The Conversation

Have you ever found yourself facing your recycling bin, completely befuddled about whether or not you can put a particular item in it? You’re not alone. According to Planet Ark, nearly half of Australians find recycling confusing.

Australia’s recycling rules can seem horrendously complicated, but fortunately they are becoming more simple.

In the meantime, here’s a brief guide to some of the golden rules of kerbside recycling, plus what to do with materials that can’t go in your recycling bin.

The Conversation, CC BY-ND

As the first rule above says, most papers, plastics, metals and glasses can be recycled, but there are a few exceptions and rules for special handling. To find out more, click on each material below. This will also tell you how else you can recycle the items that can’t go in your kerbside recycling bin.

Other helpful sources for recycling rules include:

• Planet Ark’s mobile app, online guide and National Recycling Week website.

• The Victorian government’s Get it right on bin night and the South Australian government’s Recycle right campaigns.

• Sydney’s Garbage Guru, which lets you look up any item and see the best thing to do with it – it’s likely to be applicable to many other cities across the country.

Why do some things need special treatment?

Some items need special handling before they can go in kerbside recycling. These are generally either very small items, or complex/composite items.

Small items, like scraps of paper or foil, steel bottle caps or plastic bottle lids and coffee pods, can cause problems if simply placed in a recycling bin. Because they are small, they can literally fall through the cracks in sorting machines, causing damage to the machines or ending up in landfill.

Combined or composite items are complex items that contain multiple materials, such as newspapers or magazines in plastic wrap, or composite items like Pringles tubes. Automated recycling machines can cope with very small amounts of different materials, such as staples in paper, plastic windows on envelopes, paper labels on glass jars, or slight residues of food on containers. But items with multiple materials can confuse the machines and end up in the wrong category, introducing contamination.

Why is contamination an issue?

Contamination is when things that can’t be recycled through kerbside recycling systems end up in the recycling system.

Contamination can create many problems: recyclable materials may need to be dumped in landfill; the output of recycled materials is less pure; workers at recycling facilities can be put at risk; and in some cases machinery can be damaged. All of these lead to increased costs of recycling that may be passed on to residents.

For example, glass recycling programs are designed only to process glass bottles and jars, which are crushed and then melted down and re-used. Drinking glasses, ceramics, plate glass (window panes) and oven-proof glass melt at higher temperatures than normal glass bottles and jars. When these are incorrectly placed in recycling, this tougher glass can remain solid among the melted glass, leading to impure glass products and damaged machinery.

Better technology is helping to remove contaminants during sorting. But it’s always best to get it right at the source. Planet Ark says that a good recycler’s motto is: “If in doubt, leave it out.”

What about things that can’t be recycled at home?

Just because something can’t be recycled through kerbside collections, that doesn’t mean it can’t be recycled at all.

New channels for recycling more complex items have been pioneered by organisations such as Planet Ark and TerraCycle, as well as by local councils, industry and government under schemes such as the Australian Packaging Covenant and the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme.

Most councils have drop-off locations for larger items that can’t go in kerbside bins, such as electronics, batteries, light bulbs, chemicals and hazardous waste, as well as pickups for white goods and mattresses.

Many supermarkets in metro areas have REDcycle bins that accept soft plastics like plastic bags, soft plastic packaging, biscuit packets and trays, dry cleaning bags, and other “scrunchable” plastics.

Industry take-back programs include Fridge Buy Back, TechCollect for electronics, and ReturnMed for unwanted or expired medicines.

Some big companies now have collection points, such as Ikea which take used batteries, light bulbs, mattresses and allen keys, and Aldi which also takes used batteries.

Free Terracycle recycling programs. Adapted from TerraCycle (http://www.terracycle.com.au)

Recycling is vital to reducing resource use and waste to landfill, and so getting it right is crucial.

Jenni Downes 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.

At first glance, Australians appear to be good recyclers: ABS figures report that in 2012 about 94% of households participated in some way in kerbside recycling. State waste authorities also report a consistent increase in the volume of materials recovered for recycling.

However, these figures do not justify complacency. Our total household waste is increasing and our kerbside recycling rate – the amount of materials collected for recycling as a percentage of the total waste generated – is actually relatively low by global standards, and is only growing slowly.

The recycling rate increased from 45% in 2007 to 51% in 2011, just creeping above the average of 50% across comparable countries.

One reason our kerbside recycling rate isn’t higher is because many people find the rules confusing: a Planet Ark survey found that 48% of Aussies struggle to figure out what can and can’t be recycled, and many incorrectly identified materials that could be recycled. Much of this is likely due to the variation in rules in different places, and the extent to which recycling has changed in the 35 years since it began in Australia.

Many people are confused about what can and can’t be recycled. Adapted from Planet Ark, 7 Secrets of Successful Recyclers Why is there variation in recycling rules?

Every local council makes its own decisions about what it collects for recycling, based on factors like population density, economics, local infrastructure and facilities, waste contracting services available, and potential end markets.

For example, the volume and value of recyclables collected from smaller or remote populations might be too low to be economic, once the costs of collection and transport are factored in. In other words, one size will not fit all council areas.

The type of facilities available to a council also affects what can be collected. For example, combination products like Tetra Pak juice cartons are made of multiple materials: cardboard, plastic and foil linings. Specialised machinery is needed to separate the product into its component materials before it can be recycled and this may not be available in all areas.

In the past the variation between councils was big, as some got access to facilities and new technologies quicker than others.

The good news is things are getting simpler as councils move towards much greater consistency. Now more than 80% of people can place the same things in their recycling bins, by following a few golden rules.

How has recycling changed over time?

Household kerbside recycling schemes were introduced in the 1980s, initially in Sydney, and then spread to the other major centres. By the early 1990s nearly half of households had kerbside collections, and by 2014 94% of Australians had access to kerbside recycling.

Early recycling collections used council-provided bags and crates, or boxes or other bins that were provided by the householder. But mobile garbage bins, better known as “wheelie bins”, have steadily gained in popularity and are now the major form of recycling bin provided by councils. This shift was in part driven by waste service contractors desiring greater cost-efficiency.

Initially, recycling had to be sorted into paper and plastic/glass. Over the past 15 years many councils have moved towards “comingled” recycling, in which all recyclables are placed in the one bin. For example, in 2006, only 47% of Sydney councils had comingled recycling, while in 2012, 95% of councils across NSW did.

Research suggests, however, that while comingled recycling is more convenient for households, it leads to lower recovery rates and more contamination than separated recycling.

Again, the shift to comingled recycling is partly due to a desire for reduced costs. While sorting was traditionally done by hand, recycling is increasingly sent straight to automated machines in materials-recovery facilities, which use the physical properties of different materials to separate them from each other.

Is recycling enough?

Like most conversations about recycling, so far we have only discussed the “supply” side: how things get recycled. It is also important to recognise the “demand” side: what happens to recycled material.

A strong recycling system requires a closed loop, where there is demand for products made from recycled material. Increased demand supports a more circular economy by providing an incentive for investment in recycling collection schemes and infrastructure.

People who want to be super successful recyclers can increase demand by “buying back” their recycling; looking for products with recycled content, such as toilet paper, wrapping and copy paper, boxes, plastic containers and packaging, as well as bigger items like outdoor furniture and carpet underlay.

Recycling also needs to be considered in its appropriate place in the scheme of things. While it is extremely important to ensure useful materials don’t go to waste in landfill, many might be surprised to know that recycling sits below a number of waste avoidance actions. Recycling and other waste management should be more of a last line of defence.

The ‘waste hierarchy’ prioritises actions by those with the greatest environmental benefit. UTS: Institute for Sustainable Futures

Most of us only think about recycling when we’re disposing of something. However it’s much more effective to think about recycling where we’re acquiring it. For most of us, that is in the supermarket when buying groceries.

When considering a product, if we think about the waste that will be produced when we get home, we could choose refuse to purchase products with too much packaging, thus reducing the amount of waste that needs to be recycled. Similarly, we could buy reusable items instead of single-use, disposable items.

New social movements are also trying to encourage people to be even more creative about how they can avoid waste, introducing concepts like “repair” and “re-gifting” back into our consciousness. They are trying to create an extended waste hierarchy with more emphasis on waste avoidance.

An extended waste hierarchy, focusing on waste avoidance. UTS: Institute for Sustainable Futures

Recycling is vital to reducing resource use and waste to landfill, and getting it right is crucial. But it’s also important for recycling to take its place alongside waste-avoidance actions for a more sustainable lifestyle.

Jenni Downes 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.

The Whanganui River: now a legal person. Joerg Muller/Ulanwp/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

In the space of a week, the world has gained three notable new legal persons: the Whanganui River in New Zealand, and the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in India.

In New Zealand, the government passed legislation that recognised the Whanganui River catchment as a legal person. This significant legal reform emerged from the longstanding Treaty of Waitangi negotiations and is a way of formally acknowledging the special relationship local Māori have with the river.

In India, the Uttarakhand high court ruled that the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers have the same legal rights as a person, in response to the urgent need to reduce pollution in two rivers considered sacred in the Hindu religion.

What are legal rights for nature?

Legal rights are not the same as human rights, and so a “legal person” does not necessarily have to be a human being. Take corporations, for example, which are also treated in law as “legal persons”, as a way to endow companies with particular legal rights, and to treat the company as legally distinct from its managers and shareholders.

Giving nature legal rights means the law can see “nature” as a legal person, thus creating rights that can then be enforced. Legal rights focus on the idea of legal standing (often described as the ability to sue and be sued), which enables “nature” to go to court to protect its rights. Legal personhood also includes the right to enter and enforce contracts, and the ability to hold property.

There is still a big question about whether these types of legal rights are relevant or appropriate for nature at all. But what is clear from the experience of applying this concept to other non-human entities is that these legal rights don’t mean much if they can’t be enforced.

Enforcing nature’s legal rights

What does it take to enforce the legal personhood of a river or other natural entity? First, there needs to be a person appointed to act on its behalf.

Second, for a right to be enforceable, both the “guardians” and users of the resource must recognise their joint rights, duties, and responsibilities. To possess a right implies that someone else has a commensurate duty to observe this right.

Third, if a case requires adjudication by the courts, then it takes time, money, and expertise to run a successful legal case. Enforcing legal rights for nature therefore requires not only legal standing, but also adequate funding and access to legal expertise.

And finally, any actor seeking to enforce these rights will need some form of legislative independence from state and national governments, as well as sufficient real-world power to take action, particularly if such action is politically controversial.

Both New Zealand and India face considerable challenges in ensuring that the new legal rights granted to the rivers are successfully enforced. At present, New Zealand seems significantly better prepared than India to meet these challenges.

In New Zealand, the new system for managing the river will slot into existing systems of government, whereas India will need to set up completely new organisations in a matter of weeks.

Granting legal rights to New Zealand’s Whanganui River catchment (Te Awa Tupua) has taken eight years of careful negotiation. The new legislation, introduced at the national level, transfers ownership of the riverbed from the Crown to Te Awa Tupua, and assigns a guardian the responsibility of representing Te Awa Tupua’s interests.

The guardian will consist of two people: one appointed by the Whanganui Iwi (local Māori people), and the other by the New Zealand government. Substantial funds have been set aside to maintain the health of the Whanganui River, and to establish the legal framework that will be administered by the guardian, with support from independent advisory groups.

In contrast, almost overnight, the High Court in India has ruled that the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers will be treated as minors under the law, and will be represented by three people – the director general of Namami Gange project, the Uttarakhand chief secretary, and the advocate general – who will act as guardians for the river. The court has requested that within eight weeks, new boards should be established to oversee the cleaning and maintenance of the rivers. Few further details of the proposed institutional framework are available.

Big questions remain

In both cases, there are still big questions about the roles and responsibilities of the rivers’ guardians.

How will they decide which rights to enforce, and when? Who can hold them to account for those decisions and who has oversight? Even in the case of the Whanganui River, there remain biting questions about water rights and enforcement. For instance, despite (or perhaps because of) longstanding concerns about levels of water extraction by the Tongariro Power Scheme, the legislation specifically avoids creating or transferring proprietary interests in water.

Ultimately, both of these examples show that conferring legal rights to nature is just the beginning of a longer legal process, rather than the end. Although legal rights can be created overnight, it takes time and money to set up the legal and organisational frameworks that will ensure these rights are worth more than the paper they’re printed on.

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

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s plan for a A$2 billion upgrade and expansion of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, announced last week, will be an impressive engineering achievement. Snowy Hydro 2.0 will increase the scheme’s capacity by 50%.

Meeting this extra capacity will depend entirely on the natural water supply available in the Snowy Mountains. But the current environmental conditions of these mountains, and the Australian Alps where they are located, are compromising both water delivery and water quality.

The only way to maintain water flow is to control the threats that are actively degrading the high country catchments. These include introduced animals, wetland loss, and climate change.

Restoration and management

The remarkable Snowy Hydro Scheme was developed over 25 years from the 1940s. During this period the NSW Soil Conservation Service and later NSW National Parks effectively managed soil and restored areas damaged by grazing.

Conservation efforts focused on looking after topsoil, stabilising wetlands, and restoring vegetation after decades of grazing. This ensured good amounts of high-quality water for both hydro power and irrigation downstream.

More recent efforts have focused on the impacts of building the original Snowy scheme. This includes restoring areas cleared for roads and construction sites, and areas where rock and soil from blasting and cutting were dumped.

Before and after revegetation works in the 1970s, following the removal of cattle. Current ecological change is likely to be far more significant and could require new types of intervention. Image courtesy of Roger Good Threats to mountain catchments

The Australian Alps are the nation’s water towers. They provide water for growing food and hydroelectricity, but face several threats.

Across the Alps, despite well-informed and committed control programs, feral horses, pigs and deer are destroying wetlands, degrading streamside vegetation, and causing moisture-holding peat soils and stream channels to erode. This leads to more evaporation, more rapid runoff and erosion, less water flow, and lower water quality.

There is currently no effective response to this damage. We estimate that more than 35% of the high mountains’ wetlands have been affected, and the problem is getting worse.

The Alps are also recognised as extremely vulnerable to climate change. Climate models suggest that alpine areas that currently receive at least 60 days of snow cover will shrink by 18-60% by 2020.

Temperatures in the alps are already increasing by 0.4℃ per decade, an increase of 1.79℃ since records began. Climate change projections for the Australian Alps indicate the hottest summer days will be around 5°C warmer in 2100, minimum temperatures will rise by 3-6℃, and precipitation (rain and snow) will decrease by up to 20%, with less falling as snow. These changes are already putting pressure on iconic mountain ecosystems including the peatlands, snowgum woodlands and alpine ash forests.

The Australian Alps are also likely to experience more extreme events such as heatwaves, storms, fires and severe frosts. All of these affect high mountain ecosystems, making the environment more vulnerable to disturbances such as more fires, weeds and disease outbreaks.

For example, the root-rot fungus, Phytophora cambivora, recently appeared in the alps. The fungus killed large areas of shrubs following unusually warm springtime soil temperatures.

New weeds are an additional concern for the alps as these may compromise the existing plant communities and their ability to deliver services such as water. Alpine peat soils, which build up over thousands of years, can also burn in drought.

Reliable water depends on functioning ecosystems

A stable water supply from the Alps is crucial for energy and food production. This relies on intact vegetation.

Back in the 1950s, it became clear to the researchers at the Soil Conservation Service that hard-hooved animals, in this case domestic cattle, were severely damaging the alpine catchments.

The success of the original Snowy scheme depended on removing cattle from alpine areas, controlling soil erosion that resulted from prior grazing and hydro works, and carrying out extensive revegetation works across the whole of the nearby mountain ranges.

However, land managers to this day are still controlling a legacy of disturbance and weed invasions from both the Snowy scheme itself and years of previous grazing. Snowy 2.0 must consider these lessons from the past, and work to improve mountain catchments.

Alpine plants and animals often live close to their environmental tolerances, meaning they are not necessarily able to cope with change. For some species, climate change is likely to exceed these thresholds. Vegetation communities will change as current populations decline and colonisers from different species move in to occupy the gaps, including invasive species.

Feral horses make it even more difficult for native species to respond to a changing climate, by exacerbating environmental degradation and impacts on water.

Part of the solution is restoring and re-vegetating degraded high country landscapes. For example, restoring snowgum communities, which were severely affected by burning and grazing, may lead to increases in the amount of water trapped as drifting fog.

But climate change will demand new research and management partnerships to find species that will survive well into the future and to develop adaptation pathways to respond to uncertain conditions.

This will be a new and different world. We are currently ill-prepared to maintain high-quality water yield in the future, to predict the impacts of climate change, or to effectively protect our alps for future generations.

But we are confident these questions can be answered with adequate investment in the environmental infrastructure needed to underpin the engineering. We estimate that between A$5 million and A$7 million per year is needed to research and develop new management structures. You could see this investment as royalties returned to the system that provides the water and power.

Turnbull’s plan may deliver more power, but only if the environment is carefully managed. Otherwise Snowy Hydro 2.0 may be left high and dry.

Adrienne Nicotra receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the NCCARF. She is a member of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Science Advisory Council and the Ecological Society of Australia.

David Freudenberger receives funding from Whitehaven Coal to conduct mine site rehabilitation research. He is a board member of the Society for Ecological Restoration Australasia, a member of the Australian Ecological Society and a member of the ACT Natural Resource Management Advisory Council

Geoff Cary currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Bushfire and Naturals Hazard CRC, and has recently received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Greenhouse Office/Department of Climate Change Greenhouse Action in Regional Australia funding schemes, NSW Department of Environment and Conservation, and the Bushfire CRC. He is affiliated with the International Association of Wildland Fire.

Geoffrey Hope has received funding from the Office of Environment and Heritage, NSW Government and the ACT Government for research on mountain wetland ecology. He is affiliated with the Australian Institute of Alpine Studies and is a member of the Kosciuscko National Park Wild Horse Management Plan Review Independent Technical Reference Group. . .

Sam Banks receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Susanna Venn receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Graeme Worboys 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.

Pollution and debris off the Sri Lankan coast. David Jones/plasticoceans.org

We live in a world of plastic. Shopping bags, drink bottles, your toothbrush and even your clothes are among the everyday items made from plastic. But plastic isn’t fantastic, and neither is the current state of our environment.

Humans have been mass-producing plastic since the 1950s. We produce hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic every year and production is only increasing. Unfortunately, most of it is used only once and then thrown away.

Only a small proportion of plastic is recycled. The majority ends up in landfill or, in the worst case scenario, our oceans.

A Plastic Ocean is a documentary film directed by the Australian journalist Craig Leeson. It dives into and investigates the devastating impacts that plastic has caused to our environment, especially our marine life.

What starts off as an adventure to film the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet, leads to the shocking discovery of a thick layer of plastic debris floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Craig, alongside Tanya Streeter, a world record-breaking free diver and environmental activist, then travel across the globe to report on the havoc caused by decades of plastic use.

The film presents beautiful shots of the marine environment. This contrasts with footage of heavily polluted cities and dumps full of plastic rubbish. The juxtaposition between these images sends the message that our actions and choices can severely impact the planet. Throughout the film, experts are interviewed to provide further insight into some of the problems derived from plastic.

Impacts of plastic use

Plastic is so widely used because it is durable and cheap. Unfortunately, this durability is the same quality that makes it so detrimental to the environment. Most plastics do not break down chemically. Instead, they break into smaller and smaller pieces that can persist in the environment for an extensive period of time.

Because it is so affordable, developing countries use plastics extensively. However, many regions lack proper waste management, and much of the rubbish is washed into the ocean when it rains. As a result, a large percentage of all plastics in the ocean are due to only a handful of countries. Scientists estimate that more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic are currently floating in our oceans.

Throughout the film, we are shown footage of numerous marine species that have been affected by plastic debris. Marine animals and sea birds often mistake floating plastic for food. Large pieces of plastic, when eaten, can obstruct the animals’ digestive tracts of the animals, essentially starving them to death.

When smaller “microplastics” are ingested, toxins are released and become stored in their tissue. These toxins accumulate up the food chain and can eventually end up on our dinner tables. The consumption of the contaminated seafood can cause many health problems including cancer, immune system problems, and even childhood developmental issues. This is a major problem, as almost a fifth of the world’s population relies on the ocean for their primary source of protein. Society’s huge appetite for plastic is literally poisoning us.

The future of plastics

There is no quick fix for a problem that has grown hugely over the past few decades. The use of plastics is so ingrained in society that it is all but impossible to eliminate them completely.

The film does, however, offer various strategies that can be implemented to reduce the impact of plastics.

Ideally, avoid plastic-containing products as much as possible. Avoid single-use plastic products and recycle whatever you can. Local governments also need to implement a refund scheme for the return of plastic bottles to incentivise recycling.

For unrecyclable plastics, new technology has been developed to convert them into fuel, providing a second life for those plastics.

It is up to us to embrace these changes and move away from the plastic culture. We need to get this problem under control, as it will only become worse as the human population increases. Our marine animals deserve to live in a blue ocean, not a plastic soup.

A Plastic Ocean is touring internationally, including screenings in Brisbane on March 25 and Cairns on March 27.

Gary Truong 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.

Just think of it as a battery that can also take you to the shops. Steve Jurvetson/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

A key question amid the consternation over the current state of Australia’s east coast energy market has been how much renewable energy capacity to build, and how fast.

But help could be at hand from a surprising source: electric vehicles. By electrifying our motoring, we would boost demand for renewable energy from the grid, while smoothing out some of the destabilising effects that the recent boom in household solar has had on our energy networks.

Australia’s electricity infrastructure was built largely without renewable energy in mind, and primarily to maintain reliability for when demand peaks. The high uptake of solar panels, while good for reducing carbon emissions, has reduced grid demand by 5-10% in Australia, and as a side-effect has lowered the value of network assets, raised power prices, and made the grid trickier to manage.

Electric vehicles can ease the pressure on spikes in electricity prices by adding storage capacity. They are effectively a distributed storage system - with smart meters they can feed electricity back into the grid when prices are high. These vehicles’ battery reserves can thus help with the balancing of the grid and provide energy in the peak period. Electric vehicles would also add battery storage to the grid at the same time, which can reduce the need to size the grid for demand peaks.

One way to think of electric vehicles is essentially as batteries you can drive. So before the government pursues plans such as spending A$2 billion on expanding the Snowy Hydro scheme, it should do a cost-benefit analysis comparing the returns from similar infrastructure investment in electric vehicles.

According to the Office of the Chief Economist, Australia produced 6 billion kilowatt hours of solar PV in 2015 – enough to run almost 2 million cars, equivalent to 10% of Australia’s total current passenger vehicle fleet. Increasing demand for grid-sourced electricity will put downward pressure on network prices, which typically are roughly half of the cost of a household energy tariff. At a time when demand has declined and policy settings have created lots of investor uncertainty, the increased demand will also encourage investment in new generation capacity.

Electric vehicles can also increase economic activity in Australia and improve air quality and health. Australia has nearly 20 million cars that together drive 280 billion km each year. Passenger vehicles alone consume 20 billion litres of fuel each year in Australia. At A$1.50 per litre, that is A$30 billion per year that is burned, with roughly half the revenues going to multinational oil companies and the other half going into federal coffers as fuel tax.

The health costs of pollution from vehicle emissions adds a further A$1,450 per household per year in major cities, an annual impost of some A$14.5 billion on household and government budgets – roughly the same as what the government earns in fuel tax.

If all vehicles were electric, the same distance could be driven with electricity costing less than A$15 billion, because electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines (although this is slightly offset by minor grid losses). This would thus deliver a double saving, in terms of both household fuel bills and reduced health costs.

Changing gear

Of course this won’t happen overnight, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The electricity grid will need time to adjust and add extra renewable capacity, as the cost of electric cars comes down and coal power stations get old.

Both economic analysis and recent political experience suggest that encouraging investment in renewable energy is expensive, especially if the only driving factor is the need to cut greenhouse emissions (important though that is).

Here is where electric vehicles can really help the grid. Swapping petrol or diesel cars for electric ones on a large enough scale will increase Australia’s flatlining electricity demand, making it more lucrative for energy suppliers to invest in new generation capacity. Given the increasing cost of gas, and the declining support for coal, on balance most of this demand will be met with new renewable capacity, facilitated by the addition of all these new “batteries you can drive”.

A suggested pathway to energy sustainability via electric cars. Adapted from Andrich et al. Inequality as an obstacle to sustainable energy use, Energy for Sustainable Development

Government policy should be to set some high-level national interest objectives, such as maintaining gas for domestic use, and then simply not interfere with the market as much as possible. But political leaders are struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in technology and the market. The pathway to sustainability would have been smoother and faster if governments had looked to WA for a gas reservation policy, not intervened by closing coal, and reduced the subsidies that allowed solar power to grow so disruptively fast (particularly in wealthier households).

Making more effort to promote electric cars would also have allowed a more successful transition to renewable energy and reduced the price shocks being suffered by eastern Australia in areas such as the gas market. Fortunately, it is not too late.

Hitting the road

Investing in a new car is not a decision most households take lightly. This is especially true of electric cars, which are expensive, are not marketed widely, are available in only a limited range of models, and are subject to concerns about charging and range.

Presently, electric vehicles are only affordable for higher-income households, which is ironic given the benefits they would offer lower-income households in terms of fuel budgeting and reduced exposure to urban pollution and health costs.

One-third of an electric vehicle’s cost is batteries, which are rapidly coming down in price. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that by 2022, electric models will cost the same as their petrol counterparts. That will be the point of liftoff for sales.

Meanwhile, electric cars have an undoubted cool factor. Buying one is a powerful way to show you care about your community’s future. Pardon the pun, but just look at the way Tesla founder Elon Musk electrified the debate over South Australia’s electricity problems.

For governments, electric vehicles offer an opportunity to make significant inroads on environmental and health problems, not to mention urban planning and infrastructure. The demand for car batteries could also boost related industries, such as lithium mining, in which Australia is a world leader.

Feeling electric

Simple, inexpensive policies could encourage electric vehicle uptake, such as reducing registration fees and stamp duty on electric cars and allowing them to drive in bus or other priority lanes, while also hiking the tax on diesel cars that cause cancer.

Other emerging transport trends, such as car-sharing clubs and ride-sharing apps, could also hasten the uptake of electric vehicles. Sharing increases the number of kilometres driven by each individual vehicle, meaning that the upfront costs are paid back more rapidly, leaving the owner with a car that is paid off and cheaper to run than a petrol or diesel model.

These facts are not lost on the car manufacturers themselves. But given the potential co-benefits to the electricity grid and community health, we might expect power utilities and health agencies to join the push to actively promote electric vehicles – not to mention politicians who are looking to deal with our energy issues and win a few votes along they way.

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

Soils play an important role in the nutritional value of our food.

The next time you bite into an apple, spare a thought for the soils that helped to produce it. Soils play a vital role, not just in an apple’s growth, but in our own health too.

The formation of soil, pedogenesis, is a very slow process. Creating one millimetre of soil coverage can take anything from a few years to an entire millennium.

But with soils around the world under threat, we’re in danger of losing their health benefits faster than they are replaced.

Healthy soils for healthy plants

A healthy soil is a living ecosystem in which dead organic matter forms the base of a food web consisting of microscopic and larger organisms.

Together, these organisms sustain other biological activities, including plant, animal and human health. Soils supply nutrients and water, which are vital for plants, and are home to organisms that interact with plants, for better or worse.

In the natural environment, plants form relationships with soil microbes to obtain water, nutrients and protection against some pathogens. In return, the plants provide food.

The use of mineral fertilisers can make some of these relationships redundant, and their breakdown can lead to the loss of other benefits such as micronutrients and disease protection.

Certain farming practices, such as tillage (or mechanical digging), are harmful to fungi in soils. These fungi play important roles in helping plants obtain crucial nutrients such as zinc.

Zinc is an essential micronutrient for all living organisms. Zinc deficiency affects an estimated one-third of the world’s population, particularly in regions with zinc-deficient soils. If food staples such as cereal grains are grown on zinc-deficient soils and further lack their fungi helpers, they become deficient in zinc.

If the way food is grown affects the composition and health of plants, could farming practices that focus on soil health make food more nutritious? A recent review on fruits says yes.

The researchers found that fruits produced under organic farming generally contained more vitamins, more flavour compounds such as phenolics, and more antioxidants when compared with conventional farming. Many factors are at play here, but pest and soil management strategies that benefit soil organisms and their relationship with plants are part of the equation.

The composition and function of animals and humans reflects, to some extent, what they eat. For example, the fish you eat is only rich in omega-3 fatty acids if the fish has eaten algae and microbes that manufacture these oils. The fish itself does not produce these compounds.

Increasing numbers of studies are demonstrating the link between nutrition and human health issues. We know, for example, that antioxidants, carbohydrates, saturated fat content and the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids contribute to immune system regulation.

We do not produce some of these nutrients; we must obtain them through our food. Therefore, how food is grown is a matter of public health.

Beyond nutrition

Soil is the greatest reservoir of biodiversity. A handful of soil can contain millions of individuals from thousands of species of bacteria and fungi, not to mention the isopods, rotifers, nematodes, worms and many other identified and yet-to-be-identified organisms that call soil home.

Soil microbes produce an arsenal of compounds in their chemical warfare for dominance and survival. Many widely used antibiotics and other drugs were isolated from soil. It may hold the answers to our battle with antibiotic resistance and other diseases including cancer.

It has also been suggested that exposure to diverse microbes in the natural environment can help prevent allergies and other immune-related disorders.

The road to healthy soils

Unfortunately, we are doing a poor job of looking after our soils. About two-thirds of agricultural land in Australia is suffering from acidification, contamination, depletion of nutrients and organic matter, and/or salinisation. And in case anyone forgets, soil is every bit as non-renewable as oil because soil formation is such a slow process.

On the other hand, soil erosion can happen very quickly. For a taste of what happens when soils are destroyed, nothing beats sitting through a dust storm and watching day turn into night. Dust storms inspired George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road.

In the 2009 Red Dawn in Sydney, some 2.5 million tonnes of soil were lost within hours to the ocean in a 3,000km-long, 2.5km-high dust plume.

Australia’s major cities began on fertile land. Melbourne’s food bowl can supply 41% of the city’s fresh food needs. Such secure access to fresh and whole food needs our protection.

Healthy soils are part of the solution to some of our dilemmas – poverty, malnutrition and climate change – as they underpin processes that gives us food, energy and water. If we want to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, soil health is a linchpin we cannot ignore.

From this perspective, agricultural practices to maintain healthy soil are clearly an important target for policymakers. Looking after our soils ultimately means looking after ourselves.

Ee Ling Ng works at the Australian-China Joint Research Centre: Healthy Soils for Sustainable Food Production and Environmental Quality. She receives funding from the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science.

Deli Chen receives funding from Australia Research Council, Meat Livestock Australia, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.

Orange-bellied parrots are one of the species included in the government's Threatened Species Prospectus. JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA

Southern cassowaries, orange-bellied parrots, Leadbeater’s possums, and Australia’s only purple wattle are among the threatened species the government is seeking conservation investment for under its recently released threatened species prospectus. The prospectus seeks business and philanthropic support in partnership with the government and community groups to raise around A$14 million each year.

The government has proposed 51 projects, costing from A$45,000 to A$6 million. At first glance the prospectus is a positive initiative.

But it also highlights that the current government is unwilling to invest what’s needed to assure the conservation of our threatened plants, animals and other organisms.

The good news

The government’s partial outsourcing of conservation investment and responsibility might have some benefit. Raising broader awareness about the plight of Australia’s threatened species, particularly among Australia’s leading companies and donors, could lead to valuable conservation gains. It could translate to pressure for greater financial investment in conservation and less damaging actions by big companies.

The prospectus includes an excellent range of critically important projects. These include seed banks for plants facing extinction, and projects to control feral animals and create safe havens for mammals and birds.

These projects could help to save species on the brink of extinction, such as the critically endangered Gilbert’s potoroo, the Christmas Island flying fox and the orange-bellied parrot.

The projects have a high chance of success. Community groups and government are already on board and ready to take action, if only the funds materialise.

Why do so many species need urgent help?

The State of the Environment Report released in early March shows that the major pressures on wildlife have not decreased since 2011 when the previous report was released. The prospects for most threatened species have not improved.

Habitat loss is still the biggest threat. The homes of many threatened species are continually under threat from developments. Coal mines threaten the black-throated finch, urban sprawl eats away at the last 1% of critically endangered Victorian grasslands, and clearing for agriculture has spiked in Queensland.

Grasslands, such as these in Melbourne, are being lost to development. Takver/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Feral animals are widespread and control programs have been inadequate. New diseases are emerging, such as the chytrid fungus that has devastated frog populations worldwide.

The horticulture industry, for example, introduced myrtle rust to Australia. The disease was poorly managed when it was first detected. It now infects more than 350 species of the Myrtaceae family (including eucalypts).

We have so many threatened species because national and state governments don’t invest enough money in protecting our natural heritage, and environmental protections have been rolled back in favour of economic development.

Show us the money

Over the past three years the federal government has invested A$210 million in threatened species. This annual investment of A$70 million each year is minuscule compared with the government’s revenue (0.017% of A$416.9 billion).

It includes projects under the National Landcare Program, Green Army (much of which didn’t help threatened species) and the 20 Million Trees program.

The A$14 million that the prospectus hopes to raise is a near-negligible proportion of annual revenue (0.003%).

Globally, the amount of money needed to prevent extinctions and recover threatened species is at least ten times more than what is being spent.

In Australia, A$40 million each year would prevent the loss of 45 mammals, birds and reptiles from the Kimberley region.

Most species in the government’s threatened species strategy, like this northern quoll, are charismatic. S J Bennett/Flickr, CC BY

The inescapable truth is that Australia’s conservation spend needs to be in the billions, not the current and grossly inadequate tens of millions, to reverse the disastrous state of the environment.

Can we afford it? The 2016 Defence White Paper outlines an expansion of Australia’s defence expenditure from A$32.4 billion in 2016-17 to A$58.7 billion by 2025, even though the appropriate level of investment is extremely uncertain.

We are more certain that our biodiversity will continue to decline with current funding levels. Every State of the Environment report shows ongoing biodiversity loss at relatively stable, low-level funding.

And what will happen if industry won’t open its wallets? Will the government close the funding gap, or shrug its shoulders, hoping the delay between committing a species to extinction and the actual event will be long enough to avoid accountability?

In the past few years we’ve seen the extinction of the Christmas Island forest skink, the Christmas Island pipistrelle, and the Bramble Cay melomys with no public inquiry. Academics have been left to probe the causes, and there is no clear line of government responsibility or mechanism to provide enough funding to help prevent more extinctions.

Popularity poll

Another problem is the prospectus’s bias towards the cute and cuddly, reflecting the prejudice in the Commonwealth Threatened Species Strategy. The strategy and prospectus make the assumption that potential benefactors are inclined to fork out for a freckled duck, but not for a Fitzroy land snail.

The prospectus includes almost half of Australia’s threatened mammals (listed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act) and one-fifth of the threatened birds.

Other groups are woefully represented, ranging from 13% of threatened reptiles to just 1% of threatened plants and none of the listed threatened invertebrates. The prospectus does not even mention spectacular and uniquely Australian threatened crayfish, snails, velvet worms, beetles, butterflies, moths and other insects.

The allocation of funds is equally problematic. We found that birds received the most money (A$209,000 per species on average), followed by mammals and plants.

Raising new funds to help save iconic species is valuable, and can help other species. This focus on birds and mammals wouldn’t be a problem if the government were to pick up the tab for the less popular threatened species.

But it hasn’t. That means our threatened species program will continue to be exceptionally biased, while many more species vanish forever, with little acknowledgement.

We think that the prospectus, despite its biases, is a positive initiative. It is vital to engage society, including business and wealthy philanthropists, in the care of Australia’s natural heritage. But it also highlights how little the government is willing to invest in preserving our threatened wildlife and ecosystems.

This work arose from discussions held by the communications team of the Ecological Society of Australia (ESA). Don Driscoll is president of the ESA. He has recieved funding to undertake research aimed at reducing extinction risks in the Christmas Island Giant Gecko and the Baw Baw frog.

Bek Christensen is vice president of the Ecological Society of Australia, and chair of their Policy Working Group. She works for the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, which is a research infrastructure project funded under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

Euan Ritchie receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Euan Ritchie is a Director (Media Working Group) of the Ecological Society of Australia, and a member of the Australian Mammal Society.

AAP/Lukas Coch

Who would have thought that, scarcely five weeks after Treasurer Scott Morrison, paraded a chunk of coal in parliament, planning for Australia’s energy needs would be dominated by renewables, batteries and hydro?

For months now, the Coalition has been talking down renewables, blaming them for power failures, blackouts, and an unreliable energy network.

South Australia was bearing the brunt of this campaign. The state that couldn’t keep its lights on had Coalition politicians and mainstream journalists vexatiously attributing the blame to its high density of renewables.

But this sustained campaign, which would eventually hail “clean coal” as Australia’s salvation, all came unstuck when tech entrepreneur Elon Musk came out with a brilliant stunt: to install a massive battery storage system in South Australia “in 100 days, or it’s free”.

The genius of the stunt was not to win an instant contract to follow up on such a commitment, but to put an end to decades of dithering over energy policy that major political parties are so famous for in Australia and around the world, and which have intensified the climate crisis to dangerous levels.

Musk’s stunt was not without self-interest. It also aimed to position Tesla as a can-do company for future contracts. But where it was lethal was in completely neutering the campaign against renewables.

Anti-renewable politicians around the country, regardless of whether they are captive to the fossil-fuel lobby, could no longer argue for a dubious “clean-coal” powered station that would take between five and seven years to build when Tesla could fix a state’s energy crisis in 100 days – and not emit one gram of carbon at the end of the process.

Both the South Australian and Victorian governments have responded to Musk’s proposal by bidding for 100 megawatts of battery storage in their states. In South Australia’s case, a state-owned 250MW backup gas-fired fast-start aeroderivative power plant is also to be commissioned.

The state-owned gas power plant is, however, only a support to plans for a renewable-fed grid to be the main source of emergency dispatchable power. It is a plant that anticipates the way extreme weather can impact on energy infrastructure in much the same way desalination plants do for water infrastructure.

This is one reason it must be state-owned. But another is that a private operator would insist on full-time generation to maximise investment and profits. Thus, the South Australian gas plant is actually a critique of the privatisation of energy provision in Australia, which is the single greatest cause of why electricity prices have gone up.

As Giles Parkinson from RenewEconomy points out, within a framework in which privatisation dominates, the current market rules actually disadvantage the merits of non-domestic battery storage for consumers – because private power retailers can exploit arbitrage between low and high prices.

They can load up the batteries when excess wind and solar are cheap and sell it at peak demand for inflated prices. So, storage can actually enhance profits for power suppliers and create a bad deal for consumers.

However, the intrinsic value of storage is that the more you add, the less volatility there will be in a market. This creates a stable price for consumers and less profits for the corporations.

An example Parkinson uses is the Wivenhoe pumped storage facility in Queensland. This is:

… rarely used, because it would dampen the profits of its owners, which also own coal and gas generation.

Nevertheless, as a concept, the battery storage solution proposed by Musk, followed by South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill’s decisive action, really had constricted Malcolm Turnbull’s options. For a start, it makes redundant the longstanding fiction of “baseload power”, which was coined by the fossil-fuel industry to justify coal.

By last week, Turnbull would have already had the results of focus groups telling him that “clean” coal doesn’t wash with voters at all.

So, after reeling for most of last week over the humiliation that the Tesla and Weatherill challenge presented, and after scrambling for a counterpunch, Turnbull came up with Snowy Hydro 2.0. Here Musk’s stunt could only be really met with another stunt, but one in which Turnbull is only trying to salvage a very bad hand that he has played against battery-friendly renewables.

It is true that pumped hydro is currently cheaper than battery storage, but cannot be implemented nearly as quickly, and is not infinitely scalable as battery farms are.

Also, whereas the cost of battery storage continues to fall, the cost of the engineering needed for pumped hydro is not. And there are limited locations suitable for its operation.

But more important than all these considerations is that it while Snowy 2.0 will stabilise the national grid no matter whether clean or dirty energy is powering its pumps, it will only assist decarbonisation if the pumps are powered by wind and solar, which has all been glossed over in its PR sell.

With current energy market rules, there is still some incentive for dirty generators to feed the Snowy pumps. This helps energy security but does nothing for the climate crisis.

Yet, with his PR campaign, Turnbull thinks he is on a winner. The Snowy is also an icon of Australian nation-building and fable. And there is probably some political capital to be scored there. But the Snowy is a once-off, and not a part of the future as battery storage is.

But in having to play the part of the Man from Snowy River, Turnbull may have forestalled the inevitable onset of batteries, the price of which was that he was snookered into committing to an alternative substantial renewable-energy-friendly project.

So significant was the original stunt by Musk that set off a train of events cornering Turnbull into offering counter-storage that Giles Parkinson declared:

Turnbull drives stake through heart of fossil fuel industry.

But then, just when you thought coal had been cremated for the last time, it is revived over the weekend with the work of Chris Uhlmann, the ABC’s political editor, who gained notoriety for his anti-renewable stance on South Australia last year.

In his latest piece on the ABC, Uhlmann forewarns that the closure of the Hazlewood power station (5% of the nation’s energy output) will lead to east coast blackouts and crises in the manufacturing sector.

Uhlmann salutes the language of the coal companies in predicting that an energy crisis will result from no new investment in “baseload” power, even though this is precisely what renewables plus storage actually amounts to. He then quotes a Hazelwood unit controller as his source to raise the bogie of intermitancy once again:

Intermittent renewable energy could not be relied on during days of peak demand.

But the most misleading part of his piece was to point to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s prediction that shortfalls in supply next summer can be attributed to the closure of coal power stations, rather than the fact that climate-change-induced hotter temperatures are driving up demand during this period – as they did in the summer just gone, when Hazelwood was operating.

Perhaps Uhlmann’s piece would not look like such an advertorial for the coal industry had it not appeared on the same day as Resources Minister Matt Canavan’s speculation that a new coal-fired plant could be built in Queensland that will be subsidised by the A$5 billion Northern Australia Infrastructure fund.

On the ABC’s Insiders, Canavan lamented that Queensland did not have a:

… baseload power station north of Rockhampton … We’ve got a lot of coal up here, the new clean-coal technologies are at an affordable price, reliable power and lower emission.

It seems that while South Australia is leading the progress on a renewables Kodak moment, Queensland, with plans to build a coal-fired power stations and the Queensland Labor government going to great lengths to support the gigantic Adani coal mine, at least two states are moving in completely opposite directions.

The long view: energy policy needs to stay firmly focused on the horizon. Mattinbgn/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

If you’ve been watching the news in recent days, you’ll know we have an energy crisis, partly due to a gas crisis, which in turn has triggered a political crisis.

That’s a lot of crises to handle at once, so lots of solutions are being put forward. But what do people and businesses actually need? Do they need more gas, or cheaper prices, or more investment certainty, or all or none of the above? How do we cut through to what is really important, rather than side details?

The first thing to note is that what people really care about is their energy costs, not energy prices. This might seem like a pedantic distinction, but if homes and businesses can be helped to waste less energy, then high prices can be offset by lower usage.

The second thing to note is that energy has become very confusing. A host of short- and long-term problems have developed over decades of policy failure, meaning that there is no single solution.

Take gas prices, which were indirectly responsible for South Australia’s blackouts last month. Last week, SA Premier Jay Weatherill responded by unveiling a A$550-million plan including a new state-owned gas power station, while Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull claimed to have secured a promise of secure domestic supply from gas producers.

Short-term thinking

It is crucial to keep the ultimate goals in focus, or else our short-term solutions could exacerbate long-term problems.

For electricity, we want to avoid blackouts and limit prices and overall costs. We need to do this in ways that allow us to meet our climate constraints, so we need solutions with zero or very low greenhouse emissions.

For gas, we need to ensure enough supply for local demand, at reasonable prices, and give large consumers the opportunity to negotiate contracts over reasonable time frames.

This means we need to allocate more of our gas to local consumers, because increasing overall gas production would just add to our long-term climate problems.

Peak gas and electricity prices are entangled. In our electricity markets, the most expensive generator needed to maintain supply in a given period sets the price for all the generators. So if an expensive gas generator sets a high price, all of the coal and renewable energy generators make windfall profits – at the consumer’s expense.

So either we need to ensure gas generators don’t set the price, or that they charge a reasonable price for the power they generate.

Quick fixes

Demand management and energy storage are short-term fixes for high peak prices. Paying some electricity or gas consumers to use less at peak times, commonly called “demand response”, frees up electricity or gas, so prices don’t increase as much.

Unfortunately, policymakers have failed to introduce effective mechanisms to encourage demand response, despite the recommendations of numerous policy reviews over the past two decades. This is a serious policy failure our politicians have not addressed. But it could be fixed quickly, with enough political will.

Energy storage, particularly batteries and gas storage, can be introduced quickly (within 100 days, if Tesla’s Elon Musk is to be believed). Storage “absorbs” excess energy at times of low demand, and releases it at times of shortage. This reduces the peak price by reducing dependence on high-priced generators or gas suppliers, as well as reducing the scope for other suppliers to exploit the shortage to raise prices.

The same thinking is behind Turnbull’s larger proposal to add new “pumped hydro” capacity to the Snowy Hydro scheme, although this would take years rather than weeks.

Thus South Australia’s plan, which features battery storage and changes to the rules for feeding power into the grid, addresses short-term problems. Turnbull’s pumped hydro solution is longer-term, although his handshake deal with gas suppliers may help in the short term.

The long view

When we consider the long term, we must recognise that we need to slash our carbon emissions. So coal is out, as is any overall expansion of natural gas production.

Luckily, we have other affordable long-term solutions. The International Energy Agency, as well as Australian analysts such as ClimateWorks and Beyond Zero Emissions, see energy efficiency improvement as the number-one strategy – and in many cases, it actually saves us money and helps to offset the impact of higher energy prices. Decades of cheap gas and electricity mean that Australian industry, business and households have enormous potential to improve energy efficiency, which would save on cost.

We can also switch from fossil gas to biogas, solar thermal and high-efficiency renewable electricity technologies such as heat pumps, micro-filtration, electrolysis and other options.

Renewable energy (not just electricity) can supply the rest of our needs. Much to the surprise of many policymakers, it is now cheaper than traditional options and involves much less investment risk. Costs are continuing to fall.

But we need to supplement renewable energy with energy storage and smart demand management to ensure reliable supply. That’s where options such as pumped hydro storage, batteries and heat-storage options such as molten salt come in.

This is why the crisis is more political than practical. The solutions are on offer. It will become much more straightforward if politicians free themselves from being trapped in the past and wanting to prop up powerful incumbent industries.

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. .

South Australia has the most wind energy in the country. Wind turbine image from www.shutterstock.com

The last couple of days have brought the differences between state and federal energy policy into stark contrast. South Australia has unveiled an energy plan in which the state takes a much greater role in the energy industry. The plan includes storage, a new gas plant and greater powers for the state over the National Electricity Market.

SA has the highest proportion of wind energy in Australia – and the federal government has consistently blamed this for the widely reported blackouts last year.

In a acrimonious joint press conference with South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill on Thursday, federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg reiterated that states are responsible for the stability of their electricity system. The federal government has cast doubt on the legality of the plan.

Is reliability a state responsibility?

The federal government has repeatedly claimed that the SA government can’t keep the lights on. More generally, it has implied that the states are responsible for electricity system stability.

Under the National Electricity Market (NEM) framework, these statements are somewhat misleading.

The SA electricity industry is entirely privatised. The NEM governance framework is run by national institutions under the Council of Australian Governments Energy Council, a forum of federal and state energy ministers. This framework is supposed to ensure the system reliably delivers electricity to all consumers.

System security and reliability are the responsibility of the Australian Energy Market Operator. Network investment is the responsibility of private network businesses, overseen by the Australian Energy Regulator.

This governance system leaves little space for the SA government to take action to ensure system security. On the contrary, the NEM was set up to remove direct government involvement in the electricity sector. This was because a market was considered more efficient to achieve the same service.

The federal government has blamed wind energy for SA’s reliability issues. But, even if wind is one factor among many, did the SA government exacerbate the risk of blackouts?

South Australia has actively encouraged co-existence of wind farms and farming activities in its planning legislation. Land use planning laws can have great influence on the uptake of large-scale renewable energy, as Victoria shows.

While state renewable targets have been blamed for uneven investment in renewable energy, the SA target of 50% by 2050 is not actually backed by a particular mechanism. Wind generators settled in South Australia because it has good wind resources and favourable planning laws.

They were financed under the federal Renewable Energy Target, but also by the ACT reverse auction schemes, which led to considerable investment in SA.

The review of the NEM, chaired by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, will consider how climate and energy policies can be aligned. As the policymaker for the NEM, the COAG Energy Council should be the responsible authority, not individual states, to resolve any mismatch.

Is South Australia breaking the rules?

Apart from public investment in storage and gas, SA’s energy plan aims to give the state energy minister “strong new powers to direct the national market in case of an electricity supply shortfall”. The federal energy minister has implied that some of the SA plans may be illegal and that the government will be seeking legal advice.

But is SA breaking any rules?

The governance arrangements for the NEM are based on an intergovernmental arrangement, which relies on federal-state cooperation. The Australian Constitution contains no clear powers to regulate for energy. This means that having both levels of government work together to overcome these constraints was necessary to set up and manage a national electricity system.

The intergovernmental agreement that sets up the NEM is the Australian Energy Market Agreement (AEMA). All governments – state, territory and federal – have signed this. The AEMA covers the setting up of the market institutions and legislation. Based on this document, all states have passed state legislation that contains the National Electricity Law.

The AEMA includes provisions for amending legislation. These mean that only the COAG Energy Council can amend energy market legislation. Whether the council would agree to SA ministers getting special powers is doubtful.

However, the agreement is political and not legal. Indeed, one clause states that “this agreement is not intended to give rise to legal obligations” for the state and federal signatories.

Where does this leave SA’s plan? It does not break the law, but, depending on how the actual legislation is drafted, it may well fail to pass COAG.

A dangerous development or much-needed leadership?

Due to the limits of the constitution, intergovernmental arrangements play an important role in Australian policy-making. An increasing number of agreements covers areas such as water, environment or trade.

As we’ve seen with debate about the Gonski deal on education funding, these agreements require trust between all parties and should not be lightly departed from.

SA’s frustration with the lack of COAG leadership and the blame game for the blackouts is understandable. The SA energy plan may galvanise energy market reform and lead to a better system. It can be interpreted as taking leadership in the energy-climate debate, where none has been forthcoming from the federal government or COAG.

On the other hand, a danger exists that other states decide to follow SA’s example. With a review of the market in process, one-sided action seems counterproductive.

An agreement on a timely and fair energy transition needs all parties at the table. It will need national coordination and a whole-of-system perspective. Finkel’s task of overhauling the electricity market may just have been made even harder.

Anne Kallies 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.

The federal government has announced a A$2 billion plan to expand the iconic Snowy Hydro scheme. It will carry out a feasibility study into the idea of adding “pumped hydro” storage capacity, which it says could power up to 500,000 homes.

Hydro is one of the oldest and most mature electricity generation technologies. And pumped hydro storage – in which water is pumped uphill for later use, rather than simply flowing downriver through a hydro power station – is the dominant form of energy storage globally.

But there are limitations to how much freshwater hydro can be accessed, so it’s worth looking at what alternate approaches are available. One promising prospect is to use seawater instead of rivers. This tactic could potentially help South Australia resolve its highly publicised energy problems.

Hydro basics

The principle behind conventional hydro power is straightforward: rainwater runoff feeds a river, which is dammed to create a large reservoir of water. This is then gradually released through pipes to a turbine at the foot of the dam, thus converting the gravitational potential energy into electricity. The water then flows on downriver.

Hydro power is fossil-free and also “dispatchable” – it can be turned on or off at will (provided there is water in the dam). This gives it a significant advantage over wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, which produce power only when the wind blows or the sun shines.

Hydro thus makes an ideal partner for wind and solar PV, as it can adjust its output in response to changes in output from these non-dispatchable renewables.

Pump it up

Pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) is very similar to conventional hydro power but differs in that rather than being a generator, it’s more accurate to describe it as a battery.

Normally done at smaller scales than conventional hydro, PHES uses excess electricity from the grid (such as during periods of low demand and/or high generation) to pump water uphill from a lower reservoir to a higher one.

Later, this water is released back downhill through the turbine, returning the electricity to the grid when it is most needed – typically during the evening peak. It is this approach that is being considered in the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project.

Pumped hydro storage thus helps to “smooth out” peaks in demand by effectively transferring excess electricity from periods of low demand to periods of high demand. It has a “round trip” efficiency of ~80%, which is comparable to that of batteries.

PHES is the most common form of grid-connected energy storage in the world, accounting for around 97% of the total. It is often built in partnership with “baseload” power generators such as coal and nuclear plants, to help them vary their output to cope with peaks and troughs in demand.

Australia already has three PHES facilities – at Tumut 3 in the Snowy Hydro Scheme, at Shoalhaven in New South Wales, and at Wivenhoe Dam on the Brisbane River in Queensland.

South Australia is arguably the place that is most in need of grid-scale energy storage. Unfortunately, South Australia lacks the rainfall, rivers and mountains to run a conventional hydro system, with or without storage.

However, there is a way to use this technology without rivers and mountains: by using the ocean as the lower reservoir, and building an artificial upper one.

The upper reservoir doesn’t need a river to feed it fresh water; it just needs to be significantly higher than the ocean (that is, there should be a steep slope on or near the coastline, up which the seawater can be pumped). Using seawater also avoids the need to divert freshwater resources into a large reservoir, where a significant amount would be lost through evaporation.

Testing the technology

So far, only one seawater PHES installation has been built anywhere in the world – on the island of Okinawa, Japan. It came online in 1999 and was decommissioned in 2016, after Okinawa’s power requirements changed. Seventeen years for a first-of-its-kind project is a significant success. However, the Okinawa project was combined with a coal-fired power station, so linking this technology with intermittent renewables has never been trialled anywhere.

So could this technology help to ease South Australia’s energy crisis? The Melbourne Energy Institute (MEI) report on Pumped Hydro Opportunities identifies several potential seawater PHES locations in South Australia. This includes a very promising site at the northern end of the Spencer Gulf, with significant elevation close to the coast and close to high-capacity transmission lines.

The Department of Defence manages this land, and discussions are ongoing as to how the project might be designed to not interfere with the department’s operations on the site. A win–win development is the primary design aim.

The MEI study suggests that PHES could be delivered at around A$250 per kWh of storage. This compares well with utility-scale lithium ion battery storage, which currently costs of the order of A$800 per kWh, although recent annoucements on Twitter from Elon Musk suggest this might be coming down towards A$500 per kWh.

The Spencer Gulf site has the potential to provide at least 100 megawatts of dispatchable generation, effectively making the wind and solar generation in South Australia significantly more reliable.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) will help fund a feasibility study into the technology, working with partners Energy Australia, Arup and MEI. If the facility is ultimately built, it could become a key element in SA’s bid to avoid future power blackouts.

Roger Dargaville works with the consortium of EnergyAustralia and Arup that have been funded by ARENA to conduct the PHES feasibility study. He has previously received funding from ARENA to undertake energy system modelling studies.

An emissions cap could save Australians up to A$500 each year in fuel costs. Petrol image from www.shutterstock.com

The cheapest way for Australia to cut greenhouse gas emissions is to put a cap on car emissions. It would be so cheap, in fact, that it will save drivers money.

According to analysis from ClimateWorks, the toughest proposed standard would help Australia achieve about 6% of its 2030 emission reduction target, and save drivers up to A$500 each year on fuel.

The federal government is looking at policy options to meet Australia’s 2030 emissions target of 26-28% below 2005 levels. Last year it established a ministerial forum to look at vehicle emissions and released a draft Regulation Impact Statement for light vehicles (cars, SUVs, vans and utilities) in December.

There is no reason for the government to delay putting the most stringent emissions standard on cars.

Cars getting cleaner, but not in Australia

Australia currently does not have carbon dioxide emission standards on light vehicles. CO₂ standards work by improving the overall efficiency of the vehicle (the amount of CO₂ emitted per kilometre). These are different from fuel quality standards, which regulate the quality of fuels used by vehicles, and noxious emissions standards, which monitor a car’s emissions of noxious gases and particulates.

Currently, CO₂ emission standards cover over 80% of the global light automotive market. The lack of standards here means that Australia’s cars are less efficient than in many other countries, and this gap is set to widen.

In 2015, the average efficiency of new cars sold in Australia (in grams of CO₂ emitted per km) was 184g per km. In the European Union, the average efficiency of new cars was 120g per km for passenger vehicles and 168g per km for light commercial vehicles (such as vans used as couriers). In the United States – the spiritual home of the gas-guzzler – it is 183g per km and set to improve to 105g per km in 2025.

Australia’s cars account for about 10% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, which are set to grow to 2030 if the market is left to its own devices.

Helping meet Australia’s climate target

In our submission to the draft Regulation Impact Statement, we confirmed that if the most stringent proposed target (105g per km) were introduced as proposed from 2020 to 2025, it would deliver 6% of Australia’s 2030 emissions reduction target. This would save A$49 per tonne of CO₂. Although there would be some costs in introducing the scheme, it would save A$13.9 billion by 2040 overall.

This saves an extra additional 41 million tonnes of CO₂ by 2030, 140 million tonnes by 2040, and an extra A$8.1 billion overall by 2040 compared with the least stringent proposed target (135g per km by 2025).

However, we found that a two-year delay would add an extra 18 million tonnes of CO₂ to the atmosphere, or 2% of the government’s 2030 carbon budget.

Any reductions not achieved in vehicle emissions will need to be made up in other sectors, or purchased through international carbon permits, most likely at a higher cost.

Savings on fuel and health

The most stringent target delivers A$27.5 billion in total fuel savings by 2040, A$16.7 billion more than the least stringent standard.

The draft regulations show that for an average car this is equal to a saving of A$197-295 a year for a driver doing 15,000km per year, and A$328-493 for a driver doing 25,000km per year.

To put this in context, based on 2012 household energy costs data, this would cut household energy costs by up to 10%, with even greater savings for low-income households.

But a two-year delay of the most stringent standard would also result in new car owners paying an extra A$4.9 billion in fuel costs by 2030, and an extra A$8.3 billion to 2040.

The reduction in fuel use will also potentially reduce air pollution, resulting in better health outcomes.

The most stringent standard will save deliver 2.6 times as much fuel as the least stringent standard, so should reduce health costs by a similar proportion. However, the introduction of emissions standards would need to occur in a way that does not increase noxious emissions such as nitrogen oxides.

No reason to delay

Given the enormous benefit of a more stringent standard, the government should also investigate an even more ambitious target.

Our research shows a standard of 95g per km by 2025 will deliver even greater benefits and is technically feasible based on achievements in other markets. The EU is aiming for this level by 2020.

While we also support improving fuel quality to reduce noxious emissions, research by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) shows that we do not need to improve Australia’s fuel quality standards before the introduction of standards to improve the overall efficiency of the vehicle.

Similarly, despite discrepancies between on-road and in-lab performance of vehicles as seen in the Volkswagen emissions scandal, a standard will still provide significant savings to consumers and the environment.

Standards alone are not the silver bullet. We’ll need a range of other measures to support emissions standards on cars to help improve efficiency and build consumer awareness of fuel-efficient vehicles.

With Australian car manufacturing due to cease by the end of 2017, it is an ideal time to ensure that new cars bought into Australia are the most efficient available. This will set us on the path towards lower vehicle emissions while reducing costs for motorists and improving health.

ClimateWorks is funded by philanthropy through The Myer Foundation with Monash University. ClimateWorks Australia also periodically conducts research with funding from Federal, State and local governments and from private companies; all our work is focused on supporting strong emissions reductions in Australia. The author has no other relevant affiliations

ClimateWorks is funded by philanthropy through The Myer Foundation with Monash University. ClimateWorks Australia also periodically conducts research with funding from Federal, State and local governments and from private companies; all our work is focused on supporting strong emissions reductions in Australia. The author has no other relevant affiliations.

The Great Barrier Reef has already been badly damaged by global warming during three extreme heatwaves, in 1998, 2002 and 2016. A new bleaching event is under way now.

As shown in a study published in Nature today, climate change is not some distant future threat. It has already degraded large tracts of the Great Barrier Reef over the past two decades.

The extreme marine heatwave in 2016 killed two-thirds of the corals along a 700km stretch of the northern Great Barrier Reef, from Port Douglas to Papua New Guinea. It was a game-changer for the reef and for how we manage it.

Our study shows that we cannot climate-proof coral reefs by improving water quality or reducing fishing pressure. Reefs in clear water were damaged as much as muddy ones, and the hot water didn’t stop at the boundaries of no-fishing zones. There is nowhere to hide from global warming. The process of replacement of dead corals in the northern third of the reef will take at least 10-15 years for the fastest-growing species.

The Great Barrier Reef is internationally recognised as a World Heritage Area. In 2015 UNESCO, the world body with oversight of World Heritage Areas, considered listing the reef as a site “in danger” in light of declines in its health.

Australia’s response falling short

In response to concerns from UNESCO, Australia devised a plan, called the Reef 2050 Long-term Sustainability Plan. Its ultimate goal is to improve the “Outstanding Universal Value” of the reef: the attributes of the Great Barrier Reef that led to its inscription as a World Heritage Area in 1981.

We have written an independent analysis, delivered to UNESCO, which concludes that to date the implementation of the plan is far too slow and has not been adequately funded to prevent further degradation and loss of the reef’s values. A major shortcoming of the plan is that it virtually ignores the greatest current impact on the Great Barrier Reef: human-caused climate change.

The unprecedented loss of corals in 2016 has substantially diminished the condition of the World Heritage Area, reducing its biodiversity and aesthetic values. Key ecological processes are under threat, such as providing habitat, calcification (the formation of corals’ reef-building stony skeletons) and predation (creatures eating and being eaten by corals). Global warming means that Australia’s aim of ensuring the Great Barrier Reef’s values improve every decade between now and 2050 is no longer attainable for at least the next two decades.

What needs to change

Our report makes 27 recommendations for getting the Reef 2050 Plan back on track. The following are critical:

• Address climate change and reduce emissions, both nationally and globally. The current lack of action on climate is a major policy failure for the Great Barrier Reef. Local action on water quality (the focus of the Reef 2050 Plan) does not prevent bleaching, or “buy time” for future action on emissions. Importantly, though, it does contribute to the recovery of coral reefs after major bleaching.

• Reduce run-off of sediment, nutrients and pollutants from our towns and farms. To date the progress towards achieving the water quality targets and uptake of best management practice by farmers is very poor. Improving water quality can help recovery of corals, even if it doesn’t prevent mortality during extreme heatwaves.

• Provide adequate funding for reaching net zero carbon emissions, for achieving the Reef 2050 Plan targets for improved water quality, and limiting other direct pressures on the reef.

At this stage, we do not recommend that the reef be listed as “in danger”. But if we see more die-backs of corals in the next few years, little if any action on emissions and inadequate progress on water quality, then an “in danger” listing in 2020, when UNESCO will reconsider the Great Barrier Reef’s status, seems inevitable.

This article was co-authored by Diane Tarte, co-director of Marine Ecosystem Policy Advisors Pty Ltd. She was a co-author of the independent report to UNESCO on the Great Barrier Reef.

Terry Hughes receives competitive research funding from the Australian Research Council. He is the lead author on today’s Nature paper on recurrent coral bleaching, and a co-author on the independent report to UNESCO on the Reef 2050 Plan.

Barry Hart 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 his position as Emeritus Professor, Monash University .

Karen Hussey 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 her position as Professor and Deputy Director at the Global Change Institute, University of Queensland.

In the third in my series on the crisis besetting the National Electricity Market (NEM) in eastern Australia ( see Part 1 & Part 2), I look at some evidence for how the market itself has played a role and specifically market power issues.

The recent troubles in our electricity market are well documented. As described in my earlier pieces in this series, two elements have focused the attention of our political masters and industry groups.

The first is the question of security, highlighted most dramatically by recent “black outs” in South Australia.

The second is the question of price, with both wholesale and contract market prices having risen dramatically across most regions in recent times but nowhere quite as dramatically as in Queensland (note that retail prices have also been rising as highlighted by the recent Grattan report).

While a tightening of the demand-supply balance in Queensland in response to an additional ~800 megawatt load from the massive CSG field developments and LNG export processing facilities partly explains the rise in wholesale or pool prices there, it is far from the full explanation.

Lurking in the details are issues to do with the very functioning of the market, and the exercise of market power by large generators who have, and continue to, exploit monopoly rents.

As described in the earlier posts, the NEM market is designed to signal changes in the balance of demand and supply via spot prices. But how much the spot prices respond is very dependant on the level of competition.

Recent experience of market participants flouting the spirit of the rules shines a light on competition issues and highlights a rather obvious, if somewhat trite, reality. That is, the benefits of competitive markets can only flow if markets are competitive.

The exercise of market power has been a perennial issue in the NEM. It is the role of the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) to set the rules that allow for safe operation of the electricity network, and efficient operation of the market. It is the job of the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) to do the enforcing, while AEMO operates the market.

The AEMC periodically adjusts rules so as to minimise the impact of perceived or real anti-competitive behaviour. It did so most recently in December 2015 with the Bidding in Good Faith rule amendment because, to quote:

… The Commission considers that the current rules do not set adequate boundaries on the ability of some participants to influence price outcomes to the detriment of others. This is not reflective of an efficient market.

The statement “ability … to influence price outcomes” is key. It expresses AEMC’s concern that some participants have sufficient market power to extract so-called monopoly rents.

To understand why the particular rule amendment was introduced, we need to go back to the two important intervals on which the market operates, the dispatch interval and the trading interval.

The dispatch interval is where the physics of the power system meets the economics of the market.

The necessity to balance generation and demand in real time, requires a dispatch pool with an objective of serving the demand at minimum system-cost. Functionally, our energy market operates by pooling offers from generators and allocating dispatch for each five minute interval in order of increasing offer price.

A generator offer specifies the price at which a given quantity of electricity will be supplied into a given trading interval, if needed. The dispatch price is set by the last (highest-price) offer needed to meet the dispatch interval demand. All generation dispatched receives the same dispatch price, regardless of the offer price. Offers at prices above the dispatch price are not needed and so receive nought.

The theory is that, in a perfectly competitive energy-only market, generators will offer the majority of their capacity at their short run marginal cost, like that shown below for Victorian generators.

Short run marginal cost of Victorian generators, stacked from left to right in merit order of increasing marginal cost. The x-axis shows the cumulative nameplate capacity of the lowest cost power plants in megawatts. Because renewables such as wind have zero fuel cost they stack on the left side of the merit curve. Contrawise, gas and diesel generators stack on the right. Image by Dylan McConnell.

In practice, individual generators apportion their capacity into a range of different price bands. They are then allowed to rebid the capacity into different price bands at short notice as part of the mechanism for making rapid adjustments to unforeseen circumstances that periodically arise in the normal course of events. AEMC’s Bidding in Good Faith rule amendment requires a justification for any late rebidding within 15 minutes of the start of the relevant dispatch interval.

As a deregulated market, optimal bidding is insured primarily by the discipline of competitive forces. It goes without saying, that without adequate competition, there can be no such insurance.

The other key interval is the half-hour trading interval or settlement period, across which dispatch prices are averaged to obtain a settlement or spot price, so called because it is the period on which financial payments are settled.

Since demand normally varies only slightly across a given half hour trading interval there should be little difference in the dispatch prices across the six corresponding dispatch intervals and the settlement price, especially when averaged over many trading intervals. In an efficient market with generators offering the bulk of their capacity at near their short run cost, this trading interval averaging should not materially affect the financial outcomes of the market. A necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, signal of the efficient operation of our market will be independence of dispatch prices or revenues on dispatch interval.

As shown below, January 2016 provides an illustrative case. It shows the dispatch prices for each dispatch interval averaged across the month. The narrow range of variation across each of the four regional markets that define the mainland part of the NEM, meets the expectation of a well-behaved market.

Average prices for each of the 5 minute dispatch intervals that make up the half hour settlement price for January, 2016. Prices are relatively constant across all intervals as expected in a well-behaved market, trading in an interval of about $10-15 per megawatt hour, for all four regional markets that define the mainland part of the NEM. Note the period is the month following the Bidding in Good Faith rule amendment by the AEMC in December 2015, The good behaviour of the QLD1 market contrasts strongly with the same periods in the previous and following years as shown in the following diagrams.

There is no compelling theoretical or practical reason for the exercise of a half-hour trading interval, it being something of a historical artefact. However many of the operators of our large generators seem to love it (as witnessed by submissions to a proposed rule change that would dispense the trading interval).

Why so? The cynic would say because the current arrangements have afforded a convenient guise to engage in profiteering. For example, by rebidding capacity into higher price bands late in a trading interval, settlement prices can be raised, materially distorting the market because other participants do not have time enough to respond. While such a creative compliance would in theory only impact un-contracted customers trading directly on the wholesale market, any resulting price increase will eventually pass through to the contract markets thereby affecting all customers.

Does it happen? Well the AEMC certainly thought so, enough at least to amend the Bidding in Good Faith Rule in December 2015.

The AEMC was particularly concerned that such practices were impacting market outcomes in Queensland (QLD1). The smoking gun lies deeply buried in the detils of the offers and rebids. But the pointers are quite apparent, as shown in the figure below which covers the month of January in 2015, prior to the AEMC’s rule amendment. Rather than average price, it shows the wholesale revenue by the 5-minute dispatch interval (the two are strongly coupled and their graphs are identical twins). The striking feature is the asymmetry in QLD1 revenue distribution, increasing very substantially across the last two dispatch intervals, compared with the earlier intervals. A crude estimate of the excess revenue generated by the anomalous, or inefficient, market behaviour is given by the sum of the differences between the dispatch interval prices and the lowest average dispatch interval price for the period. As noted on the right, in QLD1 it amounted to some 30% of total market value, or ~ $200 million for the month.

Notional wholesale markets revenues for 5 minute dispatch intervals for January, 2015. The figures on the right correspond to the total market revenue for the month, and (marked with a +) the anomalous revenue given by the sum of the differences between the dispatch prices and the lowest average dispatch price. The latter is a guide to distortion that can be attributed to non-competitive market forces - about $200 million, or 30%, for QLD1 in this case.

Given the magnitude of the anomaly the AEMC’s interest in a rule change is hardly surprising. To quote from their rule determination:

… the price volatility that arises from deliberately late rebidding … [is] … estimated to have added around eight dollars per megawatt hour to the price of caps in Queensland in the final quarter of 2014, and around seven dollars per megawatt hour in the first quarter of 2015. Across the market, this represents additional expenditure of approximately $170 million.

The AEMC noted also that

… While it is not guaranteed that the changes to the rules will put an immediate stop to the conduct of concern, they are a proportionate response to the issue, and ought to make it easier for the AER compared to the current arrangements to take enforcement action in respect of deliberately late rebidding. At the same time, they should not prevent rebidding in legitimate pursuit of commercial interests.

Did it do so? The AEMC and AER may well have been well pleased to see the initial response to its new rule determination in data such as for January 2016 shown above. However I suspect they will be concerned by the figure below, for January 2017. Essentially it is the mirror image of the January 2015 scenario, seemingly implying QLD1 generators are now initially bidding in capacity into elevated price bands in the early dispatch intervals. Conceivably, they may be rebidd capacity down to more normal values later in the trading interval, though that is moot since whatever the strategy it is achieving an identical outcome to 2015. Even if entirely within the rules, it would seem not in the spirit. The substantive result would appear to be situation normal in Queensland, with a $225 million monopoly rent extraction at the expense of electricity customers for this past January accompanying unprecedented spot price rises.

Notional wholesale markets revenues for 5 minute dispatch intervals for January, 2017. It is notable that it is almost the mirror image of January 2015 shown above, an example of creative compliance by QLD1 generators following AMEC’s Bidding in Good Faith rule amendment of December 2015. Note also the almost doubling of January revenues since 2015.

There is such a lot to be said about this, and hopefully it will be. It is but one, easily illustrated example of the exercise of market power. There are others, as for example described in the notes below. From the perspective of this discussion it is illustrative of significant deficiencies in the current operation of the NEM. Those deficiencies are exacerbating our current energy crisis. A concentration of market power is adding materially to costs especially, but not only, in Queensland.

It is worth noting that the half-hour settlement period is currently under review by AEMC and will likely be scrapped against the wishes of most established operators, or so it would seem judging from their submissions to the review. (As Dylan McConnell has shown, the current rules also seriously disadvantage the economics of a number of emerging technologies such as battery storage, hindering innovation that would serve much needed competitive discipline into the market.)

Whatever is decided by AEMC, the underlying issue of market power cannot be addressed by tinkering with the rules. And it is only getting worse as old power stations such as Northern in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria are closed. In the wake of such closures lies an even more concentrated market. For example, following closure of Northern, AGL’s proportion of registered capacity in South Australia increased 4% points, from 35% to 39%, improving its relative market power by more than 10%.

Percentage of registered generation capacity by participant in South Australia (top) and Victoria (bottom), both before and after the closure of the Northern (NPS) and Hazelwood (HPS) Power Stations, respectively. Note that Hazelwood is still operational at the time of writing, but is scheduled to close at end of this month (March, 2017). In both instances AGL’s relative market power has, or will be, substantially improved by these closures, by over 10% in relative market power terms. This increases the likelihood of AGL being a necessary or pivotal supplier, as it’s was in July 7th in the first of the South Australian energy crises of last year as described briefly in note [1]. Only the biggest seven participants in each state are shown.

With AGL in a position of great market power following the closure of Northern, it played its hand ruthlessly across July 2016, during the first of the South Australian energy crises as summarised here and described in more detail here (see Note [1]). With the closure of Hazelwood in a few weeks, AGL will again be the beneficiary of increased market share in Victoria, to a similar margin as it was in South Australia. That will increase the likelihood of AGL being a necessary or pivotal supplier in future high demand events in Victoria. How AGL responds will be a key to how steeply prices rise in Victoria and neighbouring states.

Like with any industry, our electricity generators have shown adeptness at exploiting the opportunities availed by the market rules. In so doing they have contributed to the price outcomes that are helping provoke our current energy crisis. One could only wish they turned such “innovation” to helping drive our energy system to a place we need it to be, that is secure, affordable and with much, much lower emissions. To be so guided, our market rules will have to be radically reshaped to be more aligned to the national interest, explicitly including all three elements of our energy trilemma, and ensuring adequate levels of competition allow the benefits of the deregulated market flow to all participants.

Sadly, as our energy crisis has unfolded, partly in response to the need to address its emissions intensity, emissions have begun to rise again. Just by how much we do not know, as I will discuss in the next piece in this series.

Notes

[1] In our analysis of the July 7th event in South Australia, we analysed the extent to which AGL bid capacity to high price bands (typically the market cap price) for the Torrens Island A Power Station. We also looked at the proportion of capacity that was available below and above $300/MWh. In aggregate, Torrens Island A offered its entire capacity to the market at less than $300/MWh 96.5% of time in 2015. For the remaining 3.5% of the year (or about 300 hours) some capacity was pushed into high price bands. Our analysis shows a correlation between periods of high scheduled demand and Torrens Island A’s bidding of capacity into high price bands. The proportion of time when some capacity was priced above $300/MWh is clearly skewed to times of high scheduled demand. In 2015, for the top 10% of scheduled demand periods, the amount of time some capacity was bid into these high price bands was 16.7%. For the top 1% of scheduled demand periods it increased to 35%. On July 7th 2016, it is clear is that Torrens Island had bid an unusually high volume of capacity at the market price cap, at a time it was needed to ensure supply as a pivotal supplier, consistent with exercising market power. While there is nothing in the rules to prevent this, the lack of appropriate competitive discipline means significant market distortion accumulated.

Disclosure

Mike Sandiford receives funding from ANLEC and the ARC.

Early in the morning and late in the evening is when shorebirds escape disturbance on the beaches on which their survival depends. Arnuchulo

This is the ninth article in our Contested Spaces series. These pieces look at the conflicting uses, expectations and norms that people bring to public spaces, the clashes that result and how we can resolve these.

There’s no doubt about it, Australians love the beach. And why not? Being outdoors makes us happy, and all beaches are public places in Australia.

Head to a beach like Bondi on Christmas Day and you’ll share that space with more than 40,000 people. But we aren’t just jostling with each other for coveted beach space. Scuttling, waddling, hopping or flying away from beachgoers all around Australia are crabs, shorebirds, baby turtles, crocodiles, fairy penguins and even dingoes.

Beaches are home to an incredible array of animals, and sharing this busy space with people is critical to their survival. But, if we find it hard to share our beaches with each other, how can we possibly find space for nature on our beaches?

Beach birds

Here’s a classic example of how hard it is to share our beaches with nature. Head to a busy beach at dawn, before the crowds arrive, and you will most likely see a number of small birds darting about.

You may recognise them from the short movie Piper – they are shorebirds. As the day progresses, swimmers, kite surfers, dog walkers, horse riders, 4x4s and children descend upon the beach en masse, unwittingly disturbing the shorebirds.

We share beaches with an extraordinary array of life, including many shorebirds.

Unlike seabirds, shorebirds do not spend their life at sea. Instead, they specialise on the beach: foraging for their invertebrate prey, avoiding waves, or resting.

However, shorebird numbers in Australia are declining very rapidly. Several species are officially listed as nationally threatened, such as the critically endangered Eastern Curlew.

There are few places you can let your dog run for as long and as far as it pleases, which is one of the reasons beaches appeal to dog owners. But this disturbance results in heavy costs to the birds as they expend energy taking flight and cannot return to favourable feeding areas. Repeated disturbance can cause temporary or permanent abandonment of suitable habitat.

The world’s largest shorebirds, Eastern Curlews are critically endangered – and Australia is home to about 75% of them over summer. Donald Hobern/flickr, CC BY

The fascinating thing about many of these shorebirds is that they are migratory. Beachgoers in Korea, China, Indonesia or New Zealand could observe the same individual bird that we have seen in Australia.

Yet these journeys come at a cost. Shorebirds must undertake gruelling flights of up to 16,000 kilometres twice a year to get from their breeding grounds in Siberia and Alaska to their feeding grounds in Australia and New Zealand. In their pursuit of an endless summer, they arrive in Australia severely weakened by their travels. They must almost double their body weight before they can migrate again.

And these birds must contend with significant daily disruption on their feeding grounds. A recent study in Queensland found an average of 174 people and 72 dogs were present at any one time on the foreshore of Moreton Bay, along Brisbane’s coastline. And 84% of dogs were off the leash – an off-leash dog was sighted every 700 metres – in potential contravention of regulations on dog control.

Managing the menagerie

One conservation approach is to set up nature reserves. This involves trying to keep people out of large areas of the coastal zone to provide a home for nature. Yet this rarely works in practice on beaches, where there are so many overlapping jurisdictions (for example, councils often don’t control the lower areas of the intertidal zone) that protection is rarely joined up.

The beach-nesting Hooded Plover is unique to Australia where it is listed as vulnerable (and critically endangered in NSW). Francesco Veronesi/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Benjamint444/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

However, our work at the University of Queensland shows we don’t need conservation reserves in which people are kept out. Quite the reverse. We should be much bolder in opening up areas that are specifically designated as dog off-leash zones, in places where demand for recreation is high.

In the case of Moreton Bay, 97% of foraging migratory shorebirds could be protected from disturbance simply by designating five areas as off-leash recreation zones. Currently, dogs must be kept under close control throughout the intertidal areas of Moreton Bay.

By zoning our beaches carefully, the science tells us that the most intense recreational activities can be located away from critical areas for nature. And there’s no reason why this logic couldn’t be extended to creating peaceful zones for beach users who prefer a quiet day out.

By approaching the problem scientifically, we can meet recreational demand as well as protect nature. Proper enforcement of the boundaries between zones is needed. Such enforcement is effective when carried out in the right places at the right time.

We believe that keeping people and their dogs off beaches to protect nature is neither desirable nor effective. It sends totally the wrong message – successful conservation is about living alongside nature, not separating ourselves from it.

Conservationists and recreationists should be natural allies, both working to safeguard our beautiful coasts. The key is to find ways that people and nature can co-exist on beaches.

You can find other pieces published in the series here.

Madeleine Stigner received funding for the work referred to in this article from Birds Queensland and the Queensland Wader Study Group Nigel Roberts Student Research Fund.

Kiran Dhanjal-Adams received funding for the work referred to in this article from the Centre of Excellence in Environmental Decisions, the Australian Research Council, Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, the Commonwealth Department of the Environment, the Queensland Wader Study Group, the Port of Brisbane Pty Ltd, the Goodman Foundation and Birdlife Australia’s Stuart Leslie Award.

Richard Fuller received funding for the work referred to in this article from the National Environmental Science Programme's Threatened Species Recovery Hub, the Australian Research Council, Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, the Commonwealth Department of the Environment, the Queensland Wader Study Group, the Port of Brisbane Pty Ltd, the Goodman Foundation and Birdlife Australia’s Stuart Leslie Award.

South Australia’s government has unveiled its keenly anticipated new energy plan, with the aim of making itself more self-sufficient.

Against the backdrop of repeated crises such as the blackouts of last month and September last year, and a dramatic offer from Tesla founder Elon Musk to fix the state’s energy security problems, the new plan proposes a range of measures to fix what Premier Jay Weatherill has described as the “failures” of national electricity regulation.

Battery storage

First, as almost universally anticipated, there will be a tender for 100 megawatts of battery storage, to be funded from a A$150 million Renewable Technology Fund. The plan document says this project will “modernise South Australia’s energy grid and begin the transformation to the next generation of renewable-energy storage technologies”.

Neither the National Electricity Market rules nor any other federal policy provides any specific mechanism to encourage battery installation. Nor do the existing regulations allow battery operators to be rewarded for other services they could provide, including responding rapidly to price spikes or to sudden drops in voltage on the grid.

Large battery installations, if appropriately configured, would be capable of providing large injections of energy to the grid over short periods, as a way to offset extreme volatility. Both SA and Queensland have been plagued by such volatility in recent months, causing a rash of short-term price spikes indicative of markets without enough competition.

The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) is currently considering a Rule change, termed the 30 minute/5 minute trading interval change, proposed by a large electrolytic zinc smelter in Townsville. The change is ferociously opposed by established generators, but supported by almost everyone else. If and when the AEMC ever gets around to approving the rule change, large battery installations would be able to compete directly with generators, thereby both gaining a new source of revenue and helping to keep wholesale prices within reasonable limits.

Taking back control

The second component of the plan is to introduce legislation that would allow the state government to override the NEM’s market dispatch process for generation in the event of an emergency such as the demand peaks that triggered last month’s blackouts.

This is an obvious response to what is widely seen, at least in SA, as the reluctance of the federal regulator to use its powers to suspend the market. Many observers consider that such reluctance was most evident in the morning of the statewide blackout last September, and believe that earlier intervention could have prevented it, despite the massive storm damage to the state’s transmission infrastructure.

The new proposal could be interpreted as a challenge to the federal government over who controls SA’s electricity.

Energy security

Third, the plan will require all new generators with more than 5MW of capacity to demonstrate how they will contribute to the state’s energy security, by providing what are called ancillary services, such as frequency control, so-called inertia, or short-term storage. This is another clear statement that the state government believes the NEM rules, which establish markets for some frequency control services but not the other services mentioned above, fail to offer the state enough of a guarantee of reliable power supply.

Build a new gas plant

The government plans to become a power station owner, 20 years after the Liberal state government sold off the last publicly owned plant, by building a new open cycle (peaking) gas turbine plant. This decision is most obviously a reaction to the load-shedding blackout amid last month’s heatwave, when the operators of the Pelican Point gas power station were either unable or unwilling to increase output. Had they done so, load shedding could have been avoided.

At A$360 million, this seems a rather expensive way to avoid another load-shedding blackout, presumably justified on the basis of avoided political cost. It could be seen as a missed opportunity to provide more support for a far more innovative (though well proven in other countries) project to integrate solar thermal generation, gas generation and molten salt storage.

Solar thermal generation may gain support from the tender for new generation to supply the government’s own electricity requirements, and possibly some from the Renewable Technology Fund, but that remains to be seen.

Energy security target

Finally, the government will introduce a requirement, called an energy security target, requiring electricity retailers to source a minimum percentage of their wholesale requirements from local generators, rather than from Victorian coal-fired stations.

This will provide a guaranteed amount of revenue to local generators, thus reducing dependence on supply through the interconnectors with Victoria, with their associated security risks.

In a direct, though entirely unsurprising confrontation with the Commonwealth, the plan document states that “South Australia’s energy security target will transition to an EIS or Lower Emissions Target (LET) if or when national policy changes in the future”.

The wider context

In the policy document, Weatherill writes that the NEM is “failing South Australia and the nation”. Taken together, the various elements of the plan can be read as a list of how exactly the SA government considers it to be failing, and what powers the state proposes to assume in order to get it fixed.

Although the plan’s objectives are not stated explicitly, it is clear that they are threefold, and seen of equal priority:

• suppress retail price rises by introducing more competition into the wholesale market

• enhance the physical security of electricity supply

• encourage renewable generation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

These priorities neatly match the three components of what the preliminary report of the forthcoming Finkel Review calls the “energy trilemma”, which is the need to “simultaneously provide a high level of energy security and reliability, universal access to affordable energy services, and reduced emissions.”

With the review’s final version set to be delivered to the Commonwealth government in the coming months, it remains to be seen whether federal energy policy will become similarly proactive in the future.

Hugh Saddler is a member of the Board of the Climate Institute.

The keenly awaited new energy policy unveiled today by South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill features a range of headline-grabbing items, such as a plan to spend A$150 million on a 100-megawatt battery storage facility to help stave off the danger of future blackouts.

On page 7 of the policy document, Weatherill explains part of his underlying rationale:

The national market is now widely considered to be failing and in need of urgent reform. The ability of governments to influence the industry requires cooperation within and across state borders and at a Federal level – cooperation that needs to transcend politics and self-interest.

Noble words, but the new policy doesn’t “transcend politics and self-interest”. Quite the contrary – it is a unilateral move by a state government understandably keen to safeguard itself after suffering vicious criticism at a federal level.

There are rules for how SA and the east coast states that make up the National Electricity Market (NEM) are supposed to behave, yet member states seem to be able to flaunt them, systematically undermining the NEM along the way.

Rightly or wrongly, the NEM does not account for schemes such as renewable energy targets or solar feed-in tariffs. This means that when states pursue them, they can distort the market in the process.

There is conjecture about how much blame the Weatherill government should shoulder for the reliability issues that have beset SA’s electricity network. Either way, the decision has been made to fix it with yet more unilateral state government intervention in what is supposed to be a federated electricity market.

As a result, the new policy is likely to cause major headaches for the NEM and its operators. The announcement includes plans to give the state’s energy minister Tom Koutsantonis the power to override the NEM’s operating rules, allowing him to order generators to supply extra power when he deems it necessary.

This might help avert another South Australian blackout, but it will also undermine the role of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which is responsible for managing the supply of electricity within the NEM. I will be fascinated to see how the SA government deals with the complex issue of what price they will pay for such power.

If the NEM is experiencing a peak in demand and South Australia is facing a shortage, will the South Australian Minister be able to override AEMO and demand private power generators in SA deliver power at a price determined by the minister? Or will the price be the one dictated at that moment by the market?

It is unlikely that the predominantly Labor-run states that now constitute the NEM will allow any adverse action against South Australia. In fact, the SA Parliament is the body through which rules of the NEM are legislated, so it will be nigh-on impossible to toss SA out of the NEM, lest the whole house of cards collapses.

Going it alone

Two other interesting aspects from the South Australian “energy intervention” is the construction of a new A$360 million gas-fired power plant, courtesy of SA taxpayers, and the A$150 million battery bank.

Presumably the SA government would like this new power plant to be able to sell electricity into the NEM, but to reserve the right to commandeer its output when circumstances dictate. It is not at all clear that the NEM rules allow this.

Consider the circumstances during last month’s heatwave, when both SA and New South Wales were facing power shortages. Under SA’s proposed new rules, NSW would be on its own (unless it develops a similar policy of its own). Hardly an example of cooperation.

The same issue will apply to the battery bank. Will it only be on standby for power shortages in SA, or will it be able to discharge into the NEM to take advantages of peak pricing? Could this result in SA finding its batteries empty when the wind stops blowing?

The SA government is correct to point out the deficiencies in the NEM, and even perhaps to claim that it is failing the nation. But an interstate scheme cannot be fixed by the unilateral actions of one state government – in this case, it is likely to be worsened.

The most worrying prospect of all, as far as the NEM is concerned, is the possibility that this will increase investment uncertainty still further, making it even less likely that the interstate grid will attract the new investment it needs.

If that happens, we might well see a few more states deciding to follow SA’s lead and plan sweeping energy reforms of their own.

Jeffrey Sommerfeld is involved with an energy analytic consultancy he established with two other persons with PhD expertise in energy. He/they are not doing this research on behalf of a client and will receive no direct benefit from it. He was an adviser to former Queensland LNP energy minister Mark McArdle from April 2012 to July 2013.

The energy sector was supposed to be the showcase for privatisation and market deregulation. Yet in 2017, this premise is being sorely tested – no more so than in electricity retailing, where competition has failed to deliver on its promise of lower prices for customers.

The latest Grattan Institute report, Price shock: Is the retail electricity market failing consumers?, provides evidence that in the electricity retail sector, the anticipated price reductions have not happened, and innovation has been very slow in coming.

On the contrary, the markets with the least regulation have the highest prices. Australia’s experience is mirrored in the UK, the United States and Canada, and all are struggling to find solutions.

Mixed success

The privatisation of Australia’s electricity retail markets dates back to the 1993 Hilmer Report on national competition policy. The ensuing decade saw a raft of reforms that initially delivered increases in productivity, lower prices and business innovation. But in the decade after that, this progress became much harder to sustain.

The idea was for states to create regulated monopolies in electricity transmission and distribution (poles and wires), while deregulating the retail side (the supply of gas and electricity to customers).

The competition in electricity generation largely delivered lower wholesale prices through the National Electricity Market (NEM). But a mess has since been created by poor or absent climate policy at a federal level, which failed to match the enthusiasm of (some) states for clean energy. The resulting surge of investment in wind and solar happened without due consideration of the consequences for security and reliability of supply. Generating more renewable energy is essential, but failing to integrate it properly with the NEM was negligent.

Meanwhile, in Victoria – the state with most electricity retailers and the longest history of full competition – retail prices have been increasing without apparent justification and retail margins are higher than they should be. The cost to Victorians could be as much as A$250 million a year.

Lazy customers?

Customers are unhappy, and yet we are not seeing a surge of consumer action to get the best deals. So if it’s just a matter of lazy consumers, why should governments care?

Part of the answer to this conundrum lies with the product and its relationship with consumers. First, electricity is an essential service that underpins our daily lives, and switching off is not a realistic option for most consumers.

Second, the products offered by retailers are often complex and the advertising is confusing, if not downright misleading. It is hardly surprising that consumers feel stuck and eventually give up trying to find the best deal, when all too often an advertised 30% discount on their electricity bill doesn’t necessarily mean their bills will be 30% cheaper.

So far there have been few genuine innovations in electricity pricing – even in Victoria which has had full deregulation since 2009. The most common tactic has been a discount for paying on time or by direct debit, although consumers are often frustrated when they discover that at the end of their contract they lose the discount even if they continue to pay the same way.

Meanwhile, products that offer different prices for electricity use at different times of the day have been slow to appear. These products have the potential to deliver major savings, yet the industry has failed to deliver them in a way that makes them easy for customers to understand and adopt.

What to do

When faced with a market failure, governments should consider action. Yet, as with the Australia’s domestic gas market and South Australia’s power “crisis”, they should proceed with caution.

In Britain, the partial re-regulation of retail electricity competition delivered unexpected and perverse outcomes, such as the removal of the cheapest deals. A move to re-regulate prices here could stifle emerging innovation, and would most likely leave some consumers worse off without the guarantee of a better outcome overall. We seem to be driven to a choice between free markets and central planning. Yet neither is a panacea.

There are government interventions that could fix the worst problems without stifling effective competition. They include requiring clearer and simpler advertising, and more transparent and fairer contracts. Requiring retailers to provide data on their profit margins to an independent agency could also help, and could even be in the best interest of the retailers if it fends off more heavy-handed regulation.

The retail electricity market may be fixable, and the benefits of competition may ultimately exceed its costs. We may yet see fairer prices and real innovation. But if not, governments will have no choice but to return to price regulation. The electricity retailers who are used to the current free market certainly won’t want that.

Tony Wood owns shares in several energy and resources companies through his superannuation fund

One of the worst instances of mangrove forest dieback ever recorded globally struck Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria in the summer of 2015-16. A combination of extreme temperatures, drought and lowered sea levels likely caused this dieback, according to our investigation published in the journal Marine and Freshwater Research.

The dieback, which coincided with the Great Barrier Reef’s worst ever bleaching event, affected 1,000km of coastline between the Roper River in the Northern Territory and Karumba in Queensland.

Views of mangrove shorelines impacted by dieback event in late 2015, east of Limmen Bight River, Northern Territory (imagery: NC Duke, June 2016).

About 7,400 hectares, or 6%, of the gulf’s mangrove forest had died. Losses were most severe in the NT, where around 5,500ha of mangroves suffered dieback. Some of the gulf’s many catchments, such as the Robinson and McArthur rivers, lost up to 26% of their mangroves.

Views of seaward mangrove fringes showing foreshore sections of minor (left side) and extreme (right side) damage as observed in June 2016 between Limmen and MacArthur rivers, NT. These might effectively also represent before and after scenarios, but together show how some shoreline sections have been left exposed and vulnerable. NC Duke The gulf, a remote but valuable place

The Gulf of Carpentaria is a continuous sweep of wide tidal wetlands fringed by mangroves, meandering estuaries, creeks and beaches. Its size and naturalness makes it globally exceptional.

An apron of broad mudflats and seagrass meadows supports thousands of marine turtles and dugongs. A thriving fishing industry worth at least A$30 million ultimately depends on mangroves.

Dieback of mangroves around Karumba in Queensland, with surviving saltmarsh, October 2016. NC Duke

Mangroves and saltmarsh plants are uniquely adapted to extreme and fickle coastal shoreline ecosystems. They normally cope with salt and daily inundation, having evolved specialised physiological and morphological traits, such as salt excretion and unique breathing roots.

But in early 2016, local tour operators and consultants doing bird surveys alerted authorities to mangroves dying en masse along entire shorelines. They reported skeletonised mangroves over several hundred kilometres, with the trees appearing to have died simultaneously. They sent photos and even tracked down satellite images to confirm their concerns. The NT government supported the first investigative surveys in June 2016.

Areas affected by severe mangrove dieback in late 2015 (grey shaded) along southern shorelines of Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria from Northern Territory to Queensland. Aerial surveys (red lines) were undertaken on three occasions during 2016 to cover around 600km of the 1000km impacted. NC Duke

In the end, the emails from citizen scientists nailed the timing: “looks like it started maybe December 2015”; the severity: “I’ve seen dieback before, but not like this”; and the cause: “guessing it may be the consequence of the four-year drought”.

Our investigation used satellite imagery dating back to 1972 to confirm that the dieback was an unparalleled event. Further aerial helicopter surveys and mapping during 2016, after the dieback, validated the severity of the event extending across the entire gulf. Mangrove dieback has been recorded in Australia in the past but over decades, not months.

Mangroves losses (red) and surviving mangroves (green) around the shoreline and mouth of the Limmen Bight River, south-western Gulf of Carpentaria, April 2015 to April 2016. NC Duke, J. Kovacs Mysterious patterns in the dieback

We still don’t fully understand what caused the dieback. But we can rule out the usual suspects of chemical or oil spills, or severe storm events. It was also significant that losses occurred simultaneously across a 1,000km front.

There were also a number of tell-tale patterns in the dieback. The worst-impacted locations had more or less complete loss of shoreline-fringing mangroves. This mirrored a general loss of mangroves fringing tidal saltpans and saltmarshes along this semi-arid coast.

Mangroves were unaffected where they kept their feet wet along estuaries and rivers. This, as well as the timing and severity of the event, points to a connection with extreme weather and climate patterns, and particularly the month-long drop of 20cm in local sea levels.

Extreme weather the likely culprit

We believe the dieback is best explained by drought, hot water, hot air and the temporary drop in sea level. Each of these was correlated with the strong 2015-16 El Niño. Let’s take a look at each in turn.

First, the dieback happened at the end of an unusually long period of severe drought conditions, which prevailed for much of 2015 following four years of below-average rainfall. This caused severe moisture stress in mangroves growing alongside saltmarsh and saltpans.

Second, the dieback coincided with hot sea temperatures that also caused coral bleaching along the Great Barrier Reef. While mangroves are known to be relatively heat-tolerant, they have their limits.

The air temperatures recorded at the time of the mangrove dieback, particularly from February to September 2015, were also exceptionally high.

Views of mangrove shorelines impacted by dieback event in late 2015, north of Karumba, Queensland (imagery: NC Duke, Oct 2016).

Third, the sea level dropped by up to 20cm at the time of the dieback when the mangroves were both heat- and moisture-stressed. Sea levels commonly drop in the western Pacific (and rise in the eastern Pacific) during strong El Niño years: and the 2015-2016 El Niño was the third-strongest recorded.

The mangroves appear to have died of thirst. Mangroves may be hardy plants, but when sea levels drop, reducing inundation, coupled with already heat-and-drought-stressed weather conditions, then the plants will die – much like your neglected pot plants.

We don’t yet know what role human-caused climate change played in these particular weather events or El Niño. But the unprecedented extent of the dieback, the confluence of extreme climate events and the coincidence with the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef mean the role of climate change will be of critical interest in the global response to mangrove decline.

What future for mangroves?

The future for mangroves around the world is mixed. Thanks to climate change, droughts are expected to become hotter and more frequent. If the gulf’s mangroves experience further dieback in the future, this will have serious implications for Australia’s northern fisheries including the iconic prawn fishery, mudcrab and fin fish fisheries. All species are closely associated with healthy mangroves.

We don’t know whether the mangroves will recover or not. But there is now a further risk of shoreline erosion and retreat, particularly if the region is struck by a cyclone – and this may have already begun with recent cyclonic weather and flooding in the gulf. The movement of mangrove sediments will lead to massive releases of carbon uniquely buried among their roots.

Mangroves are among the most carbon-rich forests in the tropics and semi-tropics and much of this carbon could enter the atmosphere.

Aerial view of severe mangrove dieback near Karumba in Queensland, October 2016. NC Duke

Now we urgently need to understand how mangroves died at large and smaller scales (such as river catchments), so we can develop strategies to help them adapt to future change.

Australia’s top specialists and managers will be reviewing the current situation at a dedicated workshop during next week’s Australian Mangrove and Saltmarsh Network annual conference in Hobart.

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