‘Disappointment and disbelief’ after Morrison government vetoes research into student climate activism’

Between 2019 and early 2021, we developed a research proposal asking for funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC). The project was to investigate the mass student climate action movement and its relationship to democracy.

A few weeks ago, on Christmas Eve, we learnt via Twitter that the ARC had recommended our research proposal for funding, but acting Education Minister Stuart Robert vetoed the recommendation.

Robert also vetoed five other humanities projects. He did so on the grounds they “do not demonstrate value for taxpayers’ money nor contribute to the national interest”.

This political intervention is a problem for many reasons. Chief among them, it breaches key principles of academic autonomy and – in our case, also silences research working with young people on a crucial policy issue.

‘Freedom in research and training’

Since 1988, almost 1,000 universities in 94 countries have signed the Magna Charta Universitatum, including ten from Australia. The charter affirms the deepest values of university traditions.

In practice, it means a university “must serve society as a whole” and that “to meet the needs of the world around it, its research and teaching must be intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power”.

Central to the charter is that “freedom in research and training is the fundamental principle of university life”.

The ARC administers the National Competitive Grants Program, which delivers around $800 million to Australian researchers each year.

The ARC grants process involves several rounds of rigorous review and assessment, by internationally leading scholars. The ARC then recommends to the education minister which proposals should be funded, and the budget. The minister makes the final funding decisions.

The Morrison government claims it wants to protect academic freedoms. And it commissioned a 2019 review of freedom of expression and intellectual inquiry in higher education.

However, Robert’s veto of the ARC’s decision to fund six projects is a clear breach of the core principle of academic freedom.

What’s more, it’s not the first time Morrison government education ministers have ridden roughshod over the funding processes of the ARC and university research.

In 2018-19, Simon Birmingham vetoed 11 research grants recommended by the ARC. In 2020, Dan Tehan vetoed five.

An important new phenomenon

The project we proposed for ARC funding was titled “New possibilities: student climate action and democratic renewal”. It involved working directly with young people to investigate a significant new phenomenon.

Since 2018, millions of students across the globe have worked hard as leaders, organisers and advocates for action on climate change. Their actions include the school strikes for climate and various legal actions. In Australia since 2018, we estimate at least 500,000 school students have participated in the movement, including coordinated school strike actions online and in the streets.

Our project was designed to document such actions and to establish:

• why young people participate

• what activities they undertake

• what we can learn from the movement to address climate change and strengthen our democracy.

Our project would have led to vital new knowledge on a global phenomenon. It had the potential to help address falling trust in governments and dissatisfaction with democracy, and to give new insights on engaging with young people in learning about and responding to climate change.

It also provided jobs for early-career researchers already facing cripplingly precarious employment in the university sector.

Our proposal relied on a vast body of academic work and expertise, and previous scholarship by the research team. It was connected to a global research network exploring young people’s climate politics and broader possibilities for democracy.

Developing the proposal involved hundreds of hours of additional research, writing, editing and consultation with professional staff across five universities.

For the ARC to judge the project worthy of funding, it must have determined it passed the national interest test and that it was value for money.

Significantly, we have no formal right to appeal the decision.

‘Disappointment and disbelief’

The minister’s intervention is a serious blow to Australia’s reputation for research excellence and its commitment to academic freedom.

The Morrison government has also sent a negative message to Australia’s young people – essentially saying research into their views on climate change is irrelevant.

We asked students who we work with to respond to the government’s veto, and they stand with us in disappointment and disbelief. Audrey, aged 10, who has participated in climate action, said:

“I personally think that the vetoing was to stop the research from public view to make the government look better, as they aren’t doing enough on climate change. Another main reason why the vetoing is so bad and unfair is that the government is sending the message that young people’s views aren’t important to both young people and the community.”

Urgent change is needed to ensure academic autonomy, freedom, and independence of process are not subject to political interference in future.

Addressing urgent and complex problems such as climate change involves research across the full spectrum of society – and that includes Australia’s young people.

Philippa Collin, Associate Professor, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University; Brendan Churchill, ARC Research Fellow and Lecturer in Sociology, The University of Melbourne; Faith Gordon, Associate Professor in Law, Australian National University; Judith Bessant, Professor in School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University; Michelle Catanzaro, Senior Lecturer in Design / Senior Research Fellow (YRRC), Western Sydney University; Rob Watts, Professor of Social Policy, RMIT University, and Stewart Jackson, Senior Lecturer, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney

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

(The most social) bird of the year: why superb fairy-wren societies may be as complex as our own

One mystery many biologists want to solve is how complexity develops in nature. And among the many social systems in the natural world, multilevel societies stand out for their complexity. Individuals first organise into families, which are members of bands, which are organised into clans.

At each level, associations between components (individuals, families and clans) are structured and stable. In other words, individuals within families usually stay together, and families usually interact with other specific families in a predictable way, to form stable clans.

Such social organisation has probably characterised much of human evolution (and is still common among many hunter-gatherer societies around the world).

In fact, multilevel societies likely played a fundamental role in human history, by accelerating our cultural evolution. Organising into distinct social groups would have reduced the transmission of cultures and allowed for multiple traditions to coexist.

In our research, published today in Ecology Letters, we studied social behaviours in a wild population of superb fairy-wrens. We found these birds also organise into multilevel societies – a level of complexity once thought to be exclusive to big-brained mammals.

Cooperatively breeding birds

Although we have ideas about the advantages of multilevel societies, we know relatively little about how and why they form in the first place.

Of the few species known to live in multilevel societies, there is one characteristic shared among all. That is, they live in stable groups, in environments where food availability is inconsistent and difficult to predict.

This is also true for many cooperatively breeding birds, including the superb fairy-wren – familiar across southeastern Australia’s parks and gardens. They breed in small family groups, with non-breeding helpers assisting a dominant breeding pair. And this social system is common among Australian bird species.

The superb fairy-wren is a well-studied species and is beloved by Australians, even being crowned bird of the year in this year’s Guardian/BirdLife Australia poll.

These birds are notorious for their polyamorous approach to sex, despite being socially monogamous. Breeding pairs form exclusive social bonds, yet each partner will still mate with other individuals.

Our work now reveals this complex arrangement during the breeding season is just the tip of the iceberg.

Associating by choice

We tracked almost 200 birds over two years, by attaching different-coloured leg bands to each individual. We recorded the birds’ social associations and, from our observations, built a complex social network that let us determine the strength of each relationship.

We found that during the autumn and winter months, some breeding groups – (which include the breeding pair, one or more helpers and last summer’s offspring), stably associated with other breeding groups to form supergroups. And this was usually done with individuals they were genetically related with.

In turn, these supergroups associated with other supergroups and breeding groups on a daily basis, forming large communities. In the following spring, these communities split back into the original breeding groups inhabiting well-defined territories – only to join again next winter.

Just like humans, these little birds don’t associate with each other randomly during the long winter months. They have specific individuals and/or groups they choose to be with (but we’re currently not sure how they make this choice).

While it’s not yet clear why superb fairy-wrens form upper social units (supergroups and communities), we suspect this might allow individuals to exploit larger areas during winter, when food is scarce. It would also provide additional safety against predators, such as hawks and kookaburras.

This theory is supported by our literature study, which shows that multilevel societies are likely common among other Australian cooperatively breeding birds, such as the noisy and bell miners and striated thornbills.

Cooperative breeding is another strategy to deal with harsh condition such as food scarcity. So the conditions that favour cooperative breeding are the same as those that favour multilevel societies.

Multilevel societies in other animals

There are several other species which seem to have a similar social organisation. They include primates such as baboons, and other large mammals that exhibit rich animal cultures, such as killer whales, sperm whales and elephants.

For a long time, researchers thought living in complex societies might be how humans evolved large brains. They also thought this characteristic may be exclusive to mammals with large brains, since keeping track of many different social relationships is not easy (or so the reasoning went).

Consequently, other animals with whom we are less closely related have mostly been excluded from this field of investigation.

This might reflect a bias that we, humans, have towards our own species and species which are similar to us.

As it turns, you don’t need to be a mammal with a big brain to evolve complex multilevel societies. Even small-brained birds such as the tiny superb fairy-wren can do this – as well as the vulturine guineafowl a chicken-like bird from northeast Africa.

We strongly suspect quite a few birds will join their ranks in the coming years as more research is done.

Acknowledgement: we would like to thank our colleagues Alexandra McQueen, Kaspar Delhey, Carly Cook, Sjouke Kingma and Damien Farine who are co-authors on this research.

Ettore Camerlenghi, PhD student, Monash University and Anne Peters, Professor, Monash University

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

We’ve unveiled the waratah’s genetic secrets, helping preserve this Australian icon for the future

When the smoke cleared after the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20, the bush surrounding the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden Mount Tomah was charred. Among the casualties was a NSW waratah, Telopea speciosissima, that had recently become the first of its species to have its genome sequenced. We have published this genome in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources.

The waratah is the official floral emblem of New South Wales, and its spectacular red blooms have been adopted as the logos of state government agencies and sporting teams.

The genome sequence paves the way for the waratah to serve as a model for understanding how plant populations change over time and adapt to their environments, and particularly how this species bounces back after a bushfire.

Genome sequencing has come a long way in a short time. The first human genome, completed in 2003, cost around US$1 billion and took about 13 years to compile the roughly 3 billion “letters” of our genetic code. Today, sequencing a human genome would cost less than $1,000 and take just a few days.

With rapidly decreasing costs and advancing technology, the genomic era presents the opportunity to decode many plant genomes that we can then use as reference resources. In turn, this will help us understand and conserve Australian fauna for the long term.

What is a genome anyway?

An organism’s genome is the complete set of genetic information it needs to develop, grow and survive. Plants, animals and many other living things are made of DNA, which consists of a string of four chemical “bases”, known as A, C, G and T.

Sequencing a genome involves determining the order of these bases. When we began our project, we knew from previous research the waratah genome would be quite long, at around a billion bases, that it was likely to be arranged into 11 large parcels called chromosomes, and that each plant would have two copies of the genome in each of its cells.

Cracking the waratah code

Generating the waratah reference genome first involved sampling young leaves from a plant growing naturally in the Blue Mountains. We extracted DNA from the leaves, and used three different sequencing technologies to piece together its genetic code. This approach generated many sequences, hundreds or thousands of bases long, which we then needed to assemble to determine the full genome.

Assembling the genome involved a range of different software tools, running on powerful computers. The result was a sequence of slightly less than a billion bases, mostly in 11 large sequences, as expected. The sequences appear to contain around 40,000 genes in total – roughly twice as many as humans have.

Why we sequenced the waratah

Previous sequencing efforts have focused on important crops and on “model organisms” such as Arabidopsis, which is widely studied by researchers and was the first plant to have its genome sequenced, back in 2000. But of course, there are many other types of species in the plant tree of life.

The NSW waratah is one of five waratah species in the genus Telopea, which grows throughout southeastern Australia, and one of around 1,700 species in the family Proteaceae. This family includes other iconic Australian plants such as banksias, grevilleas and macadamias. Yet despite this, very few Proteaceae genomes have so far been sequenced.

A collaborative effort between the Australian Institute of Botanical Science and UNSW Sydney, the waratah genome project was the first completed as part of the Genomics for Australian Plants (GAP) Initiative. A key aim of this initiative is to generate genomes to enable better conservation and understanding of Australia’s unique plant diversity.

Hope for the future

For many Australians, Black Summer embodied the threat posed by climate change to our unique natural heritage. But waratahs evolved with fire, and can regenerate with the help of a modified stem called a lignotuber, from which masses of fresh shoots emerge after a bushfire. It offers a potent symbol of our hope for the future.

The waratah plant whose genome we sequenced has resprouted after being burned in the Black Summer fires, and has now been propagated at the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden Mount Tomah and will become part of the garden’s living collection.

A display inspired by this plant and its genome will also feature in the foyer of the new National Herbarium of NSW when it opens at the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan next year.

The waratah’s genome sequence will provide a platform for future studies of its evolution and environmental adaption, ultimately informing breeding efforts and helping us better conserve this iconic species. By sequencing its DNA, we can uncover its evolutionary past and pave the way for its survival long into the future.

Stephanie Chen, PhD Candidate, UNSW; Jason Bragg, Research Scientist, and Richard Edwards, Senior Lecturer in Genomics and Bioinformatics, UNSW

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

Regent honeyeaters were once kings of flowering gums. Now they’re on the edge of extinction. What happened?

Less than 80 years ago, regent honeyeaters ruled Australia’s flowering gum forests, with huge raucous flocks roaming from Adelaide to Rockhampton.

Now, there are less than 300 birds left in the wild. Habitat loss has pushed the survivors into little pockets across their once vast range.

Sadly, our new research shows these birds are now heading for rapid extinction. Unless we urgently boost conservation efforts, the regent honeyeater will follow the passenger pigeon into oblivion within the next 20 years.

If we let the last few die, the regent honeyeater will be only the second bird extinction on the Australian mainland since European colonisation, following the paradise parrot.

How did it come to this?

With vivid yellow and black wings, embroidered body and warty faces, these honeyeaters are among Australia’s most spectacular birds.

John Gould, one of Australia’s earliest European naturalists, observed these birds in “immense flocks amongst the brushes of New South Wales”. He described the regent honeyeater as “the most pugnacious bird he ever saw”, noting they “reigned supreme in the largest, most heavily-flowering trees.” Their success in securing nectar supplies made them vital pollinators.

The world Gould saw is sadly a thing of the past. Regent honeyeater populations have plummeted, with the loss of over 90% of their preferred woodland habitats to farmland.

You might wonder how this could be, given there are still large tracts of forest in Australia. But these are invariably on poorer soils and hilltops. Our remaining forests do not yield the rich nectar regent honeyeaters require for breeding.

As their habitat has declined, the surviving regent honeyeaters have been forced to compete with larger species – without the safety of their huge flocks. The result? The once common species no longer reigns supreme.

Gone within 20 years

Unless conservation actions are urgently stepped up, our research shows these birds will be extinct within 20 years.

We’ve known about the decline of regent honeyeaters since the late 1970s. In response, a recovery team including BirdLife Australia and Taronga Conservation Society launched a long-term recovery effort to protect habitat, plant new trees and release zoo-bred birds. These efforts have slowed but not arrested the decline of these birds.

In 2015, we began a large-scale survey to better understand their population decline. Regent honeyeaters are a notoriously difficult bird to study in the wild. As nomads, they wander long distances throughout their vast range in search of nectar in their favoured tree species. Finding these birds is hard enough, let alone monitoring the population in detail.

After six years of intensive fieldwork, and with data from research in the 1990s and long term bird banding, we have finally gathered enough information to be able to understand the challenges for the few remaining wild birds. We now know their breeding success has declined because their nests are raided and the chicks killed by aggressive native species, with noisy miners a particular problem.

We also know the wild birds are losing their song culture because of a lack of older birds for fledglings to learn their songs.

Our fieldwork has given us accurate estimates of vital breeding data, such as how many young birds fledge for each adult female, how many birds are breeding and how well juveniles are surviving. We combined this with data from the decades of monitoring of zoo-bred and released birds to create population models, which allow us to predict the future for the wild population under different conservation scenarios.

Habitat is king

What do the models show? That time is critical. To have any chance of getting the regent honeyeater back, we must build its numbers up enough for them to be able to roam in large flocks for protection.

How? First, we have to nearly double the nesting success rate for both wild and released zoo-bred birds. Too many young birds are dying early. That means we have to find nesting birds early in the breeding season and protect them from noisy miners, pied currawongs and even possums.

Next, we have to boost the numbers of zoo-bred birds released in the Blue Mountains, and maintain these numbers for at least twenty years. Staff at Taronga Conservation Society are preparing zoo-bred birds for the trials of the wild by exposing them to competition in flight aviaries, song tutoring young males and improving husbandry practices in zoos to increase survival in the wild.

Finally, our models clearly show regent honeyeaters will only become self-sustaining if we do much more to secure their habitat. Their remaining pockets of habitat are simply too small. We must protect all remaining habitat, restore degraded habitat and control noisy miners.

Without habitat, other conservation efforts will be pointless. The honeyeater will simply never reach flock sizes large enough to muscle their way back into the surprisingly competitive business of drinking nectar.

Unfortunately, we continue to destroy essential regent honeyeater habitat in some areas even as we attempt to restore lost habitat elsewhere. For example, if the Warragamba Dam in the Blue Mountains is raised it will flood essential habitat and make it even harder to bring back our iconic honeyeater.

The status quo is not enough

For decades, conservationists and researchers have worked to save the regent honeyeater. Despite this tireless work, the species is inching towards the exit. If we maintain the status quo, we will lose it.

We must think bigger. Nest protection and release of zoo-bred birds can help get flock sizes up, but these efforts will be pointless if there are no blossoms for them to drink from.

Like the regent honeyeater, the passenger pigeon sought safety in numbers. We now know its extinction could have been predicted, if modern risk assessments had been available. Those same assessments and models tell us very clearly what will happen to the regent honeyeater.

It is too late for the passenger pigeon. It is not too late to save the regent honeyeater. But only if we act now.

Monique Van Sluys (Taronga Conservation Society) and Dean Ingwersen (Birdlife Australia) contributed to this article

Rob Heinsohn, Professor of Evolutionary and Conservation Biology, Australian National University; Dejan Stojanovic, Postdoctoral Fellow, Australian National University, and Ross Crates, Postdoctoral fellow, Australian National University

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

Without urgent action, these are the street trees unlikely to survive climate change

Cities across the world are on the front line of climate change, and calls are growing for more urban cooling. Many governments are spending big on new trees in public places – but which species are most likely to thrive in a warmer world?

Numerical targets such as “one million trees” dominate tree-planting programs in cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai, Melbourne and Sydney. But whacking a million trees into the ground won’t necessarily mean greener suburbs in decades to come.

Often, not enough attention is paid to selecting the right trees or providing enough water so they survive a hotter, drier climate in future.

In our recent research, we assessed the effects of extreme heat and drought on urban tree species. Some much-loved tree species, widely planted across our cities, did not handle the conditions well. It shows how important decisions must be made today for urban greening programs to succeed in a warmer world.

A hothouse experiment

In January 2020, following several years of drought, Penrith in Western Sydney hit 48.9℃ – the hottest temperature ever recorded in Greater Sydney. Researchers later assessed about 5,500 street trees and found more than 10% displayed canopy damage. Exotic deciduous species fared the worst.

The event showed how simultaneous intense heat and drought can damage urban trees.

Trees cool down in hot temperatures by losing water through microscopic openings in their leaves called stomata. Sufficiently watered trees can often tolerate extreme hot temperatures, while drought-stressed trees may struggle to survive.

Our research involved stress-testing 20 broadleaf evergreen tree species from habitats ranging from tropical rainforests to semi-arid woodlands.

Seedlings were grown in a coordinated glasshouse experiment. After the plants were established and acclimatised, half of them – five plants per species – were exposed to a gradual, five-week drought.

In the final week of water deficit, all plants were exposed to conditions simulating a six-day heatwave.

What we found

The 20 plant species varied widely in their ability to handle these conditions.

Of the plants exposed to both heat and drought, two species suffered modest crown dieback (a decline in health of the canopy) and another four species suffered extensive crown dieback.

Most plants resumed growth after the heatwave but several individual plants died: two swamp banksia (Banksia robur) and one crimson bottlebrush (Callistemon citrinus).

Species with dense wood and small, thick, dense leaves use water efficiently and are drought-tolerant. The species which fared best in our study included orange jasmine (Murraya paniculata), inland rosewood (Alectryon oleifolius) and Australian teak (Flindersia australis).

Even when plant species had access to water, their tolerance of heat stress varied widely. Swamp banksia (Banksia robur) and powderpuff lilly pilly (Syzygium wilsonii) suffered extensive crown dieback even with access to water. This shows warmer heatwaves may threaten urban trees in both wet and dry years.

While some species may fare well in heat and drought, they may not necessarily be the best choice for cooling our cities. Many drought-tolerant species such as leopardwood (Flindersia maculosa) grow slowly and have sparse foliage that provides little shade or cooling. But these species could be planted in sunny, dry areas to create habitat and improve biodiversity.

So what about trees like the weeping fig (Ficus microcarpa) and London plane tree (Platanus x acerifolia), which are widely planted in Sydney, Melbourne and other Australian cities?

These trees are at greater risk during heat and drought, because they have soft, low-density wood and thin, large leaves that are vulnerable to heat. But they grow quickly and form extensive canopies that help cool urban areas.

So these trees should be planted where water is available, either from rain or through active management such as irrigation.

Looking ahead to a hot future

Our research highlights how access to water is crucial for the survival of urban trees during hotter and drier summers.

That means urban greening programs must also incorporate elements of so-called “blue” infrastructure – retaining water in urban landscapes via engineered solutions and making it available for plant uptake. Such infrastructure comes together under the umbrella of “water sensitive urban design”.

Examples include passive irrigation (where trees draw water from storage pits containing stormwater) or raingardens – garden beds that filter stormwater runoff. Planting young trees in locations where such design is applied will improve their odds of survival.

Such methods offer multiple benefits: increasing the health of trees, helping prevent flooding during storms and reducing the need for additional irrigation from local water supplies.

Across the world, extreme heat in cities will affect citizens, infrastructure and natural environments. Effective planning for urban trees is needed now to strike the right balance between trees that cool our cities and those that will survive increasingly harsh conditions.

Renée M. Prokopavicius, Postdoctoral Researcher in Plant Ecophysiology, Western Sydney University; David S. Ellsworth, Professor, Western Sydney University, and Sebastian Pfautsch, Research Theme Fellow - Environment and Sustainability, Western Sydney University

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

Weakening Australia’s illegal logging laws would undermine the global push to halt forest loss

One success from this year’s United Nations climate conference in Glasgow was an agreement to halt forest loss by 2030. The Morrison government signed the agreement, and this commitment is now being put to the test as it reviews Australia’s rules on illegal logging imports.

Australia’s Illegal Logging Prohibition Act and associated regulations are up for periodic review. The rules were designed to ensure timber produced overseas and imported to Australia was not logged illegally. Some changes under discussion would water down the rules by reducing the regulatory burden on businesses.

According to Interpol, the illegal timber industry is worth almost US$152 billion a year. In some countries, it also accounts for up to 90% of tropical deforestation, which is a major driver of climate change. Illegal logging and associated tax fraud has other devastating environmental, social and economic harms.

Australia would be acting inconsistently with the Glasgow agreement if it weakened illegal logging laws. Any loosening of the rules could also threaten the confidence of Australian consumers that the timber they’re buying is legally harvested.

Due diligence matters

Under the deal inked at COP26, 141 countries agreed to a range of measures to end deforestation this decade, including to:

facilitate trade and development policies, internationally and domestically, that promote sustainable development, and sustainable commodity production and consumption, that work to countries’ mutual benefit, and that do not drive deforestation and land degradation.

As it currently stands, Australian law regulating timber imports supports this goal. It prohibits a person from importing or processing timber harvested in a way that contravenes the laws of the jurisdiction from which it was harvested.

People in Australia importing and processing timber are required to conduct due diligence to ensure imported timber was legally logged. Failure to do so can result in criminal or civil penalties.

Due diligence requires a business to gather information about the timber product being imported and assess and mitigate the risk it was logged illegally.

Similar laws exist in other jurisdictions, including the United States, the European Union, South Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The restrictions are consistent with established principles of international trade law, which recognise as necessary some trade restrictions to conserve exhaustible natural resources or protect human, animal or plant life.

A push for ‘efficiency’

The Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment is currently conducting a scheduled ten-year review of the Illegal Logging Prohibition Regulation 2012.

The department’s consultation paper asks, among other things, how the regulation’s efficiency could be enhanced. The proposed changes could include, among other things:

• removing the requirement to establish a due diligence system, for those who import and process foreign timber infrequently. The department says establishing the system may be “unnecessarily burdensome”, however these importers would still be required to undertake a risk assessment.

• reducing requirements and allowing exemptions for low-volume and low-value importers and processors.

• reducing due diligence requirements for repeated imports. So, for example, if timber products were from the same supplier, made from the same timber species and harvested from the same area, only one due diligence assessment would be required in a year. However, importers may be required to check no pertinent elements of the supply chain have changed ahead of each repeat import.

• removing the requirement for companies to undertake due diligence on timber imports if they instead use third-party frameworks, such as that established by the Forest Stewardship Council, to assess risks associated with a regulated timber product. This would be known as a “deemed to comply” arrangement.

The department has proposed measures to compensate for the loosening of some rules, including stronger requirements for frequent importers and processors of foreign timber, and third-party auditing of due diligence systems.

It also says risks would need careful management, including ensuring claims relating to timber species and harvest origins were underpinned by authentic documentation.

We must stay vigilant

As the department prepares its final recommendations to the federal government, it must factor in the need for increased vigilance of global logging practices. This need was clearly recognised by nations signatory to the COP26 deforestation deal.

What’s more, overseas experience has shown some mooted changes have the potential to be problematic.

Indeed, in foreign timber markets, “deemed to comply” arrangements have been exposed as vulnerable to fraud. The European Union, for example, has pointed to misuse of certification and questions around transparency.

Australia has a way to go if it wants to satisfy the COP26 agreement to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation – not least by tightening domestic policy on deforestation within our borders.

It could also embrace efforts to address the other major driver of deforestation - agricultural expansion - through the joint statement on forests, agriculture and commodity trade which other countries progressed at Glasgow.

But it must also ensure foreign timber entering Australia is not the product of illegal logging. While due diligence requirements may present a regulatory burden for some operators, this must be weighed against the pressing global imperative to halt forest loss.

Margaret Young, Professor, The University of Melbourne and Catherine E. Gascoigne, Research Affiliate, University of Sydney

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

Sydney’s dams may be almost full – but don’t relax, because drought will come again

Dams serving capital cities such as Canberra, Hobart and Sydney are near full after two years of widespread rainfall. But these wet conditions won’t last.

Under climate change, droughts in Australia will become more frequent and severe. Our drinking water supplies, and water crucial for irrigation and the environment, will dwindle again.

Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, is among those that must prepare for the next drought. The NSW government is developing the Greater Sydney Water Strategy, to guide water management in coming decades.

Among the plan’s more contentious proposals are increased use of Sydney’s existing desalination plant and expanding the use of recycled water (highly treated sewage), including for drinking water. So let’s examine whether such measures are enough to secure Sydney’s water future.

A city of water scarcity

During the most recent drought from 2017 to 2020, Sydney’s water storage levels dropped by 50% of full dam capacity in two years – a much faster depletion than in previous droughts.

Inflows into Sydney’s dams have dropped over the past 30 years. From 1991 to 2020, inflows averaged 770 million litres a year – 45% less than the long-term average.

The news isn’t all bad. Sydney used less water in 2019-20 than it did in 1990, despite its population growing from 3.8 million to 5.4 million.

But as the Greater Sydney Water Strategy states, increasing climate variability means that, without action, the city could face a shortage of drinking water as periods of severe drought become longer and more frequent.

Desalination for the nation?

The strategy raises the prospect of increased use of Sydney’s existing desalination plant, and building a second plant in the Illawarra region south of Sydney.

Desalination removes salt from sea water to create drinking water. The Millenium drought – from the late 1990s until 2010 – prompted several major Australian cities, including Sydney, to build desalination plants.

The technology can revolutionise water supply. For example, in 2020-21, Perth’s two desalination plants supplied 47% of the city’s water. But desalination plants can also face limitations and challenges.

The plants are expensive to build and to operate – and can sit idle for years, as the Kurnell plant did between 2012 and 2019. This can make them politically unpopular and see them criticised as “white elephants”.

Even at full production, the Kurnell plant produces only 15% of Sydney’s daily demand. And while an additional plant in the Illawarra will extend desalinated supply to more households, the technology can’t supply water to all parts of Sydney due to the city’s complex distribution infrastructure.

As I discuss below, expanded use of recycled water is a better option for Sydney than more desalination.

Can we stomach recycled water?

Many Australian cities, including Sydney, already use recycled water – sewage that has been heavily treated – in applications such as watering golf courses and parks, flushing toilets and fighting fires.

The draft plan raises the prospect of also adding recycled water to drinking supplies, which has long been a vexed issue in Australia. Some people oppose it on health grounds, while others just can’t get over the “yuck” factor.

The concept of recycled water has a lot going for it. For example, analysis suggests it would be far cheaper and use much less energy than desalination.

Making better use of recycled water would also reduce the environmental impact of disposing of wastewater in rivers and oceans. And the potential supply of recycled water will only increase as populations grow.

Finally, good recycled water projects are used continuously, not just at times of water stress. The Rouse Hill recycled water scheme in Sydney, which supplies 32,000 properties for non-drinking water uses, is a great model.

The draft plan says recycled water would not be added to drinking supplies without public support, but past history suggests this may be hard to achieve. In 2006, for example, Toowoomba residents rejected a plan to drink recycled water, despite the town facing a grave water shortage.

However, as urban water supplies become ever more scarce, Australians may have to get used to the idea of drinking recycled water – and authorities will have to find new and better ways of selling the concept to the public.

The Sydney water plan recognises this. It emphasises the need for public consultation, and raises the prospect of investing in a recycled water demonstration plant to “highlight the safety of demonstrated and proven technology”.

A major omission

The plan shows how Sydney’s growing population could sustainably adapt to to a drier future. But it ignores one important measure for reducing water use - charging customers a penalty for excessive water use.

Under the measure, also known as an “inclining block tariff”, the rate per unit of water increases as the volume of consumption increases.

Research has shown water pricing can be an effective way to manage water scarcity, as well as helping water utilities recover the costs of their services. Australian cities such as Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane apply inclining block tariffs to water, but Sydney does not.

Sydney Water’s price regulator, IPART, has argued against charging high water users more, saying it would provide less incentive for smaller households to conserve water and impose unfair costs on larger households.

Granted, water pricing is a complex issue and may require protections for lower-income users and the environment.

But under worsening climate change, our major cities cannot eschew any opportunity to ease pressure on water supplies.

Ian Wright, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science, Western Sydney University

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

Experience the spectacular sounds of a Murrumbidgee wetland erupting with life as water returns

In the southwestern corner of New South Wales, along the Murrumbidgee river, frogs are calling in a wetland called Nap Nap. This is Nari Nari country – nap nap means “very swampy” in traditional language.

Nap Nap is one of many inland wetlands across Australia to receive so-called “environmental water”: water allocated and managed to improve the health of rivers, wetlands and floodplains.

Long-term monitoring shows how these environmental flows sustain big old trees and cycle nutrients through the ecosystem. They drive breeding for frogs, waterbirds, reptiles and fish, and protect endangered species. This is a good news story for our inland waterways – but it’s mostly told through scientific reports.

We wanted to use ecological data to convey not just facts but feelings, and create a vivid digital portrait of life in Nap Nap. So we recently produced The Sound of Water, using audio, images and water data to reveal the patterns and rhythms of the swamp.

In part, this is about finding an engaging way to tell an important story. But there’s a bigger agenda here too: how might we use environmental data to amplify humanity’s attachment to the living world?

Addressing an imbalance

Healthy wetlands rely on varying river flows. When a river is flooding or at high flow, water is delivered to wetlands, enabling seeds to sprout and animals to move and breed. When the river is at low flow, wetlands enter a natural drying phase.

But across Australia, thousands of wetlands have lost their natural connection to rivers. Lower river flows – the result of water regulation and diversions required to meet human needs – means many wetlands no longer experience these natural cycles.

Environmental flows seek to address this imbalance. Managed by water authorities, the flows involve strategically delivering water to replenish rivers, wetlands and floodplains.

Our project – a design-science collaboration – was funded by the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office’s Flow-MER program, which undertakes long-term monitoring of the ecological impact of environmental water allocations.

The Sound of Water

Across nine days in spring of 2020, an environmental flow of about 16,000 million litres rolled into Nap Nap swamp in the Lowbidgee floodplain after a brief dry spell. The Lowbidgee floodplain is near the confluence of the Kalari (Lachlan) and Murrumbidgee rivers in New South Wales.

The frogs began calling as the water returned. But don’t take our word for it - listen for yourself:

In this clip, you can hear the squelchy, “cree-cree” call of tiny, hardy Murray Valley froglets. You can also hear inland banjo frogs, whose “dok” call sounds a bit like a plucked string; spotted marsh frogs with a machine-gun like “duk-duk-duk”; and the shrill, rattling call of Peron’s tree frog.

This recording comes from an audio logger used in Flow-MER’s environmental monitoring. These automatic devices record for five minutes every hour, day and night – that’s two hours of sound captured every day.

Seeing wetland sounds

To reveal the content of all this audio, we used a visual representation of sound known as a spectrogram. We adapted a technique developed by researchers at the Queensland University of Technology which enables ecologists to visualise and analyse thousands of hours of recordings.

We visualised almost a year’s worth of audio from Nap Nap – more than 700 hours.

The below image contains spectrograms of audio from June 2020, which was a dry period in the swamp. The colourful central band corresponds to the noisy daylight hours, when woodland birds dominate.

The vivid blue areas are wind and rain noise. The pink and orange are mostly bird calls, and continuous sounds like cricket calls show up as strong horizontal bands (top right).

The mostly dark outer bands correspond to the nights, which in dry periods are fairly quiet.

But as the environmental water flow reached Nap Nap, the night lit up with frog calls. Our story focuses on this moment. We found a way to link the visuals to the source audio, creating interactive timelines in which we can see, hear and explore the wetland soundscape.

The stars of our story are Nap Nap’s frogs, and our most important find was a southern bell frog. Once widespread across southeastern Australia, these frogs are now found in only a few isolated populations.

Their distinctive call indicates the ecological health of Nap Nap, and the value of these environmental flows. Here you can listen to its deep, growling call, which appears as a sequence of pink and purple blobs along the bottom of the spectrogram.

A data portrait of a living place

Our design uses a scroll-based interaction technique sometimes termed “scrollytelling”. It works because it’s familiar (everyone can scroll) and translates well to all kinds of devices. It lets us lead the audience step by step into the place, the data and the spectrograms, while still encouraging exploration.

The Sound of Water builds on established techniques to create something new. It shows how design and science can unite to tell environmental stories in a richer way – with both facts and feelings. This matters because Nap Nap, and thousands of places like it, need people to care about their protection.

To explore the full version of The Sound of Water, click here.

Mitchell Whitelaw, Professor of Design, School of Art and Design, Australian National University and Skye Wassens, Associate Professor in Ecology, Charles Sturt University

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

Fire management in Australia has reached a crossroads and ‘business as usual’ won’t cut it

The current wet conditions delivered by La Niña may have caused widespread flooding, but they’ve also provided a reprieve from the threat of bushfires in southeastern Australia. This is an ideal time to consider how we prepare for the next bushfire season.

Dry conditions will eventually return, as will fire. So, two years on from the catastrophic Black Summer fires, is Australia better equipped for a future of extreme fire seasons?

In our recent synthesis on the Black Summer fires, we argue climate change is exceeding the capacity of our ecological and social systems to adapt. The paper is based on a series of reports we, and other experts from the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub, were commissioned to produce for the NSW government’s bushfire inquiry.

Fire management in Australia has reached a crossroads, and “business as usual” won’t cut it. In this era of mega-fires, diverse strategies are urgently needed so we can safely live with fire.

Does prescribed burning work?

Various government inquiries following the Black Summer fires of 2019-20 produced wide-ranging recommendations for how to prepare and respond to bushfires. Similar inquiries have been held since 1939 after previous bushfires.

Typically, these inquiries led to major changes to policy and funding. But almost universally, this was followed by a gradual complacency and failure to put policies into practice.

If any fire season can provide the catalyst for sustained changes to fire management, it is Black Summer. So, what have we learnt from that disaster and are we now better prepared?

To answer the first question, we turn to our analyses for the NSW Bushfire Inquiry.

Following the Black Summer fires, debate emerged about whether hazard reduction burning by fire authorities ahead of the fire season had been sufficient, or whether excessive “fuel loads” – such as dead leaves, bark and shrubs – had been allowed to accumulate.

We found no evidence the fires were driven by above-average fuel loads stemming from a lack of planned burning. In fact, hazard reduction burns conducted in the years leading up to the Black Summer fires effectively reduced the probability of high severity fire, and reduced the number of houses destroyed by fire.

Instead, we found the fires were primarily driven by record-breaking fuel dryness and extreme weather conditions. These conditions were due to natural climate variability, but made worse by climate change. Most fires were sparked by lightning, and very few were thought to be the result of arson.

These extreme weather conditions meant the effectiveness of prescribed burns was reduced – particularly when an area had not burned for more than five years.

All this means that hazard reduction burning in NSW is generally effective, however in the face of worsening climate change new policy responses are needed.

Diverse and unexpected impacts

As the Black Summer fires raged, loss of life and property most commonly occurred in regional areas while metropolitan areas were heavily affected by smoke. Smoke exposure from the disaster led to an estimated 429 deaths.

Socially disadvantaged and Indigenous populations were disproportionately affected by the fires, including by loss of income, homes and infrastructure, as well as emotional trauma. Our analyses found 38% of fire-affected areas were among the most disadvantaged, while just 10% were among the least disadvantaged.

We also found some areas with relatively large Indigenous populations were fire-affected. For example, four fire-affected areas had Indigenous populations greater than 20% including the Grafton, Eurobodalla Hinterland, Armidale and Kempsey regions.

The Black Summer fires burnt an unprecedentedly large area – half of all wet sclerophyll forests and over a third of rainforest vegetation types in NSW.

Importantly, for 257 plant species, the historical intervals between fires across their range were likely too short to allow effective regeneration. Similarly, many vegetation communities were left vulnerable to too-frequent fire, which may result in biodiversity decline, particularly as the climate changes.

Looking to the future

So following Black Summer, how do we ensure Australia is better equipped for a future of extreme fire seasons?

As a first step, we must act on both the knowledge gained from government inquiries into the disaster, and the recommendations handed down. Importantly, long-term funding commitments are required to support bushfire management, research and innovation.

Governments have already increased investment in fire-suppression resources such as water-bombing aircraft. There’s also been increased investment in fire management such as improving fire trails and employing additional hazard reduction crews, as well as new allocations for research funding.

But alongside this, we also need investment in community-led solutions and involvement in bushfire planning and operations. This includes strong engagement between fire authorities and residents in developing strategies for hazard reduction burning, and providing greater support for people to manage fuels on private land. Support should also be available to people who decide to relocate away from high bushfire risk areas.

The Black Summer fires led to significant interest in a revival of Indigenous cultural burning – a practice that brings multiple benefits to people and environment. However, non-Indigenous land managers should not treat cultural burning as simply another hazard reduction technique, but part of a broader practice of Aboriginal-led cultural land management.

This requires structural and procedural changes in non-Indigenous land management, as well as secure, adequate and ongoing funding opportunities. Greater engagement and partnership with Aboriginal communities at all levels of fire and land management is also needed.

Under climate change, living with fire will require a multitude of new solutions and approaches. If we want to be prepared for the next major fire season, we must keep planning and investing in fire management and research – even during wet years such as this one.

Ross Bradstock, Owen Price, David Bowman, Vanessa Cavanagh, David Keith, Matthias Boer, Hamish Clarke, Trent Penman, Josh Whittaker and many others contributed to the research upon which this article is based.

Rachael Helene Nolan, Senior research fellow, Western Sydney University; Grant Williamson, Research Fellow in Environmental Science, University of Tasmania; Katharine Haynes, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Wollongong, and Mark Ooi, Senior Research Fellow, UNSW

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

Surprisingly few animals die in wildfires – and that means we can help more in the aftermath

The estimate that one billion animals were killed by Australia’s 2019-20 Black Summer fires drew international attention to the fate of wildlife during fire.

This estimate assumed all animals in the fire’s path were killed by the flames, or in the immediate aftermath due to injury, predation, dehydration or starvation.

However, our new research, published today in Global Change Biology, suggests that, on average, the vast majority of animals (more than 90%) actually survive the immediate passage of a typical fire. But there are precious few studies of animal survival through catastrophic fires, such as those observed during Australia’s Black Summer.

We urgently need data on how animals cope with megafires, given these are expected to increase in a warming world.

How do we know how many animals are killed by fire?

How do researchers actually know the fate of wildlife exposed to fire? The most reliable way is to track animals wearing radio or GPS collars.

As fire passes through a landscape, animals in its path unable to flee or find shelter often die from the the flames, radiant heat, or smoke. By tracking these individuals, as well as those that survived, we can calculate the proportion of animals that live and die during fire.

We systematically reviewed all studies tracking animal survival during fires from around the world. The 31 studies we found came largely from Australia and North America. The fires included planned burns, as well as opportunistic studies where an unexpected wildfire passed through an existing animal tracking programme.

Studies mostly tracked mammals and reptiles, though some included birds and amphibians. Animals studied ranged from tiny red-backed fairywrens weighing only 8 grams through to African bush elephants, the world’s largest terrestrial vertebrate at up to 4.4 tonnes.

So what did we find? The most remarkable finding is that almost two-thirds of studies (65%) found zero animal deaths directly caused by the fires. It turns out animals are surprisingly good at avoiding oncoming fire. Some animals may have evolved these tricks over time.

For instance, all mountain brushtail possums tracked through Victoria’s intense 2009 Black Saturday fires survived.

It’s important to note the 31 studies often tracked only a handful of animals (half tracked less than ten individuals), with a wide variation in death rates. In one study, for instance, up to 40% of rattlesnakes were killed. However, this study only tracked five snakes, two of which perished in the fire.

When we aggregated the studies we found something interesting. On average, fires killed just 3% of tracked animals. This figure rose to 7% for studies tracking animal survival through high severity fires.

Not all fires are the same, and some animals are good at surviving one kind of fire, but succumb to other fires. Take frill-necked lizards, who typically shelter in the tree canopy during fires in northern Australia. When they employed this tactic during cool, early dry season fires, all tracked lizards survived.

When more severe fires occurred later in the dry season, a quarter of the lizards were killed. Many that remained in place were killed by flames that scorched the canopy. Those savvy enough to shelter in termite mounds survived.

The silver lining: All is not lost after fire

When you read a headline about the number of animals killed in fires, it can be easy to despair.

That’s why we believe our research is good news. Why? Because it means there may be a narrow window of opportunity after fires to have a real impact, by helping animals survive the challenging post-fire period.

You might remember stories of helicopters dropping sweet potatoes and carrots to starving rock wallabies immediately following the Black Summer fires.

Our research suggests this is exactly the time to act to help as much wildlife as possible.

That’s because the post-fire landscape is exceptionally challenging for surviving wildlife. For months afterwards, home has turned hostile for animals.

It’s very hard to find shelter, with food and water also scarce. Predators roam, looking for easy pickings.

So what can be done? Efforts to reduce these dangers are key, such as supplementing food and water, and even dropping in temporary shelter options. Controlling foxes and cats might also help.

Taken together, this package could help save threatened species after wildfire – even from high-severity megafires. But these interventions need to be monitored to assess their effectiveness.

Can animals cope with megafires?

At present, we know next to nothing about animal death rates during catastrophic fire events like the megafires raging over the Black Summer.

Although animals might survive typical fire, there are increasing instances of fires around the world that display extreme behaviour. For instance, the numerous fire storms that occurred during the Black Summer probably left a narrow pathway to survival for many species.

We simply lack the data to provide justifiable estimates of how many animals are killed across such vast areas during such extreme fires.

As climate change intensifies, megafires are likely to become more common. Even if populations are resilient to individual megafires, their cumulative impacts may gradually erode that resilience. We also need to consider the major impact fires can have on habitat, which can last for decades or centuries.

We will urgently need to find ways of helping wildlife before and after these fires.

Chris J Jolly, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Charles Sturt University and Dale Nimmo, Associate Professor in Ecology, Charles Sturt University

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

This WA town just topped 50℃ – a dangerous temperature many Australians will have to get used to

While Australians are used to summer heat, most of us only have to endure the occasional day over 40℃.

Yesterday though, the temperature peaked at 50.7℃ in Onslow, a small Western Australian town around 100km from Exmouth.

Remarkably, the town sits right next to the ocean, which usually provides cooling. By contrast, the infamously hot WA town of Marble Bar has only reached 49.6℃ this summer, despite its inland location.

If confirmed, the Onslow temperature would equal Australia’s hottest on record set in Oodnadatta, South Australia, in January 1960. It would also mark only the fourth day over 50℃ for an Australian location since reliable observations began.

Unfortunately, this extreme heat is becoming more common as the world heats up. The number of days over 50℃ has doubled since the 1980s. These dangerous temperatures are now being recorded more often – not just in Australia but in cities in Pakistan, India and the Persian Gulf. This poses real threats to the health of people enduring them.

Where did the heat come from?

Hitting such extreme temperatures requires heat to build up over several days.

Onslow’s temperatures had been close to average since a couple of heatwaves struck the Pilbara in the second half of December. So where did this unusual heat come from?

In short, from the bakingly hot desert. South to south-easterly winds blew very hot air from the interior of the state up to Onslow. The wind came from an area that has had little to no rainfall since November, so the very hot air was also extremely dry.

Dry air kept the sun beating at full intensity by preventing any cloud cover or storm formation. The result? The temperature rose and rose through the morning and early afternoon, and the temperature spiked at over 50℃ just before 2.30pm local time.

Aren’t we in a cooler La Niña period?

Australia’s weather is strongly linked to conditions in the Pacific Ocean. At the moment we’re in a La Niña event where we have cooler than normal ocean temperatures near the equator in the central and east Pacific.

La Niña is typically associated with cooler, wetter conditions. But its effects on Australian weather are strongest in spring, when we had unusually wet and cool conditions over the east of the continent.

During summer the relationship between La Niña and Australian weather usually weakens, with its strongest impacts normally confined to the northeast of the continent.

During La Niña we typically see fewer and less intense heatwaves across much of eastern Australia, but the intensity of heat extremes in Western Australia is not very different between La Niña and El Niño.

The pattern of extreme heat in Western Australia and flooding in parts of Queensland is fairly typical of a La Niña summer, although temperatures over 50℃ are extremely rare.

Climate change is cranking up the heat

Should these temperatures be a surprise? Sadly, no. Australia has warmed by around 1.4℃ since 1910, well ahead of the global average of 1.1℃.

In northern Australia, summer-average temperatures have not risen as much as other parts of the country, because summers in the Top End have also got wetter. That’s in line with climate change models.

When the conditions are right in the Pilbara, however, heat is significantly more extreme than it used to be. Heat events in the region have become more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting, just as in most other regions.

Most of us have chosen not to live in Australia’s hottest areas. So you might think you don’t need to worry about 50℃ heatwaves. But as the climate continues to warm, heatwave conditions are expected to become much more common and extreme across the continent.

In urban areas, roads and concrete soak up the sun’s heat, raising maximum temperatures by several degrees and making for dangerous conditions.

Even if we keep global warming below 2℃ in line with the Paris Agreement, we can still expect to see our first 50℃ days in Sydney and Melbourne in coming years. In January 2020 the Western Sydney suburb of Penrith came very close, reaching 48.9℃.

As you know, it’s going to be very hard to achieve even keeping global warming below 2℃, given the need to urgently slash greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade.

As it stands, the world’s actions on emission reduction suggest we are actually on track for around 2.7℃ of warming, which would see devastating consequences for life on Earth.

We already know what we need to do to prevent this frightening future. The stronger the action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally – including by major carbon emitting countries such as Australia – the less the world will warm and the less Australian heat extremes will intensify. That’s because the relationships between greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures and Australian heat extremes are roughly linear.

You may think Australians are good at surviving the heat. But the climate you were born in doesn’t exist any more. Sadly, our farms, wildlife, and suburbs will struggle to cope with the extreme heat projected for coming decades.

Let’s work to make this 50℃ record an outlier – and not the new normal.

Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne

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

Ocean heat is at record levels, with major consequences

The world witnessed record-breaking climate and weather disasters in 2021, from destructive flash floods that swept through mountain towns in Europe and inundated subway systems in China and the U.S., to heat waves and wildfires. Typhoon Rai killed over 400 people in the Philippines; Hurricane Ida caused an estimated US$74 billion in damage in the U.S.

Globally, it was the sixth hottest year on record for surface temperatures, according to data released by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in their annual global climate report on Jan. 13, 2022. But under the surface, ocean temperatures set new heat records in 2021.

As climate scientist Kevin Trenberth explains, while the temperature at Earth’s surface is what people experience day to day, the temperature in the upper part of the ocean is a better indicator of how excess heat is accumulating on the planet.

The Conversation spoke with Trenberth, coauthor of a study published on Jan. 11, 2022, by 23 researchers at 14 institutes that tracked warming in the world’s oceans.

Your latest research shows ocean heat is at record highs. What does that tell us about global warming?

The world’s oceans are hotter than ever recorded, and their heat has increased each decade since the 1960s. This relentless increase is a primary indicator of human-induced climate change.

As oceans warm, their heat supercharges weather systems, creating more powerful storms and hurricanes, and more intense rainfall. That threatens human lives and livelihoods as well as marine life.

The oceans take up about 93% of the extra energy trapped by the increasing greenhouse gases from human activities, particularly burning fossil fuels. Because water holds more heat than land does and the volumes involved are immense, the upper oceans are a primary memory of global warming. I explain this in more detail in my new book “The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System.”

Our study provided the first analysis of 2021’s ocean warming, and we were able to attribute the warming to human activities. Global warming is alive and well, unfortunately.

The global mean surface temperature was the fifth or sixth warmest on record in 2021 (the record depends on the dataset used), in part, because of the year-long La Niña conditions, in which cool conditions in the tropical Pacific influence weather patterns around the world.

There is a lot more natural variability in surface air temperatures than in ocean temperatures because of El Niño/La Niña and weather events. That natural variability on top of a warming ocean creates hot spots, sometimes called “marine heat waves,” that vary from year to year. Those hot spots have profound influences on marine life, from tiny plankton to fish, marine mammals and birds. Other hot spots are responsible for more activity in the atmosphere, such as hurricanes.

While surface temperatures are both a consequence and a cause, the main source of the phenomena causing extremes relates to ocean heat that energizes weather systems.

We found that all oceans are warming, with the largest amounts of warming in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. That’s a concern for Antarctica’s ice – heat in the Southern Ocean can creep under Antarctica’s ice shelves, thinning them and resulting in calving off of huge icebergs. Warming oceans are also a concern for sea level rise.

In what ways does extra ocean heat affect air temperature and moisture on land?

The global heating increases evaporation and drying on land, as well as raising temperatures, increasing risk of heat waves and wildfires. We’ve seen the impact in 2021, especially in western North America, but also amid heat waves in Russia, Greece, Italy and Turkey.

The warmer oceans also supply atmospheric rivers of moisture to land areas, increasing the risk of flooding, like the U.S. West Coast has been experiencing.

2021 saw several destructive cyclones, including Hurricane Ida in the U.S. and Typhoon Rai in the Philippines. How does ocean temperature affect storms like those?

Warmer oceans provide extra moisture to the atmosphere. That extra moisture fuels storms, especially hurricanes. The result can be prodigious rainfall, as the U.S. saw from Ida, and widespread flooding as occurred in many places over the past year.

The storms may also become more intense, bigger and last longer. Several major flooding events have occurred in Australia this past year, and also in New Zealand. Bigger snowfalls can also occur in winter provided temperatures remain below about freezing because warmer air holds more moisture.

If greenhouse gas emissions slowed, would the ocean cool down?

In the oceans, warm water sits on top of cooler denser waters. However, the oceans warm from the top down, and consequently the ocean is becoming more stratified. This inhibits mixing between layers that otherwise allows the ocean to warm to deeper levels and to take up carbon dioxide and oxygen. Hence it impacts all marine life.

We found that the top 500 meters of the ocean has clearly been warming since 1980; the 500-1,000 meter depths have been warming since about 1990; the 1,000-1,500 meter depths since 1998; and below 1,500 meters since about 2005.

The slow penetration of heat downward means that oceans will continue to warm, and sea level will continue to rise even after greenhouse gases are stabilized.

The final area to pay attention to is the need to expand scientists’ ability to monitor changes in the oceans. One way we do this is through the Argo array – currently about 3,900 profiling floats that send back data on temperature and salinity from the surface to about 2,000 meters in depth, measured as they rise up and then sink back down, in ocean basins around the world. These robotic, diving and drifting instruments require constant replenishment and their observations are invaluable.

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Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Scholar, NCAR; Affiliated Faculty, University of Auckland

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

Green hydrogen is coming - and these Australian regions are well placed to build our new export industry

You might remember hearing a lot about green hydrogen last year, as global pressure mounted on Australia to take stronger action on climate change ahead of the COP26 Glasgow summit last November.

The government predicts green hydrogen exports and domestic use could be worth up to A$50 billion within 30 years, helping the world achieve deep decarbonisation.

But how close are we really to a green hydrogen industry? And which states are best placed to host it? My research shows that as of next year, and based on where the cheapest renewables are, the best places to produce green hydrogen are far north Queensland and Tasmania.

As ever more renewable energy pours into our grid, this picture will change. By the end of the decade, the north Queensland coast could become the hydrogen powerhouse. By 2040, dirt-cheap solar should make inland areas across New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia the lowest cost producers.

Renewable energy you can store and transport

Why is there so much buzz around green hydrogen? In short, because it offers us a zero emissions way to transport energy. Take cheap renewable energy and use it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using an electrolyser. Store the hydrogen on trucks, ship it overseas, or send it by pipeline. Then use the hydrogen for transport, manufacturing or electricity production.

All the technology exists – it’s the cost holding the industry back at present. That’s where Australia and its wealth of cheap renewable energy comes in.

Making hydrogen is nothing new – it has a long history of use in fertiliser production and oil refining. But until now, the main source for hydrogen was gas, a fossil fuel.

In the last few years, however, there has been a sudden surge of interest and investment in green hydrogen, and new technology pathways have emerged to produce cheap green hydrogen. As global decarbonisation gathers steam, Japan, South Korea and parts of Europe are looking for clean alternatives to replace the role fossil fuels have played in their economies.

Australia is exceptionally well placed to deliver these alternatives, with world-beating renewable resources and ports set up for our existing fossil fuel exports, such as coal and LNG.

In 2019, we sold almost $64 billion of black coal, with most going to Japan, South Korea, India and China. As these countries decarbonise, the coal industry will shrink. Green hydrogen could be an excellent replacement.

How competitive is Australian hydrogen?

At present, Australia is a long way from producing green hydrogen cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels, given we seem to have no appetite for taxing carbon pollution.

Does that mean it’s a non-starter? Hardly. It was only a decade ago sceptics ridiculed solar and wind as too expensive. They’ve gone awfully quiet as renewable prices fell, and fell, and fell – as tracked by the International Renewable Energy Agency. Now renewables are cheaper than coal. Battery storage, too, has fallen drastically in price. The same forces are at work on the key technology we need – cheaper electrolysers.

By 2040, the CSIRO predicts an 83% fall in electrolyser costs, according to its Gencost 2021-22 report. By contrast, gas-derived hydrogen with carbon capture is predicted to reduce in cost only slightly. That means green hydrogen is likely to capture much of the market for hydrogen from 2030 onwards.

Which states could benefit?

My research with the Victorian Hydrogen Hub) shows as of next year, the lowest cost location for green hydrogen would be Far North Queensland ($4.1/kg) and Tasmania ($4.4/kg) due to high renewable resources.

But this picture will change. By 2030, northern Queensland’s coastal regions could be the Australian hydrogen powerhouse due to a combination of cheap solar and access to ports. Western Australia and the Northern Territory could also have similar advantages, though the modelling for these areas has not yet been done.

As solar energy and electrolyser costs continue to fall, new states could enter the green hydrogen economy. In CSIRO’s cost predictions, electricity from solar is predicted to become much cheaper than wind by 2040. This means sunny areas like central and northern Queensland ($1.7/kg) and inland NSW, Victoria and South Australia ($1.8/kg) could be the best locations for green hydrogen production.

In making these estimates, I do not consider supply chain and storage infrastructure required to deliver the hydrogen. Transport could account for between $0.05/kg to $0.75/kg depending on distance.

Comparing my modelling to price thresholds set out in the National Hydrogen Strategy indicates we can produce green hydrogen for trucking at a similar cost to diesel within four years. Fertiliser would take longer, becoming competitive by 2040.

Does our dry country have the water resources for green hydrogen?

If we achieved the $50 billion green hydrogen industry the government is aiming for, how much water would it consume? Surprisingly little. It would take only around 4% of the water we used for our crops and pastures in 2019-20 to generate an export industry that size – 225,000 megalitres.

Much more water than this will be freed up as coal-fired power stations exit the grid. In Queensland and NSW alone, these power stations consume around 158,000 megalitres a year according to a 2020 report prepared for the Australian Conservation Foundation. Coal mining in these two states takes an additional 224,000 megalitres.

As the cost of renewable energy falls and falls, we will also be able to desalinate seawater along our coasts to produce hydrogen. We estimate this would account for only about 1% of the cost of producing hydrogen, based on Australian Water Association desalination cost estimates.

How can we get there faster?

This decade, we must plan for our new hydrogen economy. Government and industry will need to develop and support new hydrogen infrastructure projects to produce, distribute, use and export hydrogen at scale.

We’re already seeing promising signs of progress, as major mining companies move strongly into green hydrogen.

Now we need governments across Australia to rapidly get optimal policy and regulations in place to allow the industry to develop and thrive.

Steven Percy, Senior Research Fellow, Victorian Hydrogen Hub, Swinburne University of Technology

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Sponges can survive low oxygen and warming waters. They could be the main reef organisms in the future

Sponges are ancient marine animals, very common throughout the world’s oceans and seem less affected by ocean warming and acidification.

Our latest research shows they can also survive low levels of oxygen.

This is a surprising finding because most sponges are rarely exposed naturally to low oxygen in modern seas.

We propose their tolerance is the result of their long evolutionary history and exposure to variable oxygen concentrations through geological time.

As our oceans continue to warm due to climate change, they are expected to hold less oxygen.

The ability of sponges to survive low-oxygen conditions means they are likely to tolerate these possible future environments better than other organisms living on the seafloor.

There are an estimated 8000-plus sponge species in the oceans. They are multicellular organisms with a body architecture built around a system of water canals, pores and channels allowing water to be pumped and circulated through them.

Their specialised pumping and feeding cells, called choanocytes, are highly efficient. Sponges can pump the equivalent of their own body volume in a matter of seconds.

In modern oceans, sponges are often the most abundant organisms in rocky reef environments. They fulfil important ecological functions as part of bottom-dwelling (benthic) communities worldwide.

Sponges have many roles in marine ecosystems, but their water-processing ability and efficiency at capturing small particles is the most important because it links the water column with the seafloor. Sponges also support diverse seafloor communities by transforming carbon.

Some sponge species have been shown to be very tolerant to climate change stressors, particularly changing temperature and acidity (measured as pH). This means sponges could be future winners in changing oceans.

Sponges in past oceans

We know that sponges are ancient organisms, but recently described 890-million-year-old fossils have turned our understanding of evolution on its head.

Most major animal groups, including arthropods and worms, first appear in the fossil record during a period known as the Cambrian explosion, 540 million years ago. But if the newly-described fossils are indeed sponges, they would have existed nearly 300 million years earlier, significantly pushing back the date of Earth’s earliest known animals.

If the ancestors of modern sponges are about 900 million years old, they would have evolved and survived during the Marinoan glaciation, 657-645 million years ago, when the oceans were extremely low in oxygen.

They would have also likely experienced wide fluctuations in other environmental conditions such as pH, temperature and salinity through evolutionary time.

Sponge tolerance to low oxygen

Our recent environmental tolerance experiments support this scenario, showing they are surprisingly tolerant to low levels of oxygen.

We assessed the response of sponges to moderate and severe low-oxygen events in a series of laboratory experiments on four species from the northeast Atlantic and southwest Pacific. Sponges were exposed to a total of five low-oxygen treatments, with increasing severity (40%, 20%, 6%, 5% and 1.5% air saturation) over seven to 12 days.

We found the sponges generally very tolerant of hypoxia. All but one of the species survived in the extreme experimental conditions, and that species only began to die off at the lowest oxygen concentration. In most experiments, hypoxic conditions did not significantly affect the sponges’ respiration rates, which suggests they can take up oxygen at very low concentrations in the surrounding environment.

As a response to the low oxygen, sponges displayed a number of shape and structural changes, likely maximising their ability to take up oxygen at these low levels.

Sponges in future oceans

Warmer ocean water holds less oxygen, and ocean deoxygenation is one of the major consequences of climate change.

Warmer water also becomes more buoyant than cooler water, which reduces the mixing of surface oxygenated water with deeper layers that naturally contain less oxygen. At the same time, warmer temperatures increase the demand of organisms for oxygen as metabolic rates increase and stress responses are initiated.

While oxygen levels in the ocean are only expected to fall on average by 4% across all oceans, these effects are likely to be much more extreme locally and regionally. In coastal waters, climate-driven ocean deoxygenation can be exacerbated by a process called eutrophication, essentially an increase in nutrients. This fuels plankton blooms, and when bacteria breakdown the dead phytoplankton, they use up all the oxygen.

Since the land is generally the source of these excess nutrients, shallow coastal areas are most at risk. These are areas where rocky reefs are typically dominated by sponges, particularly just below the depth of light penetration (typically 20-30m).

Our finding lends further support to the idea that sponges will be the survivors if our oceans continue to warm.

James Bell, Professor of Marine Biology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington; Rob McAllen, Professor of Marine Conservation, University College Cork, and Valerio Micaroni, PhD Candidate in Coastal and Marine Biology and Ecology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

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

They live for a century and clean our rivers - but freshwater mussels are dying in droves

Am I not pretty enough? This article is part of The Conversation’s series introducing you to Australia’s unloved animals that need our help.

Freshwater mussels are dying suddenly and in the thousands, with each mass death event bringing these endangered molluscs closer to extinction. Tragically, these events rarely get noticed.

In March last year, for example, seawater was introduced into the lower Vasse River in south-western Australia to control harmful algal blooms. This killed the entire population of Carter’s freshwater mussel (Westralunio carteri) in this section of the river.

For me, this was particularly distressing for two reasons. First, the species was recently listed as vulnerable to extinction thanks to the work of my then graduate student Michael Klunzinger.

Second, among the 3,000-4,000 mussels killed were 160 my colleagues had previously collected from the river, kept alive in cages for nine months, then re-introduced so they would survive the construction of a new bridge.

Freshwater mussels are one of the most endangered groups of animals on the planet, with 47% either extinct or threatened with extinction. Yet we hear almost nothing about the extinction crisis they face.

I want to bring your attention to why freshwater mussels are important, why many will become extinct within our lifetimes, and why this will have dramatic consequences for freshwater environments throughout the world.

Under threat, yet poorly studied

Mass death events like the one in the Vasse River are not uncommon for freshwater mussels.

In 2019, the death of hundreds of thousands of pheasantshell mussels in the Clinch River in Tennessee, USA may have been caused by a virus, and prolonged droughts have killed mussels en masse throughout the USA and Australia.

There are 18 species of freshwater mussels in Australia. Only two of these are listed as threatened under Australia’s environment law: Carter’s freshwater mussel and the Glenelg freshwater mussel (Hyridella glenelgensis).

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean we’re doing better at mussel conservation than the rest of the world. It just means our freshwater mussels are very poorly studied. There have been no ecological assessments of the conservation status of most Australian freshwater mussels.

One of the most serious threats to freshwater mussel populations in Australia is climate change. Reduced rainfall has resulted in a dramatic reduction of water flow. In south-western Australia, for example, water flow has decreased by around 70% since the 1970s and climate change models predict at least a further 25% reduction by 2030.

This loss of flow means more of our rivers go without water over the dry season, and these drought conditions are lasting longer. Mussels can live for a short time without water by burrowing into the sediment, but longer and more severe dry spells will kill them.

Indeed, severe drought killed around 2.9 million freshwater mussels in the Murray Darling Basin between 2017 and 2020.

The livers of rivers

A big reason freshwater mussels are so vulnerable is because of their unique life cycle.

Unlike marine mussels (which release their eggs and sperm into the sea), female freshwater mussels fertilise their eggs internally. The embryos grow in special pouches of the gills until they’re released as tiny larvae that are parasitic on fish.

Many mussel species have marvellous ways to attract fish when the larvae are due to be released. For example, the US pocketbook mussel (Potamilus capax) uses part of it’s body to create a lure which looks like a small fish. This lure is waved about to attract the mussel’s host fish, bass, which are predators of smaller fish.

After spending several months as a parasite, the larvae then metamorphose into juvenile mussels and drop off their host into the sediment.

Most mussel species take five to ten years to reach sexual maturity. They are slow growing and long lived, often with a lifespan of 100 years or more. This combination of characteristics means mussel populations often cannot recover from large death events.

This can have devastating knock-on effects to the freshwater ecosystem, as mussels are considered “keystone” species.

When rivers cease to flow in dry summer months, freshwater fish and other animals find refuge in the remaining pools. Freshwater mussels behave like the livers of rivers, keeping these refuges clean and ensuring animals can survive until the rains return.

They maintain water quality by filtering and removing suspended sediments, nutrients, bacteria and algae. They also deposit nutrients on the river bottom, and their burrowing activity mixes and aerates the sediment.

Take more notice

I was distressed that thousands of endangered mussels died in the Vasse River. I was also distressed, but not surprised, at the general lack of attention to these deaths. If a pod of dolphins had died in an estuary because of human actions, we would have heard an outcry.

The plight of freshwater mussels illustrates a sad reality for freshwater life. Freshwater ecosystems are incredibly diverse. Per unit area, there are more than twice as many species of freshwater animals and plants than on land or in the ocean. But more than four times as many of these species are threatened with extinction.

Despite this, the conservation management of freshwater species lags far behind that of terrestrial or marine species. Freshwater environments are very poorly protected by conservation reserves and up to 71% of the world’s wetlands have been lost since 1900.

One urgent priority for Australia is to invest in freshwater protected areas, the same way as we invest in marine protected areas and terrestrial conservation reserves.

If you live near a stream, river or freshwater lake, go and visit it soon and appreciate the myriad forms of life that live below the surface. Chances are they won’t be there in the decades to come unless we develop policies and practices that protect our freshwater ecosystems.

Alan Lymbery, Professor, Harry Butler Institute, Murdoch University

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