We’ve lost a giant: Vale Professor Will Steffen, climate science pioneer

One of Australia’s leading climate scientists, Professor Will Steffen, died on Sunday. Steffen has been hailed as a leading climate thinker, selfless mentor and gifted communicator. He is survived by his wife Carrie and daughter Sonja. Steffen’s colleagues and friends remember him here.

John Finnigan - Honorary Fellow, CSIRO

The last time I talked to Will was in early January. We had a drink or two before I left for a few weeks work in the United States. He was looking forward with optimism to an operation to get rid of the cancer he had dealt with for a year so he could get on with his life. Unfortunately, there were complications.

The world has lost an enormously influential environmental scientist. And I’ve lost a very dear friend.

Will Steffen and I were close friends for more than 40 years. I came from England to Canberra in the 1970s, and Will came from the US. At that time, it seemed like everyone in Canberra was from somewhere else. As a result, we formed a kind of family. We’d look after each other’s children, or do babysitting so the others could go cross-country skiing. Will and his wife Carrie looked after our kids and we looked after theirs.

I was a scientist at CSIRO when Will joined us as an editor and information officer. Very soon, his obvious scientific intelligence meant he was headhunted to the nascent International Geosphere Biosphere Program, an international consortium of scientists. This was the early 1980s, when the field now known as Earth system science was just taking off. Will proved enormously effective, not just as a manager but as a synthesiser and broadcaster of his group’s ideas.

Many of those ideas are now mainstream but back then, they were radical. Ideas such as the Great Acceleration – the sudden increase in our impact on the environment since the 1950s, brought about by trends such as spiking fossil fuel use, and population growth.

After Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen proposed that the world had entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, Will ran with the concept. He helped popularise the idea that our collective activity is now a force as potent as natural forces in shaping our planet.

Will was also a skilled rock and ice climber who climbed mountains all over the world. In 1988 he was part of the ANU expedition which climbed Nepal’s 7,162 metre Mount Baruntse, an icy spire east of Everest. Of his climbing, Will once said:

Climbing is like science. To get up a hard rock or ice climb, just like when you’re solving a problem in the carbon cycle, you have to be ultra-focused, you have to make holistic decisions and you have to be absolutely aware of your surroundings. When you come off a big climb, you really appreciate the beauty of what’s around you. That’s the buzz you get in science when you solve a big problem and suddenly see how it all fits together.

In the best of ways, Will could also be a stubborn bugger. He refused to let things defeat him – whether on the mountain or taking on climate deniers. On the latter, he was never accommodating. And he’d never fall for their leading questions. He knew how easy it was to edit an interview to twist his words and was smart enough to insist interviews were live.

I remember one interview where he was asked if he accepted carbon dioxide was good for humanity. I might have made the mistake of saying “yes, at certain levels”. But Will knew how to avoid those traps. He said something like: “No. That’s the wrong way to think of it.” He never got boxed in.

During the decade of political climate wars in Australia, Will got a lot of abuse on social media. At one stage, his office at the Australian National University had to be locked down due to death threats. It didn’t stop him.

He never saw deniers or obstructionist politicians as his personal enemies. He didn’t waste his time on the negativity of climate politics. While he was angry at the way the selfish actions of vested interests were sacrificing the future of coming generations, including his daughter, Sonja, he did not despair. Instead, he channelled his anger into action.

When the Abbott government shut down the Climate Commission in 2013, Will and his colleagues – Tim Flannery, Lesley Hughes and Amanda McKenzie – didn’t just quit. Instead they crowd-sourced A$1 million in a week and founded the Climate Council, now a leading independent source of climate advice in Australia.

As well as a hugely influential scientist, Will was a really nice bloke and a true friend. He was calm, not confrontational. He had a wry sense of humour and could see the funny side, even when the climate politics were crazy.

Would he have been happy about recent efforts to speed up action on climate change? Yes and no.

He felt, as I do, that things are much further advanced and much worse than generally recognised. He felt limiting global warming to 1.5℃ was already well out of reach and that it was going to be very difficult to keep it under 2℃.

While he was heartened by recent progress, he knew it was all but impossible to change fast enough to keep warming to a safer level. But he knew we had to try.

Pep Canadell - Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO

Will Steffen took global environmental research to a whole new level.

Beginning when fax machines were the main tool to communicate across multiple time zones, Will developed unparalleled skill in scientific diplomacy and leadership. His work helped create research networks across the world involving tens of thousands of scientists.

In the 1980s, environmental research labs and individual scientists were mostly still working on their own. The new scientific networks spurred on by Will’s brokering made globally coordinated research possible. This was necessary to understand the planetary changes caused by human activity.

Will achieved this global impact through positions such as executive director of the highly influential International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP). His most powerful tools were his never-ending appetite for the very latest science, his kind nature and genuine people skills, his focus and hard work ethic, and his exceptional communication abilities which let him convey the gravity of complex problems and the need for immediate action.

I came to Australia in the late 1990s to take the job Will had left when he moved to Sweden to become the director of the IGBP. I was never able to fill his shoes. But I have tried, with colleagues, to build on his work in bringing together many strands of research.

Will was a visionary in many ways. He understood the environmental problems we were trying to solve spanned many academic disciplines and were deeply interconnected. Few people had his ability to absorb so many diverse types of science and to work with the diverse research communities whose expertise was urgently needed as part of the solutions.

Steve Lade - ARC Future Fellow, Australian National University

I first encountered Will during one of his talks in Canberra. He was an incredible public speaker and a role model for how a scientific specialist could broaden themselves into a holistic thinker on the most important topics imaginable. Hearing him as a PhD student changed the direction of my career.

My scientific interactions with Will began in the mid-2010s as a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, where he was a frequent visitor. Will had recently co-developed the planetary boundaries framework, now one of the most influential ideas in sustainability science.

These boundaries show us the environment is not boundless and elastic, able to absorb all that we throw at it or take from it. Our planet has limits – and if we push too far, we will break something, leading to dramatic changes to the only life-bearing planet we know of.

Planetary boundaries are just one of his discipline-changing contributions to sustainability science - others include co-developing the concept of the Great Acceleration and promoting the concept of the Anthropocene. His ideas were grounded in his view of the Earth as a complex, interconnected, evolving system.

Viewing the world in this way helps us understand what we have done to our environment – and how to begin fixing the problems.

Will’s scientific, policy and advocacy efforts were directed at helping us recognise our role as planet-shapers. He knew we must transform our mindset from exploitation to stewardship if we, and our planet as we know it, are to survive.

His career is an exemplar of how to be an interdisciplinary, inclusive, caring and socially responsible sustainability scientist. Let us continue his legacy.

John Finnigan, Leader, Complex Systems Science, CSIRO; Pep Canadell, Chief Research Scientist, Climate Science Centre, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere; Executive Director, Global Carbon Project, CSIRO, and Steven J Lade, Resilience researcher at Australian National University, Stockholm University

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

Enough with the koala cakes – the government’s annual Threatened Species Bake Off seriously neglects fish, plants and other lesser-loved species

Almost 2,000 native species are officially listed as “threatened” in Australia – but how many have you actually heard of?

Each year, the federal government holds the Threatened Species Bake Off, a social media competition where entrants represent a threatened species in cake form. It aims to build awareness of Australia’s vast diversity of wildlife facing extinction – but our new research found a serious problem with bias towards cute and cuddly animals.

We trawled over 700 entries between 2017 and 2021, and found koalas, echidnas, and wombats consistently depicted. These are the typical poster children of conservation.

Koalas, for example, are frequently allocated large sums of money for conservation. Compare this to many lesser known, more impactful and at-risk species including the grey nurse shark and foundation species such as seaweeds.

Australia is a world leader in extinctions and, indeed, many at-risk plants and animals aren’t even on the official threatened species list, but should be. While the bake off is well-intentioned, our results highlight a massive gap in conservation messaging.

Unless we build the profile of our lesser-loved plants, invertebrates, frogs and fish, we’ll certainly see more species vanish.

What species do people like to bake?

The Threatened Species Bake off begins on September 7, when Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter get flooded with photos of baked goods with elaborate animal or plant designs. Since its inception in 2017, the competition has become increasingly popular and has even garnered celebrity judges including Dawn French, Costa Georgiadis and Kat Sabbath.

It reflects the urgent need to explore creative and novel ways to engage with diverse audiences about Australia’s extinction crisis. But whether it can actually makes a difference to wildlife depends on what people choose to depict.

The charts below show the top ten most popular species baked in the Threatened Species Bake Off on Instagram and Twitter since 2017. Birds and mammals have proven most popular – koalas, echidnas, orange-bellied parrots and other iconic species come out on top. The corroboree frog is the exception to this trend, topping popularity on Twitter and in the top five on Instagram.

Most of the nearly 2,000 species listed as threatened by the federal government are plants – 1,411 plants compared to 562 animals. But very few contestants depict plants in the Threatened Species Bake Off. Just 3% of the listed threatened plants have been depicted, compared to 40% of the listed mammals and 30% of the listed birds.

This highlights a global issue with “plant blindness” – a phenomenon where plants are frequently forgotten when considering the nature in an area, leading to limited interest and funding for their conservation.

In fact, many of the species in the Albanese government’s 2022-2032 Threatened Species Action Plan are birds and mammals – species considered much more charismatic than a plant or invertebrate. The action plan includes 14% of threatened mammals and 13% of threatened birds – and just 2% of threatened plants.

What the bake off revealed about conservation gaps

This brings us to Australia’s invertebrates – the bedrock of ecosystems. We found 50% of invertebrates on the official threatened species list were featured in bake offs (that’s 34 of 68 listed species).

This prevalence, however, is misleading. It masks one of the most significant deficiencies in threatened species management: the lack of invertebrates on threatened species lists. In fact, invertebrates are simply classified as “other animals” under Australia’s threatened species legislation.

Their relative absence from lists of protected groups highlights two major gaps in our knowledge:

1. many invertebrates are yet to be scientifically described and named – the key entry point to being included on these lists

2. we know very little about most invertebrates that have been scientifically described and named – we know only where they were found.

To adequately conserve Australia’s biodiversity, we need to urgently prioritise research on such crucial animals.

Social media can help and hamper conservation

The bake off’s popularity shows social media can be powerful conservation messaging tool. But promoting conservation via social media walks a fine line between protecting and endangering threatened species.

For example, a social media post of a scenic location inhabited by threatened species may drive increased tourism to the location, adding more pressure to the species and its habitat. Indeed, a study in 2019 drew potential links between the rise in videos posted to YouTube of otters as pets with an increase in illegal otter trade.

On the other hand, the use of social media has led to great success in controlling populations of the invasive Indo-Pacific lionfish in the Western Atlantic and Caribbean.

To reduce populations, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has held fishing tournaments since 2014, advertising via social media. The event has evolved into a multi-day festival with art booths, lionfish tastings, and filet demonstration.

What these examples and the bake off shows is the need for a tailored approach for each conservation message.

But so far, the conservation message of the bake off is not clear given people have baked species that aren’t even listed as threatened such as the platypus, brolga, and Mount Lewis spiny crawfish, as well as species that aren’t even Australian, such as tigers and pandas.

Try something different this bake off

We need to find ways to ensure all species, not just koalas, are on the receiving end of conservation action. Here are some ways we can encourage this.

First is to increase their visibility by providing images of threatened species. For example, researchers and nature enthusiasts could make their images free to use on websites such as Wikimedia Commons. Or, they could upload images to iNaturalist or Atlas of Living Australia, two websites that catalogue the sightings of species submitted by researchers and the public.

Giving newly discovered species interesting or funny names can also create emotional connections, encouraging people to care more about them – like the Amazonian Agra beetle species, which include names such as Agra vation and Agra cadabra, or the Australian wasp species Aha ha.

Previous bake offs have incorporated themes including “species I’ve seen” and “ecosystem engineers”. Organisers should introduce a new theme: “species I’ve never heard of”, or “the species under my feet”.

So next bake off, how about baking a small-flowered snottygobble , a Kangaroo Island Assassin Spider, a red handfish, or a cauliflower soft coral?

Eliza Middleton, Biodiversity Management Officer, University of Sydney; Caitlyn Forster, Associate Lecturer, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney, and Dieter Hochuli, Professor, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

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

Why Queensland is still ground zero for Australian deforestation

Five years ago, bulldozers with chains cleared forests and woodlands almost triple the size of the Australian Capital Territory in a single year.

Brazil? Indonesia? No – much closer: Queensland. In 2018-19, truly staggering land clearing, mostly by farmers and cattle graziers, saw around 680,000 hectares of habitat destroyed – more than the preceding 18 years. Even though the state Labor government tightened land clearing rules in 2015, the new rules were riddled with loopholes. If Queensland was a country, it would have been the ninth highest forest destroying nation globally in 2019 – just above China.

Clearing is slowing – but nowhere near fast enough. At the end of 2022, Queensland quietly released its latest figures, showing clearing rates in 2019-20 had fallen to under two Australian Capital Territories that year (around 418,000 hectares). The government celebrated it as a win, as did some farming groups. But it’s nothing to be celebrated.

Yes, it’s better than the worst year in the last two decades. But as our climate and extinction crises worsen and as the Great Barrier Reef teeters on the brink, clearing as usual is no longer good enough.

Why is Queensland still clearing so much – and why does it matter?

In a word, beef. Like Brazil, Queensland tears down its forests and woodlands largely to make way for grass to feed livestock – mainly cattle. The latest 2019-20 figures show 85% of all clearing was done to create new pasture.

You might have heard defenders of land clearing claiming the land being cleared is home to low-value vegetation or trees that regrow easily, such as mulga acacia. This is not true. About 52% of all vegetation cleared in 2019-20 was classified as old growth or older than 15 years. The Brigalow Belt and the Mulga Lands accounted for three-quarters of all clearing. Of the clearing in these regions, 80% was full clearing, meaning bulldozing turned forests or woodlands into areas with less than 10% canopy remaining.

This matters, because Queenslanders are the custodians of more biodiversity than any other Australian state, most of which is found in its woodlands and forests.

Queensland’s thousands of unique plant species provide homes and resources for many of Australia’s famous animals. More than 1,800 species of Australian plants and animals are now threatened with extinction – and Queensland’s land clearing is a key threat for many.

It can be hard to connect bulldozers clearing trees and the reality of what it does to the animals relying on them. So we cross-referenced the cleared land with threatened species distribution maps. Approximately 417 threatened species lost some of their habitat, with the worst hit including grey falcon, the newly endangered koala, and squatter pigeon. The clearing is a double blow, as many of these species were devastated by the Black Summer fires.

This large scale destruction also hampers Australia’s ability to meet climate targets. The agriculture, forestry and other land use sector on average, accounted for almost a quarter (23%) of the world’s human-caused emissions. Of these, 45% were from deforestation.

If we leave woodlands and forests intact, they look after our interests too. They improve water quality and availability for our uses and for nature. They control erosion by protecting soils and riverbanks. And they increase the productivity of nearby cropland by hosting pollinators and species which prey on plant pests. Ripping out the forests and woodlands not only reduces the carbon they sequester but also makes the ground immediately warmer, making many parts of Queensland even hotter and more drought prone.

Destroying old, biologically important woodland and forests at such scale is a terrible idea. It flies in the face of global pledges to end deforestation and maintain the integrity of all of Earth’s ecosystems. Australia is a signatory to both of these.

Cynics might wonder whether the rush to clear pasture is linked to the fact many of our trading partners are looking to import beef not linked to deforestation. In December, the European Union passed laws requiring beef exporters to show their operations haven’t contributed to deforestation. Cattle must not have been raised on land cleared after December 2020. Though the EU is not the largest beef market for Australian farmers, the National Farmers Federation reacted angrily.

Even in Australia, huge companies such as Woolworths and McDonalds have committed to remove deforestation from their supply chains.

Some companies are doing the right thing, but the sheer scale of felling and clearing shows many are not. Both the Queensland and federal governments must fix the problem with better regulation and adequate enforcement, access to data to demonstrate deforestation-free credentials, and incentives for producers to improve their land use to the emerging global standards. In the age of ubiquitous satellite imagery, it’s impossible to hide what you’re doing. One option could be to make the deforestation images publicly available in real time.

Labor has pledged action federally – but the state Labor government must do more

There’s a strange disconnect developing where Labor, federally, has signalled they want to reverse Australia’s biodiversity crisis, while at state level, their actions are nowhere near enough. Federal Labor recently signed national and international commitments aimed at halting species extinctions, reversing biodiversity loss, and stopping further land degradation. For that to actually happen, though, it will need the states to play ball – especially Queensland.

Why is Queensland ground-zero for deforestation in Australia? It has water, arable land, and a decentralised population often reliant on farming or mining work outside the major cities. Sugarcane plantations, mango farms, beef cattle, dairy, bananas – it’s hard to shift a long-set path.

But if the state government is unable to close the obvious loopholes such as Queensland’s questionable land clearing Category X and stop rampant land clearing, the environmental, social and economic bill will come due. Extinctions, coral death, climate damages, degraded human health and the reputational risk of becoming a pariah.

It doesn’t have to be that way. By working with farmers and graziers, they can end the policy ping-pong with laws to encourage all food producers to shift to deforestation-free produce. We can get there.

Michelle Ward, Postdoctoral research fellow, The University of Queensland and James Watson, Professor, The University of Queensland

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

Losing the natural world comes with major risks for your super fund and bank

As the economist Herman Daly pithily said, the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment – not the reverse. Nature makes our lives possible through what scientists call ecosystem services. Think healthy food, clean water, feed for livestock, building materials, medicine, flood and storm control, recreation, and attractions for tourists.

Despite this, Australian businesses and financial institutions have so far failed to track how their activities both rely on and affect nature. This means our investments and superannuation could be exposed to hidden financial risks because of nature loss – and may also contribute to the destruction of nature.

That’s set to change. The private sector is waking up to nature’s value (and the risks of losing it). The world’s biodiversity rescue plan agreed to last year could help motivate governments and businesses to clean up their investments by directing more money to protect nature and less towards bankrolling extinction.

There’s one crucial plank we’re missing though – mandatory reporting of how businesses both depend on and impact nature.

Nature and financial health are inextricably linked

Fully half of the world’s total economic activity – around A$61 trillion – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.

In Australia, that figure is very similar: around half of our GDP – $896 billion – has a moderate to very high direct dependence on ecosystem services provided by nature.

What happens when we breach nature’s limits? Ecosystem services seize up or collapse, eventually disrupting these sectors. The tireless pollination work of honeybees, for instance, is valued at $14 billion a year. Or take Australia’s wheatbelt, where poor soil health is now costing farmers almost $2 billion a year in lost income.

Ecosystem services are not hypothetical. They have real value – and we will absolutely notice if they are gone.

What does this have to do with my super?

Australia’s super sector is responsible for the retirement savings of around 12 million Australians. Super funds are directly exposed to financial risk from nature loss through their investment portfolios.

Just as farmers can’t grow crops without healthy soils or pollinators, developers can’t build apartments without timber or environmental permits. In turn, that has implications for their value as investments.

And because so many sectors are exposed, classic investment strategies such as diversification may no longer protect your super from losses.

So what are our super funds and banks doing about it?

To find out, we surveyed ten super funds and ten retail banks about their responses to nature-related risks. The survey – commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation – is the first time this has been done in Australia.

The findings? Not ideal. Every participating super fund and bank agreed the loss of nature now presented a serious risk to investment returns. They all agreed it was part of their responsibility to members and customers to measure and manage these risks. But only 20% of super funds and 10% of banks had attempted to assess how exposed they were.

Again, this is not abstract. Super funds often have large holdings in the big four banks. Together, these banks have $170 billion in exposure to agriculture, mining, fisheries, and forestry – sectors directly reliant on a functioning natural world.

So why isn’t it a higher priority? One issue may be that many financial institutions are currently focused on climate change, given how rapidly impacts are mounting. But climate change and the breakdown of natural systems are twin crises. Nature offers far and away the largest method of taking carbon back out of the atmosphere, for instance. But that only works if salt marshes and wetlands and forests are intact.

Net zero targets for our banks and super funds are not fully credible unless there is a commitment to end the financing of deforestation. Only one organisation, Australian Ethical, had made such a commitment.

You would think Australia’s super funds and banks would be interested to find out how exposed their investments were to this growing risk. Tools to do this such as IBAT and ENCORE are readily available.

But to date, our survey findings don’t indicate banks and funds will do this voluntarily.

Banks and super funds may soon have to report these risks

The biodiversity rescue plan agreed to last year – known as the Kunming-Montreal agreement – is intended to set expectations for responsible finance and business globally, as the Paris Agreement did for climate change.

That means Australia will be expected to introduce disclosure requirements. If this comes to pass, banks, super funds, and the businesses they invest our savings in will have to measure and publicly report their impact on nature – as well as how much they rely on nature to make a profit.

First, though, the Australian government must introduce mandatory nature risk reporting. It’s already moving ahead with plans to make climate risk disclosures mandatory.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has indicated nature is also on his radar.

The question then will be whether making this information public will actually do what we hope it will and use money to help natural systems rather than extract from them.

What happens next?

Since taking office, the Labor government has pledged to take action on the perilous decline of the natural world with plans such as bringing the value of nature into our national accounts.

While positive, the real action won’t happen until nature risk reporting is mandatory, environment laws with teeth are introduced, and until both governments and private industry direct serious money into helping nature, not harming it. Risky nature credit markets aren’t going to cut the mustard.

You don’t have to sit back and wait. Why not ask your super fund and bank what nature-related risks they are exposing your money to?

Madeline Combe, Doctoral student, University of Technology Sydney; Megan C Evans, Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow, UNSW Sydney, and Nathaniel Pelle, Honorary Associate, Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney

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

Win-win: how solar farms can double as havens for our wildlife

Australia’s renewable energy transition has prompted the construction of dozens of large-scale solar farms. The boom helps reduce Australia’s reliance on fossil fuels, but requires large areas of land to be converted to host solar infrastructure.

Solar farms are mostly built in rural areas. This has raised concerns about a potential decline in both agricultural production – as arable land is used for solar energy production – and wildlife habitat.

But there are ways to expand solar infrastructure so both nature and people win. We’ve already seen this in so called “agrivoltaics”, where land under and around solar panels is used to grow crops and graze livestock. But what about “conservoltaics”, combing conservation and solar energy?

My new research examines whether solar farms could also be used to help conserve native species. I found solar panels can provide valuable habitat for wildlife – and potentially benefit both the land and farmers.

A new place to call home

Our wild landscapes are diminishing and protected areas, such as national parks, cover only about 9% of Australia.

Many agricultural landscapes have been cleared of trees to provide pasture for livestock. It means wildlife that rely on trees have lost vast tracts of habitat.

So we must find new places for wildlife to forage, rest, shelter and breed.

My work examines how solar parks on agricultural land can double as wildlife habitat. It involves surveys and trapping to identify what plants and animals occupy solar farms, how long they take to recolonise, and how we can promote even more biodiversity.

My new paper coins a new term for this dual land-use: conservoltaics. I highlight research from overseas into how solar parks can bring conservation benefits, and describe the research still needed.

Solar panels add three-dimensional structure and complexity to an environment. They can provide animals shelter from predators and the elements, much like artificial reefs in lakes and oceans. They can also act as perch or nesting structures.

Solar infrastructure also creates a mosaic of sun and shade patches – and so provide many “micro-habitats” for plants and animals.

Research from Europe has shown large solar farms can enhance the diversity and abundance of plants, grasses, butterflies, bees and birds.

What’s more, vegetation between solar panel rows can also provide travel corridors, nesting sites and shelter for wildlife.

Management is key

Research suggests several management strategies that can maximise the benefits of solar farms for wildlife.

Land managers should provide a diverse mix of flowering plant species to encourage pollinators. And grass between solar panels should not be mowed too short or too often. Pollinators prefer tall vegetation where they can forage – though vegetation should not be so tall that it shades the solar panels.

The use of herbicides and other chemicals should be avoided where possible. And solar farms should be connected to other vegetated areas, using features such as hedgerows and wildflower strips, so wildlife can move between the solar farm and other habitats.

Landholders who combine solar farms with wildlife habitat may reap several benefits.

They could receive financial returns by earning environmental credits through schemes that reward carbon sequestration and biodiversity improvements.

They may also improve the health of their land by, for example, increasing pollination or providing habitat for predators such as raptor perches or nest boxes – which in turn could help control pests.

Much work remains, however, to understand these opportunities.

Looking ahead

The benefit of renewable energy in reducing carbon emissions is well known. But more work is needed to understand how solar farms can benefit wildlife.

Research is also lacking on how to locate, configure and manage solar farms to best enhance biodiversity. Collaboration between industry, land managers and researchers is needed so clean energy production and conservation can go hand-in-hand.

Eric Nordberg, Senior Lecturer (Applied Ecology and Landscape Management), University of New England

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

Planting more trees could reduce premature deaths in European cities by a third – new research

Urban development leads to fewer shaded areas and more heat-absorbing paved surfaces. Cities tend to be warmer than their rural surroundings as a result, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect. During the summer daytime, cities can be up to 12℃ hotter than rural areas.

UHIs are a major environmental hazard for urban dwellers. Research suggests that for each 1℃ rise in temperature, the risk of death increases by between 1% and 3%. Heat exposure also increases the risk of suffering cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses.

Our research calculated the death rates of urban inhabitants across 93 European cities (57 million people in total) between June and August 2015. We found that 6,700 premature deaths during this period were linked to UHIs.

But the pace of global warming is accelerating and 2–3 billion people are expected to live in cities by 2050. The health impacts of UHIs will likely worsen in the coming years.

Several strategies exist to protect urban residents from the impacts of heat. These include covering roofs and facades in vegetation (green roofs), decorating them in lighter colours, and replacing paved surfaces with areas of vegetation. Our modelling revealed that one-third (2,644) of UHI deaths in Europe could be prevented by increasing tree canopy cover to 30% in every urban neighbourhood.

Urban tree guidelines

This target was established last year by a study published in the Journal of Forestry Research. Since then it has been adopted by several cities worldwide, including Barcelona (Spain), Bristol (UK), Philadelphia (US), Canberra (Australia) and Seattle (US).

Urban forests regulate a city’s microclimates effectively. Research found that urban forests cooled the average temperature of 601 European cities by 1.1°C and by as much as 2.9°C.

Leafy neighbourhoods are also linked to improved mental and physical health. In California, a 10% increase in neighbourhood tree cover has been associated with a 19% reduction in rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Surrounding greenness, particularly greenness at schools, can be important in the cognitive development of children. Cognitive testing of schoolchildren in Barcelona revealed a 6% better working memory development in children at schools with the highest levels of greenness compared to those at the least-green schools.

More trees means less heat

We found substantial variation in UHI death rates across European cities. In 2015, Gothenburg in Sweden recorded no premature UHI deaths, while urban heat was responsible for 32 premature deaths per 100,000 people in the Romanian city Cluj-Napoca.

The cities with the highest UHI death rates were in southern and eastern Europe. Most of these cities generally had low tree coverage and recorded the highest UHI effect.

Just 3.3% of Thessaloniki in Greece is covered by trees, resulting in urban temperatures 2.8℃ higher than the surrounding area. By contrast, 27% of Gothenburg is covered by trees, delivering an UHI effect of just 0.4℃.

Overall, southern European cities will benefit most from increasing their tree cover. Our model estimates that Barcelona could reduce its UHI death rate by 60% by meeting the 30% tree coverage target.

The way forward

But the intensity of the UHI effect depends on multiple factors and is specific to each city. While vegetation cover influences urban temperatures during the day, nighttime temperatures are driven by the height of the urban canyon.

The cooling capacity of a tree canopy also varies. This depends on the type and size of trees, which are themselves contingent on the city’s natural climate and the degree to which trees are maintained.

Drier climates, like Thessaloniki, favour smaller trees that have fewer leaves. By contrast, Gothenburg’s cooler and wetter climate favours larger and leafier trees that provide better protection from daytime heat.

Due to this variation, we built a tool called the Cooling Efforts Index. The index assesses how much cooling can be achieved in each city for every 1% increase in tree cover. We also generated high-resolution maps for each city to identify the areas where tree coverage is needed most urgently.

In some cities, the majority of urban forests will grow on private land. Tree planting programmes must therefore encourage residents to plant trees.

In Victoria, a city on Canada’s western coast, neighbourhoods are offered a CAD$1,000 (£610) grant to plant residential trees. So far, over 78 trees have been planted on private property across the city.

Space can also be a major constraint in compact urban areas. So increasing tree cover to 30% may be challenging for some European cities.

But each city can adapt this target to its local context. For example, a lower tree canopy target can be combined with alternative measures like green roofs in compact urban areas.

Terrace roofs account for 67% of Barcelona’s roof surface area. As the city’s urban population continues to rise, the city council has launched a guide to transform roofs into areas with partial or total plant cover. The guide sets out the social and environmental benefits of green roofs and offers advice for choosing the right kind of terrace roof for the building.

Incorporating urban green infrastructure into cities should make them more resilient to climate change. But planting trees may not be enough. Tree growth is a long processes and around half of newly-planted trees die within two years. Preserving existing trees and complementing tree planting schemes with other measures that reduce the intensity of UHIs, such as reducing car use, are similarly important.

Urban trees provide substantial public health and environmental benefits. Our study suggests that by increasing tree coverage, premature UHI deaths in European cities can be reduced. But for the resilience of cities to increase, it remains important to combine greater tree coverage with other urban green infrastructure.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 10,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Meelan Thondoo, Research Associate, University of Cambridge; Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Research Professor ISGlobal Barcelona and Professorial Fellow, ACU Melbourne, Australian Catholic University, and Tamara Iungman, PhD researcher, Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)

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

It’s hot, and your local river looks enticing. But is too germy for swimming?

Swimming in rivers, creeks and lakes can be a fun way to cool off in summer. But contamination in natural waterways can pose a risk to human health.

Waterborne pathogens can cause acute gastrointestinal illnesses such as diarrhea and vomiting. Other common illnesses include skin rashes, respiratory problems, and eye and ear infections.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to find out if a waterway in Australia is safe for recreation. By contrast, a comprehensive system in Aotearoa-New Zealand, called Can I Swim Here?, provides timely water quality information for 800 beach, river and lake sites.

We have investigated the benefits and barriers associated with opening up waterways for recreation. Unsurprisingly, ensuring a local swimming site is safe is key to getting people using it. That includes giving people access to accurate information about water quality.

Can swimming really make you sick?

Contaminated water can exist in swimming pools and spas, as well as oceans, lakes, and rivers, exposing humans to a range of pathogens.

According to official advice in New South Wales, common waterborne pathogens include:

• enteric bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E.coli) or Enterococci, that live in the intestinal tracts of all warm-blooded animals and can enter water as faecal matter (or poo). They can cause gastroenteritis, skin and ear infections and dysentery

• viruses such as noroviruses and hepatitis. They can cause diarrhoea, vomiting, hepatitis and respiratory disease

• protozoa such as giardia which, once ingested, can live as parasites in humans and animals and cause diarrhoea.

Australian research has documented a link between gastroeneritis and people swimming in public pools and freshwater sites such as rivers, lakes and dams.

Other water quality hazards for swimming include toxic blue-green algae and exposure to chemical pollutants.

Recent floods in Australia have led to an elevated risk of water contamination. As others have noted, flood waters can be highly polluted with disease-causing organisms, including from sewerage overflows.

So how do swimming locations get contaminated? Pollution can come from untreated sewage, or runoff containing animal poo or fertilisers. The source could be chemicals from nearby industrial activities, or the water users themselves.

Thankfully, most disease outbreaks from swimming are not fatal. An exception is the amoeba Naegleria fowleri. It lives in warmer waters and can cause amoebic meningitis, a potentially fatal brain disease.

How safe is your local swimming hole?

In Australia, guidance on recreational water quality tends to focus on ocean beaches. For example, NSW’s Beachwatch program cover more than 200 NSW coastal (and some estuary) beaches. The advice is based on likelihood of rain combined with testing swimming sites for faecal bacteria.

The Victorian government also provides coastal swimming guidance for 36 beaches in Port Phillip Bay.

But away from the coast, information on the water quality of our local rivers, creeks and lakes, is sparse.

In NSW, advice exists for swimming and boating at four sites on the Nepean River in Western Sydney. Information is provided for a recently reopened swimming site at Lake Parramatta and for swimming at some Blue Mountains sites.

In Victoria, the Yarra Watch program monitors four swimming sites in freshwater stretches of the Yarra River, upstream of Melbourne.

And authorities in Canberra provide regular water quality monitoring and swimming advice for lakes and rivers.

But in contrast to Australia, New Zealand provides far more detailed and broad guidance.

How New Zealand does it

New Zealand’s world-leading national program Can I swim here? enables people to find the best places to swim across 800 beach, river and lake sites across the country.

The advice is provided by LAWA (Land, Air, Water Aotearoa), a collaboration between regional councils, the New Zealand government, scientific experts and academics, and a philanthropist organisation.

The data available includes both the latest weekly water quality test results, and results dating back five years.

The guidance also includes an interactive map (see below) where users can zoom to swimming sites in their region.

More work is needed

Everyone loves to be around, on and in the water, especially during summer. As well as providing a way to cool down, local swimming holes are great places for people to socialise, exercise and engage with nature – especially for those not near a beach.

Governments are recognising the real opportunity to open up underused waterways for recreation across Australia. But for the sake of our communities, more work is needed on improving water quality and sharing information.

Australia has a lot to learn from New Zealand and other countries on how to manage our waterways for recreational use. And ongoing research, partnering with government and industry, is clearly needed.

Ian A Wright, Associate Professor in Environmental Science, Western Sydney University and Nicky Morrison, Professor of Planning and Director of Urban Transformations Research Centre, Western Sydney University

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

Australia’s cotton farmers can help prevent exploitation in the global garment industry

Ten years ago, the garment industry’s worst industrial accident – the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh – killed more than 1,100 workers and highlighted the travesty of conditions for millions of garment workers globally.

It spurred action to address exploitation, but for many workers little has changed.

Just in the past few months, Britain’s Tesco supermarket chain has been accused of profiting from the “effective forced labour” of workers in Thailand (making Tesco-brand jeans), while the world’s biggest clothing retailer, China’s fast-fashion brand Shein, has been exposed for rampant human rights abuses.

Such incidents are meant to have been eliminated, as big brands are supposed to leverage their power to effect change in global supply chains. Australia’s Modern Slavery Act, for example, requires companies with more than A$100 million in annual revenue to publicly report on their efforts to ensure their supply chains are free of labour exploitation.

The expectation has been that pressure from consumers and investors will be enough for retailers (who profit the most from driving down production costs) to drive change. Campaigners for better conditions say these requirements are all too often a “fig leaf”, because audits can easily be fudged.

Limited attention has been given to what suppliers can do to ensure their products aren’t associated with exploitation.

In this, Australia’s cotton industry could make a valuable contribution, as the world’s fourth-largest exporter (behind the United States, Brazil and India). Most of this cotton goes to low-wage countries in Asia to be spun, knitted or woven into cloth, and then turned into garments.

Producers don’t have anywhere near the same influence of buyers. Yet there is more they can do protect the workers overseas who transform their product into material goods.

Extending producer responsibility

We received funding from the Cotton Research and Development Corporation (which is funded by the Commonwealth government and cotton growers) to look at ways the Australian industry can ensure its cotton is not tainted by exploitation.

The idea of sellers taking responsibility for what end users do with a product is not entirely new. The principle of “extended producer responsibility” is credited to a 1990 report by academic Thomas Lindquist.

Since then, producer responsibility (or “product stewardship”) obligations have become accepted as needed to reduce waste and environmental pollution.

In Europe, clothing retailers are being asked by regulators to address the waste caused by consumers disposing of their clothing. They will have to ensure their clothes are more durable and have less impact on the environment. Retailers will also need to provide consumers with information on how to reuse, repair and recycle clothing.

In Australia, the concept has also been applied to animal welfare, following a public furore in 2011 over animal cruelty in Indonesian abattoirs.

In response, the federal government introduced the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System.

Exporters now require their buyers to provide information about the supply chain including the port of arrival, transport, handling and slaughter of the livestock.

There is also a push to make coal and gas exporters responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions released by the use of their products.

Taking a book-end approach

Our report examines how to increase transparency and traceability in cotton supply chains. Among other approaches, it looks at extending the Australian cotton industry’s existing certification scheme.

This scheme helps market Australian cotton on its sustainability credentials. Our idea is to extend the existing “chain of custody” checklist – which serves as proof of the cotton’s Australian origin - to include information about working conditions further along the chain in spinning, fabric and garment production.

This could potentially enable Australian growers to sell their cotton at a premium. Buyers already know Australian cotton isn’t tainted by child or forced labour, unlike cotton from many other exporter nations. This assurance could then be extended to the final products made from Australian cotton too.

There is, of course, some debate about the size of the market for ethical materials. But research and growing commitments to ethical standards by major retailers suggest it is growing.

A “book-end” approach that combines actions by producers and retailers is, in our view, the best way to rid the global cotton supply chain of exploitation.

The authors wish to acknowledge the other report contributors: Rowena Maguire and Justine Coneybeer (Queensland University of Technology), and Timo Rissanen and Karina Kallio (University of Technology Sydney).

Martijn Boersma, Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame Australia; Alice Payne, Professor in Fashion, Queensland University of Technology, Queensland University of Technology, and Erin O'Brien, Associate Professor, Centre for Justice, Queensland University of Technology

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

How culling Australia’s feral water buffalo could help tackle climate change

The world’s largest wild population of water buffalo now roam Australia. As does the largest wild herd of camels. We have millions of feral goats and deer. For these introduced species, Australia is a paradise. Plenty of vegetation, and not many predators, other than dingoes, crocodiles and humans.

The problem is, these ruminants burp out the potent greenhouse gas methane from fermenting vegetation in their stomachs. While ferals only produce an estimated 5% of the methane produced by Australia’s 24 million cattle and 74 million sheep, feral ruminant numbers are soaring.

Buffalo, in particular, are high methane emitters, pumping out methane at around the same rate as cattle. Their numbers have rebounded after earlier culls to more than 200,000. Of the world’s animal methane emissions, cattle account for 77% and buffalo for 13%.

At present, culling is expensive. But our new research on feral water buffalo in Kakadu shows this could change. If landowners, land managers and governments could claim carbon credits for culling, it would go from an expense to a profit. At a stroke, we could reduce pressure on ecosystems, cut emissions and add another source of income for those doing the work.

Are feral ruminants really a big problem?

If you live in a big city, you’re unlikely to ever see the full scale of the issue. But that’s changing. Residents in Melbourne and Sydney have become more familiar with feral deer, as they spread up and down the Great Dividing Range.

We’re more familiar with the damage done by other introduced species, including foxes, rabbits, rats and cats. Ruminants are a real problem – just usually not in the places where most people live.

These large herbivores are often much heavier than kangaroos and, unlike any native animal, have hard hooves which trample plants, compact soil and increase erosion. They can foul rivers and lakes, and carry diseases to farm animals.

Why is it hard to control these animals at present? The cost. Historically, keeping feral ruminant numbers down has been done by sending shooters up in helicopters. Since the 1960s, we have spent billions controlling feral ruminants.

Despite this, most of these species are more common than ever. How can that be? Once we stop culling, feral animal populations often bounce back very quickly because of their high breeding rates and through migration from neighbouring areas where culling hasn’t been undertaken.

For land managers, the scale of the task is often bigger than their budget, meaning feral ruminant control is often placed in the “too hard” basket, especially for remote areas. That’s where carbon credits could help. As the carbon economy grows, it has begun to change the economics of land use and land management.

Could carbon credits really improve feral ruminant control?

Land managers now have incentives to take action to avoid emissions in a way which can be documented and to increase how much carbon their land can sequester in trees, wetlands or soils.

That’s because these actions can earn them carbon credits. Every tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂-e) kept out of the atmosphere is currently worth around A$30. Credits can be sold to third parties looking to offset their emissions.

How could land managers create credits by controlling buffalo? We could borrow from the success of farmers and managers across northern Australia’s vast and fire-prone savannas who produce credits by using cool burns to reduce fuel loads and prevent devastating late-season fires which release large volumes of greenhouse gases.

At present, you cannot claim carbon credits for culling. What if you could? We put that to the test in our research to see if the income from carbon credits would make culling self-sustaining.

In short, it would make a major difference. The income from selling carbon credits could far outweigh the costs of culling. Rather than being a huge expense, keeping numbers down on your landholdings would become a substantial source of income.

A water buffalo belches an average of 76 kilograms of methane each year. That’s the equivalent of 2.1 tonnes of CO₂. Over a 25-year lifespan, that’s the equivalent of more than 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

A rare win-win?

We examined the feral buffalo population around the South Alligator River in Kakadu National Park, and simulated different culling scenarios. We found effective control would drastically reduce emissions, abating up to 913,000 tonnes of CO₂-e over 20 years. That would make aerial culling very profitable. The net income from these avoided emissions would be more than $26 million in credits – after taking out the cost of culling.

While more research is needed, we hope our research demonstrates the concept is viable. If culling high-emitting ruminants such as buffalo earned carbon credits, we believe it would open the door to far better feral animal control across the Top End.

We could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, open up new income streams for landowners and managers, and give regional ecosystems a health boost.

With buffalo pressure reduced, the wetlands and floodplains they churn into mudpits could recover. That, in turn, would help these natural systems hold their carbon better – and mean the value of buffalo removal would increase even more. At present, however, we haven’t quantified how much extra carbon could be stored.

It’s rare to find an approach in land management that benefits both landholders and the environment. Buffalo carbon credits might just be that rare win-win.

Hugh Davies, Research Associate, Charles Darwin University; Brett Murphy, Professor, Charles Darwin University; Clément Duvert, Senior Research Fellow, Charles Darwin University, and Georgina Neave, PhD candidate, Charles Darwin University

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