First global assessment of the ecological health of the world's "wild" rivers has found only about one third of the longest rivers are still free-flowing

As the Queensland flood waters finally make it down the Dimantina and Georgina rivers and Cooper's Creek and spread out over the Eyre Basin and into Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, it is well to remember three things.

The first is that; The Lake Eyre Basin is one of the largest and most pristine desert river systems on the planet, supporting 60,000 people and a wealth of wildlife.

The second is the fact that the Morrison Government has a stated policy to dam and divert more water from Australia's river systems if it is re-elected. 

The third is that water sustainability into the future is dependent on wild rivers running free.

ABC Radio,“RN”, 9 May 2019:

The first global assessment of the ecological health of the world's "wild" rivers has found only about one third of the longest rivers are still free-flowing.

The report warns the disruption is harming ecosystems, with 3,700 new large dams either under construction, or planned.

Listen to interview with Dr. Gunter Gill here https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podcast/2019/05/bst_20190509_0635.mp3

Nature, 8 May 2019:

Gill,Gunter et al, (2019) Mapping the world’s free-flowing rivers

ABSTRACT

Free-flowing rivers (FFRs) support diverse, complex and dynamic ecosystems globally, providing important societal and economic services. Infrastructure development threatens the ecosystem processes, biodiversity and services that these rivers support. Here we assess the connectivity status of 12 million kilometres of rivers globally and identify those that remain free-flowing in their entire length. Only 37 per cent of rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres remain free-flowing over their entire length and 23 per cent flow uninterrupted to the ocean. Very long FFRs are largely restricted to remote regions of the Arctic and of the Amazon and Congo basins. In densely populated areas only few very long rivers remain free-flowing, such as the Irrawaddy and Salween. Dams and reservoirs and their up- and downstream propagation of fragmentation and flow regulation are the leading contributors to the loss of river connectivity. By applying a new method to quantify riverine connectivity and map FFRs, we provide a foundation for concerted global and national strategies to maintain or restore them.

At least 13 local government authorities around Australia have formally recognised a climate emergency

Clarence Valley Council, media release, 8 May 2019:

Mayor: Jim Simmons LOCKED BAG 23 GRAFTON NSW 2460

General Manager: Ashley Lindsay Telephone: (02) 6643 0200

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Council recognises a climate emergency

ADDRESSING climate change has become a core issue in the Clarence Valley following a council decision to recognise there is a climate emergency that requires urgent actions by all levels of government and the community.

Council has joined a number of local councils that have recognised the urgency needed to implement actions to mitigate and adapt to projected climate change impacts.

Australia’s climate has warmed by 1°C since 1910 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) September 2018 report on global warming highlights the serious risks of not containing global warming to 1.5°C or below. Current projections are tracking for more than 3°C of global warming by 2100.

To stay below 1.5°C the IPCC concludes the world must embark on a World War II level of effort to transition away from fossil fuels and start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at large scale.

Council has previously decided to fast track a strategy of cutting Council emissions by 40% and increase the use of renewables to 50% before 2030.

At its last meeting, council adopted a five-point resolution aimed at addressing climate change urgently, including making “climate change” a sub heading in all council reports and continuing to carry out actions in an earlier “100% Renewables” strategy.

Waste and sustainability coordinator, Ken Wilson, said there were cost savings for council from its energy efficiency gains and onsite solar, with an average payback period of 6.5 years.

He said council’s recognition of a climate emergency provided an opportunity to lobby other levels of government on the urgency of cutting emissions.

“Council’s work to date and the ambitious strategy for increasing renewable energy and reducing emissions is doing well, however the community Climate Change Advisory Committee considers council should engage our local community and other levels of government to communicate there is a climate emergency and we all need to do more,” he said.

At least another 12 local government authorities around Australia have formally recognised a climate emergency, including Upper Hunter Shire Council, Blue Mountains, Hawkesbury and Bellingen councils in NSW. The British parliament has also just resolved to declare a national climate emergency.

* NSW Government projections about the impact of climate change on the North Coast are available here 

https://climatechange.environment.nsw.gov.au/Climate-projections-for-NSW/Climate-projections-for-your-region/North-Coast-Climate-Change-Downloads

Release ends.

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

Palmer loses bid in Australian High Court to stifle election coverage on 18 May 2019

Clive Palmer before he resigned from parliament ahead of the 2016 federal election
Image: Huffington Post

Mining billionaire Clive Palmer may be back onto the Forbes Australian Rich List and currently attempting to 'buy' his way into the Senate on 18 May 2019, but the High Court of Australia is unimpressed by his latest legal foray.

The  Court unanimously dismissed Clive Palmer's application with reasons to be given at a later date.

SBS News, 7 May2019:

Clive Palmer's attempt to delay the publication of early results on federal election night has been shot down by the High Court.

Mr Palmer wanted the detailed data kept quiet until all polling booths had closed, lest last-minute crowds in far-flung locations be swayed by the results.

He was concerned West Australian voters who left their run until the last two hours could be influenced by early figures from the eastern states.

But the full bench of the High Court ruled the Australian Electoral Commission does not need to wait for stragglers in WA before broadcasting indications in east coast seats.

"The court is unanimous in its view that the application should be dismissed," Chief Justice Susan Kiefel said on Tuesday…..

Mr Palmer's case takes aim at the AEC's two-candidate preferred counting practice.

This is used on election night to give an early indication of results.

But the two candidates listed are almost always from Labor and the coalition, rather than the minor parties or independents. But the two candidates listed are almost always from Labor and the coalition, rather than the minor parties or independents…….

Solicitor-General Stephen Donaghue downplayed the potential "bandwagon" effect.

Mr Donaghue said last-minute voters in WA voters could be influenced by many other factors, including basic voting figures and exit polls.

He also argued the federal election was not a presidential race, with people in WA voting for different local candidates than those on the east coast.

Palmer's United Australia Party is said to be standing candidates in every federal electorate and for Senate positions in every state.

The Guardian reported on 1 May 2019 that almost 40% of all United Australia party candidates do not live in the electorates they are standing for and, the party has recruited senior executives from Clive Palmer’s mining interests to fill its ranks.

Quality of Australian television & radio will take a dive under a re-elected Morrison Government

The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 May 2019:

The ABC is facing "inevitable" job cuts and programming disruption if the Morrison government is returned to power, the national broadcaster's new managing director has warned.

In his first interview in the new job, David Anderson told Radio National's Patricia Karvelas that planning for two possible budget scenarios was at the top of his to-do list, after establishing a new leadership team.

One of those options is a budget in which the ABC's indexation funding is frozen for the next three years.

"If the Coalition is returned, then we have an $84 million budget reduction over the next three years," Mr Anderson said.

"Having been through a number of budget reductions to this point, I don’t see how we can avoid staff cuts and, I think, disruption to our content. I think it’s inevitable."

None of the options available for finding $84 million in savings were great, he said.

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…..

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/one-million-species-risk-extinction-threatening-human-communities-around-world-un-report-warns-180972114/#exuFQ5WihTWc7MTq.99

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

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:

Only 5 more sleeps until federal polling day across Australia & Newspoll still predicts that the Morrison Coalition will lose government

This is the 54th consecutive Newspoll in which Labor leads on a Two Party Preferred (TPP) basis.

The last time the Coalition scored a higher TPP than Labor was on election day in 2016.

Primary Vote - Coalition 39 (up 1 point) Labor 37 (up 1 point)

Two Party Preferred (TPP) Vote - Coalition 49 (unchanged) Labor 51(unchanged)

Voter Net Satisfaction with Leaders - Scott Morrison 0 (up 1 point)  Bill  Shorten -10 (up 8 points)

Newspoll results 11-12 May 2019, published 13 May 2019

If an election was held today then Labor would form government with 77 House of Representatives seats to the Coalition's 68 seats.

Both Pauline Hanson's One Nation and Clive Palmer's United Australia Party would have 0 seats in the Lower House.

Based on preference flows at the June 2016 federal election Antony Green predicts that Labor will gain the electorates of Robertson (NSW), Gilmore (NSW), Flynn (Qld), Ford (Qld) and Capricornia (Qld).

All five of these electorates were held by either the Liberal Party or Liberal-National Party at the 2016 election.

Previous Newspolls