3 billion animals were in the bushfires' path. Here's what the royal commission said (and should've said) about them

The Black Summer bushfires were devastating for wildlife, with an estimated three billion wild animals killed, injured or displaced. This staggering figure does not include the tens of thousands of farm animals who also perished.

The bushfire royal commission’s final report, released on October 30, recognised the gravity of the fires’ extraordinary toll on animals.

Read more: Click through the tragic stories of 119 species still struggling after Black Summer in this interactive (and how to help)

It recommended governments improve wildlife rescue arrangements, develop better systems for understanding biodiversity and clarify evacuation options for domestic animals.

While these changes are welcome and necessary, they’re not sufficient. Minimising such catastrophic impacts on wildlife and livestock also means reducing their exposure to these hazards in the first place. And unless we develop more proactive strategies to protect threatened species from disasters, they’ll only become more imperilled.

What The Royal Commission Recommended

The royal commission recognised the need for wildlife rescuers to have swift and safe access to fire grounds.

In the immediate aftermath of the bushfires, some emergency services personnel were confused about the roles and responsibilities of wildlife rescuers. This caused delays in rescue operations.

To address this issue, the royal commission sensibly suggested all state and territory governments integrate wildlife rescue functions into their general disaster planning frameworks. This would improve coordination between different response agencies.

Read more: The bushfire royal commission has made a clarion call for change. Now we need politics to follow

Another issue raised by the commission was that Australia does not have a comprehensive, central source of information about its native flora and fauna. This is, in part, because species listing processes are fragmented across different jurisdictions.

For example, a marsupial, the white-footed dunnart, is listed as vulnerable in NSW, but is not on the federal government’s list of threatened species.

To better manage and protect wild animals, governments need more complete information on, for example, their range and population, and how climate change threatens them.

As a result, the royal commission recommended governments collect and share more accurate information so disaster response and recovery efforts for wildlife could be more targeted, timely and effective.

Helping Animals Help Themselves

While promising, the measures listed in the royal commission’s final report will only tweak a management system for wildlife already under stress. Current legal frameworks for protecting threatened species are reactive. By the time governments intervene, species have often already reached a turning point.

Governments must act to allow wild animals the best possible chances of escaping and recovering on their own.

This means prioritising the protection and restoration of habitat that allows animals to get to safety. As a World Wildlife Fund report explains, an animal’s ability to flee the fires and find safe, unburnt habitat — such as mesic (moist) refuges in gullies or near waterways — directly influenced their chances of survival.

Read more: Summer bushfires: how are the plant and animal survivors 6 months on? We mapped their recovery

Wildlife corridors also assist wild animals to survive and recover from disasters. These connect areas of habitat, providing fast moving species with safe routes along which they can flee from hazards.

And these corridors help slow moving species, such as koalas, to move across affected landscapes after fires. This prevents them from becoming isolated, and enables access to food and water.

Hazard reduction activities, such as removing dry vegetation that fuels fires, were also a focus for the royal commission. These can coexist with habitat conservation when undertaken in ecologically-sensitive ways.

As the commission recognised, Indigenous land and fire management practices are informed by intimate knowledge of plants, animals and landscapes. These practices should be integrated into habitat protection policies in consultation with First Nations land managers.

The commission also suggested natural hazards, such as fire, be counted as a “key threatening process” under national environment law. But it should be further amended to protect vulnerable species under threat from future stressors, such as disasters.

Read more: Let there be no doubt: blame for our failing environment laws lies squarely at the feet of government

Governments also need to provide more funding to monitor compliance with this law. Another new World Wildlife Fund report warns that unless it is properly enforced, a further 37 million native animals could be displaced or killed as a result of habitat destruction this decade.

And, as we saw last summer, single bushfire events can push some populations much closer to extinction. For example, the fires destroyed a large portion of the already endangered glossy black-cockatoo’s remaining habitat.

What About Pets And Farm Animals?

Pets and farm animals featured in the commission’s recommendations too.

During the bushfires, certain evacuation centres didn’t cater for these animals. This meant some evacuees chose not to use these facilities because they couldn’t take their animals with them.

To guide the community in future disasters, the commission said plans should clearly identify whether or not evacuation centres can accommodate people with animals.

Read more: Seven ways to protect your pets in an emergency

Evacuation planning is crucial to effective disaster response. However, it is unfortunately not always feasible to move large groups of livestock off properties at short notice.

For this reason, governments should help landholders to mitigate the risks hazards pose to their herds and flocks. Researchers are already starting to do this by investigating the parts of properties that were burnt during the bushfires. This will help farmers identify the safest paddocks for their animals in future fire seasons.

Disasters are only expected to become more intense and extreme as the climate changes. And if we’re to give our pets, livestock and unique wildlife the best chance at surviving, it’s not enough only to have sound disaster response. Governments must preemptively address the underlying sources of animals’ vulnerability to hazards.

Read more: How we plan for animals in emergencies 

Ashleigh Best, PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow, University of Melbourne; Christine Parker, Professor of Law, University of Melbourne, and Lee Godden, Director, Centre for Resources, Energy and Environmental Law, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Zali Steggall's new climate change bill comes just as economic sectors step up

Yesterday, Zali Steggall, the independent member for Warringah, introduced her long-awaited climate change bill to the Australian parliament.

Much of the debate around the bill centres on what needs to be done for Australia to reach net zero emissions by 2050. That’s a crucial discussion — but it’s equally vital to recognise what’s already been committed.

Read more: Conservative but green independent MP Zali Steggall could break the government’s climate policy deadlock

Our project, the Net Zero Momentum Tracker, monitors Australia’s journey towards net zero emissions, tracking climate commitments and progress in key sectors of the economy. This includes superannuation, transport, retail, property and local government, and a forthcoming analysis of the resources sector.

We’ve found progress is, in general, going well. These sectors are increasingly making more climate-active commitments, which means the moment is right for precisely the kind of pivot Steggall’s bill seeks to facilitate.

What The Climate Change Bill Proposes

Steggall has garnered huge support outside of politics. In a joint letter this week, more than 100 Australian businesses, industry groups and community organisations endorsed the bill as a critical step in the recovery from the pandemic.

This included Oxfam, the Business Council of Australia, the ACTU, the Australian Medical Association and our organisation, ClimateWorks Australia

Along with the 2050 target, the bill proposes the establishment of an independent Climate Change Commission. It also adopts the government’s low emissions technology roadmap and would require the government to introduce risk assessment and adaptation plans.

To reach the 2050 target, the bill calls for a process to review the target every five years, and ensure independent advice on five-yearly emissions budgets.

An emissions budget sets the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted over five-year periods — in line with requirements for the Paris Agreement on climate. This is important because the amount of global warming depends on cumulative emissions, not emissions in any one year.

Tracking The Sectors

Australia can no longer consider a commitment to a net zero target as a matter of ideology or a moral gesture. Increasingly, it’s simple economic common sense, especially for investors.

In 2019, Geoff Summerhayes from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority pointed out that climate change now constitutes “a legally foreseeable risk facing many different companies in a range of different industries”. As such, the financial sector has an obligation to act.

In 2020, the level of ambition in the superannuation sector rose considerably, with REST super now joining Cbus, HESTA and UniSuper with net zero pledges.

Read more: Super funds are feeling the financial heat from climate change

Similarly, the recent ANZ announcement of “strong action to support the Paris Agreement” signals that all the major banks and insurers are moving away from thermal coal, as the International Energy Agency declares solar energy to be the cheapest source of electricity in history.

Certainly, some sectors of the Australian economy are moving faster than others. Our analysis of 21 major property companies found 90% had set an emissions reduction target, while nearly a third were already committed to net zero.

The local government sector is equally proactive. Over a third of the largest local governments we assessed (representing a fifth of the Australian population) have committed to reaching zero community emissions by or before 2050.

And more than half are acting to reduce their operational (or direct) emissions by, for instance, installing solar panels and switching their vehicle fleet to electric vehicles.

By contrast, our analysis showed the retail and transport sectors have a long way to go before they’re aligned with net zero.

Asking ‘How’, Not ‘Why’

Even in a historically difficult sector like resources, progress is being made.

BHP, for instance, now says it can flourish under conditions compatible with the Paris Agreement. Rather than posing a problem for business, action to decarbonise the global economy will, it declares, present “opportunities to invest in commodities such as potash, nickel and copper”, which will “provide a strong foundation” for its business.

This shows when it comes to net zero many of Australia’s biggest companies no longer ask “why”, but instead focus on “how”.

In part, that’s because businesses that don’t change know they increasingly risk isolation.

For example, the International Energy Agency said in its annual report that demand for Australian thermal coal has peaked, and renewables will meet 80% of the world’s energy demands in the coming years.

Japan, South Korea and the European Union have committed to reaching net zero by 2050, and US President-elect Joe Biden says his administration will make the same pledge. China also recently committed to reaching net zero by 2060.

Read more: Biden says the US will rejoin the Paris climate agreement in 77 days. Then Australia will really feel the heat

That means the vast majority of Australia’s exports are going to trading partners who have committed to transform their economies.

This will result in a shift in demand from high-carbon products and services, such as thermal coal, towards zero or near zero carbon alternatives, such as renewable hydrogen.

An Opportunity, Not A Threat

Such a demand also presents extraordinary opportunities. The international transition to cleaner economies is a chance for Australia to become a renewable energy superpower.

After all, Australia possesses the world’s third-largest reserves of lithium and currently produces nine of the ten elements required for lithium-ion batteries.

Likewise, by 2030, Australia could be using renewable electricity and water to produce 500,000 tonnes of green hydrogen annually, one of the most important commodities of the transition into a clean economy.

Providing Certainty To Businesses

In tracking the momentum to net zero, we’ve seen the importance of clear targets in raising ambition, encouraging innovation and fostering the deployment of known solutions quickly and at scale.

And a parliamentary commitment to decarbonisation at the federal level, backed by interim targets set every five years, would provide businesses and the public with the certainty they need to plan.

Read more: The UK has a national climate change act – why don't we?

Many other countries, such as Britain, already have their own climate change acts. So, too, does the state of Victoria.

Across the country, all the state and territory governments have made net zero commitments – and our assessment of local governments found many of them to be taking strong stands, too. It’s time for the federal parliament to get on board.

Anna Malos, Project Manager, climate and energy policy, ClimateWorks Australia and Amandine Denis-Ryan, Head of National Programs, ClimateWorks Australia, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

NSW has joined China, South Korea and Japan as climate leaders. Now it's time for the rest of Australia to follow

It’s been a busy couple of months in global energy and climate policy. Australia’s largest trading partners – China, South Korea and Japan – have all announced they will reach net-zero emissions by about mid-century. In the United States, the incoming Biden administration has committed to decarbonising its electricity system by 2035.

These pledges have big implications for Australia. With some of the best renewable resources in the world, we have much to gain from the transition. And this week, the New South Wales government embraced the opportunity.

Its new A$32 billion Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap will, among other things, support the construction of 12 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity by 2030. This is six times the capacity of the state’s Liddell coal-fired power station, set to close in 2023.

The roadmap was developed by NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean through extensive consultation with industry and others, including ourselves. While we believe a national carbon price is the best way to reduce emissions, the NSW approach nonetheless sets an example for other states looking to increase renewable energy capacity. So let’s take a closer look at the plan.

What’s The Roadmap All About?

The roadmap acknowledges that within 15 years, three-quarters of NSW’s coal-fired electricity supply is expected to reach the end of its technical life. It says action is needed now to ensure cheap, clean and reliable electricity, and to set up NSW as a global energy superpower.

The plan involves a coordinated approach to transmission, generation and storage. By 2030, the government aims to:

• deliver about 12 gigawatts of new transmission capacity through so-called “renewable energy zones” in three regional areas by 2030. It would most likely be generated by wind and solar

• support about 3 gigawatts of energy storage to help back up variable renewable energy supplies. This would involve batteries, pumped hydro, and “hydrogen ready” gas peaking power stations

• attract up to A$32 billion in private investment in regional energy infrastructure investment by 2030

• support more than 6,300 construction and 2,800 ongoing jobs in 2030, mostly in regional NSW

• reduce NSW’s carbon emissions by 90 million tonnes.

The plan also aims to see the average NSW household save about A$130 a year in electricity costs, although this might be hard to achieve in practice. And regional landholders hosting renewable projects on their properties are expected to earn A$1.5 billion in revenue over the next 20 years.

Giving Generators Options

One of the most innovative aspects of the NSW proposal is that generators will have two options when it comes to selling their electricity.

First, the government will appoint an independent “consumer trustee” to purchase electricity from generators at an agreed price – giving the generators the long-term certainty they need to invest. The trustee would then sell this electricity either directly to the market, or through contracts to retailers.

But the trustee will encourage generators to first seek a better price by finding their own customers, such as energy consumers and other electricity retailers.

Read more: Zali Steggall's new climate change bill comes just as economic sectors step up

This system is different to the approach adopted in Victoria and the ACT, where government contracts remove any incentive for generators to participate in the energy market. Over time, this limits market competition and innovation.

The NSW plan improves on existing state policies in another way – by aligning financial incentives to the physical needs of the system. The Consumer Trustee will enter into contracts with projects that produce electricity at times of the day when consumers need it, and not when the system is already oversupplied.

While this won’t be easy for the trustee to model, this approach is likely to benefit consumers more than in other jurisdictions where lowest-cost projects seem to be preferred, irrespective of whether the energy they produced is needed by consumers.

One shortcoming of the roadmap is it does not financially reward existing low-emissions electricity generators in NSW, nor does it charge carbon-heavy electricity producers for the emissions they produce. This could be corrected in the future by integrating the policy into a nationally consistent carbon price, which transfers the cost of carbon pollution onto heavy emitters.

Why Is All This So Important?

NSW’s ageing coal-fired power stations are chugging along – albeit with ever-declining reliability. But it’s only a matter of time before something expensive needs fixing. This was the case with Hazelwood in Victoria: the old walls of the boilers had thinned to less than 2 millimetres. The repair cost was prohibitive and the station closed with just five months’ notice. Electricity prices shot up in response to unexpectedly reduced supply.

In NSW, the consumer trustee will be tasked with helping ensuring replacement generation is delivered in a timely way. This means developing new generation capacity well ahead of announced coal plant closures.

This is a helpful development. But ultimately a stronger measure will be needed to ensure coal plants give early notice of their intention to exit the market. The Grattan Institute has previously suggested coal generators put up bonds that are forfeited if they close early. We think this model is worth considering again.

Seize The Opportunity

As the world’s largest exporter of coal and LNG, Australia has much to lose as global economies shift to zero emissions. But our renewable energy potential means we also have much to gain.

Australia needs a durable, nationally consistent policy framework if we’re to seize the opportunities of the global transition to clean energy. The NSW roadmap is a significant step in the right direction.

Read more: Biden says the US will rejoin the Paris climate agreement in 77 days. Then Australia will really feel the heat 

Tim Nelson, Associate Professor of Economics, Griffith University and Joel Gilmore, Associate Professor, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

83% of Australians want tougher privacy laws. Now’s your chance to tell the government what you want

Federal Attorney-General Christian Porter has called for submissions to the long-awaited review of the federal Privacy Act 1988.

This is the first wide-ranging review of privacy laws since the Australian Law Reform Commission produced a landmark report in 2008.

Australia has in the past often hesitated to adopt a strong privacy framework. The new review, however, provides an opportunity to improve data protection rules to an internationally competitive standard.

Here are some of the ideas proposed — and what’s at stake if we get this wrong.

Read more: It's time for privacy invasion to be a legal wrong

Australians Care Deeply About Data Privacy

Personal information has never had a more central role in our society and economy, and the government has a strong mandate to update Australia’s framework for the protection of personal information.

In the Australian Privacy Commissioner’s 2020 survey, 83% of Australians said they’d like the government to do more to protect the privacy of their data.

The intense debate about the COVIDSafe app earlier this year also shows Australians care deeply about their private information, even in a time of crisis.

Privacy laws and enforcement can hardly keep up with the ever-increasing digitalisation of our lives. Data-driven innovation provides valuable services that many of us use and enjoy. However, the government’s issues paper notes:

As Australians spend more of their time online, and new technologies emerge, such as artificial intelligence, more personal information about individuals is being captured and processed, raising questions as to whether Australian privacy law is fit for purpose.

The pandemic has accelerated the existing trend towards digitalisation and created a range of new privacy issues including working or studying at home, and the use of personal data in contact tracing.

Australians are rightly concerned they are losing control over their personal data.

So there’s no question the government’s review is sorely needed.

Issues Of Concern For The New Privacy Review

The government’s review follows the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Digital Platforms Inquiry, which found that some data practices of digital platforms are unfair and undermine consumer trust. We rely heavily on digital platforms such as Google and Facebook for information, entertainment and engagement with the world around us.

Our interactions with these platforms leave countless digital traces that allow us to be profiled and tracked for profit. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) found that the digital platforms make it hard for consumers to resist these practices and to make free and informed decisions regarding the collection, use and disclosure of their personal data.

The government has committed to implement most of the ACCC’s recommendations for stronger privacy laws to give us greater consumer control.

However, the reforms must go further. The review also provides an opportunity to address some long-standing weaknesses of Australia’s privacy regime.

The government’s issues paper, released to inform the review, identified several areas of particular concern. These include:

• the scope of application of the Privacy Act, in particular the definition of “personal information” and current private sector exemptions

• whether the Privacy Act provides an effective framework for promoting good privacy practices

• whether individuals should have a direct right to sue for a breach of privacy obligations under the Privacy Act

• whether a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy should be introduced into Australian law, allowing Australians to go to court if their privacy is invaded

• whether the enforcement powers of the Privacy Commissioner should be strengthened.

While most recent attention relates to improving consumer choice and control over their personal data, the review also brings back onto the agenda some never-implemented recommendations from the Australian Law Reform Commission’s 2008 review.

These include introducing a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy, and extending the coverage of the Privacy Act.

Exemptions For Small Business And Political Parties Should Be Reviewed

The Privacy Act currently contains several exemptions that limit its scope. The two most contentious exemptions have the effect that political parties and most business organisations need not comply with the general data protection standards under the Act.

The small business exemption is intended to reduce red tape for small operators. However, largely unknown to the Australian public, it means the vast majority of Australian businesses are not legally obliged to comply with standards for fair and safe handling of personal information.

Procedures for compulsory venue check-ins under COVID health regulations are just one recent illustration of why this is a problem. Some people have raised concerns that customers’ contact-tracing data, in particular collected via QR codes, may be exploited by marketing companies for targeted advertising.

Under current privacy laws, cafe and restaurant operators are generally exempt from complying with privacy obligations to undertake due diligence checks on third-party providers used to collect customers’ data.

The political exemption is another area of need of reform. As the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal showed, political campaigning is becoming increasingly tech-driven.

However, Australian political parties are exempt from complying with the Privacy Act and anti-spam legislation. This means voters cannot effectively protect themselves against data harvesting for political purposes and micro-targeting in election campaigns through unsolicited text messages.

There is a good case for arguing political parties and candidates should be subject to the same rules as other organisations. It’s what most Australians would like and, in fact, wrongly believe is already in place.

Read more: How political parties legally harvest your data and use it to bombard you with election spam

Trust Drives Innovation

Trust in digital technologies is undermined when data practices come across as opaque, creepy or unsafe.

There is increasing recognition that data protection drives innovation and adoption of modern applications, rather than impedes it.

The COVIDSafe app is a good example. When that app was debated, the government accepted that robust privacy protections were necessary to achieve a strong uptake by the community.

We would all benefit if the government saw that this same principle applies to other areas of society where our precious data is collected.

Information on how to make a submission to the federal government review of the Privacy Act 1988 can be found here.

Read more: People want data privacy but don't always know what they're getting 

Normann Witzleb, Associate Professor in Law, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A third of our waste comes from buildings. This one's designed for reuse and cuts emissions by 88%

Designing buildings so they can easily be taken apart and the materials reused provides a feasible and commercial pathway for minimising waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Our research shows one such Curtin University building, the Legacy Living Lab in Fremantle, reduces construction waste and cuts emissions to almost a tenth of what a conventional building process would produce.

The modular, circular economy building produces benefits in all six environmental indicators we assessed. It’s part of our vision for the decarbonisation of buildings.

Read more: Buildings produce 25% of Australia's emissions. What will it take to make them 'green' – and who'll pay?

Learning From Nature

Natural biogeochemical cycles create little or no waste. These circular cycles eventually transform used material into a new resource. For example, through the nutrient cycle a fallen leaf provides the building blocks for future leaves.

It’s simple and beautiful. The opposite of a linear model of “take, make, dispose”. It’s complex and ugly.

Unfortunately, this is the model industrialised society has adopted. And not only for our coffee pods, which mostly end up in landfill, but also for most commercial and residential buildings.

The building industry consumes about 50% of mineral resources and produces about 35% of waste. It’s a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions. What, then, can be done?

Read more: We create 20m tons of construction industry waste each year. Here's how to stop it going to landfill

Rethinking ‘Downward Spiral’ Recycling

The answer lies in revisiting the basics of our recycling practices. Since the late 1990s, recycling has been considered an environmental solution, with recycling bins popping up everywhere. However, researchers and consumers alike have begun to realise recycling often comes down to mere “wishcycling”. Less than 10% of plastics is actually being recycled.

Reprocessing is considered the best way to keep materials in use, particularly for artefacts like coffee cups or microchips. However, for many other products, such as building materials, recycling often translates into less than helpful down-cycling.

Even seemingly environmentally benign material, such as timber, often cannot be recycled. Rather, it is remanufactured into products of lower economic value and quality. The material is in a downward spiral that only delays its disposal to landfill.

Clearly, it is much better for the environment if we can find ways to reuse products. Indeed, there are “reusable alternatives for almost everything: beeswax or silicone food wraps, reusable coffee pods, shampoo and conditioner bars, reusable safety razors and bars of soap, rather than liquid soap”.

Read more: With the right tools, we can mine cities

Applying Reuse Principles To Buildings

Can this reuse practice be adopted for buildings too? After all, a building is a sophisticated and complex product compared to coffee pods or cling wrap.

Researchers from Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute put this question to the test by building a modular, reusable laboratory. It’s a place where researchers, builders and citizens alike can meet to prototype and study new products.

The Legacy Living Lab (L3) is a highly functional, state-of-the-art building with offices and space for collaboration. Yet it can be taken apart – deconstructed or disassembled – moved and reused anywhere within weeks.

Findings from studying the environmental impact of this facility point towards a resounding yes to the question of whether reuse practices can be adopted for buildings. The in-built reuse practices of the L3 save 18 tonnes of construction materials from disposal compared to common building industry practices. This leads to an 88% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

So how was this done? Simply, by choosing reused steel frames, opting for steel foundations instead of concrete, and designing internal wall cladding that’s easily disassembled. This makes it almost as easy to take the building apart as your average Lego spaceship.

Read more: Green cement a step closer to being a game-changer for construction emissions

When the time comes to decommission the building, it can be deconstructed as eight modules. These can be moved to the next site for reuse rather than being demolished.

Modular buildings are made of box-shaped structures, built off-site and delivered on-site in a matter of hours. This has the added benefit of minimum disruption for our cities compared to traditional construction sites.

Modular buildings come in all shapes and dimensions, from tiny houses to skyscrapers and factories. They are often more cost-effective to produce than traditional double-brick constructions.

Thus, as well as a minimal environmental footprint, the advantages of modular buildings include flexibility, speed and cost.

Creating A New Building Materials Market

By adopting easily disassembled modular buildings, we can create a whole new market for reusable building materials. Design-for-disassembly and closed-loop supply chains can keep building components in the material loop as they are – without the need for wishy-washy and wasteful recycling procedures.

Similar to the way nature operates, the team at CUSP created a building whose byproducts from one process remain in the loop as inputs for the next, keeping waste to a minimum. In this way, disassembly becomes much safer and cleaner, which benefits our cities and their residents.

Read more: Unbuilding cities as high-rises reach their use-by date

All that does not mean recycling building waste isn’t beneficial. It all depends on the project. Timber can at least be chipped into garden mulch, bricks and concrete crushed into road base, and so forth.

But this approach is not nearly as neat as nature’s way of handling waste. Design for disassembly and modularity comes closer to that. It can lead the way towards a marketplace where it is common practice to retain material in the supply chain.

If our goal is to create products and processes that “solve our greatest design challenges sustainably and in solidarity with all life on Earth”, it’s time we turned toward nature. We believe it will be a wiser guide than any other in our efforts to redefine wasteful, linear business models.

Roberto Minunno, Research Fellow in Sustainability Buildings, Curtin University; Greg Morrison, Professor and Director, Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute, Curtin University; Richard L. Gruner, Senior lecturer, University of Western Australia, and Timothy Michael O'Grady, PhD researcher, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Friday essay: in praise of pardalotes, unique birds living in a damaged country

I’ve spent more of my life with pardalotes than with most other acquaintances. They are an obscure and odd group of four species of small (thumb-sized) birds. They have little public profile, not helped by the awkward name. But they are quintessentially Australian, occurring nowhere else in the world.

As a boy, I chanced upon a pair of spotted pardalotes absorbed in constructing their nesting burrow, a long tunnel built into sloping earth. Whereas most of the bird’s existence is spent unobtrusively foraging in tree canopies, breeding brings this species to ground, allowing close observation by the quiet but inquisitive.

My interest was piqued by their industry, beauty and strangeness. The intrigue stayed with me. Later, a PhD in zoology gave me the opportunity to study them in detail.

Zoology is a charmed science. Done well, it offers the opportunity to escape the conformity, constraints and solipsism of the human perspective; to see and understand the world from the viewpoint of another species, where space and time differ from the conventions we’re used to, where the ordering of the importance of things is upended, where the elements of the natural world come far more sharply into focus and are imbued with different meanings.

Zoology offers shapeshifting, and the insights that brings. It has taken me to many places, and a little into the diverse minds of remarkable species.

Adapted To Australia

So, for three years I counted pardalotes at many sites and over many seasons. I caught thousands, with wire-mesh traps at the entrances to their nesting burrows or with carefully sited nets. I attached leg bands, so I knew the identity of individuals. I weighed them, measured them, described the subtle variations in their jewelled plumage.

I watched them for hours every day, recording the plant species in which they foraged, and what they ate. I studied their mating habits, their breeding success, their territoriality and social interactions.

I reassessed my initial conception of them as placid when my experiments with a dummy pardalote and call playback triggered violent responses from territorial males. I examined the factors that threatened and killed them.

I found that they have long adapted to and exemplify an Australian ecology: they fit this country well.

They forage almost entirely in eucalypts, that linchpin and defining feature of many Australian environments. Their diet is unusual, comprising mostly the sweet exudate (manna) that seeps from eucalypt foliage, and “lerp”, the sugary coating of psyllid insects (a specialised group of bugs) that suck the phloem (the “sap” in leaves) from within that foliage.

This strange resource is itself a consequence of the Australian environment – our soils are typically so poor that trees capturing nutrients must also drink up an excess of carbohydrates that they then need to secrete.

The eucalypt/lerp/pardalote web is an intricate arrangement, played out in kaleidoscopic variation in different regions, with varying eucalypt, psyllid and pardalote species.

Season adds a further dynamic to the landscape, with insect abundance diminishing in cooler areas in winter. So, like many other animal species, the pardalotes must track the ebb and flow of resources across our country, else stay put and starve.

Indeed, episodes of mass mortality of pardalotes have been recorded in some winters. Some populations of these tiny birds cross formidable Bass Strait each year, heading from Tasmanian summers to the mainland for winter. Others disperse in a less orderly manner, nomadically tracking more unpredictable booms and busts of psyllid populations.

Subverted Pathways

Such nomadic movement is a distinctive feature of many Australian birds, contrasting markedly with the more rigid migration routes typical of birds on other continents – our seasonal patterning is more subtle and complex. But the ageless dispersal pathways of pardalotes have been subverted.

Clearing has broken the continuity of the forests, rendering dispersal more hazardous. In little more than 200 years, about 40% of their forest home has been destroyed, directly causing a comparable proportional loss in their population size.

Pardalotes have other threats. Around 10% of their habitat was burned in the severe wildfires of 2019–20, with those fires most likely killing the birds directly, and leaving burned habitat unsuitable for their re-establishment for at least several years.

Read more: A season in hell: bushfires push at least 20 threatened species closer to extinction

In many parts of their range, the manner in which we have degraded and fragmented their forest and woodland habitat has benefitted a small suite of aggressive honeyeaters – the native noisy miner and bell miner – and these miners can kill pardalotes and exclude them from otherwise suitable habitat.

Ecology is a complex network with many interwoven threads, and manipulation of one thread can have many reverberating impacts. We play with those threads at our peril.

From a human perspective, our land is mostly familiar, comforting.

But studying any Australian animal almost always leads to a crystallisation, a deciphering, of the destabilising manner in which we’ve contorted the ecology of this place. Purposefully, incompetently or haphazardly, we have rearranged the ecology of this land to suit our needs, and in doing so have rubbed away much that was integral to the existence of many other species.

We are corroding our nature and will pass on to our descendants a land that is less healthy, less diverse, less wonderful.

Notwithstanding the less secure life most pardalotes now face, three pardalote species remain reasonably abundant and widespread. However, one species – the forty-spotted pardalote (a charming and apt name) – has been particularly hard-hit by the changes we have wrought to its environment.

Now recognised as endangered, it has declined extensively and been reduced to a few populations (in beautiful locations) on some islands off Tasmania, with a fragile toehold at several small sites on the Tasmanian mainland. We still have the chance to save it, but that opportunity may soon be lost.

I no longer study pardalotes. But in the soundscape of my days, their intermittent call can still lure me away into lives that are not my own, into different ways of knowing our country and its workings, of the damage we’ve done and the healing we have yet to do.

This is an edited extract from Animals Make Us Human ed. Leah Kaminsky and Meg Keneally (Penguin Life, RRP $29.99), available now.

John Woinarski, Professor (conservation biology), Charles Darwin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Streeton: an optimistic celebration of the golden boy of Australian art

Review: Streeton, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has launched its summer season with a large, optimistic reconsideration of one of Australian art’s most favoured sons.

Curator Wayne Tunnicliffe has indicated that his decision to name the exhibition simply Streeton, without any subtitles, was part of his strategy to emphasise Streeton’s importance to Australian art and culture.

This assessment is hardly new. Lionel Lindsay, in The Art of Arthur Streeton of 1919 called him “our national painter”.

In 1923 when Streeton’s The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might was first exhibited in London, Lindsay wrote,

Streeton has painted the light and colour of Australia with such truth and beauty that his service to our country must ever remain the equivalent of Constable’s to England.

Six years later, in 1929, James S. MacDonald, the then director of the AGNSW, claimed Streeton

has shown us our land as no one else has done, and is still our best exemplar of the craft and mystery of painting as applied to landscape.

In 1931, as a way of lifting spirits in the Great Depression, the cash-strapped gallery gave Streeton the first ever survey exhibition of work by a living Australian artist.

In the years between the two world wars, Streeton’s characteristic paintings of blue tinged bush, golden fields, and clear Australian skies spoke of a country that had never seen war. His work was easily seen as characteristic of Australian smug insularity.

Most are pure landscapes but some show stocky soldier settlers attempting to tame the land by culling trees. Others show cattle grazing in newly cleared land. In The Land of the Golden Fleece (1926) a flock of sheep confidently graze in a valley sheltered by the Grampians.

It is not surprising this painting so effectively encapsulates the sentiment of the conservative establishment: a label on the frame indicates it is the proud possession of one of Australia’s gentleman’s clubs.

Conservatives And Conservation

Streeton’s art is also a reminder that conservatives once cared about conservation. He was a passionate advocate for the need to conserve the Australian bush against the timber industry.

Silvan Dam of 1939 is a celebration of the tree clad landscape near his home in the Dandenongs. But in Silvan Dam and Donna Buang, AD 2000, painted the following year, the same subject becomes an apocalyptic vision condemning the then state government’s proposed logging of the forest. Stark, bleached, tree trunks stand against bare rock and denuded mountains.

Streeton’s advocacy for nature over industry was not new. In 1895, when living in Sydney, he painted Cremorne Pastoral, an exquisite landscape of a grassy hill framed by graceful trees and Sydney Harbour as a political response to a proposed coal mine.

It is one of many harbour subjects painted in his Sydney years. As the AGNSW is directly opposite Sirius Cove, where Streeton lived in the 1890s, the bias towards this subject matter is understandable. The camp where Streeton, Roberts and others lived during the 1890s recession was built by the Brasch brothers who were active patrons of the arts.

Reuben Brasch supplied the artists with discarded varnished cedar panels from his department store. Their dark tones and elongated shape encouraged Streeton to become more experimental in his composition.

The colours of the harbour of his paintings in this period are almost dazzling in their intense blue of the water and gold of the Sydney sandstone, with flashes of gum tree green.

A further room shows his second Sydney period, after his return from spending some years in England. These are virtuoso pieces, but lack the experimental flair of the earlier works.

His paintings of Coogee Beach, a subject previously painted by Tom Roberts and Charles Conder, deserve a close look as a reminder of how Sydney’s magnificent beaches have been so degraded.

Lack Of Context

If there is one problem I have with this exhibition, and indeed with all celebrations of the life of a single artist, it is the lack of context. From the beginning, Streeton was praised simply because he was an Australian, born with a natural talent developed with little formal teaching.

But this is not quite true. While he attended evening classes with Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, the young artist met the academically trained Tom Roberts and the sophisticated adventurer Charles Conder.

Streeton’s art developed during his relationship with these more experienced artists. He painted alongside them at Box Hill and Eaglemont. The exhibition includes his Settler’s Camp (1888), a less than successful homage to Tom Roberts’ The Artists’ Camp (1886). Streeton was, however, a fast learner, and by the time he participated in the 9 by 5 Impressions exhibition, was their equal.

The wall of Streeton’s paintings from that most radical of all Australian art exhibitions is a joy. Conder’s influence can be seen in many of Streeton’s earlier paintings, especially in his Symbolist works and in The Railway Station, Redfern (1893), a painting that successfully quotes Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay (1888).

‘Smike’

The clearest indication of Streeton’s position in the early hierarchy of these brothers of the brush lies in the nickname bestowed on him by the dogmatic Roberts (aka “Bulldog”). Streeton was called “Smike”, after Nicholas Nickleby’s amiable but feeble-minded acolyte.

Arthur Streeton’s later career serves as a repudiation of that assessment. Travel broadened his perspective. He relished the exoticism of Egypt, where magical architecture took the place of gum trees. After initially being intimidated by the sophistication, class system and muted light of England, he did eventually achieve modest success in the centre of the empire.

At the end of World War I, he returned to Australia for real fame and fortune. In 1937, he became the only one of the artists who painted at Heidelberg to be honoured with a knighthood.

The last Arthur Streeton exhibition, curated by Geoffrey Smith for the National Gallery of Victoria in 1995, was shown in other state galleries. This much larger exhibition will not travel.

It is, however, on view throughout summer until February 14 2021. It is well worth the effort of an interstate trip for those newly liberated from quarantine.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This super rare squid is a deep-sea mystery. We recently spotted not 1, but 5, in the Great Australian Bight

The mysterious bigfin squid has been spotted in Australia’s waters for the first time. My colleagues and I from the CSIRO and Museums Victoria detail the encounters in our new research, published today in Public Library of Sciences ONE.

There have only been about a dozen bigfin squid sightings worldwide over the past two decades. Ours happened more than two kilometres below the ocean’s surface in the Great Australian Bight, off the coast of South Australia.

For many people, the phrase “deep-sea squid” may conjure up images of the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, or krakens with huge tentacles swimming in inky black water.

But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other species of deep-sea squid and octopus (both members of the class Cephalopoda) that are just as mysterious.

First Encounters With A Slippery Individual

For years, one of the only ways to sample the deep sea was to trawl the sea floor with nets. This often damaged the soft bodies of deep-sea organisms beyond recognition. These mangled specimens are then difficult to identify and reveal little to nothing about the creatures.

Fortunately, newer technologies such as remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) equipped with high-definition cameras are letting scientists see species as they’ve never seen before — offering deeper insight into their shapes, colours and behaviours in the wild.

The enigmatic bigfin squid, Magnapinna, is one case in point. When scientists first described the species in 1998, all they had to go by were some damaged specimens from Hawaii.

The most distinctive feature of these specimens were the large fins (at the very top of the body), which gave the squid its name. Years later, scientists exploring the deep Gulf of Mexico with ROVs realised they had come across Magnapinna in the wild.

They discovered that in addition to its distinctive fins, its arms had incredibly long filaments on the tips, making the bigfin squid unlike any other encountered.

These delicate filaments, which are mostly broken off in collected specimens, give Magnapinna an estimated total length of up to seven meters!

Mysterious Critters And Where To Find Them

But despite deep-sea ROV surveys becoming more common, Magnapinna has remained elusive.

The handful of sightings have been as far apart as the Central Pacific, North and South Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean. This suggests a worldwide distribution.

Yet, the big fin squid had never been seen in Australian waters. That is, until recently, when our team took part in a major research project to better understand the biology and geology of the Great Australian Bight, through the Great Australian Bight Deepwater Marine Program.

On the CSIRO’s research vessel Investigator and charter vessel REM Etive, we surveyed as deep as five kilometres below the water’s surface. Using nets, ROVs and other camera equipment, we recorded hundreds of hours of video footage and uncovered thousands of species.

On one dive, as we watched the video feed from cameras far below us, a wispy shape emerged from the gloom. With large undulating fins, a small torpedo-shaped body and long stringy limbs, it was unmistakably Magnapinna. We yelled and brought the ROV to a halt to get a better look.

The meeting lasted about three minutes. During this time we managed to use parallel laser pointers to measure the squid’s length — about 1.8 meters — before it swam away into darkness.

Read more: Octopuses are super-smart ... but are they conscious?

In total, we recorded five encounters with Magnapinna in the Great Australian Bight. Based on the animals’ measurements, we believe we recorded five different individuals: the most Magnapinna ever filmed in one place.

Most previous records have been of single Magnapinna, but our five squid were all found clustered close to each other. This might mean they like the habitat where they were found, but we’ll need more sightings to be sure.

Unexplained Behaviours

The footage we captured has offered new information about Magnapinna’s ecology, behaviour and anatomy.

Previously, Magnapinna has been seen many meters off the sea floor in an upright posture, with arms held wide and filaments draping down. We’re not sure what the specific function of this behaviour is. It might be a way to find prey — akin to dangling sticky, sucker-covered fishing lines.

On our voyage, we saw the squid in a horizontal version of this pose, just centimetres off the sea floor, with its arms and filaments streaming behind. Again, we don’t know whether this behaviour is for travelling, avoiding predators or another method of searching for prey.

One near-miss with a camera gave us a very closeup image of Magnapinna which showed filaments that appeared to be coiled like springs. This may be a means for Magnapinna to retract its filaments when needed, perhaps if it wanted to avoid damage, or reel in something it caught.

Until now, only one other cephalopod, the vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis), has been known to coil its filamentous appendages this way.

We have learned more about the mysterious bigfin squid. But until we have more sightings, or even an intact specimen, questions will remain.

One thing we do know is ROV surveying has great potential to enhance our understanding of deep-sea animals. With so much of the ocean around Australia yet to be explored, who knows what we’ll see coming out of the gloom next time?

Read more: Curious Kids: have people ever seen a colossal squid? 

Hugh MacIntosh, Research Associate, Marine Invertebrates, Museums Victoria and Deborah Osterhage, Marine Scientist, Oceans and Atmosphere, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.