Avoiding dangerous climate change

Climate change is already having a significant impact on Australia’s environment and all Australians. Places we love, such as the Great Barrier Reef are suffering. Our farmland and water supplies are stressed. We are already planning for damage to our coastline. And we face great uncertainty about how severe droughts, fires, floods and cyclones will be. All of these are expected to increase in severity with climate change.

Some level of climate change is already occurring and more change will inevitably come. But just how great the damage will be is up to us. We can still avoid truly dangerous climate change but we must ACT NOW!   Coping with climate change will be difficult and expensive the more we allow climate change to increase in severity.

Failure to act now will cost jobs in the future and make it far less likely we will succeed.

And, if we do not take strong measures soon it may be too late for many of our native plants and animals.

We must do all we can to limit climate change now. This means large and rapid reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases from all sources.

Keeping as far below 2°C as possible

To give the planet its best chance of long term survival the current scientific thinking supports keeping global temperature increases to less than 2°C, above which the impacts will be extremely damaging.

To stay under this 2°C ‘target’ climate scientists and international environment groups are calling for a reduction in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is currently at 387 parts per million. To achieve 350 ppm, global emissions must peak by 2015 and industrialised countries will need to reduce their emissions by at least 40% by 2020 and 90% by 2050 (compared to 1990 levels). This is a phenomenally challenging but still achievable target.

This ‘peak and decline’ approach comes from the panel of scientists set up to advise the United Nations on Climate Change. Known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), these scientists (numbering over 400), ran a number of global emissions scenarios and their impacts in their fourth assessment report on climate change.

The longer that global emissions continue to grow, the more warming is injected into the system, the steeper (or more abruptly) declines in emissions are needed, and the risk of runaway global warming increases.

Australia’s 2008-2012 Kyoto target allows it to increase emissions from 1990 levels by 8%. Most countries were requested to reduce their emissions. Yet Australia's emissions are so high that it will fail to meet even this generous target.

Furthermore, it is clear that the Kyoto targets (agreed to in 1998) are far from adequate to address the current climate situation and the climate negotiations in Copenhagen (Dec 2009) where widely considered to be unsuccessful. The months leading up to 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol ceases, will determine whether we succeed or fail to address the moral challenge of our time. Developed countries such as Australia and the United States urgently need to follow the lead of countries in Europe  which have committed to serious rates of emissions reductions, in the order of tens of percent per decade.

While this seems like  a tall order, it is achievable with the necessary will to act. It will involve significant improvements to energy efficiency and a significant investment in renewable energy. We can all reduce our carbon footprint at home and in our choice of transport. And some solutions are relatively easy and can be implemented right now. Solutions like reducing carbon pollution caused by destroying our forests and bushland.

Protecting our native forests and bush not only prevents emissions, it improves their ability to safely store carbon out of the atmosphere and helps plants and animals survive the impacts of climate change. Three big wins through one simple action!  

If we get this right, we can transform Australia into a place that wastes less resources, is more self-sufficient, is cleaner and less polluted, where we have built more sustainable urban villages with healthier lifestyles and where our natural environment is properly protected.

Only now are scientists are becoming increasingly aware that protecting and restoring biodiverse natural ecosystems is a critically important part of fighting climate change.

In October 2009, The Convention on Biological Diversity released a study called CBD Technical Series No. 43 on Forest Resilience, Biodiversity and Climate Change (6.9Mb pdf) that found that maintaining and restoring biodiversity in forests not only promotes their resilience to human-induced pressures (and is therefore an essential “insurance policy” to safeguard against climate-change impacts) it helps fight climate change.

This report supports the need for climate change policies and measures to promote the protection of intact forest ecosystems and the restoration of damaged forest ecosystems. The report also stresses that the resilience inherent in intact forest ecosystems - that are fully functional units of plants, animals, micro-organisms, and fungi - provide the best insurance against climate change, and help ensure that forests meet the needs of present and future generations.

It is becoming more evident that in order to avoid dangerous climate change we need to protect and restore the world’s natural carbon stores - our biodiverse forests and natural ecosystems.

There are three things you can do to help:

1. Actively support campaigns to save our wild places. This means ending land clearing and most native forest logging – a guaranteed, immediate and cost-effective way to stop carbon pollution – and creating more protected areas to give habitats and wildlife a better chance to cope with climate change.

2. Help the Wilderness Society to make sure Australia doesn’t choose a nuclear future. Nuclear is the wrong answer to climate change which produces far more toxic waste than CO2.

3. Help reduce greenhouse emissions from energy use.

Seven simple things you can do at home to reduce your energy consumption and help reduce climate change:

   1. Save energy at home: use appliances with 5-star energy ratings and turn them off at the wall; change over to compact fluoro light globes and turn lights off when you don’t need them; install solar water heating; and choose accredited Green Power electricity suppliers!

   2. Eat less meat and animal products in general.

   3. Drive less: take a bus, train, walk or ride a bike - every 5 kilometres driven creates 1.5kg of carbon dioxide.

   3. Reduce, reuse, recycle: cutting down on packaging and recycling your waste can save thousands of kilograms of greenhouse pollution for each household.

   4. Buy local: transporting products creates huge amounts of greenhouse pollution – buy local and cut down on carbon emissions!

   5. Turn down the air conditioning: Australians spend tonnes of greenhouse gases to heat and cool our homes. By building and insulating more efficiently, and learning to live with our natural environment we can make a huge contribution to reducing global warming.

   6. Plant some trees: each tree can absorb a tonne of carbon dioxide over its lifetime. Fill your garden with water-wise natives and help make a difference.