Mark Lynch |
Showing posts with label ecological disaster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ecological disaster. Show all posts
Saturday 2 January 2021
Wednesday 15 May 2019
Australia cannot afford a third term Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government
The continuous prevarication and callous disregard for any policy which might provide a sustainable future for our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren makes the Liberal and National political parties a danger to us all.........
The
Guardian, 9
May 2019:
Scott Morrison’s office
has declined to say what legislation he was referring to when he said he had
“been taking action” on a
landmark UN report about the extinction of a million different species.
On Monday, the UN
released a comprehensive, multi-year report that revealed human
society was under threat from the unprecedented extinction of the
Earth’s animals and plants. The agriculture minister, David Littleproud, said
the report “scared him”, during a debate on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Morrison
responded to the report saying: “We already introduced and passed legislation
through the Senate actually dealing with that very issue in the last week of
the parliament. We’ve been taking action on that.”
However, no legislation
regarding animal conservation or the environment passed in the last week of
parliament.
When asked what the
legislation was, the prime minister’s office did not reply. The office of the
environment minister, Melissa Price, also did not respond when asked what
legislation Morrison was referring to.
The only legislation
regarding animals that passed within the last few months is the
Industrial Chemicals Bill 2017, which set new regulations on testing
cosmetics on animals.
However, it was passed
by both houses on 18 February – not in the last week of parliament, which was
in April.
Neither the prime
minister nor the environment minister responded to clarify if this was the bill
Morrison was referring to, or whether he made an error.
Tim Beshara, the federal
policy director of the Wilderness Society, said Morrison appeared to have
“alluded to a bill that doesn’t exist”.
“The last bill to pass the Senate from the
environment portfolio was about changing the board structure of the Great
Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in 2018,” he said.
“It looks like the prime
minister of Australia is so desperate to move the debate off the environment as
an issue that he has alluded to a bill that doesn’t exist so that journalists
would stop asking questions about it.”…..
On Wednesday, Morrison
also railed against the expansion of environmental regulations, calling them
“green tape”.
He told the Sydney
Morning Herald the
expansion of “green tape” – like native vegetation laws – was delaying projects
like mining and “costs jobs”.
“[Labor] want to
hypercharge an environment protection authority which will basically interfere
and seek to slow down and prevent projects all around the country,” he said.
Beshara said the timing
of this with the mass extinction report showed “excellent comedic timing”.
“What he is calling
‘green tape’, most Australians would call basic environmental protections,” he
said. “I don’t expect the prime minister to know their numbats from their
bandicoots, but I do expect them to know what bills their government has
passed, and to respond to a globally significant UN report like this with the
seriousness it deserves.”
The
Guardian, 9
May 2019:
Most clearing of
Australian habitat relied on by threatened species is concentrated in just 12
federal electorates, nine of which are held by the Coalition, an
analysis has found.
University of Queensland
scientists found more than 90% of the threatened species habitat lost since the
turn of the century has been in six electorates in Queensland, two each in NSW
and Western Australia and one in Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Most of
the land-clearing in Queensland has been to create
pasture.
The study, commissioned
by the Australian Conservation Foundation, was released following a United
Nations global assessment that found biodiversity is being lost at an
unprecedented rate, with one million species at risk of extinction. The report
warns the decline in native life could have implications for human populations
across the globe.
Threatened species
habitat loss, by federal electorates
Showing the percentage
of habitat loss used by threatened species
Source: ACF |
The research found the
greatest loss of threatened species habitat had been in the agriculture
minister David Littleproud’s electorate of Maranoa, in southern Queensland.
Nearly two million hectares, or 43%, has been cleared since 2000, when the
federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act
was introduced. Among the 85 threatened species affected are the koala, the
greater bilby, the black-throated finch and the long-nosed potoroo.
Maranoa is followed on
the list by Kennedy, home to the maverick independent Bob Katter, the Liberal
Rick Wilson’s Western Australian seat of O’Connor and Capricornia, a marginal
electorate held by the LNP’s Michelle Landry.
The environment minister
Melissa Price’s vast electorate of Durack, which covers nearly two-thirds of
Western Australia, is seventh, with more than 300,000 hectares lost.
Other seats on the list
are Flynn, Parkes, Leichhardt, Lingiari, Farrer, Dawson and Lyons.
James Watson, the
director of the university’s centre for biodiversity and conservation science,
said Australia was sleep-walking through a worsening extinction crisis.
“These results show the
laws we have to protect our wonderful natural heritage are not working and that
is a significant failure of government,” he said.
The Australian
Conservation Foundation’s nature policy analyst, James Trezise, said the next
Australian government must invest in the recovery of threatened species and
introduce strong environment laws overseen by an independent national regulator
if it was serious about reversing the decline in native wildlife…..
Australia has the highest
rate of mammal extinction in the world over the past 200 years. It
is considered
one of 17 “megadiverse” countries, which share just 10% of global land but
70% of biological diversity. A green group study found funding to the national
environment budget has been reduced
by a third since the Coalition was elected.
Habitat loss on the NSW North Coast
Richmond electorate held by Labor MP Justine Elliot - 710 ha loss
Page electorate held by Nats MP Kevin Hogan - 16,725 ha loss
Cowper electorate held by Nats MP Luke Hartsuyker until April 2019 - 5,159 ha loss
Lyne electorate held by Nats MP David Gillespie - 6,181 ha loss
Tuesday 14 May 2019
UN-UNESCO Global Assessment Report: "The loss of species, ecosystems and genetic diversity is already a global and generational threat to human well-being."
Smithsonian.com, 6 May 2019:
Our world is losing
biodiversity, and fast. According to a report released today by the United
Nations, up to one million species could face extinction in the near future due
to human influence on the natural world. Such a collapse in biodiversity would
wreak havoc on the interconnected ecosystems of the planet, putting human
communities at risk by compromising food sources, fouling clean water and air,
and eroding natural defenses against extreme weather such as hurricanes and
floods.
In the sweeping
UN-backed report, hundreds of scientists found that biodiversity loss poses a
global threat on par with climate change. A 40-page “Summary for Policy Makers”
was released in advance of the full report, which is expected to be published
later this year and span nearly 2,000 pages. The document calls the rate of
change in nature “unprecedented” and projects that species extinctions will
become increasingly common in the coming decades, driven by factors such as
land development, deforestation and overfishing.
“The basic message is
the same as what the scientific community has been saying for more than 30
years: Biodiversity is important in its own right. Biodiversity is important
for human wellbeing, and we humans are destroying it,” Robert Watson, the
former chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) that produced the report, said during a press
conference on Monday.
To produce the report,
145 biodiversity experts plus hundreds of other contributors compiled
information over three years from 15,000 sources. For years, scientists have
been sounding the alarm about biodiversity’s dramatic decline in what some have
dubbed the world’s sixth
mass extinction event. This die-off, however, differs from the other five
in its central cause: humans.
As the global assessment
confirms, human activity is a major driver of biodiversity decline among
the millions of species on Earth. The report ranks some of the
top causes of species loss as changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation
of organisms (like hunting or fishing), climate change, pollution and invasive
alien species (often introduced by human travel across ecosystems).
The current global rate of species extinction is already “at least tens to
hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years,”
and it’s expected to keep accelerating.
All in all, human action
has “significantly altered” about 75 percent of the world’s land environment
and 66 percent of its marine environment, according to the report. Insect
populations have plummeted in tropical forests, grasslands
are increasingly drying out into deserts, and pollution along with ocean
acidification is driving
many coral reef ecosystems to the brink.
The destruction of
biodiversity at all levels, from genes to ecosystems, could pose
significant threats to humankind, the report says. In addition to affecting
human access to food resources, clean water and breathable air, a loss of
species on a global scale could also clear a path for diseases and parasites to
spread more quickly, says Emmett Duffy, a biodiversity expert with the
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center who contributed to the report.
“Historically, a lot of
us have thought about conservation and extinction in terms of charismatic
animals like pandas and whales,” Duffy says. “But there’s a very strong utilitarian
reason for saving species, because people depend on them. There’s an
environmental justice aspect.”
The effects of
biodiversity loss won’t be distributed equally, either, the researchers found.
The most devastating impacts would disproportionately affect some of the
world’s poorest communities, and the report concludes that the decline in
biodiversity undermines global progress toward the Sustainable
Development Goals, milestones set by the U.N. General Assembly in 2015 to
reduce global inequality…..
IPBES Global
Assessment Preview,
excerpt:
Important
aspects of the Global Assessment
Building upon earlier IPBES assessment
reports, especially the recently-released Land Degradation and Restoration
Assessment and the Regional Assessment Reports for Africa, the Americas,
Asia-Pacific and Europe and Central Asia (March, 2018), the Global Assessment:
• Covers all land-based ecosystems
(except Antarctica), inland water and the open oceans
• Evaluates changes over the past 50 years — and implications for our economies, livelihoods, food security and quality of life
• Explores impacts of trade and other global processes on biodiversity and ecosystem services
• Ranks the relative impacts of climate change, invasive species, pollution, sea and land use change and a range of other challenges to nature
• Identifies priority gaps in our available knowledge that will need to be filled
• Projects what biodiversity could look like in decades ahead under six future scenarios: Economic Optimism; Regional Competition; Global Sustainability; Business as Usual; Regional Sustainability and Reformed Markets
• Assesses policy, technology, governance, behaviour changes, options and pathways to reach global goals by looking at synergies and trade-offs between food production, water security, energy and infrastructure expansion, climate change mitigation, nature conservation and economic development
• Evaluates changes over the past 50 years — and implications for our economies, livelihoods, food security and quality of life
• Explores impacts of trade and other global processes on biodiversity and ecosystem services
• Ranks the relative impacts of climate change, invasive species, pollution, sea and land use change and a range of other challenges to nature
• Identifies priority gaps in our available knowledge that will need to be filled
• Projects what biodiversity could look like in decades ahead under six future scenarios: Economic Optimism; Regional Competition; Global Sustainability; Business as Usual; Regional Sustainability and Reformed Markets
• Assesses policy, technology, governance, behaviour changes, options and pathways to reach global goals by looking at synergies and trade-offs between food production, water security, energy and infrastructure expansion, climate change mitigation, nature conservation and economic development
What the CSIRO
and climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au
state about coastal New South Wales:
KEY MESSAGES
·
Average
temperatures will continue to increase in all seasons (very high confidence).
·
More
hot days and warm spells are projected with very high confidence. Fewer
frosts are projected with high confidence.
·
Decreases
in winter rainfall are projected with medium confidence. Other changes are
possible but unclear.
·
Increased
intensity of extreme rainfall events is projected, with high confidence.
·
Mean
sea level will continue to rise and height of extreme sea-level events will
also increase (very high confidence).
·
A
harsher fire-weather climate in the future (high confidence).
·
On
annual and decadal basis, natural variability in the climate system can act to
either mask or enhance any long-term human induced trend, particularly in the
next 20 years and for rainfall.
At its ordinary monthy meeting of 23 April 2019 Clarence Valley Council passed the following resolution:
Saturday 20 April 2019
Quote of the Week
“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril. This is the new extinction and
we are half way through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer
we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.” [World renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough speaking at an International Monetary Fund
event on 11 April 2019, quoted by Vox
12 April 2019]
Labels:
climate change,
ecological disaster
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