The Conversation

Traditional hunting poses no threat to dugongs. Flickr, CC BY-SA

Recent calls for a ban on legal traditional hunting of dugongs and marine turtles imply that hunting is the main threat to these iconic species in Australia. The science indicates otherwise.

While more is being done to address traditional hunting than any of the other impacts, the main threats to their survival often pass unnoticed.

The real threat to sea turtles

The draft Recovery Plan for Marine Turtles in Australia evaluated 20 threats to the 22 populations of Australia’s six species of marine turtle. Climate change and marine debris, particularly “ghost nets” lost or abandoned by fishers, are the greatest risks for most stocks.

Indigenous use is considered to be a high risk for three populations: Gulf of Carpentaria green turtles, Arafura Sea flatback turtles and north-eastern Arnhemland hawksbill turtles.

However, in each of these cases it is the egg harvest, not hunting, that causes concern. International commercial fishing is also a high risk for the hawksbill turtle, whose future remains uncertain. Traditional hunting of marine turtles in Australia is limited to green turtles.

Is hunting a threat?

The Torres Strait supports the largest dugong population in the world and a globally significant population of green turtles. Archaeological research shows that Torres Strait Islanders have been harvesting these species for more than 4,000 years and the dugong harvest has been substantial for several centuries.

Our research shows that the Torres Strait dugong population has been stable since we started monitoring 30 years ago and that the harvest of both species is sustainable.

The situation for dugongs is very different in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef south of Cooktown. The Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report classifies the condition of the dugong population in this region as poor.

Modelling indicates that the southern Great Barrier Reef stock of the green turtle, which live and breed south of Cooktown, is increasing.

Nonetheless, both green turtles and dugongs died in record numbers in the year after the extreme floods and cyclones of the summer of 2010-11. Dugongs stopped breeding in the Great Barrier Reef region south of Cooktown.

Thankfully, our current aerial survey indicates that dugong calving has resumed as inshore seagrass habitats recover. There is no evidence that the 2011 losses significantly affected green turtle numbers.

Working together

Traditional owners are the first managers of our coastal waters, with cultural practices extending back thousands of years. They have the most to lose from any loss of turtles and dugongs. It is therefore in their best interests, and the government’s best interest, to work in partnership to protect and sustainably manage these species.

Longstanding tensions between traditional owners and tourist operators are behind much of the opposition to traditional hunting in the Cairns area. Some of these tensions have been relieved by the Gunggandji Traditional Use of Marine Resources Agreement signed in June 2016.

Under this agreement, the traditional owners decided to cease hunting turtles and dugongs in the waters surrounding Green Island, Michaelmas Cay and Fitzroy Island.

The Gunggandji agreement is the seventh to be signed between the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and traditional owners. In addition, there are two Indigenous land use agreements that address hunting issues in the Great Barrier Reef.

In the Torres Strait, dugong and turtle hunting is managed through 14 (soon to be 15) management plans. There are similar agreements with traditional owners and management agencies in other regions in northern Australia.

Indigenous rangers are crucial to implementing all these agreements in collaboration with management agencies and research institutions. Rangers deliver the practical, on-the-ground arrangements to conserve these species in their Sea Country.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has implemented an Indigenous Compliance Program that authorises trained Indigenous rangers to respond to suspicious and illegal activities that they encounter as part of their work.

Indigenous rangers and community members from Badu Island in Torres Strait help JCU scientists fit a dugong with a satellite tracking device. Takahiro Shimada/James Cook University

Indigenous rangers also remove marine debris from remote beaches. The community-based organisation GhostNets Australia has worked with 31 coastal Indigenous communities to protect over 3,000km of northern Australia’s saltwater country from ghost nets. These community projects have been instrumental in rescuing turtles, clearing ghost nets off beaches and identifying key areas to aid management agencies to better understand the impact.

Traditional owners from the Torres Strait and the northern Great Barrier Reef also play a valuable role in intervention works at Raine Island, one of the world’s most significant green turtle rookeries. This includes rescuing stranded turtles, using fences to stop turtles from falling over cliffs, and altering beach profiles.

What about welfare?

Traditional hunting raises animal welfare issues. The turtle and dugong management plans developed by the Torres Strait communities explicitly address animal welfare. The Torres Strait Regional Authority has been working with a marine mammal veterinarian and traditional owners to develop additional methods of killing turtles humanely.

Indigenous hunters who breach state and territory animal welfare laws can be prosecuted. But more widespread animal welfare problems, not associated with hunting, are largely hidden and ignored. The Queensland Strand Net Program reported that 879 turtles died of their wounds from vessel strike between 2000 and 2011.

An immature female loggerhead turtle severely injured by a boat strike near Gladstone. This turtle was determined to be unrecoverable and was euthanased by a local veterinarian in May 2016. Takahiro Shimada/James Cook University

Other serious animal welfare issues are associated with animals drowning in nets and being caught in and ingesting marine debris. In addition, the potential impact of emerging threats like underwater noise pollution and water quality remain as substantial knowledge gaps. These matters tend not to make the headlines.

Australian waters are home to some of the world’s largest populations of marine turtles and dugongs. A comprehensive and balanced approach to their conservation and management is required to enable our grandchildren and their children to enjoy these amazing animals.

Helene Marsh FAA, FTSE, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science at James Cook University, is a conservation biologist who has been studying dugongs for 40 years. She has co-authored two books and some 200 professional articles. Helene currently receives funding from the federal government via the Australian Research Council, the Department of Environment and Energy, the National Environmental Science Program and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. She provides professional advice to the Torres Strait Regional Authority, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Helene chairs the Threatened Species Scientific Committee, is a member of the Reef 2050 Plan Independent Expert Panel and Co–chair of the IUCN Sirenia Specialist Group. https://research.jcu.edu.au/portfolio/helene.marsh/

Mark Haman is an Associate Professor in the College of Science and Engineering at James Cook University. He currently receives funding from the federal government via the Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program and from the Gladstone Port Authority. Mark provides professional advice to the Torres Strait Regional Authority, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the Department of Environment and Energy and the Queensland Government. Mark is a Co-vice Chair of the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group and a member of the Science Advisory Committee for the IOSEA MoU for Marine Turtles and their Habitats.

OPEC’s recent decision to cut oil production for the first time in eight years marked the return of the oil cartel’s favourite tactic: squeeze supply in a bid to jack up the price.

Of course, this is nothing new. In 1851, during the Pennsylvania oil rush, the Oil Creek Association helped to push the price of oil up from 10 US cents a barrel to US$4.

OPEC can only dream of having the power to move prices by 4,000%. The reality is that its power to move prices at all is waning rapidly, as factors move beyond the bloc’s control.

It’s worth noting what happened to the oil drillers of Pennsylvania after they installed a floor under their high oil prices. Investors shifted their focus elsewhere, looking to Russia, Texas and eventually the Middle East. Precisely the same thing is happening to OPEC, particularly through the advent of the US shale oil industry. And this time it’s happening not in the golden age of oil but in an era when market conditions for polluting fuels are much tougher.

In 2008, when oil prices were high, Goldman Sachs predicted that oil would hit US$200 a barrel. But they are financial wizards, not historians. It has been 75% less for most of the period since.

Over the decades we have also grown used to hearing predictions that there are “only 30 years of oil left at current production rates”. (The horizon never seems to move any closer or further away.)

But bear in mind that oil reserves are a function of technology and price. When prices rise and technologies improve, more oil becomes economically viable to extract, effectively increasing the world’s oil reserves. As prices fall, these reserves effectively cease to exist until prices rebound or technology gets cheaper.

So, in one sense, the oil game hasn’t changed. OPEC needs high prices to justify extracting the oil. But bigger factors are now at play, which makes it harder for OPEC to squeeze supply as effectively as it once did.

What has changed?

OPEC was at its most powerful when the United States, the world’s largest oil consumer, relied on OPEC member states to meet its oil needs. Since the US shale boom increased US energy independence, OPEC can no longer threaten supply as it did during the 1970s. Now it simply risks squeezing itself out of the market.

It’s not just the US domestic market that has grown. If OPEC restricts supply, Canada can increase oil production from tar sands, and Brazil can bring on more deep-water oil production.

All of this challenges the perception that there is a shortage of oil, although more sophisticated peak-oil followers have shown that cheap oil from conventional sources did indeed peak in 2007, prompting the most recent big surge in oil prices.

In a bid to maintain its influence on supply and therefore prices, OPEC has turned to Russia, the world’s largest state-controlled oil producer, which has agreed to cut production in tandem with OPEC nations.

But even this will not be enough to keep pace with the changes wrought by new markets, new technologies and energy efficiency. Two years ago we wrote that OPEC had lost its power and, despite the latest move, we don’t see much to indicate that it has returned.

The knock-on effects

The fundamentals of the oil industry haven’t changed with this latest deal. In Australia the effect will be a roughly 5% increase in the oil price, and a larger increase in the price of petrol (perhaps up to 10%), as distributors and retailers take advantage.

Aside from the small effect on Australian consumers, this announcement will probably be helpful to Australian oil companies, giving them some good news to tell shareholders and employees.

But before boardrooms get too excited, it is worth noting that oil is also suffering a demand problem. All developed nations have now begun to decouple economic growth from fossil fuels. For oil, the chief threat is one of being replaced by electric public transport and electric or hybrid cars.

Oil’s murky future

Oil’s future suffers from another problem: it’s not good for your health. An announcement that will have a more powerful effect on the oil price, but which received much less media attention, came in 2012 when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) updated its classification of diesel engine exhaust from “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A) to “carcinogenic to humans” (Group 1). Petrol exhaust is listed as probably carcinogenic.

Health impacts are a large driver for moving away from fossil fuels – even for those who don’t accept the predicted climate impacts. With the fundamental shift towards fuel efficiency and electric vehicles, the Volkswagen emissions scandal and the awareness that petrol and diesel cause cancer, respiratory disease and lower birth weights in babies with mothers living near major roads, the trend for oil consumption is downward.

So the drivers for change are as they have always been – demand and technology are behind the wheel, not OPEC making “important” announcements. Look for a small, short-lived increase in your local fuel price, but remember that if your tank of fuel goes up by 10c a litre, most of that isn’t down to OPEC. It’s mainly retailers looking for a bigger Christmas bonus.

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

The Great Barrier Reef's major threat is climate change. Great Barrier Reef image from www.shutterstock.com

At first glance, the progress reports on the Great Barrier Reef released last week by the Australian and Queensland governments might seem impressive.

The update on the Reef 2050 Plan suggests that 135 of the plan’s 151 actions are either complete or on track.

The Australian government’s apparent intention in releasing five recent reports is to reassure UNESCO that the Great Barrier Reef should not be listed as “World Heritage in Danger” (as the World Heritage Committee has previously threatened).

Sadly, behind the verbosity and colour of these reports, there is disappointingly little evidence of progress in the key areas needed to make a significant difference to a World Heritage Area that is in crisis.

Poor baseline

The government framework for protecting and managing the Reef from 2015 to 2050, the Reef 2050 Plan, has been widely criticised as failing to provide a sound basis for the necessary long-term protection of the Reef.

As well as providing a shaky basis to build effective actions, the Reef 2050 Plan has few measurable or realistic targets. It is therefore not easy to report on the actual progress.

Several of the actions that will have the greatest impacts on the overall health of the Reef are shown in the progress reports as “not yet due”. In some cases, such as climate change, the Reef 2050 Plan is silent, instead simply referencing Australia’s national efforts on climate change.

Instead, the plan is to “[improve] the Reef’s resilience to climate change by reducing local pressures”. Besides addressing water quality, there are many things that should also be considered but they involve making some really hard decisions, such as choosing between coal and coral.

Progress versus reality

The overview of progress claims that 135 of the 151 actions in the Reef 2050 Plan are either completed (dark green) or are on track for their expected milestones (light green), as shown below.

Reef 2050 Plan: Update on Progress, 2016, CC BY

The reality, however, is that many of the 103 of the actions described as “on track/underway” have not progressed as initially proposed when the Reef 2050 Plan was submitted to UNESCO, and that the definition of “underway” is far too loose to be meaningful.

Our rapid assessment of the status of actions indicates that the level of progress reported for at least 32 of these 151 actions (around 21%) has been overstated. The following are just some examples:

The unfortunate truth is that neither UNESCO nor the IUCN has the time or resources to conduct their own comprehensive assessment of the Great Barrier Reef. They rely heavily on these reports when deliberating on what to recommend to the World Heritage Committee, including whether the Reef should be placed on the World Heritage in Danger list.

Our rapid assessment indicates there are real concerns with relying on the government to self-report accurately. It would appear the only way that UNESCO will receive an accurate update is if that assessment is done independently of government. Fortunately, UNESCO and IUCN do consider other evidence.

It is also concerning that the members of the government’s Independent Expert Panel and the Reef 2050 Advisory Committee were not involved in making the final assessments for the 2016 update report.

Despite pronouncements that the Great Barrier Reef remains healthy, the evidence of the 2015 Water Quality Report Card, along with numerous expert opinions (for example, Jon Brodie on water quality; Terry Hughes on coral health; the Queensland government on scallops; and the Marine Park Authority on inshore dolphins) shows that the real situation is not as rosy as UNESCO and the Australian public are being told.

Some real progress, but not enough

It is important to recognise some progress is being made – but sadly too little and not enough to reverse the declining trend for many of the values for which the Reef was listed as World Heritage.

We should also question some of the priorities in the Reef 2050 Plan given the widely acknowledged critical issues (see page 252 in the government’s 2014 Outlook Report). Adopting best practice for water quality from point sources such as sewage discharge (action WQA11 under the plan) and protecting habitat for coastal dolphins (BA12) should be immediately addressed.

Whether we have the money to do what’s necessary is another question. The government’s pledge to spend A$2 billion over 10 years is the current collective yearly spending (A$200 million) of four federal agencies, six state agencies and several major research programs, extrapolated over the coming decade.

While the level of funding is significant compared with many other World Heritage areas, the amount and priorities must be questioned, given that many of the Reef’s values are continuing to decline.

So far most funding has been spent on addressing water quality, and while this has achieved some positive results, it has not managed to stop the deteriorating trends.

As Jon Brodie recently wrote on The Conversation:

The best estimate is that meeting water quality targets by 2025 will cost A$8.2 billion … If we assume that … A$4 billion is needed over the next five years, the amounts mentioned in the progress report (perhaps A$500-600 million at most) are … totally inadequate.

More action needed

The Reef is unquestionably of global significance. Given its sheer size and location, no other World Heritage Area on the planet includes such biodiversity.

The worst-known bleaching event in the Great Barrier Reef demonstrates the limitations of the Reef 2050 Plan, which is silent on the impact of greenhouse emissions from Queensland’s coal mines and the effects of climate change more generally.

Governments have an obligation to protect all the Reef’s values for future generations. To do this they must recognise growing global moves to address climate change, and the widespread national and international expectations that more needs to be done to protect the Reef.

Australia is a relatively rich country and has the technical capability to address the issues. This provides an opportunity to show some global leadership for managing such a significant part of the world’s heritage.

Listing the reef as World Heritage in Danger won’t in itself fix the problems – but it will certainly focus the spotlight on the issues.

As the World Heritage Committee prepares for its next meeting in July 2017, and considers once again whether to officially list the reef as in danger, it will need to study all the evidence, not just the government’s reports.

Certainly the true picture is more complicated and dire than the most recent government reports imply.

Alana Grech receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Jon Brodie is a partner in the environmental consulting partnership C2O.

Jon C. Day 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.

Rooftop solar proves a challenge to keeping prices low on the grid. Solar image from www.shutterstock.com

The Australian government is reviewing our electricity market to make sure it can provide secure and reliable power in a rapidly changing world. Faced with the rise of renewable energy and limits on carbon pollution, The Conversation has asked experts what kind of future awaits the grid.

Australia’s low-cost electricity, thanks to cheap coal, was once a source of substantial competitive advantage. While Australia’s electricity prices are still below the OECD average, the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a major challenge to cheap electricity.

In a report released today by CSIRO and Energy Networks Australia, we show that Australia is so far making rocky progress on reducing emissions, maintaining energy security and keeping prices low. But we also show how Australia can regain world leadership, delivering cheap electricity with zero emissions by 2050.

A Balanced Scorecard for Australia’s electricity sector in 2016. ELECTRICITY NETWORK TRANSFORMATION ROADMAP The challenge facing Australia

Australia is the world leader in adopting rooftop solar. Rising retail electricity prices and subsidies have encouraged households to embrace solar with enthusiasm. As a result 17% of Australian households now have solar panels.

This can be seen as Australians exercising greater choice about how their electricity is supplied. However, it also highlights some of the problems our electricity network is facing.

Retailers sell electricity in Australia by volume (the kilowatt hours and megawatt hours on your electricity bill). This made sense when most households contained a similar set of fairly low-energy appliances.

But the rapid increase in high-energy air conditioners and the adoption of rooftop solar mean fees are less suited to each customer’s demand on the system or any services they provide.

More panels and electric cars

The are two major opportunities to reduce electricity prices for Australia.

First, we need to harness the power of more households producing their own electricity through solar or other distributed sources. In coming decades, households are expected to invest a further A$200 billion in distributed energy sources.

We need to avoid duplicating network expenditure (poles and wires) and support balancing supply and demand as the share of renewable electricity increases. But this can be an opportunity if we introduce the right prices and incentives.

This means using household devices such as batteries to support the electricity network, and paying customers for this service instead of building more poles and wires. This would require many actions (detailed in the report), including pricing reform, some regulation change, improved information sharing and minimum technology standards.

Second, we need to use the existing network more efficiently. Demand has fallen in recent years, chiefly through improvements in energy efficiency and increasing rooftop solar.

Because of the reliance on volume-based retail pricing, when consumption falls, networks are forced to increase prices to recover the fixed cost of delivering their services. Conversely, if it were possible to increase demand for grid-supplied electricity without increasing the fixed costs of the system, then network price could be stabilised or reduced.

Our research found that electric vehicles offered the greatest opportunity to increase demand for grid-supplied electricity. These have the added benefit of supporting greenhouse gas emission reduction goals.

The report recommends that light vehicle emission standards should be pursued as a relatively cheap way of supporting electric vehicles. Appropriate pricing and incentives will also be needed to encourage car owners to charge their vehicles at off-peak times, reducing the need to add more capacity to the network.

Keeping bills low

Residential electricity bills will need to increase gradually over time in all countries due to the cost of decarbonising electricity supply. Australia’s goal should be to be the most efficient at achieving that.

Relative to taking no action on these issues, CSIRO estimates that the measures described above will together reduce the average residential electricity bill by A$414 per year by 2050.

Projected savings in average residential bills (in real terms) Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap

Those savings are funded through reduced network spending and customers needing to spend less on their own distributed energy devices (to avoid higher bills or go off grid). These savings add up to A$101 billion by 2050.

Cumulative electricity system total expenditure to 2050 (in real terms) compared with the counterfactual (business as usual). Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap

At the same time, customers have more choice to participate in providing services to the grid, are receiving fairer payments for doing so, and the electricity system is using distributed energy resources to balance the system. All of these will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector to zero by 2050.

The Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap Key Concepts Report will be livestreamed here today at 10am AEDT.

Paul Graham leads the Energy Networks Transformation Roadmap which is funded in equal parts by CSIRO and Energy Networks Australia. CSIRO is responsible for overall program delivery and is a key research provider along with other institutions from Australia, United States and United Kingdom. The roadmap is based on work captured in almost 20 supporting reports available or soon to be published on the Energy Networks Australia webpage.

These red and yellow blobs are yellow lac scale insects that feed crazy ants. A tiny wasp could reduce both populations. Parks Australia

A couple of days ago I published an article with Peter Green about the imminent release of a tiny wasp that will be used for biological control of a bug that feeds the crazy ants that kill red crabs on Christmas Island.

It is understandable that people are nervous about the introduction of exotic species to manage wildlife in a natural setting. It turns out that ecologists are even more nervous than the public about this, so if they have decided to do it anyway, then there is a remarkably good reason.

Parasitoid wasps use scale insects

The release of the wasp has concerned some readers because they imagine swarms of biting insects setting up their nests in the back garden. The truth is that the wasps that will be released are tiny and unlikely to be noticed at all.

First of all, Tachardiaephagus somervillei are only 2 mm long and cannot sting humans or other animals. They do not form colonies, they do not swarm, and they do not build nests. In fact, they won’t be at all interested in hanging around human habitations unless there is a tree nearby containing a colony of the yellow lac scale insect (Tachardina aurantiaca).

This is because these wasps are parasitoids – a type of parasitic organism that kills its host species. They don’t need a nest or a colony because the scale insects they target are both their food source and their home.

The specificity of the wasp for this particular type of scale insect can be seen in the first part of their Latin names: Tachardiaephagus literally means “eater of Tachardina”.

Scale insects use ants

Scale insects are a type of true bug (in the Order Hemiptera) that line up along tree branches like barnacles, sucking sap from the tree and in their mature form, releasing a sweet liquid known as honeydew from their backsides for the benefit of ants. They don’t do this for nothing. Their strategy is to use the ants as body guards.

In a situation where scale insects are relatively rare this increases the number of the ants who will in turn protect the scale insects. On Christmas Island, where the introduced yellow lac scale insects have become common because they do not have any natural predators, the invasive crazy ants have access to large quantities of honeydew. In this case, the crazy ants are using the yellow lac scale insects as a super abundant food source.

The super colonies that have formed as a result have instigated an environmental disaster. The crazy ants kill red crabs and other species mostly due to their extremely high densities driven by the abundance of honeydew.

Any detractors concerned about the dangers of yet another invasive species have not fully grasped the consequences of doing nothing. Chemical baiting of the ants is ongoing but has consequences for other animals and is not environmentally desirable or sustainable.

People using wasps

If the scale insects can use the ants as bodyguards and the ants can use the scale insects as a free food source, why can’t we use a tiny wasp as a biological control?

Unlike birds, lizards or other predators that may be deterred by ants crawling all over the scale insects, the tiny parasitoid wasps can slip through and lay their eggs in a scale insect without being noticed by the ants. Their eggs hatch and develop inside the scale insect, emerging as adult wasps that are ready to lay their eggs in another scale insect nearby.

In essence, the wasp uses the scale insect as a one-stop nursery, food source and conveniently located launching pad for the next generation. Inside a scale insect colony, they are likely to find another scale insect less than a centimetre from where they were born.

Consider how this will allow the wasp population to quickly grow and, perhaps, reduce the scale insect colony density so that the wasps will eventually have to fly further and further to find another scale insect. At some point the effort to find more scale insects will balance the benefit of finding an insect, and the two populations (wasp and scale insect) will reach a new equilibrium at a lower density.

How will the crazy ants respond?

The wasp will not run out of food, nor will the scale insects become extinct, but the ants will find themselves deprived of excess honeydew and will have to adjust their populations accordingly.

How do you empirically test the response of the ants to the removal of excess honeydew from their environment? Well, you can’t remove the scale insects but you can prevent the ants from getting into the trees where the scale insects live, even though it wasn’t easy. Apparently, doing this involves Glad wrap, Mr Sheen furniture polish, and daily vigilance by a research student.

The result was a 95% decrease in crazy ant activity in a few weeks, an outcome that suggests this approach has every chance of reducing the impacts of crazy ants on Christmas Island.

What happens next?

I understand that the team is gathering in Malaysia today to pack up some wasps and fly them to Christmas Island. The release will not happen right away, as the wasps will be acclimatised and grown up in large numbers in a dedicated facility. Monitoring programs are planned to observe the impacts, both short and long term, on the scale insects, the ants, the crabs and the forest structure.

The research to understand the ecology of Christmas Island sufficiently to identify a biological control agent started decades ago, and many scientists were involved along the way. It is not possible to provide links to all the research articles produced thus far, but here is a link to the final risk report.

I am not involved with the research but am familiar with it and in my view there are two things that could happen next. Either the wasp will fail to reduce the scale insect populations and nothing changes, or they will reduce the scale insect populations which could kick start a cascade of beneficial environmental outcomes for Christmas Island.

We are all really hoping that it is the latter.

Disclosure

Susan Lawler has received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past.

Dry period in semi-arid central Australia James Cleverly

Back in 2010-11 Australia “greened”, as record-breaking rains triggered a boom in plant growth that removed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stored it as carbon in the landscape.

But what happened after that? Our latest research, published in Scientific Reports, shows that this greening was short-lived and was rapidly dissipated through drought and fire.

Our study also shows that as extreme wet years are getting wetter and more common, Australia’s terrestrial ecosystems will play a larger role in the global carbon cycle.

Carbon, water and climate change

Each year, land plants absorb the equivalent of more than a quarter of the carbon emissions generated by burning fossil fuels and deforestation. This helps to partly offset global increases in atmospheric CO₂ concentration. In 2011, this “land carbon sink” was unusually large, thanks largely to the greening of Australia’s vegetation, which accounted for 60% of the global carbon uptake anomaly that year.

Flux towers for measuring carbon and water fluxes between ecosystem and the atmosphere: (left) Calperum near Adelaide; (right) Alice Springs Mulga woodland in central Australia. Both sites are part of Australia’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, or TERN. from www.ozflux.org.au

Satellite imaging and ground observations from CO₂ “flux” towers showed that much of the 2011 greening happened in savannas and grasslands, largely in central Australia. New data shows that the return of drought conditions in many of these areas has quickly un-greened them.

Mulga dry tropical forest in central Australia was extraordinarily green and took large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. James Cleverly Be resilient, be prepared

To an extent this is no surprise. Australia’s dryland plant species live in the most variable climates in the world. As such these ecosystems can swing rapidly between being highly productive in wet years and becoming nearly dormant to withstand drought during dry ones.

Given that the 2010-11 extreme greening followed on rapidly from the protracted Millennium Drought, it should hardly be surprising that we find the ecosystem has now swung back the other way so promptly.

Australia’s climate is the most variable in the world. (a) shows the variability of rainfall (coefficient of variance or CV) compared with other continents; (b) shows the same in Australia for four periods. Ma et al. (2016) Australia’s unique native hummock grassland (Spinifex) in dry season (left) and wet season (right). James Cleverly Drought and fire count

On a biological level, the reason that plants take up less carbon dioxide during dry periods is because this process costs water. Plants exchange gases with the atmosphere via tiny pores on their leaves called stomata, through which CO₂ diffuses in during the day but through which water also escapes.

When water is scarce it is more important to conserve it. This is why during drought conditions plants tend to reduce their carbon dioxide uptake by closing stomata or even shedding leaves entirely.

Sometimes the combination of heat and drought can be so stressful that plants die, ultimately decomposing or burning and releasing all of their stored carbon back to the atmosphere.

Australia’s ungreening

Our research shows that these processes began to take hold across Australia during the second half of 2012 and into 2013. As the chart below shows, this diminishes Australia’s large net carbon uptake as boosted by the 2010-11 wet year.

Drought rapidly eliminates Australia’s large land carbon uptake. (left) SPEI drought index; (right) satellite measures of ecosystem productivity and water storage across Australia. Ma et al. (2016)

We also found that carbon dioxide emissions from fires increased during this period. This makes sense too, given that the productive wet period spurred more plant growth, which then became fuel for fire during the subsequent drought.

As a result, Australia’s semi-arid landscapes are mostly dry once again, although the speed with which they greened and then ungreened suggests that they will be quickly refreshed when the next big deluge arrives.

Not alone

Australia’s giant green carbon sink was remarkable, but was it unique? There are two ways we can answer this question: we can wait and see if there’s another one, or we can go back and look at the historical record.

Fortunately, with long-term satellite observations, we have measurements of the entire continent back to 2000, and even earlier for some data sets. Our new research shows that the 2010–11 event was not unique. Rather, it was something that tends to happen whenever Australia has a strong wet phase, such as the one in 2000-01.

This means we can expect more large greening events to happen again in the future. One important question is whether these will be as strong as in 2010-11 – or perhaps even stronger?

Wilder, not milder

Interestingly, by looking at continent-wide rainfall records for each significant wet period dating back to 1900, we found that Australia’s wet episodes have become significantly wetter over the past century. Given this trend, we expect that in the near future Australia’s terrestrial ecosystems will come to play a larger role in the global carbon cycle. The intensification of these wet pulses is mostly seen in central and northwestern Australia.

A wilder future with more rain during wet years will have important implications, not only for carbon uptake by plants, but also for many other important issues such as flood risk management, water rights and increased bushfire danger once the landscape dries out again. We had better keep an eye on that.

Intensification of Australia’s wet extremes since 1900s. Most of the intensification is seen in central and northwestern Australia. Ma et al. (2016)

Australian ecosystems are important locally and globally: they absorb carbon, produce food and contain huge species diversity. But these “ecosystem services” are vulnerable to climate change and the increasing frequency of extreme wet and dry events.

Knowing in detail how the landscape is likely to respond to these ever more erratic swings between wet and dry will be a crucial help in learning how we can best respond to drought and deluge in future.

So long, farewell, (for now) Australia’s “great green boom”.

Xuanlong Ma receives an Early Career Research Grant (PRO16-1358) from the University of Technology Sydney.

Alfredo Huete receives funding from The Australian Research Council, NSW-RAAP, NHMRC, TERN, and UTS.

Ben Poulter receives funding from the United States National Science Foundation, the United State Geological Society, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Derek Eamus receives funding from The Australian Research Council, Google, Hunter Water Corporation, Mid-Coast Water and UTS.

James Cleverly 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.

Germany gets 12% of its electricity from wind power. Renewable energy Germany photo from www.shutterstock.com

The Australian government is reviewing our electricity market to make sure it can provide secure and reliable power in a rapidly changing world. Faced with the rise of renewable energy and limits on carbon pollution, The Conversation has asked experts what kind of future awaits the grid.

The Finkel review of the National Electricity Market is an opportunity to consider how Australia can transition its electricity system to be less carbon-intensive.

Germany’s energy transition is often held up as an incredible success story. Starting from a sector relying predominantly on fossil fuels and nuclear energy in the 1990s, renewable energy now provides about 30% of Germany’s electricity.

Germany is on track to achieve its 80% renewable target by 2050. This transformation has been the result of a range of policy measures.

The depth and breadth of these legal and regulatory reforms can provide valuable lessons for Australia.

Strong policy

Energy policy and climate policy have been expressly integrated in Germany since 2007. The government’s Energy Concept sets out Germany’s energy policy until 2050 with a strong focus on transforming the energy system.

It contains short, medium, and long-term targets for reducing greenhouse gases, increasing renewable energy, and improving energy efficiency in consumption, the building and transport sectors. While target-setting in a policy document may seem no more than a political gesture, it shows ambition and leads to political pressure for action. The policy targets for renewable energy are also binding as objectives in the German Renewable Energy Sources Act.

Notably, German legislation for the electricity industry, the Electricity Industry Act 2005, picks up on the ambition of transforming the energy system. It provides that electricity supply should not only be “cost-effective, consumer friendly and efficient”, but also “environmentally compatible” and “increasingly generated from renewable sources”. While the reference to environmental compatibility was already contained in the 1998 law, the express reference to renewables was added in 2011.

Australia, in contrast, continues to keep climate and energy policy separate. The National Electricity Objective remains narrowly-confined to achieving the reliable supply in an efficient way. Overall, Australia lacks long-term target setting, which stymies the necessary planning.

Supporting generators

Germany’s generous feed-in-tariffs (FITs) for renewable energy have been a major driver of transformation since they were first introduced in 1990. The FITs were set separately for each generation source. As a result they have funded a diverse range of renewable sources.

They also enabled the emergence of small and medium-sized renewable generators, which greatly reduced the political power of the big “gentailers” (generators and electricity retailers owned by the same companies).

Twenty-year payback periods and guaranteed dispatch for renewable energy made the FIT a major driver in Germany’s electricity transformation. They have also been a very costly way of supporting renewables.

With renewable energy now maturing, Germany is moving to increased market exposure for renewable energy through reverse auctions similar to mechanisms employed in the Australian Capital Territory.

The Australian Renewable Energy Target (RET) and state-based FITs have predominantly supported wind and rooftop solar. However, both are hampered by the lack of ambitious and long-term targets and considerable policy insecurity. Reverse auction schemes may provide a way forward to efficient support for a diverse range of renewables.

Transforming networks

A crucial part of Germany’s energy reforms is the focus on making networks more renewable-energy friendly. Germany’s renewable energy act requires network businesses (the owners of the poles and wires) to prioritise connecting renewable energy, and upgrade infrastructure where needed. This investment is overseen by the regulator.

No such mechanism for network investment to enable renewable energy exists in Australian network regulation.

German regulation now considers the whole system to strategically update electricity networks. This includes a nationwide and binding planning regime and investment into north-south interconnection. This is to help absorb the massive investment in wind generation in the north.

Network constraints are a major barrier to a 100% renewables future in Australia. Different modelling exercises for large amounts of renewable energy have been done by Beyond Zero Emissions or the Australian Energy Market Operator. Achieving these scenarios would require strategic and binding network planning across the whole of the NEM.

The Australian Energy Market Operator provides information to support efficient network planning, but actual investment decisions are in the hand of the network businesses. The network businesses continue to operate within each of the states. They invest in networks if necessary to guarantee reliable electricity supply.

There are no incentives for “greening” the network and strategically planning beyond state borders in the current regulatory framework.

Lessons for Australia

The German example is by no means a blueprint for Australia. Australia has different natural resources, existing network and generation infrastructure and the lack of neighbouring countries to connect to.

We can see though that a single instrument, be it a RET, Direct Action or a carbon price, will not be enough to enable a transformation.

Energy transitions need reform across the sector. This starts with a high level setting of ambitious, binding and long-term targets for emissions reductions and renewable energy.

It requires not only mechanisms to support generators financially, but also targeted regulation to adapt electricity networks to enable more renewables.

Reform in Germany is ongoing. There is now an impressive amount of legislation and amending legislation that deals with different aspects of the transition.

Crucially, the German government has shown willingness to go back and adapt policy instruments to changing circumstances or to address unintended consequences. Yet the overall commitment to the energy transition remains steady.

The terms of reference for the Finkel review recognise the need to integrate energy and climate policy in Australia. Hopefully it can take a more holistic view of the reforms necessary for decarbonisation of the industry.

A more detailed comparison of German and Australian reforms can be found here A Barrier for Australia’s Climate Commitments? Law, the Electricity Market and Transitioning the Stationary Electricity Sector.

Anne Kallies 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.

Our food system depends on nitrogen fertilisers. Nitrogen image from www.shutterstock.com

While carbon pollution gets all the headlines for its role in climate change, nitrogen pollution is arguably a more challenging problem. Somehow we need to grow more food to feed an expanding population while minimising the problems associated with nitrogen fertiliser use.

In Europe alone, the environmental and human health costs of nitrogen pollution are estimated to be €70-320 billion per year.

Nitrogen emissions such as ammonia, nitrogen oxide and nitrous oxides contribute to particulate matter and acid rain. These cause respiratory problems and cancers for people and damage to forests and buildings.

Nitrogenous gases also play an important role in global climate change. Nitrous oxide is a particularly potent greenhouse gas as it is over 300 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Nitrogen from fertiliser, effluent from livestock and human sewage boost the growth of algae and cause water pollution. The estimated A$8.2 billion damage bill to the Great Barrier Reef is a reminder that our choices on land have big impacts on land, water and the air downstream.

Lost nitrogen harms farmers too, as it represents reduced potential crop growth or wasted fertiliser. This impact is most acute for smallholder farmers in developing countries, for whom nitrogen fertiliser is often the biggest cost of farming. The reduced production from the lost nitrogen can represent as much as 25% of the household income.

The solution to the nitrogen challenge will need to come from a combination of technological innovation, policy and consumer action.

The essential ingredient

Nitrogen is an essential building block for amino acids, proteins and DNA. Plant growth depends on it; animals and people get it from eating plants or other animals.

Nitrogen gas (N₂) makes up 78% of the air, but it cannot be used by plants. Fertilisers are usually made from ammonia, a form of nitrogen that the plants prefer.

A century after the development of the Haber-Bosch process gave us a way to manufacture nitrogen fertiliser, our demand for it has yet to level off.

The use of nitrogen fertiliser has risen from 11 million tonnes in 1961 to 108 million tonnes in 2014. As carbon dioxide levels continue to rise in the atmosphere, some plants such as grains will also likely demand more nitrogen.

Wheat with and without nitrogen fertiliser. Deli Chen/ The University of Melbourne

In fact, nitrogen from fertiliser now accounts for more than half the protein in the human diet. Yet some 50% of applied nitrogen is lost to the environment in water run-off from fields, animal waste and gas emissions from soil microbe metabolism.

These losses have been increasing over the decades as nitrogen fertiliser use increases. Reactive nitrogen causes wide-ranging damage, and will cause more damage if nitrogen losses are not reined in.

Faced with a growing population and changing climate, we need more than ever to optimise the use of nitrogen and minimise the losses.

From farm to fork

One way to understand our nitrogen use is to look at our nitrogen footprint – the amount of nitrogen pollution released to the environment from food, housing, transportation and goods and services.

Research by University of Melbourne PhD candidate Emma Liang shows Australia has a large nitrogen footprint. At 47kg of nitrogen per person each year, Australia is far ahead of the US, which came in with 28kg of nitrogen per person.

A high-animal-protein diet appears to be driving Australia’s big nitrogen footprint. The consumption of animal products accounts for 82% of the Australian food nitrogen footprint.

Animal products carry high nitrogen costs compared to vegetable products. Both products start with the same cost in nitrogen as a result of growing a crop, but significant further losses occur as the animal consumes food throughout its life cycle.

The N-Footprint project aims to help individuals and institutions calculate their nitrogen footprints. It shows how we can each have an impact on nitrogen pollution through our everyday choices.

We can choose to eat lower nitrogen footprint protein diets, such as vegetables, chicken and seafood instead of beef and lamb. We can choose to reduce food waste by buying smaller quantities (and more frequently if necessary) and composting food waste. The good news is, if we reduce our nitrogen footprint, we also reduce our carbon footprint.

Back to the farm

In the meantime, efforts to use nitrogen more efficiently on farms must continue. We are getting better at understanding nitrogen losses from soil through micrometerological techniques.

From sitting in the sun with plastic bucket chambers, glass vials and syringes, scientists now use tall towers and lasers to detect small changes in gas concentrations over large areas and send the results directly to our computers.

Eddy covariance tower. Mei Bai/ The University of Melbourne

We now know nitrification (when ammonia is converted to nitrate) is an important contributor to nitrogen losses and therefore climate change and damage to ecosystems. It is a process researchers – and farmers – are targeting to reduce nitrogen losses.

Nitrification inhibitors are now used commercially to keep nitrogen in the ammonium form, which plants prefer, and to prevent the accumulation of nitrate, which is more easily lost to the environment.

As this technology advances, we are starting to answer the question of how these inhibitors affect the microbial communities that maintain the health of our soil and form the foundation of ecosystems.

For example, our research shows that 3,4-dimethylpyrazole phosphate (better known as DMPP) inhibits nitrification without affecting soil microbial community diversity.

There have also been exciting observations that the root systems of some tropical grasses inhibit nitrification. This opens up a management option to slow nitrification rates in the environment using genetic approaches.

Solving the challenge of nitrogen use will require research into more efficient ways for primary producers to use nitrogen, but it will also need government leadership and consumer choices to waste less or eat more plant protein. These tools will make the case for change clearer, and the task of feeding the world greener.

On December 4-8, leading international researchers are meeting in Melbourne for the 7th International Nitrogen Initiative Conference to discuss the best new solutions to problems in nitrogen use. For a more in-depth look at these issues, visit the INI2016 website or join a range of food and production experts at the Good Food for 9 Billion: Community Forum.

Ee Ling Ng works for The University of Melbourne. She receives funding from the Commonwealth Government.

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

Robert Edis receives funding from The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). He is affiliated with and employed by ACIAR.

Emma Liang receives funding from Meat and Livestock Australia​ and the ​Australia-China Joint Research Centre at the University of Melbourne.

Water quality is one of the biggest threats facing the Great Barrier Reef. Tatters ❀/Flickr, CC BY-NC

The Australian and Queensland governments have delivered their progress report to the UN on the Reef 2050 Plan to ensure the long-term survival of the Great Barrier Reef.

The report focuses on water quality, and managing pollution runoff, but only deals in a superficial way with the other preeminent issue for the reef - climate change.

It shows recent progress on water quality has been slow, and ultimately we will not meet water quality targets without major further investments.

Progress?

The progress report claims some success in managing water quality through improved practices in sugarcane cultivation under the SmartCane program, and in rangeland grazing.

But actual reductions in sediment and nutrients loads to the reef over the last two years have been very small, as shown in the Reef Report Card 2015. This contrasts with the first five years of Reef Plan (2008-2013) where there was modest progress, as you can see below.

Great Barrier Reef Report Card 2015

The positive news out of the Report Card was that grain cropping and non-banana horticulture were doing well, but these are the industries we have little robust data on.

And there’s been little progress towards adequate management practices in sugarcane and rangeland grazing as well as gully remediation in the large dry tropics catchments of the Burdekin, Fitzroy and Normanby.

The specific actions and funding promised in this area over the next five years mentioned in the progress report which have some real substance are:

1. Direct a further A$110 million of Reef Trust funding towards projects to improve water

2. Bring forward the review of the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan and set new scientifically based pollutant load targets

3. Invest A$33 million of Queensland government funding into two major integrated projects

4. Better prioritise of water quality as a major theme in Reef 2050 Plan.

What we need to do

However these fall far short of the real requirements to meet water quality targets on the reef, set out in the Reef 2050 Plan and the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan.

The best estimate is that meeting water quality targets by 2025 will cost A$8.2 billion. Other estimates suggest we’ll need at least A$5-10 billion over the next ten years.

If we assume that about A$4 billion is needed over the next five years, the amounts mentioned in the progress report (perhaps A$500-600 million at most) are obviously totally inadequate.

There is thus almost no chance the targets will be reached at the nominated time.

This reality has been clearly acknowledged by Dr David Wachenfeld, the Director of Reef Recovery at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. In fact the current progress towards the targets is so poor that we will not even get close.

The actions actually needed to manage water quality for the Great Barrier Reef are well known and have been published in the Queensland Science Taskforce Report and scientific papers.

The most important of these are:

1. Allocate sufficient funding (A$4 billion over the next five years)

2. Use the legislative powers already available to the Australian government under the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act (1975) and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (the EPBC Act) to regulate agriculture and other activities in the reef’s water catchment

3. Examine seriously the need for land use change in the reef catchment. For example, we may need to look at shifting away from more intensive forms of land use such as cropping, which produce more pollutants per hectare, to less intensive activities such as beef grazing, forestry or conservation uses

4. Continue to improve land management in sugarcane, beef grazing and horticulture but acknowledge the need to extend these programs. We also need better practices in urban and coastal development

5. Critically examine the economics and environmental consequences of the further expansion of intensive agriculture in the reef’s catchment as promoted under the Australian government’s Northern Australian Development Plan

Progress on water quality management for the Great Barrier Reef, as clearly reported in the 2015 Report Card is poor. There is little chance we will reach the water quality targets in the next ten years, without upping our game.

Jon Brodie is also a partner in the consulting partnership C2O. See: http://www.c2o.net.au/

Red crabs migrate across Christmas Island in their thousands each year. Ian Usher/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Have you heard the one about the wasp that kills the bug that feeds the ants that kill the crabs that keep the forests healthy on Christmas Island?

If not, that’s because it hasn’t happened yet, but it is a tale worth telling.

In the coming weeks, Parks Australia will release a 2mm wasp on Christmas Island to control the island’s yellow crazy ant infestation. Crazy ants are a major threat to the island’s wildlife, including its famous red crabs.

Biological control – when we use one species to control another – is infamous for giving Australia its cane toad invasion. So, how do we know this one will work?

Christmas Island and its crabs

Christmas Island is a unique natural habitat with many endemic species. The national park covers two-thirds of the island, which has been referred to as the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean.

Many people are aware of the red crabs whose mass migration to the sea has been described as one of the wonders of the natural world.

Christmas Island has many other species of crabs, including the impressive robber crabs. These may be the largest land-dwelling arthropod (the group that insects and crustaceans belong to) on earth.

Together these abundant land crabs clear the forests of leaf litter and maintain burrows that prevent soil becoming compacted, creating an open and diverse forest.

But this thriving natural system was disrupted when an invasive ant species became abundant on the island.

The ants

In the early 20th century, yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) found their way to Christmas Island. These ants now form super-colonies, with billions of individuals across hundreds of hectares.

The crazy ants spray formic acid in the eyes and leg joints of the crabs, which immobilises them. The crabs soon die and become food for the ants.

In some cases, crabs that live in areas free of crazy ants are killed during their annual migration and so never return to their original forest. This creates crab-free zones even where the ants do not live.

With fewer crabs, the forest has become less diverse, with a dense understory and compacted soils due to the collapse of crab burrows. Other invasive species such as the giant African land snail have become common where crabs declined.

Parks Australia has been trying lots of different methods from aerial to hand-baiting to reverse the impact of yellow crazy ants on red crabs.

The impact was so severe that a chemical control program targeting the super-colonies began in 2001. This program has slowed the decline of crab populations but is expensive and time-consuming, so researchers began to look into other options, including using other species.

The bug: a scale insect

Super-colonies of yellow crazy ants require a reliable food source and this is provided by yet another invasive species: the yellow lac scale insect (Tachardina aurantiaca).

Scale insects (a type of true bug) suck the sap of trees and produce a sweet secretion from their anal pore called honeydew, which ants then harvest.

It seems that the super-colonies of these crazy ants could not survive without the carbohydrate-rich honeydew provided by abundant scale insects in a patch of forest.

There is evidence that the scale insects increase ant reproduction and make them more likely to attack other species. One large field experiment demonstrated that if we stopped the ants getting access to the scale insects, ant activity on the ground fell by 95% in just four weeks.

The scale insects may need the ants as much as the ants need the scale insects. Some ants protect the scale insects in the same way that humans protect their livestock, by chasing away other predators.

The interaction between these two invasive species has allowed them to build their populations to extremely high densities, something known as invasional meltdown.

The good news is that scale insects, unlike ants, are amenable to biological control. For instance, Australian lady bugs were spectacularly successful in controlling the cottony cushion scale in North America.

The wasp

The search began to find a species that could control the scale insect on Christmas Island. And we found it: a tiny wasp known as Tachardiaephagus somervillei, which attacks the yellow lac scale insect in its native Southeast Asia.

This wasp lays its eggs in mature female scale insects and kills them from the inside, producing more wasps that then lay eggs in more females. This wasp (and other predators) are so effective that the yellow lac scale insect is rare in its native habitat.

Obviously, we had to test that the wasp wouldn’t attack other species. Researchers did this in the field in Malaysia, an unusual approach that yielded excellent results. The scientists exposed eight closely related scale insects to the wasp, and none were harmed.

This proves that no other scale insect population on Christmas Island is at risk if the wasp is introduced, with the possible exception of another introduced scale insect that is a pest in its own right.

Researchers also checked that the wasps would still work when the scale insects are being tended by yellow crazy ants – and they still attacked. After years of research it is exciting to be on the verge of releasing this wasp on Christmas Island.

Postscript: the toads

We all know the biological control stories that went wrong. The introduction of cane toads to control cane beetles in Australia backfired spectacularly. In Hawaii, the introduction of mongooses to control rats failed because mongooses are active during the day and the rats were active at night. In both those cases, those species were introduced without sufficient research.

But these examples changed the rules and laws around introducing species. Today governments are much more aware of the risks of invasive species. Rigorous experiments and risk assessments are required before any introduction can occur.

In this case, researchers from La Trobe University have worked closely with Parks Australia and the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia to collect enough data to satisfy the Australian government.

We believe that this is the most closely scrutinised biological control project in Australia. When the wasps arrive on Christmas Island in a few weeks, we are confident that this will set an example for best-practice conservation.

Fewer ants means more crabs, healthier trees, fewer African snails and better soil. And it will save money being spent on expensive conservation efforts for years to come.

Parks Australia has produced a special animation on the program – check it out here at http://www.parksaustralia.gov.au/christmas/news/biocontrol.html.

Susan Lawler has received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past.

Peter Green receives funding from the Department of Environment and Energy

Batteries may be a good way to store energy in the home. Battery image from www.shutterstoc.com

The Australian government is reviewing our electricity market to make sure it can provide secure and reliable power in a rapidly changing world. Faced with the rise of renewable energy and limits on carbon pollution, The Conversation has asked experts what kind of future awaits the grid.

Storage is the word of the moment in the energy industry. Since Tesla unveiled its Powerwall, politicians, commentators and industry have hyped storage – and particularly batteries – as the solution for getting more renewable energy into electricity grids and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.

The concept of storage is simple. A storage system takes power off the grid or from a local generation source and puts it back onto the grid or uses it locally later. It seems like a good idea if you have too much energy, or it is cheap at some times of the day and expensive at others.

So could storage be the answer, and how much would it cost?

The costs of storage

Of course storage isn’t free. It comes with both a capital cost (buying it in the first place) and a running cost, which is related to the cost of electricity to charge the battery and the round-trip efficiency – how much power is lost in the charging and discharging cycle.

To be a sensible economic investment, the benefits have to outweigh the costs. In other words, the savings on your energy bill have to be greater than the capital costs plus the running costs.

There are many different kinds of storage technologies, each with different characteristics. Lithium ion batteries are attractive as they operate effectively at small scales, are lightweight and have good round-trip efficiency. But they are currently expensive per unit of storage capacity.

Pumped hydro at the other end of the scale operates at very large scales, has good round-trip efficiency and is very cheap per unit.

Flywheels (or rotors) have low round-trip efficiency and don’t store a lot of power, but are able to dispatch lots of power in a short time and can also contribute to frequency stability.

Other storage technologies include compressed air, cryogenic (liquid air) energy storage, flow batteries and hydrogen. Each has its respective pluses and minuses.

Figure on storage characteristics. University of Birmingham Energy Storage Centre Report

Each of these technologies will have an appropriate place in the grid to be installed. Lithium ion batteries are a logical choice for a small-scale distributed application, while pumped hydro will work best at the large scale for grid management.

Flow batteries, liquid air and compressed air are in-between technologies in terms of scale, and flywheels and capacitors are most useful at the substation level for voltage and frequency control.

Batteries versus hydro

Let’s focus on lithium ion batteries and compare them to pumped hydro storage.

Lithium ion batteries are coming down in cost at a significant rate. Bloomberg has plotted the costs of lithium ion alongside solar PV. This shows the two technologies share a similar cost curve gradient, with lithium ion reducing from US$1,200 per kilowatt hour to US$600 per kWh in five years (not including installation costs).

As more batteries are built, the price gets cheaper. Bloomberg New Energy Finance

So where does lithium ion need to get to be cost-effective? Imagine a home with a 4.5kW rooftop PV system and variable electricity rate (for instance off-peak cost of 20c, shoulder of 26c and peak of 40c, similar to this tariff).

In such a home a 7kWh battery needs to cost less than A$7,000 fully installed to actually save the homeowner money. In other words, the cost per kWh of storage should be roughly A$1,000 to break even. Currently, batteries cost A$1,000-3,000 per kWh, so they are on the cusp of being cost-effective.

However, there is an important catch here. Retail electricity rates tend to exaggerate the true range in costs between peak and off-peak. The difference in the wholesale market (where retailers buy their electricity) is around 5-10c per kWh, much less than the 20c range in current variable rates. If retailers begin to lose market share, they may respond by reducing or removing these variable rates. That would make peak rates cheaper and mean that batteries would need to be correspondingly cheaper to be cost-effective.

For instance, a flat electricity rate of 25c per kWh means that batteries would need to cost around A$300 per kWh to be cost-effective. That’s less than a third of their current costs.

You could argue that using batteries also reduces the cost of the network itself. By reducing loads at peak time, we can reduce or even remove the need for infrastructure upgrades (substations and additional power lines, for instance).

But this is only true if electricity demand is growing. If demand is flat or falling, then distribution networks will tend to be under-used. Therefore reducing peak demand will not result in any savings.

Overall demand in the National Electricity Market has declined significantly since 2009, so the benefits of storage on the grid will be negligible other than in high-growth corridors. Demand has rebounded in 2015-16 and it will be interesting to watch and see if this is a resumption of the steady increase or if the demand stays low.

Demand in Australia’s National Electricity Market has been falling.

Pumped hydro, on the other hand, is a relatively inexpensive storage technology (already at around A$100 per kWh) as it can store large amounts of energy using a very inexpensive material.

All you need is some water and the means to pump it uphill. So while it can’t be used everywhere, there are many places in the National Electricity Market where it is possible. There are already 1,500 megawatts of pumped hydro in the market (Shoalhaven, Wivenhoe and Tumut 3).

This would be a more logical solution – cheaper and easier to control by the market operator. But in the same way that rooftop PV has gained more popularity than large-scale solar (even though the latter should be cheaper), distributed storage in the form of lithium ion batteries may be the eventual winner, not because of economics but because of human behaviour.

Roger Dargaville has received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency

Microplastics can carry other pollutants. Oregon State University/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Up to 236,000 tonnes of microplastics – tiny pieces of broken-down plastic smaller than your little fingernail – enter our oceans each year. This has researchers around the world worried, as wildlife can be harmed by eating the plastic or by toxins attached to it.

Another concern is that these plastics and toxins could accumulate in food chains, eventually making their way into animals that eat ocean creatures – such as ourselves.

In two recent studies (one in Marine Biology and the other in Animal Behaviour) we found that microplastics can indeed be passed up the food chain to fish. But we also found some good news: the microplastics appeared to have no effect on their behaviour.

Sweat the small stuff

Microplastics are defined as particles less than 5mm across. A range of animals throughout the marine environment, including corals and zooplankton, consume these particles.

Once in the ocean, persistent toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A (BPAs) and pesticides stick to and accumulate on plastic particles, adding extra layers of contamination.

It is possible that the contaminants on microplastics are absorbed by animals and enter the food chain. If they don’t kill the animals, these toxic chemicals may affect the animals’ behaviour and hormone levels.

The way an animal behaves in its environment is crucial. Sometimes pollutants don’t cause obvious health issues but may alter the way an animal feeds, moves or socialises. Exposure to some chemicals, for example, causes feminisation in males, resulting in reduced breeding activity and ultimately affecting a population’s stability.

Even minor changes in behaviour can affect how an animal performs and may have longer-term implications for survival and reproduction. These changes in behaviour can be an early warning that something is going on, like the canary in the coal mine.

Hop to it

We wanted to know whether microplastics pass through the food web. Microplastics accumulate on beaches, so we assessed how coastal animals respond when they ingest microplastics.

We contaminated microplastics by immersing them in Sydney Harbour for two months and then fed them directly to beach hoppers, small jumping crustaceans at the bottom of the coastal food web.

We then fed the plastic-contaminated beach hoppers to gobies – small fish that commonly eat crustaceans like beach hoppers.

The beach hoppers readily ate microplastics as part of their diet. We found that after just three days the microplastics had accumulated in the beach hoppers. After five days microplastics had caused weight gain, a reduction in the hoppers’ ability to hop, and in some cases death.

But the fish, which we fed with contaminated beach hoppers for four weeks, showed no difference in behaviour compared to fish who weren’t fed plastic-filled hoppers. This was a surprising result, given that hormones (important drivers of behaviour) are so sensitive to pollutants.

Sink or swim

It is vital we understand how animals that are exposed to microplastics are affected.

Beach hoppers are primary consumers, crucial to decomposing seaweed. They play a key role in cycling nutrients back into the beach. They are also an important food source for birds, insects and fish, which makes the hoppers essential in moving energy up the food chain.

If microplastics harm beach hoppers, then the processes carried out by the hoppers may also be affected. This in turn could mean a change in essential coastal processes.

If beach hoppers can’t hop as far or as high, they may not not able to find shelter as quickly, putting them at risk of being eaten or of drying out in the exposed environments of sandy beaches. Fewer beach hoppers could mean less decomposition and nutrient recycling, as well as less food available for animals higher in the food chain.

Gobies are middle-sized predators that live in shallow waters and are important in the connectivity between coastal environments and the deeper ocean. Gobies are themselves eaten by larger fish and sea birds.

We know that fish behaviour can change following exposure to high levels of carbon dioxide and pharmaceuticals, but our study suggests that munching on beach hoppers full of microplastics has little effect.

These results challenge the paradigm that microplastics help contaminants accumulate in the food chain. A recent study suggests that contaminants obtained from the natural environment and prey far outweigh what is absorbed from ingested microplastics, which explains our result.

While this study suggests that microplastics may not be increasing contamination in an obvious manner, there is little doubt about their impact on animals that directly consume them. Perhaps impacts on behaviour will be more apparent with longer exposure times to contaminated food sources than those in our study.

After all, it can’t be a good thing that microplastics are so abundant in the oceans that they will leave an undeniable signature in the fossil record.

Jane Williamson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. She has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council for other projects.

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

While the Bureau of Meteorology is predicting an increase in the average temperature this summer, entomologists are forecasting an increase in insect activity.

It might seem that insects choose to annoy us over the summer, however, the real reason for their population boom is a complex interaction of winter rainfall, availability of food sources and increasing temperatures.

Insects are ectothermic, or “cold-blooded”, meaning their body temperature depends on the external environment. So in summer an increase in temperature typically correlates with an increase in insect activity.

Many insect species emerge from a winter resting phase in spring and summer to begin their winged adult life stages. These highly mobile, hungry, sex-obsessed young adults are the ones that interact with us over summer. Imagine schoolies’ week for insects, lasting an entire three months.

Rain leads to aphids

We all know that a decent rain can be great for our gardens. Last winter was the second wettest on record and rainfall was above average for most of Australia. This means not only did our backyard foliage and flowering plants do well, but so did common varieties of weeds. Common garden weeds around much of eastern and southern Australia include dandelions and sowthistle.

An increase in vegetation over the winter increases the breeding environment for aphids, and the population explodes. Aphids are sap-sucking true bugs (insect order Hemiptera) that can stunt tree growth, destroy flower buds and reduce the quality of fruit.

Most species, including the peach-potato aphid (Myzus persicae), lay eggs on plant stems, leaves and under bark during winter. These eggs hatch in spring or summer as temperatures and day lengths increase. Female aphids can produce 50 to 100 offspring in a very short period.

Natural pest management

Luckily our gardens already have a built-in defence system against aphid attack – flower flies. Flower flies, sometimes called hover flies, are a group of harmless wasp-mimicking flies (order Diptera, family Syrphidae) that you’ve probably noticed in your garden hovering above flowers, giving the flies their common name. They are found all over the world and include more than 6,000 species, 165 of which are unique to Australia.

While some flies, such as mosquitoes, bushflies and blowflies, will try and crash your summer party, most species, such as the flower flies, are busy eating pests in your garden for free. The natural food source of many flower fly larvae (also known as maggots) are nymph and adult aphids. Flower fly larvae eat a staggering number of aphids, potentially clearing a plant of these pests within a matter of hours.

Flower fly larvae eat aphids and are part of your gardens natural pest management.

Aphids spend their days sapping a plant of its fluids, including plant sugars. Consequently their excrement, known as honeydew, is quite sweet. Adult flower flies will seek out aphid honeydew to feed on and lay their eggs close by to ensure that their larvae will have a viable food source.

If you have ever noticed a swarm of adult hover flies resting on your car’s windshield or bonnet, you may have parked under a tree raining aphid honeydew. These flies are feeding on the honeydew stuck to your car.

Flies feeding on honeydew from a car parked under an aphid infested tree. CSIRO

Many other insect predators, such as ladybird larvae and adults, and lacewing larvae (known as aphid lions) are also feasting on the abundance of aphids in our gardens, competing with the flower fly larvae.

So there is quite a lot going on in your garden at this time of year. All of these predators are quite susceptible to insecticides and will be knocked out if you resort to spraying your aphids.

Insects gardening Australia

There are many benefits to having more insects in your garden and community. Many native Australian plants rely on insects for pollination, including a medley of hard working ants, bees, flies, wasps, beetles, butterflies, and moths.

Recent studies have shown that blowflies can carry twice as much pollen and have potential to out-pollinate the European honey bee. Soldier flies also do a fantastic job of turning your organic waste into compost.

So celebrate this summer by firing up the barbecue in the garden and embrace the Aussie salute! Live and let live is a good way to ensure that our natural pest control agents remain intact, although, keep some repellent on hand, just in case.

Bryan Lessard receives funding from the CSIRO and the Australian Biological Resources Study.

David Yeates receives funding from the CSIRO, the Australian Biological Resources Study, the US National Science Foundation, and holds the Schlinger endowed research position at the Australian National Insect Collection.

Renewable energy poses a number of challenges for the grid. Wind turbine image from www.shutterstock.com

The Australian government is reviewing our electricity market to make sure it can provide secure and reliable power in a rapidly changing world. Faced with the rise of renewable energy and limits on carbon pollution, The Conversation has asked experts what kind of future awaits the grid.

Unreliable electricity supply can cause many inconveniences, such as the inability to check Facebook, being forced to play board games by candlelight in the evenings, and even, God forbid, missing out on a punt on the Melbourne Cup. But electricity blackouts have a more serious side too.

Findings from research overseas and in Australia show people are more likely to die during power outages. This is because of the increased risk of accidents, extreme cold or heat, food poisoning and communications breakdowns that can delay emergency responders.

So whatever our electricity grid looks like in the future, it will need to be reliable.

Meeting demand (most of the time)

Electricity demand varies during the day, so reliable electricity grids must be able to vary their output. Power supply needs to be constant and regular (this is known as “baseload power”) but also able to respond quickly to unexpected surges in demand (so-called “dispatchable power”). Finally, the grid must be responsive when extreme circumstances (such as storms or bushfires) affect supply.

Our current fossil-fuel-dominated electricity generation system is able to match supply with demand all but 0.002% of the time. It does this by relying largely on coal baseload power (64% of generation) which works together with other dispatchable power technologies – primarily gas (21%), as well as hydro (7%), oil (2%) and biomass (2%).

Generators in eastern Australia are also part of an interlinked transmission grid across New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania.

Variability in renewable resources (such sun and wind) is one of the main challenges to achieving the same reliability (or better) for a grid with more renewable energy generation.

There are several ways to manage this. First, there can be more generators than are required at any one point in time – power in one area can then be moved to areas that need it across a dispersed but highly interconnected transmission grid.

Second, we can avoid too much reliance on one particular technology (such as more than 30% wind). Having a mix of technologies provides a buffer.

Finally, we can include sufficient dispatchable energy sources or storage technologies. The list can include hydro, biomass, concentrated solar, geothermal, or batteries.

But herein lies the cost. Having more generators than needed at any point in time means that spare generators may sometimes sit idle.

Varying renewable resources also means that electricity may be produced but not purchased at times of low demand (and therefore wasted).

Buffering variable electricity supply would require an expansion of the transmission network across our vast continent to access our rich supply of renewable resources. But as distances increase, so do transmission losses.

So the question remains, at what cost would these strategies work?

The cost of reliability

Our recent research took a highly conservative approach to testing the cost question.

We assumed that there would be no future improvements in technology from what is currently viable and no future decrease in electricity demand. We also used renewable resource supply (sunshine and wind) from 2010 because this was one of the most challenging years for renewables.

Our findings indeed showed that strategies to manage the variability of renewable resources were effective in a 100% renewable energy mix of rooftop solar, wind, large-scale solar, hydro and biofuels.

In one scenario, for instance, current demand could be matched with supply at a cost of producing electricity around 20c per kilowatt hour (the current levelised cost of coal-fired electricity is 7.8-9.1c per kWh), with overall installed capacity of 162 gigawatts (2.5 to 3 times what is installed today), relatively low transmission losses and with less than 20% wasted electricity.

The interconnected eastern Australian transmission grid would need to be 2.5 times the current size, and would need to be linked to the grids in Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Recent developments look positive for renewables

But recent developments mean that the costs and constraints for reliable renewable energy are not likely to be as conservative as our scenario.

Battery storage has benefited from rapid improvements in technology even in the short period since our research in 2015. Significant battery storage could even mean a restructuring of our largely centralised (big power stations) network to a more decentralised one that includes rooftop solar panels and battery storage.

Decentralisation of power generation opens up the possibility of using waste heat from power generation in buildings to reduce power demand (such as tri-generation).

Our research also indicates that investing in more dispatchable technologies can reduce wasted energy, the cost of energy, the grid expansion required, and overall generation capacity.

With the price of renewables decreasing, the transition to renewables may have benefits for power producers and power consumers.

Future constraints and opportunities for renewable energy are uncertain, but we can’t wait for perfect certainty before we plan and act. In Australia we have some of the world’s leading experts in the field with a range of sophisticated modelling capabilities at hand. These assets could be the foundation of collaboration with policymakers to transition to reliable renewable energy.

Bonnie McBain will be on hand for an Author Q&A from 2-3pm AEDT Thursday December 1. Leave your questions in the comments below.

Bonnie McBain 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.

Think of all the resources needed to transform Shenzhen, a fishing town 35 years ago, into a megacity of more than 10 million people. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Cities are the epicentres of human activity. They cover less than 2% of the earth’s land surface but generate about 70% of GDP and house more than half the human population. The importance of cities is only going to increase in coming decades as another 2.5 billion people move to urban centres.

This intense production and consumption requires huge quantities of natural resources. Cities account for more than 60% of global energy use, 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of global waste. Current practices are depleting the Earth’s finite resources, changing its climate and damaging its natural ecosystems. With our planetary life support system in the red, we need to put cities on a serious resource diet.

Resources efficiency in the New Urban Agenda

The New Urban Agenda adopted at the Habitat III conference outlines a vision for sustainable urban development. These global guidelines, along with the related UN Sustainable Development Goals, recognise the need to use resources more efficiently.

Habitat III included a number of sessions on resource efficiency and associated tools and initiatives. Organisations such as UNEP, UN-Habitat and the European Commission and its research centres typically led these events. The New Urban Agenda includes many references to efficiency and reduced consumption in cities.

We must now act urgently to translate words into actions. This will ease pressure on ecosystems and produce a range of co-benefits, including health, wellbeing and resilience.

How do we create more resource-efficient cities?

Cities use resources directly, such as burning fossil fuels for electricity and transport. However, indirect uses, such as water for growing food crops, are much wider-reaching.

It can be overwhelming to consider the resources used for all goods, processes and infrastructure in cities. Yet it is possible to measure this using a systems approach. Instead of considering components in isolation, the entire city is considered as an open system, connected to others.

This perspective ensures a much broader understanding of complex relationships between scales, resource flows, the built environment, socio-economic factors and ecological outcomes.

There are tools that embrace a systems perspective. For example, the urban metabolism approach considers cities as ecosystems, across which flows of resources (such as energy or water) are measured. Life cycle assessment measures resource use through the entire production, consumption and degradation process of a good or service.

These approaches have been successfully applied at various scales such as cities, neighbourhoods and buildings. This reveals that we are using more resources than shown by traditional assessment techniques (see this example on building energy efficiency regulations).

But measurement without action has no impact on the ground. How can these tools be used to transform our cities?

Recent research enables us to map the quantities of materials in buildings and predict when and where we can reuse or recycle these. Here a map of estimated steel quantities in each building of Melbourne, Australia. Source: authors' own; left: Google and TerraMetrics; right: Stephan, A. and Athanassiadis, A. (In Press) Quantifying and mapping embodied environmental requirements of urban building stocks, Building and Environment

Many initiatives are targeting urban resource efficiency. The circular economy paradigm is a good example, where materials are reused, upcycled and recycled. It demonstrates that waste is a human concept and not an inherent property of cities. Waste does not exist in natural systems.

A range of projects by UNEP, the European Commission and other organisations support local resource efficiency initiatives and encourage local governments to implement related regulations. Blogging, data visualisation and disseminating research all help promote the adoption of resource efficiency concepts. In addition to the pioneering work of groups such as metabolism of cities, the uptake of open data is helping with this.

Learning from those who already live on less

Informal settlements provide interesting lessons in resource efficiency. Construction materials in these settlements are typically not very durable. However, because they are in short supply, they are constantly reused or repurposed, almost never discarded.

Other residents often reuse replaced materials, such as metal sheets, or store them for later use. This practice avoids additional resource use to produce new materials.

Although informal slum areas are often the focus of “upgrading” and improvement, lessons learnt in these settings can enhance material flow management and reduce waste elsewhere in cities.

Informal settlements like Karail next to Banani Lake in Dhaka, Bangladesh, can offer lessons in resource efficiency, waste reduction and material flow management to most cities. Alexei Trundle Co-benefits of resource efficiency

More resource-efficient cities tend to result in better health outcomes. For instance, encouraging walking, cycling and public transport instead of car use can reduce fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, and improve population health through increased physical activity.

Food systems that promote consumption of fresh, local produce can benefit both the environment and nutrition. Energy-efficient housing reduces energy and water use and can improve occupants’ health at the same time.

Resource efficiency can also contribute to urban resilience. Nature-based solutions use relatively few non-renewable materials to increase resilience to environmental change and natural disasters. For example, a park can be designed to be flooded during storms or a tsunami, reduce the urban heat island effect, support urban ecosystems and provide areas for community activities, recreation and urban agriculture.

Efficiency can also ensure that redundancy – a core principle of resilience – is built into urban systems. This means resources can be repurposed in the event of an unanticipated shock or stress. For example, during the recent blackout in South Australia, a household with solar battery storage was able to maintain power for 12 hours “off grid”.

Working together for better solutions

Although these steps move cities in the right direction, more action from governments, the private sector and civil society is needed to transform our growing urban footprints.

Focusing solely on resource efficiency may neglect opportunities to generate co-benefits across sectors and will not provide robust solutions. We need to look at the entire city as a system and work together, across all disciplines, with effective and strong governance structures that support integrated policy definition and long-term implementation. If we don’t, we might simply shift a problem from one area to another, increase resource demand elsewhere, or create social divisions and tensions.

Strong leadership, political stability, effective institutions and awareness-raising among citizens are vital factors for success. Urban resource efficiency is critical, but it should be considered along all other pressing issues highlighted in the New Urban Agenda.

André Stephan receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Alexei Trundle receives research funding from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), and an Australian Postgraduate Award from the Australian Government.

Dave Kendal receives funding from the Clean Air and Urban Landscape hub of the National Environmental Science Program

Hayley Henderson receives an APA scholarship from the Australian Government.

Hesam Kamalipour receives IPRS and APA scholarships from the Australian Government. He is also a Doctoral Academy member at the Melbourne Social Equity Institute (MSEI).

Melanie Lowe receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the National Environmental Science Programme.

On average, one person is displaced each second by a disaster-related hazard. In global terms, that’s about 26 million people a year.

Most move within their own countries, but some are forced across international borders. As climate change continues, more frequent and extreme weather events are expected to put more people in harm’s way.

In the Pacific region alone, this year’s Cyclone Winston was the strongest ever to hit Fiji, destroying whole villages. Last year, Cyclone Pam displaced thousands of people in Vanuatu and Tuvalu – more than 70% of Vanuatu’s population were left seeking shelter in the storm’s immediate aftermath.

However, future human catastrophes are not inevitable. The action – or inaction – of governments today will determine whether we see even greater suffering, or whether people movements can be effectively managed.

Human impact

International law does not generally regard people displaced by disasters as refugees, and national responses are ad hoc and unpredictable, resulting in protection gaps.

However, on July 1, a landmark new intergovernmental initiative kicked off: the Platform on Disaster Displacement. Led by the governments of Germany and Bangladesh, and with Australia as a founding member, it addresses how to protect and help people displaced by the impacts of disasters and climate change, one of the biggest humanitarian challenges of the 21st century.

The Platform does not merely envisage responses after disasters strike, but also policy options that governments can implement now to prevent future displacements.

For instance, if effective building codes are put in place and enforced, then people will be safer. If disaster warning systems are installed, then people will have time to get themselves out of harm’s way.

The provision of prompt and adequate assistance after a disaster can also reduce longer-term, secondary migration. In a study of displacement following severe floods in Bangladesh, it was found that people who felt adequately assisted and compensated were less likely to move on.

The Platform on Disaster Displacement succeeds the Nansen Initiative on Disaster-Induced Cross-Border Displacement, led by Switzerland and Norway from 2012–15. Through its groundbreaking work, there have been huge leaps and bounds in global understandings about how people move in anticipation of, or in response to, disasters, and what kinds of proactive interventions can help to avoid displacement – or at least avert some of its negative consequences.

The Nansen Initiative’s chief outcome was the Protection Agenda, which provided a toolkit of concrete policy options and effective practices that governments can implement now, both to avert displacement where possible, and to protect and assist those who are displaced.

Strategies such as disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation can help to mitigate against displacement if disaster strikes. Temporary, planned evacuation can provide a pathway to safety and emergency support.

In 2015, Northern Australia was battered by two potent tropical cyclones within six hours on the same day, Cyclone Lam and Cyclone Marcia. NASA

Implementing long-term, sustainable development projects can enhance community resilience over time, creating new labour opportunities and technologies, and building capacity for self-help.

Governments also need to develop more predictable humanitarian and temporary stay arrangements to assist those displaced across a border after a disaster. They also need to ensure that those displaced internally have their needs addressed and rights respected.

Facilitating migration away from at-risk areas can open up opportunities for new livelihoods, skills, knowledge and remittances, at the same time as relieving demographic and resource pressures.

Planned response

Indeed, in this context, the Australian government has acknowledged that the promotion of safe and well-managed migration schemes is a key part of building resilience.

The Kiribati–Australia Nursing Initiative is a good example. Kiribati is a Pacific Island nation that is very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and which lacks extensive educational and employment opportunities.

The Initiative enabled around 90 young people from Kiribati to train in Australia as nurses, providing them with an opportunity to secure a job in the healthcare sector either in Australia, overseas or back home.

On a larger scale, planned relocations can also help people to move out of harm’s way before disaster strikes, or to relocate to safer locations in the aftermath of a disaster if it’s not safe for them to go home. This requires careful consultation with those affected, ensuring that their rights and interests are safeguarded.

The Platform on Disaster Displacement will implement the Nansen Initiative’s Protection Agenda by building strong partnerships between policymakers, practitioners and experts.

While it does not intend to create new legal standards at the global level, it will encourage governments to build more predictable legal responses at the national and regional levels, including through bilateral/regional agreements relating to the admission, stay and non-return of displaced people.

The Platform is a significant opportunity. Governments that act now can make a major contribution to reducing future displacement and its high economic and human costs.

The UN Secretary-General recently highlighted the displacement risk posed by disasters and climate change, and emphasised the need for strengthened international cooperation and protection.

It is essential that the new Platform on Disaster Displacement continues this forward-looking agenda, placing the needs, rights and entitlements of individuals and communities at the forefront of its activities.

Scientia Professor Jane McAdam is Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law and head of the Grand Challenge on Refugees & Migrants at UNSW. She is speaking tonight about climate change and refugees at UNSOMNIA: What keeps you up at night?, the launch event for the University of New South Wales Grand Challenges Program.

Jane McAdam receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Platform on Disaster Displacement, and was a member of its predecessor, the Consultative Committee of the Nansen Initiative on Disaster-Induced Cross-Border Displacement.

After ratifying the Paris agreement on climate change, the government is looking ahead to its 2017 review of climate change policy. Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg tells Michelle Grattan the government will have more to say about the review before Christmas.

“The key is to ensure we’re on track to meet our 2030 targets, which is a 26-28% reduction in our emissions by 2030 on 2005 levels. We did beat our first Kyoto target by 128 million and we’re on track to beat our 2020 target by 78 million tonnes. But clearly the 2030 target is a larger one and a more challenging one,” Frydenberg says.

“We’ve got some good mechanisms in place but we’ll be looking at the overall settings to ensure we meet our Paris commitments.”

With some in the Coalition rattled by the growing popularity of One Nation, Frydenberg says: “The way to deal with it is to listen and to understand people’s concerns as to why they have left some of the major parties and to take action to ensure that they understand the good things that the government is doing.”

Music credit: “Where the river run”, by Ketsa on the Free Music Archive

Michelle Grattan 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 Murray-Darling is a complex freshwater ecosystem. Murray River wetlands image from www.shutterstock.com

Tempers have flared once again over the long-term plan to return water to the Murray-Darling River and improve its health.

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority has released its report into the northern basin (in Queensland and New South Wales). The report finds that the plan, agreed in 2012, has already affected communities. It recommends that less water be returned to the river.

The plan aims to recover 2,750 gigalitres of water from human uses for the environment, but also allows for an extra 450GL to be recovered.

Federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce has signalled that returning the extra 450GL would be extremely difficult – which has outraged South Australian politicians at state and federal level. In response, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has promised extra monitoring.

While it may seem like a political bunfight, the current argument sheds light on serious flaws in the management of the river.

Liquid gold Murray-Darling Basin Authority, CC BY

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan originates in national water legislation developed as a response to the Millennium Drought. Since the plan was passed in 2012, rains have given breathing space for those seeking to massage the detail around rebalancing Australia’s most famous river system.

The premise of the plan and the related Water Act is shifting water away from irrigation to the river to improve long-term sustainability. Leading up to and during the Millennium Drought, ecosystem health declined.

Too much water was being taken from the river, and it seemed the states were too weak to deal with the politics of sharing water allowances.

However, Joyce’s recent comments show that federal governments are equally susceptible to backsliding on commitments to securing water for the environment.

Flaws in the plan

The plan has two main flaws.

First, the states and federal government are relying on a single planning instrument to miraculously optimise water-sharing for social, economic and environmental outcomes.

Second, the only mechanism for achieving these outcomes is by adjusting the volume of water allocated to the environment.

Various interests have exploited both of these weaknesses since the plan came into force.

First, the requirement to blend multiple policy objectives into a single plan has provided an opportunity for disaffected parties to claim all manner of fallout. This has led to governments opting for high-cost reallocation mechanisms, such as providing infrastructure to farms in return for water for the environment.

Simply buying entitlements from willing sellers would have been much more cost-effective and likely better in the long run. This remains the case. But buying back is now off the table, at least while the next round of expensive infrastructure-for-water swaps occurs.

Second, focusing solely on the volume of water returned to the river is now being exploited by those who know that the environmental needs of riverine systems are more complex than simply “add more water”. Complexity means opportunity for some, and there are two groups at play here.

One is the irrigation enthusiasts reluctant to transfer their water rights. In part, this is because they know if they hold out they can secure more benefits through subsidised on-farm infrastructure that can be capitalised into private assets. These forces are obviously more pronounced in the upstream states where irrigation is most developed – NSW and Victoria.

The second group are environmental groups with particular agendas for which they have struggled to gain support.

Turning wine into water

Collectively, these groups have been active in persuading upstream states and some at the federal level that there are alternatives to simply taking water from irrigators and returning it to the environment. These alternatives have become known as “works and measures”.

In simple terms, some infrastructure can be used to mimic environmental processes but with less water. For instance, a series of water regulators could be constructed on a riverside wetland to mimic natural flood events.

The proponents of works and measures are primarily upstream and have sought to count these interventions as equivalent to water returned to the river – meaning they count towards state targets. Similarly, there are efforts to convert programs that reduce invasive species, such as carp, into an equivalent volume of water.

In practice, the challenge of converting these programs into water is scientifically problematic.

While the Water Act and the basin plan were always flawed because of their heavy focus on water volumes, the prospect of adding alternatives has simply created opportunities for more blurry metrics.

There is also a real prospect that these measures are simply not equivalent. As an ecologist explained to me privately: “It’s like saying the environment is thirsty and offering a hamburger.”

The hamburger may be welcome for some, but ultimately it won’t do the same as a drink of water. We need both water and non-water measures and it would be foolish to think the politically expedient hamburger is a perfect substitute for the politically sensitive water, as others have noted.

The South Australian government has been keen to prevent backsliding by upstream states through these types of deals. Ideally, this would be out of concern for the status of the river system, but history shows that states, including South Australia, are equally keen to use the rivers for their own consumptive ambitions.

Nonetheless, the South Australian government does have a point, even if it has been expressed recently with zeal.

The lesson, of course, is that federal governments using the plan have found shifting water away from irrigation at least as difficult and costly as it is for the states.

Lin Crase receives funding from ARC; ACIAR.

Australia's National Electricity Market brings power to millions of people. Power image from www.shutterstock.com

The Australian government is reviewing our electricity market to make sure it can provide secure and reliable power in a rapidly changing world. Faced with the rise of renewable energy and limits on carbon pollution, The Conversation has asked experts what kind of future awaits the grid.

Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) is under review following the state-wide blackout that hit South Australia in September.

The review, led by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, will “develop a national reform blueprint to maintain energy security and reliability”.

Importantly, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) specifically agreed that the review would consider Australia’s commitment under the Paris climate agreement, and how climate and energy policy can be integrated.

Before we consider how the NEM might need to change, it is important to understand how it came about.

State responsibility

Electricity supply began as a state responsibility. Originally, state-based utilities owned and operated the entire supply chain, from generation to transmission, distribution and retail. With the exception of the Snowy Hydro Scheme, there were no interstate transmission lines.

Accessibility and affordability were (and still are) key concerns for the states. As such, electricity prices were equal for all citizens, irrespective of their location or the actual cost of bringing electricity to them. This is still partly reflected in network tariffs today.

In the late 1980s, concerns about rising costs to government, but also a worldwide ideological move towards privatisation of public services, drove a shift away from publicly owned utilities. This began with a New South Wales inquiry, which found that NSW could avoid billions of dollars in new investment by connecting its network with Victoria.

This set the scene for the development of a more interconnected grid and more general reform. In particular, this was followed by a report from the former Industry Commission in 1991 and the Hilmer Review on National Competition Policy in 1993. These reports were dominated by market logic. They argued that competition would make the system more efficient.

Governments specifically agreed to reforms that would lead to a fully competitive national electricity market. This involved breaking up and selling the three layers of the electricity sector: generation, networks and retail.

The network businesses were seen as natural monopolies, and were to be regulated as such. Generators and retailers were to compete within their own layer, increasing efficiency and keeping prices down.

The national system

Following these preparatory measures, the state and federal governments agreed to pass the National Electricity Law (NEL) under a cooperative national arrangement. This provided the legal basis to create the National Electricity Market (NEM). The NEM is the national electricity market governed by the NEL and includes the wholesale markets as well as network regulation.

In 2001, the state and federal governments established the Ministerial Council on Energy with the broad aim of overseeing and coordinating national energy policy. In 2002, the council commissioned an independent review of energy markets, which highlighted many deficiencies, including governance and regulation.

The review found that the state-based regulators’ responsibilities overlapped with those of the national regulators and led to costly inconsistencies. It also found that greenhouse policy responses were “ad hoc and poorly targeted”.

The ministerial council subsequently proposed a package of reforms. This led to the formation of the Australian Energy Market Commission for developing market rules, and the Australian Energy Regulator for enforcing them, which governments endorsed through the Australian Energy Market Agreement.

This agreement contains a commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, this remained outside the National Electricity Objective, which was introduced in 2005 and is the highest point of reference for policy setting. The National Electricity Objective is to:

…promote efficient investment in, and efficient operation and use of, electricity services for the long-term interests of consumers of electricity with respect to price, quality, safety, reliability and security of supply of electricity; and the reliability, safety and security of the national electricity system.

Parallel to these regulatory developments, the states participating in the market became increasingly intertwined. Five new interconnectors were added between 1990 and 2006.

The competitive layers of the industry also began a period of consolidation, leading to the emergence of the so-called “gentailers”. The wholesale market is now dominated by three gentailers (Origin, AGL and Energy Australia), which collectively supply 71% of all retail customers.

The new review

Shortly after the blackout in South Australia, Federal Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg called for harmonisation of state renewable energy policies, and announced the latest review.

The Finkel Review is a review into the “security and reliability” of the NEM. However, its scope is wide enough to allow for a fundamental rethink of the role of the electricity sector in addressing climate change.

The blackout provides a great example of the kind of challenge the NEM will face in the future. On one hand, climate policies, especially the RET and state-based renewable energy goals, put pressure on the networks and influence the wholesale electricity market.

On the other hand, climate change is expected lead to more frequent and increasingly severe storm events, such as the one that destroyed transmission towers in South Australia. Networks, markets and their governance framework under the NEM aren’t necessarily prepared for these changing conditions.

As shown by the 2002 review, the overlap of state energy policies and ad hoc climate policies is not a particularly new phenomenon. But market governance frameworks have so far kept climate policies separate from the narrow efficiency concerns of the electricity market and network regulation.

Clearly, in the age of climate change, the NEM and its regulatory and institutional frameworks will need to take account of these new and increasing climate mitigation and adaptation pressures.

Recently, South Australian Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis called for the federal government to “get serious about bringing climate policy and energy policy together”.

With the energy and environment portfolios combined in some governments (including now the federal one), perhaps the Finkel Review can support a convergence of climate and energy policy on a national level.

For more details on the history of reforms in the electricity market see Environmental norms and electricity supply: an analysis of normative change and household solar PV in Australia and A Barrier for Australia’s Climate Commitments? Law, the Electricity Market and Transitioning the Stationary Electricity Sector.

Dylan McConnell has received funding from the AEMC's Consumer Advocacy Panel and Energy Consumers Australia.

Anne Kallies 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.

Ship strikes can be deadly, as shown by this blue whale off the US northwest. Craig Hayslip/Oregon State Univ./Flickr/Wikimedia Commons , CC BY

Living largely on the fringes of a giant island continent, Australians rely on sea transport for the exports and imports that sustain our economy and lifestyle. Australians also have a strong affinity with the ocean, as reflected in the growth in recreational boating and cruise shipping. But these numbers risk putting people on a collision course – literally – with whales, turtles and other marine life.

In the decade to 2011–12, maritime activity in Australia grew by more than two-thirds, while vessels also grew larger and faster. By 2030, bulk freight is projected to increase by half and container throughput will double.

Australia has good shipping regulations, and the general public strongly values marine life. Even so, these drastic increases in both commercial and recreational vessels are likely to lead to more injuries and deaths of marine mammals, large fish and turtles that are hit by vessels – particularly among whale populations that are rebounding in number since the end of whaling.

In response to increasing concern about collision risk, the Department of the Environment and Energy has released a draft national strategy for reducing the risk of vessel strikes. It is open for public comment until January 31, 2017.

The strategy suggests that before we can develop ways to avoid collisions, we need to know exactly where animals are most in danger, by mapping the risk of vessel strike on a national scale. We are working on a project to do just that.

Looking to the past

The first step is to collate and interpret the existing data. Focusing specifically on whales, the current International Whaling Commission (IWC) database shows 51 reported strikes in Australian waters. Only two happened before 1990.

It would be tempting to think that vessel strikes are therefore a modern issue. But the more likely explanation for this pattern is that there has never been a systematic collection of historic Australian data.

We addressed this challenge by searching online media database archives, in particular TROVE. We found reports of vessel strikes dating back to 1872, and an extra 90 records not captured in the IWC’s database. We have thus created the most comprehensive record of whale vessel collisions off Australia.

Our searches brought the number of reported vessel collisions off Australia up to 141. Meanwhile, we also found an extra 145 suspected unrecorded incidents worldwide.

It is hard to compare strike rates around the world because of different record-keeping methods, but our best estimate is that Australian strikes account for 17% of the total worldwide incidents since records began. This challenges the view that these incidents were historically rarer in Australia than elsewhere.

In the records of Australian collisions where the species could be identified, the majority involved humpback whales (52%), followed by southern right whales (12%) and sperm whales (7%). Based on 95 reports in which the fate of the whale could be reliably determined, 52% of strikes were deemed to be fatal or probably fatal; 23% were reported as injuries or probable injuries; and in 25% of cases the whale was unharmed.

Most modern-era strikes are reported in Queensland, which plays host to the east coast humpback breeding and migration route, as well as lots of recreational vessels which are more likely to report incidents as they get damaged. But again, it is very hard to tell how many strikes go unreported, both in Queensland and elsewhere. It may simply be that Queensland has a better system than other states for reporting incidents.

After reading news reports of whale strikes spanning more than 140 years, we were also struck by the changing public and media perception of these events. Early reports from the 1800s refer to ships coming under attack from frightful monsters of the deep. During much of the 20th century collisions were seen as exciting or interesting events during voyages, whereas modern reports are far more concerned with animal welfare and environmental impacts.

You might ask why it matters what happened decades or centuries ago. But of course the past helps us interpret the present.

For example, modern data do not show many large vessels striking animals in Australian waters, whereas these kinds of collisions seem to have been more common in previous eras. This is possibly because, historically, most large vessels had large crews and/or many passengers, potentially making collisions more likely to be spotted than they would be aboard today’s large automated vessels with small crews. This raises the question of whether significant numbers of collisions are happening without being noticed.

Recording vessel sizes will also help to devise the most effective strategies for avoiding collisions. For example, if small recreational vessels pose the most significant strike threat in a given region, then changing the region’s commercial shipping lanes will be of little use.

What can be done?

The jump in the number of reported vessel strikes in the late 1990s suggests that reporting rates have probably improved, but also highlights the need for a much more rigorous system. With this aim, the Australian Marine Mammal Centre has developed an online tool for reporting collisions.

The next task for our project is to compare information on shipping density and average speeds with data about the habitats and migration routes of at-risk species. This will help us draw up relative risk maps to identify specific areas and times where the risk is greatest, and where efforts to reduce them should be focused.

Some measures, including route changes, speed restrictions and exclusion zones, have already been successfully used in waters off the United States and New Zealand.

With Australia’s increasing appetite for international trade and recreational boating, it is time to develop some effective methods of our own to avoid running over our marine wildlife.

This article was co-authored by Dr Simon Childerhouse, a marine mammal biologist with Blue Planet Marine based in Nelson, New Zealand.

David Peel receives funding from the Marine Biodiversity Hub of the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Programme and previously from the Australian Marine Mammal Centre.

Joshua Smith receives funding from the Department of the Environment and Energy and previously from the Australian Marine Mammal Centre.