglomerate.

Eating ‘glocal’?

As anyone who has a passing acquaintance with contemporary food politics knows, it’s all about eating local, seasonal, and sustainable produce. As previous writers on The Conversation have pointed out, food choices have become loaded with moralism, which can make choosing the “right” food somewhat daunting.

Our research – including Elspeth’s forthcoming book, Eating the Ocean, and Kate’s soon-to-be-submitted PhD thesis on sustainable tuna – shows these problems become even trickier when it comes to fish.

Beyond the obvious problem of trying to eat local when talking about food that comes from a vast ocean, there is the added problem of the way in which fishing has developed as a globalised industry.

Over the past 20 years the ownership of fishing boats in the Global North (including Australia) has shrunk to a fraction of what it was. This has been part of a necessary move to regulate international fishing practices and ensure all countries have access to a fair share.

But the quotas introduced in Iceland, Canada, and Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s have also had the effect of concentrating ownership of the fishing industry in relatively few hands. In South Australia, for example, the number of licensed bluefin tuna fishers went from several hundred to fewer than 30.

Meanwhile, the downturn in inshore fishing because of overfishing, and the need to cover the costs of increasingly sophisticated technology to track fish, has led to ever-larger boats that can work farther from shore.

Simply put, this means you can no longer go down to the dock and “look the fisherman in the eye” as the US writer Michael Pollan has urged us to do for land-based farming. Long fishing trips means that fish have to be caught in vast numbers, flash-frozen while still at sea, then landed and immediately transferred to huge logistical operations covering hundreds or thousands of kilometres.

There are other reasons why Australia, despite having the world’s third-largest Exclusive Economic Zone, consumes so much imported fish. Our seas evidently suffer from low productivity and scarce nutrients. But no matter: the government reassures us that high seafood imports are common in wealthy nations.

One answer might be to catch your own, but be careful where you try, especially in urban areas. UNSW Australia’s Emma Johnston has described how Sydney’s stormwater overflows, combined with a history of industrial dumping, have rendered its harbour a toxic slurry – so it’s better not to eat any fish caught under the bridge.

Fish going in all directions

The flow of fish goes both ways, or rather multiple ways. Australia exports high-value fish and seafood around the world. Our lobsters and abalone are loved in China, while nearly all of South Australia’s bluefin tuna goes to Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market.

The tuna barons in Port Lincoln, SA, a town that used to boast Australia’s highest number of millionaires per capita, have become experts in international currency. Their fish, fattened in pens and inspected by visiting connoisseur Japanese investors, are priced in yen – and the farmers listen carefully to the visitors' advice, knowing that a good product is worth even more yen.

Back in the supermarket, there’s evidence that consumers are willing to spend time thinking about tuna too – at least, if Kate’s collection of dozens of eco-labelled tuna cans is any guide. Unlike the Japanese market, where the quality of the flesh is paramount, the supermarket labels suggest ecological sustainability is the key consideration. But sustainability goes deeper than just the fish itself; we rarely think about how sustainable the can is, nor about how the metal was mined, nor about the transport costs for the fish or packaging.

Does it matter that we eat so much of other nations' fish, while sending our most prized delicacies to foreign buyers? The answers vary: some people worry about reports of illegal fishing practices and pollution in Southeast Asia, where some fish are still caught using cyanide.

Equally chilling are the reports of “sea-slaves” – indentured labourers from Cambodia and Myanmar who are forced to work in the Thai shrimp trade.

On the other hand, would we want to stop our fishers, who by and large work in a highly regulated, sustainable enterprise, from getting top dollar for their produce? It is a tough call, and an even tougher set of complex relations.

What’s certain is that guilt-tripping consumers into buying local doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the ethics of eating the ocean.

Prof Elspeth Probyn receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Kate Johnston does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

A living coucal from South Africa, whose huge prehistoric relatives lived on the Nullarbor. Pascal Bernadin, CC BY-NC-ND

Western Australia’s Nullarbor Plain may be a vast treeless expanse today, but hundreds of thousands of years ago it was home to an array of weird and wonderful species, including two newly discovered extinct “giant cuckoos”.

The two species belonged to a group of birds called coucals, which are part of the cuckoo family. The larger of the extinct species would have stood more than half a metre tall and, judging by its bones, probably couldn’t fly.

The discovery, which we made during a 2014 dig at the Thylacoleo Caves, is not the first bizarre species found beneath the Nullarbor. Over the past decade, excavations of these caves have revealed thousands of exceptionally well-preserved fossils. Some are the remains of living species, others are of extinct species already known to science, while others have been totally new discoveries.

One surprise was finding two new species of tree-kangaroo. It takes a leap of imagination to envision today’s flat, treeless Nullarbor Plain covered in trees with large marsupials clambering about overhead. Clearly the region’s climate and conditions have undergone huge shifts – a fact underlined by the latest fossil finds.

The Nullarbor Plain today: not a tree or giant cuckoo in sight. Elen Shute Fossils found, species lost

Of the two new bird species we discovered, the smaller, Centropus bairdi, was similar in size to the largest living coucals from Melanesia, which weigh 700g or more. However, its exceptionally weak wing muscles imply that Centropus bairdi was flightless. We excavated its bones from cave sediments that are more than than 780,000 years old.

The larger species, Centropus maximus, is the largest cuckoo known anywhere in the world. It had long, powerful legs, and probably weighed well over 1kg, perhaps even topping 2kg.

Cavers first found one femur shallowly buried in a rock pile. Returning for more bones the following day, they uncovered two coucal skeletons side by side, where they presumably had lain undisturbed since the birds fell into the cave together hundreds of thousands of years before.

Thunder thighs: The femur of a modern Pheasant Coucal (left) looks puny next to the bones of the extinct Nullarbor species Centropus bairdi (middle) and Centropus maximus (right). Elen Shute

The two new species join another known extinct coucal, Centropus colossus, which was discovered in a South Australian cave 30 years ago, and was just a little smaller than Centropus maximus.

In their day, these two largest coucals would have been among Australia’s heaviest land-hunting birds. Today, the only living bird predators that can match them are the Wedge-tailed Eagle, Black-breasted Buzzard, White-bellied Sea-eagle and Powerful Owl.

All three coucals lived during the Pleistocene epoch, 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago. This was a time of ecological upheaval around the world. Successive ice ages caused sea levels to rise and fall, and temperatures and rainfall to fluctuate.

Many Pleistocene animals worldwide, particularly the large ones, went extinct as a result of climatic fluctuations, human impacts, or a combination of both.

We don’t know when these coucals went extinct, or what killed them, but this is one group where we can probably discount human hunting, as today’s coucals are reported to taste and smell appalling. It seems more likely that they died out when their habitat changed.

Birds of paradox

Living coucals are predatory, primarily ground-dwelling, and are known for their weak and graceless flight. They eat large invertebrates and small vertebrates, especially frogs. Perhaps the extinct ones tucked into the frogs that we now know lived on the Nullarbor too.

Coucals aren’t what we think of as typical cuckoos, which are best known for sneaking their eggs into the nests of other birds. Coucals (and many other members of the cuckoo family) build nests and raise their own young.

Even more unusually, female coucals are larger than males, and males do most or all of the work to raise the brood, a trait they share with only 5% of the world’s bird species.

The 26 living species of coucal span Africa, Madagascar, Asia, New Guinea, and northern Australia. For birds that have trouble staying airborne, they have managed to get around remarkably well.

Australia’s only living species, the Pheasant Coucal, is found only in the continent’s north and east. Without the fossil discoveries, we would never have guessed that their relatives once lived thousands of kilometres further south.

The Pheasant Coucal, Australia’s only living coucal species. Geoff Whalan Rare as hen’s teeth

Few extinct birds are known from Australia, and only ten Pleistocene species have previously been described.

This is meagre compared to the 80 Pleistocene mammal species known to have been lost from Australia. This could mean one of two things: either birds cruised through the Pleistocene largely unscathed, or we have underestimated their rates of extinction.

The best-known extinct Pleistocene bird from Australia is the “thunderbird”, Genyornis newtoni, which stood 2m tall and weighed more than 200kg. The other nine Pleistocene species include flamingos from Lake Eyre, large megapodes related to the malleefowl from eastern and southern Australia, logrunners and a pardalote from Victoria, dwarf emus from King Island and Kangaroo Island, and the previously discovered giant coucal from South Australia.

Given such modest numbers, the two new Nullarbor coucals increase the number of known Pleistocene bird extinctions in Australia by 20%. Their disappearance is another piece in a complex ecological puzzle that covers just one corner of a vast continent.

Time will tell if these birds were local oddities, or the tip of an extinction iceberg that affected birds Australia-wide and has so far slipped under the radar.

elen.shute@gmail.com received funding from BirdLife Australia for this project

gavin.prideaux@flinders.edu.au receives funding from the Australian Research Council

Trevor Worthy receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Catch them all - and maybe spare a thought for the trees. Matthew Corley/Shutterstock.com

Anyone who has been outdoors in a populated area in the past month will be aware of the massive success of Pokémon GO, which has rocketed to the top of the gaming charts.

People have been avidly collecting Pokémon creatures in various media formats for two decades, so it was a logical move to use smartphone technology to turn the franchise into a “mobile augmented reality” (MAR) gaming app.

It has proved to be an economic as well as a social phenomenon, sending the market value of its owner Nintendo soaring to US$39.9 billion. But the game was not actually developed by Nintendo; it was created by Google spin-off Niantic, which also built Pokémon GO’s popular MAR predecessor, Ingress.

Similar to Pokémon GO, Ingress is a reality-embedded sci-fi game in which players interact with real-world objects that are overlaid (using smartphone cameras) by a veneer of simulated characteristics.

In a new paper published in the journal Restoration Ecology, we argue that MAR games such as these can be a force for good in ecology and conservation, rather than being a cause for concern, as others have argued.

The key is not to lament or rail against the popularity of gaming or augmented reality, but rather to embrace what makes them a success. They tap into people’s sense of fun and competitiveness, and they get people into the great outdoors – and this is all stuff that can encourage people to embrace nature.

The problem

The growth of our modern civilisation, spurred on by technological innovations, has been underpinned by the exploitation of the natural environment. Today, a large fraction of the Earth, once swathed in wilderness, is now monopolised by humans. Populations of plants and animals have declined, leading to local losses and global extinctions, as a result of habitat destruction, harvesting, invasive species, and pollution.

Yet although the direct causes of wildlife loss are clear enough, what’s less obvious is why many people seemingly don’t care. The environmental writer George Monbiot has ascribed society’s ongoing destruction of the environment to the fact that not enough people value nature and wilderness any more.

This “eco-detachment” has been described as a symptom of our modernised, urbanised world, in which new technology both dominates peoples’ interests and simultaneously increases society’s ability to damage the environment.

But what if augmented reality – from MAR apps on smartphones to HoloLenses – could be harnessed in a positive and proactive way, to reconnect the wider public to nature and so unlock their inherent biophilia?

What if a smartphone game was created that focused not on features of the cityscape, but rather on “gamifying” nature, wildlife, and human interactions with the natural environment?

Such a game would lead its players to actively choose to experience nature. They would connect to it, and protect it (as an in-game reward), and thus understand its value.

Ingress enthusiasts. Hey, at least they’re outdoors, right? R4ph4ell-pl/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Getting more of society to connect with nature has long been an elusive dream of environmentalists. More than a decade ago, a group of leading conservation biologists famously found children were far more expert at recognising Pokémon characters than they were at identifying common wildlife groups. The problem isn’t with spotting “species” per se – it’s that they were mainly exposed to the electronic ones and not the real ones.

This issue of where people invest their attention is crucial. Ingress now has more than 7 million active players, and has been downloaded by 12 million people since its release in 2012. The fact that the game requires you to get out and about means it encourages players to locate, recognise, and identify with an array of cultural icons they might otherwise ignore.

Egress!

So here’s the challenge: to create a new version of Ingress (let’s call it “Egress”), that is educational and positive, as well as popular. It might also use augmented reality to visualise environmental changes, either good (restoration) or bad (damage), in people’s local landscapes. To be a hit, it would need to both capture an audience and to foster a community. And it could even generate data for citizen science projects.

There are lots of possibilities for how an app such as this could work. Perhaps it might involve using smartphones to photograph, locate, and automatically “tag” species within a landscape; or to identify rare plants or insects; or detect signs of animal activity (diggings, droppings, and so on). The crucial point is that although its focus would be on ecology and nature, it needs to also incorporate a fun gaming element – sort of like a high-tech version of those old birdwatching handbooks, but one that offers more kudos for spotting rarer species.

A recent editorial in Nature highlighted some of the potential uses of Pokémon GO, Ingress and others, suggesting that MAR games might even be used to discover and describe new species.

Who doesn’t want a new animal or plant to be named after them? Such citizen science activities would strengthen links between research, conservation, and the community.

What Ingress and Pokémon GO have shown is that it is possible to get millions of tech-savvy people out of their living rooms and basements and actively engaging with the wider world. While it’s impossible to guarantee that any project will go viral, this recent experience with MAR shows that people really can be persuaded, in large numbers, to get outside and explore.

That’s surely the first and most necessary step towards getting people to reconnect with, and care about, nature in the digital age.

Barry W. Brook receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Jessie C. Buettel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

If you live in southern Australia, you may have noticed it’s been a rather wet couple of months. What you might not realise is the role that the tropical Indian Ocean has played in helping to create this weather.

Since late May, the ocean has been in what we call a “negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) phase” – and it seems set to be one of the strongest such events in at least 15 years.

Compared to its Pacific cousins, El Niño and La Niña, the IOD is something of a mystery to many people. So what is it, and what does it mean for our climate, and does it explain why this winter has been such a wet one for many Australians?

What is the Indian Ocean Dipole?

The Indian Ocean Dipole is similar to the more famous El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the Pacific. That system seesaws between El Niño conditions – characterised by a “warm blob” of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific – and La Niña, where the warm patch is in the western Pacific.

Similarly, the IOD is defined by the relative distribution of warmer-than-usual water across the tropical Indian Ocean. The system can flip between positive, neutral and negative phases, depending on the presence and position of these “temperature anomalies”.

When the temperatures in the west (off Africa) and the east (off Indonesia and Australia) are roughly normal, we call this a neutral IOD phase.

Explaining the Indian Ocean Dipole

The IOD enters a negative phase (as it did two months ago) when waters in the eastern Indian Ocean become significantly warmer than normal, while waters off Africa are cooler. This happens largely because of prevailing wind patterns.

The Earth’s rotation causes trade winds to blow from east to west, which push warmer surface waters across the Pacific and into the relatively shallow waters north of Australia. This warm water (often the warmest open ocean water in the world) causes a drop in atmospheric pressure over the western Pacific and eastern Indian oceans. In turn, this low pressure induces prevailing winds to blow across the tropical Indian Ocean from west to east.

When these westerly winds strengthen, they push surface waters (which are warmer than deeper water) towards Australia, while at the same time cooler waters are drawn up to the surface off Africa.

The resulting pattern – a blob of warmer-than-normal water in the east and a cooler-than-normal patch in the west – is termed a negative IOD phase. As you can see from the map below for the week ending July 17, we’re in a negative phase now – cooler waters can be seen near the Horn of Africa, and warmer waters near Sumatra.

These conditions increase tropical moisture and cloudiness near Australia. This typically leads to increased rainfall across the southern half of the continent (see below). Conversely, eastern Africa gets less rainfall than normal, which can lead to intense droughts and, at times, quite serious humanitarian impacts.

A negative IOD affects Australia’s temperatures as well as its rainfall. Across the southern mainland, cooler-than-average days are more likely from June to November, although overnight temperatures are generally normal. The snow season typically finishes later and with deeper peak snow, although these impacts are being modulated by climate change.

Meanwhile, Australia’s tropical north tends to get warmer-than-usual days and warmer nights too.

When will it end?

IOD events typically develop during late autumn or early winter, and peak in spring. They then decay rapidly as the monsoon trough arrives in the Southern Hemisphere around the end of spring, bringing a change in wind patterns that rapidly breaks down the IOD pattern. This means that the IOD typically has little influence during the Australian summer.

Are El Niño, La Niña and the IOD linked?

While it’s not always the case, a negative IOD is more likely to form during a La Niña year, while a positive IOD is more likely to form during El Niño.

Indeed, we experienced a combined positive IOD/El Niño event in 2015, which goes a long way to explaining the particularly poor rainfall in many parts of Australia last spring. Typically when the two events occur together, their effects on rainfall are reinforced.

The current state of play

The IOD has been in a negative phase for the past two months, and is likely to stay like that until the end of spring. Recent observations suggest it’s the strongest negative event in at least the past 15 years. What’s more, as of mid-July 2016, about half of international models suggest that La Niña may form later in the year.

So why should we care? The negative phase of the IOD has already influenced recent rainfall – last month was Australia’s second-wettest June in 117 years of national records. This is good news for some of the areas in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia which were hit hard by the dry conditions associated with the 2015-16 El Niño.

It’s also likely that the negative IOD has contributed to the very warm conditions across northern Australia, which has seen several records set and even had an impact upon tropical crops such as mangoes, which require cool periods to set flower. And if La Niña does become established in the Pacific Ocean, we may have only seen the start of the wet weather.

Australia’s current climate outlook reflects the typical conditions expected during a negative IOD event. However, other factors are at play too, including the overall warming trend of Australia’s climate, the record warm Indian Ocean more generally, the tendency for our weather systems to be located more to the south, and even the occurrence of East Coast Lows which may be more likely this year due to a record warm Tasman Sea.

To stay up-to-date with the latest on the Indian Ocean Dipole, and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), please read our fortnightly ENSO Wrap-Up. We’ve also recently updated all of our Indian Ocean Dipole information, including a new list of historical IOD years, video and infographic.

Nothing to disclose.

Andrew B. Watkins, Catherine Ganter, David Jones, and Paul Gregory do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Forests and other land-based carbon stores held onto more carbon during colder historical climates. Miguel.v/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the Little Ice Age wasn’t caused by New World pioneers cutting a swathe through native American agriculture, as had been previously thought.

Instead, our new analysis of the climate record contained within Antarctic ice cores suggests that the fall in atmospheric CO₂ levels during the cold period from 1500 to 1750 was driven by increased net uptake of carbon by plants.

This in turn suggests that if plants reacted to falling temperatures by taking up more carbon, they are likely to react to the current rising CO₂ levels by releasing yet more of it into the atmosphere.

Historical atmospheres

Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were fairly stable from around 2000 years ago until the start of the Industrial Revolution, since when they have begun to climb dramatically. However, along the way were relatively small shifts, such as that seen during the Little Ice Age (LIA).

Carbon dioxide naturally cycles between the atmosphere, the land and the ocean. On land, it is removed from the atmosphere by plant photosynthesis and returned when plant material decomposes. Normally these processes balance out, but a change in the rate of one of these processes can shift atmospheric CO₂ levels to a new equilibrium.

If decomposition increases as it warms, this will slow or reverse the rebalancing uptake, leaving more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, warming the climate still further and so on, in a positive feedback.

The LIA corresponded with the start of European colonisation of the New World. European diseases devastated populations in the Americas, and one theory held that this led to a decrease in indigenous agriculture, which in turn let forests grow back and took up significant amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere. This had been suggested as the first geologically recognisable signature of human impact on the globe, and thus the start of the Anthropocene epoch.

But was this actually the case? Our study suggests not, because while we can be relatively certain the LIA change in CO₂ levels was due to differences in the behaviour of land plants, our results suggest that the change was a response to the changing climate, and not to human-driven changes in vegetation cover.

Looking for clues

How can we tell? We know that the process involved terrestrial plants, because the atmosphere during the LIA was even lower in CO₂ containing the isotope carbon-12, which is preferred by photosynthesising plants.

But how do we know if the changes were due to changes in vegetation cover, or to climate feedbacks. To answer that we looked at another gas, carbonyl sulfide (COS), which is also trapped in air bubbles along with the carbon dioxide. This molecule has almost the same structure as CO₂, except one of the oxygen atoms is replaced with sulfur.

This is close enough to trick the plants, which take it up during photosynthesis. But unlike CO₂, COS it is not released when plant material decomposes so an increase in photosynthesis leads to a decrease in atmospheric COS.

This means that the “early Anthropocene” hypothesis has a testable consequence: it should have led to an observable reduction in COS concentrations within the ice cores. However, when we looked at the ice core record we found that there was an increase. This suggests that photosynthesis actually decreased during the LIA, rather than increasing as we would expect if the difference was due to forest regrowth.

This means that the drop in atmospheric CO₂ during the LIA was more likely to have been a direct response to the dipping temperatures. The cool climate of the LIA reduced photosynthesis but also slowed down plant respiration and decomposition, with the net effect that more CO₂ was taken up by the land biosphere during cool periods.

What about the future?

The flipside of this is that the reverse may happen when temperatures rise, as they are now. Rising temperatures are likely to mean even more CO₂ being released from the terrestrial biosphere. While plants continue to increase their photosynthesis as Earth warms, our findings suggest that plant decomposition will increase even more, meaning that less carbon stays in the soil.

This is concerning, because as we know, humans have opened the tap on a new source of carbon: fossil fuels that were previously locked away underground. We are rapidly returning lots of this stored carbon to the atmosphere, and the land and ocean are only removing about half of what we add.

Our discovery suggests that every degree increase in temperature will result in about 20 parts per million extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is about the middle of the expectation from climate models. It means that, if we want to keep global warming to within 2℃ of average pre-industrial temperatures, in line with the Paris climate agreement, we need to factor in this positive feedback loop, which means that the more temperatures climb, the more extra CO₂ will be released from the world’s landscapes.

Peter Rayner receives funding from Australian Research Council linkage grant.

Cathy Trudinger has received funding from the Australian Climate Change Science Program (a partnership between the Department of the Environment, the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO).

David Etheridge has received funding from the Australian Climate Change Science Program (a partnership between the Department of the Environment, the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO), from the University of Copenhagen, from the CO2CRC and from the Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance.

Mauro Rubino does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Under a cloud: South Australia's wind farms have been blamed for price spikes, but without them the volatility would be even worse. Tim Phillips Photos/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The past few weeks have seen extraordinarily high wholesale electricity prices in South Australia, averaging (as of 23 July) A$321 per megawatt hour, compared with A$80 per MWh for July 2015.

The prices have attracted an even more extraordinary deluge of news coverage – much of it asserting, with little or no evidence, that the high prices have been caused by an excessive reliance on wind generation.

This graph shows the wholesale prices in the National Electricity Market (NEM) since the beginning of July.

Looking at the graph, several things are apparent:

• until the middle of May, SA prices were in line with those in other mainland NEM states, and almost never the highest

• price spikes also happened in other states, most notably in Queensland, which doesn’t have wind power

• prices in all four NEM states began to increase gradually from the middle of May.

In SA there is no long-term relationship between wholesale prices and the share of electricity supplied by wind, as shown below (comprehensive data on wind generation only date back to 2007). If anything, wind generation tends to drive down the wholesale price.

What does dictate electricity prices?

In the NEM, just as in any complex market, prices are determined by a combination of many different factors. The factors that may have affected SA’s prices this month include:

• the level of demand for electricity

• the amount of wind generation

• gas prices (for power generation)

• the capacity of available non-wind generation

• the capacity of the interconnectors linking SA and Victorian networks

• the level of competition between generators and their resulting price-setting behaviour.

Let’s briefly consider each in turn.

Demand

Winter heating requirements mean than July in SA is almost always one of the top two months for overall electricity demand (though not for peak monthly demand, which happens during summer heatwaves). However, average daily demand so far this month is slightly lower than the same time last year, while average wholesale prices are nearly four times higher. So something else must be pushing up the price.

Wind power

July is normally a windy month in SA. But it seems likely that this month’s total wind generation, while roughly the same as last July, will be much lower than in July 2014. The average price so far this month is about A$320, compared with about A$70 in May this year (when it was windier) and A$50 in July 2014.

Wholesale gas prices

Wholesale gas prices increased rapidly during May and June. It is generally agreed that this is due to increased demand for gas for the three export LNG plants in Queensland, which are now running at two thirds of full capacity.

Gas prices affect wholesale electricity prices mainly though their effect on the operating cost of open-cycle gas turbine (OCGT) generators. These smaller, fast-start generators are ideal for meeting demand spikes, but they are relatively expensive to run. As we have already seen, wholesale prices climbed in all NEM states during May and June, and there is little doubt that higher gas prices were the main driver.

Non-wind generation

For most of its 18-year existence, the NEM has had a large excess of generation capacity relative to demand. This ensured tough competition between rival generators, which drove prices down. But now, in SA, this competition is weakening.

Early last year, Adelaide’s 478-megawatt gas-fired Pelican Point power station was taken offline, despite being one of the most efficient and lowest-emission thermal power stations in Australia. Its owner, Engie, said it was unable to trade profitably based on expected prices of gas and electricity. (In mid-July it was brought partially back online at the state government’s request, and has been operating at about one-third capacity for much of the time since then.) Then in May this year, the ageing 530MW coal-fired Northern power station was permanently shut down.

SA’s remaining thermal generating capacity consists of modern and old gas-fired plants, including several of the OCGT plants described above. Combined, their total is less than the annual summer and winter maximum demand in the state. So if periods of high demand coincide with periods of low wind generation, owners of these power stations can charge more because these days there is less competition.

Interconnector capacity

The Heywood interconnector, the main grid connection between SA and Victoria, has a maximum capacity of 460MW and at times of low wind generation it effectively functions as a direct replacement for Northern, by supplying electricity from the Latrobe Valley. It is being upgraded to 650MW and, as part of this work, it was effectively taken offline for about a week, beginning on July 5 – the period that has seen the highest prices.

Compare the period July 5-14, 2016, with July last year when demand was almost identical. The reductions in coal and interconnector supply are plainly evident, as are the increases in expensive gas generation from Torrens Island (Austrlia’s oldest operating thermal power station) and the OCGT plants.

Market competitiveness

Periods of low wind have thus left SA depending on a mixture of gas generators, many of them old and inefficient, whose already high costs have been driven still higher by the rapid rise in gas prices.

This has given the three businesses that own these power stations – AGL, Engie and Origin – increased market power. The rapid price spikes during the period July 5-15, and for several days thereafter, suggest that this market power was being exercised.

So what’s the real cause?

As we have seen, if you want a satisfactory explanation, you have to start with the very high wholesale gas prices right across the country. These have made SA’s gas-fired electricity options much more expensive, in turn raising the floor price for all of its power in times of low wind generation.

In addition to this higher floor price, the tightening of supply and lack of competition have allowed generators to drive prices to even higher levels in the form of short-lived spikes, which have raised the monthly average price still further.

The closure of Northern power station has significantly reduced competition in the SA wholesale electricity market. Additional competition, which normally comes from the transmission links with Victoria, was almost absent for an extended period during the month, because of upgrading work on the Heywood interconnector.

Competition from wind generators protects consumers from high wholesale prices for much of the time. But when the wind is not blowing, consumers are exposed to the full effects of an uncompetitive market. That is what has happened to customers in SA this month.

It is absurd to say that SA electricity prices would be lower if there were less wind generation. On the contrary, consumers would be exposed to high prices in an uncompetitive market for more of the time, and thus face higher average prices, not lower ones.

What has happened to SA electricity prices during this month is a stark demonstration of the need for a fundamental rethink of the the design of the National Electricity Market, which was designed at a time when Australia had very little gas generation and no wind. Demands to limit the growth of wind (and also solar) generation are in effect demands to renege on national emissions reduction commitments, for the sake of preserving a set of outdated and dysfunctional institutions.

Hugh Saddler is a member of the Board of the Climate Insitute