Climate Change Australia 2024 - the elephant in the room that all three tiers of Australian government are failing to address - the indoor heat in metropolitan & regional urban areas

 

Although science had been warning about a marked global land-sea surface warming trend for longer, it wasn't until around 1972 that a global conversation about anthropomorphic global warming or climate change began.

This conversation began to formalize under the auspices of the United Nations and by 1988 its member states, including Australia, were broad brush level aware of the timeline and scale science was predicting.

Over the years since, science has been pointing at Australia when calculating where the impacts of climate change would first be felt in a recognizable and widespread way.

Between 1983 and 2022 there had been four Liberal Party prime ministers leading federal Coalition governments setting national policy and legislation (across a combined of total of just over 20 years) and four Labor prime minister leading federal Labor governments setting national policy and legislation (across a combined of total of just over 18 years).

Over that same 39 year time frame New South Wales has had six Liberal premiers and six Labor premiers.

During all these years it was only between 2007 to 2012 that an Australian federal government could be seen as genuinely attempting (and often failing) to set the nation on the path to reduce the nation's CO2-e emissions.

Since 22 May 2022 Australia has once more a Labor prime minister and federal government setting national policy and legislation for the last 625 days, as well as another NSW Labor state premier and government setting state policy and legislation for the last 316 days.

One of the early Albanese Government decisions was to create the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), with the ministers having portfolio responsibility identified as Chris Bowen, Minister for Climate Change and Energy & Tanya Plibersek, Minister for the Environment and Water.

The webpage transcript excerpt set at the end of this post is one aspect of information shared online by the DCCEEW which is barely mentioned by the media or NSW federal & state members of their respective parliaments.

It is certainly not information which has translated into action at state or local government planning level in any meaningful way in New South Wales.

This was New South Wales between 1 January to 5 February 2024:

Click on images to enlarge

This was the Australian Bureau of Meteorology NSW Heatwave Map on 3 February 2024:

Look around your town or village and count how many houses built in the last 20 years which appear to have been constructed to a design that will be likely to cope with the predicted increasing number of  days per year of maximum heatwave conditions of 35°C and over.

If your count is so low in the streets near you that it shocks, perhaps now is the time to insist that at federal, state and local government level a new mandatory building code be implemented which requires as part of development consent conditions:  (i) passive building design; (ii) indoor temperature-mitigating building material use; and (iv) subdivisions layouts and streetscapes which avoid heat island effects.

Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (est. July 2022), Your Home, "Australia's Guide To Environmentally Adaptable Homes", excerpt:

Designing for climate change

You can design or renovate your home to take into account the sort of climate impacts you expect to be most relevant for your area.

Temperature increase and heatwaves

One of the main expected effects of global climate change across Australia is increasing temperatures and a greater number of extremely hot days (CSIRO and BOM 2020). Australian households need to consider how they can adapt to maintain comfort, manage household energy costs, and reduce the risk of heat stress and heat-related illness and mortality.

The need to keep your home cool during the summer months will be greater. On the other hand, there should be less need to heat the home in winter. Good passive design can lessen the need to rely on air-conditioners and help to capture the savings from lowered heating energy needs.

Consider the impact of increased numbers of heatwaves in your region. Over the past several decades, heatwaves have increased in duration, frequency and intensity in many parts of Australia (Steffen et al. 2019). New homes are not typically constructed to provide maximum protection from heatwaves as standard. In urban areas, tree canopy cover is decreasing as development intensifies. Urban areas may be particularly prone to heatwave conditions because of the ‘heat island’ effect, in which the abundance of heat-absorbing materials such as concrete, and lack of vegetation, increases their temperature compared with the surrounding area. Good tree canopy and other vegetation around your home and neighbourhood can reduce the impact of the urban heat island effect (see Green roofs and walls).

In addition, electricity demand rises sharply during heatwaves because of increased air-conditioning usage, contributing to blackouts. Excess peak demand drives up electricity prices, making air-conditioning use during heatwaves too expensive for some low-income households.

The NCC heating and cooling load limits under the NatHERS compliance pathway assist to keep homes at a comfortable temperature year-round. The load limits have been developed using the 2022 NatHERS climate files based on historical weather data, and the requirements change depending on which climate zone the home is built in.....

Tip

In the early stage of design, decide if your home will be air-conditioned, naturally ventilated, or a combination. This will affect further design decisions including the type and level of insulation.

Overall, adapting to cope with increased temperatures requires appropriate heat-resistant building materials and design. Key design strategies include:

• orientating living rooms appropriately and using shading to minimise summer heat gain

• using thermal mass appropriately

• locating bedrooms in the coolest part of the building and using insulation, shading and so on to ensure comfortable temperatures for sleeping

• providing opportunities for night-time ventilation, including natural ventilation and mechanical systems

• using light-coloured roofs and ‘cool roof’ technology (specially designed roofing materials and coatings with high solar reflectance and thermal emittance)

• creating a ‘cool retreat’ – a portion of the dwelling designed to provide comfort during heatwave periods. This could be a shaded, ventilated room or basement that is well insulated and able to be closed off from warmer parts of the house so it can be efficiently air-conditioned

• using cooling technologies powered by renewable energy

• using landscape to decrease the need for cooling (for example, by shading, channelling cool breezes, lowering surface temperatures).

Refer to Passive cooling for more information on cooling design strategies....     [my yellow highlighting]

The people of the Northern Rivers, wider New South Wales and the rest of Australia have been warned that the hands of the climate crisis clock are at 30 seconds to midnight, but it's business as usual

 

Australian climate scientist Dr. Joëlle Gergis, ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society and a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, has recently written: 

“The climate disasters unfolding in the northern hemisphere are a sign of what’s in store here, as governments fail to act on the unfolding emergency…..

...the possibility that the Earth might have already breached some kind of global “tipping point”. The term refers to what happens when a system crosses into a different state and stays there for a very long time, sometimes even permanently. We know that once critical thresholds in the Earth system are passed, even small changes can lead to a cascade of significantly larger transformations in other major components of the system. Key indicators of regional tipping points include dieback of major ecological communities….” [my yellow highlighting]

Such observations give pause for thought.

However, the elected Mayor of the third tier governing body for the Clarence Valley Local Government Area (LGA), Cr. Ian Tiley, is apparently comfortable with the idea of personally failing to act when it comes to any proposed phasing out of logging native forests in public hands within this LGA.

At least that is the impression he gives during a photo opportunity with representatives of the state government-dominated NSW logging industry.

Presumably Mayor Tiley is willing to ignore the fact that in 2021 & again in 2022 Australian university researchers warned that logging is not just increasing the risk of severe fires, but also the risk to human lives and safety.

Logging increases the probability of canopy damage by five to 20 per cent and leads to long-term elevated risk of higher severity fires, including canopy fires. Canopy fires are considered the most extreme form of fire behaviour and can be virtually impossible to control. 

It has also been known for the last two decades that intact tree canopies can buffer against rising and increasingly record air/land temperatures due to the thermal insulation of forest canopies which protects biodiversity, allowing native flora and fauna to survive climate change-induced heat extremes better than those living on open land.

Even the NSW Dept. of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources in Land Condition in the Clarence River Catchment: Report 1 - when addressing forestry as a land use - admitted back in 2014 that:

Management of forested areas for bushfire control purposes can threaten adjacent areas, cause habitat loss and encourage erosion. Public debate on this issue has been centred around the in-situ environmental impacts of the process but smoke drift over nearby population centres and the post burning effects on water quality after erosion events also impacts water supply for urban and industrial purposes. [my yellow highlighting]

Commercial logging activity occurs within the Clarence River catchment area and logged state forests do catch fire - as evidenced by Ellis State Forest near Dundurrabin south of Grafton during the 2019-20 bushfire season.

Like many other communities in the Northern Rivers region during the 2019-20 bushfire season, communities in the Clarence Valley can attest to the physical difficulties of living for days and sometimes weeks under smoke palls loaded with gases and particulate matter (including PM2.5) with a potential to affect the health.

According to the Dept. of Health's Bushfire smoke and health: Summary of the current evidence, 6 August 2020:

The Global Burden of Disease Study has shown that outdoor PM2.5 is the most important environmental risk factor in Australia, responsible for 1.6 percent of the total burden of disease in 2017. 

Evidence shows that the likelihood of an individual experiencing health effects as a result of exposure to PM2.5 depends on a number of factors. These include: the concentration of PM2.5 in air, the duration of exposure; the person’s age and whether a person has existing medical conditions (particularly cardiorespiratory disease or asthma).

It is also acknowledged that while this document focusses on the evidence relating to the physical effects that may occur as a result of bushfires smoke, bushfires have much broader mental health and societal impacts.

Clarence Valley Independent, 30 August 2023:

*click on image to enlarge*

“The Mayor also expressed his personal view, describing the timber industry as vital to the Clarence Valley.” 

I wonder if  Mr. Tiley will still be of that opinion over the next high-risk seven to seventeen years......