Australia’s chief scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, tells Lateline we need to look at a broad suite of technological and scientific solutions to secure supplies of food, energy and water for the future. Read transcript and watch video.
Published on the AMA website 29 July 2010:
AMA President, Dr Andrew Pesce, said that Australia needs a National Strategy for Climate Change and Health to respond effectively to the health impacts of climate change.
Climate change will increase hurricane severity, causing mass casualties and other adverse health outcomes.
The 2009 State of the Climate report, released by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, confirmed that the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer in the past 50 years.
Dr Pesce said that climate change caused by global warming and greenhouse gas emissions poses significant challenges to the health and wellbeing of Australians.
“This report is further evidence that climate change is happening, that human activity is contributing to it, and that a coordinated health response is needed,” Dr Pesce said.
“Failure on the part of governments internationally to achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to result in significant public health problems.
“Extreme weather events caused by global warming, such as storms, floods, heatwaves and fires, will all have serious long-term health implications for Australians, including increased vector-borne diseases, possible chemical exposures, and fatalities and injuries from extreme weather events.
“These health impacts will place increasing demand on the health system over time.
“Australians of all ages need to be confident that they can continue to receive good quality timely access to their doctor, and other health and medical professionals,” Dr Pesce said.
A National Strategy for Climate Change and Health would assist Governments and the broader community to plan for increased demands on health service infrastructure from extreme events and emerging health conditions due to climate change, and must incorporate:
Source: AMA
I'm a believer... Andrew Stott, on his family farm in Whitton, says climate change will drive some farmers off their land and producers need to prepare for the challenge that it poses.
AUSTRALIAN farmers are sceptical about climate change and many do not believe it will affect agriculture during their lifetimes, according to a new report.
Ironically though, they are already starting to see the changes on their farms, with the intensity and duration of Australia’s last big drought linked to global warming.
The research was conducted by Australia’s CSIRO late last year using a workshopping / focus group format with farmers.
According to one newspaper’s coverage, CSIRO research team leader Steven Crimp said the need for improved climate change knowledge was paramount – “There is a lot of information about climate change and climate projections but there isn’t a lot of information on how to make changes within farm management,” he said.
The official website has a link to the report, and more importantly around 20 downloadable presentations from the workshop covering a range of aspects of this issue.
Here in Australia the population debate has been raging for decades. The crux – despite our size, much of Australia is arid or semi-arid. We are the driest inhabited continent on Earth, with most of the arable land concentrated in a strip near the coast. Most of the population is there too (90% or more). We also have fragile and increasingly-degraded ecosystems, with water access and equity a major issue.
Should Australia rapidly increase population by 60%?
The debate currently hinges on whether Australia should significantly increase her population (from the current 21.4 million) to 36 million souls. On one side sits the economic rationalists who look at all those extra consumers with greedy eyes while chanting “growth and GDP”. On the other, environmental and other groups who can see that we are irreversibly reducing our carrying capacity with our current population, let alone a much larger one.
I found an interesting take on it today: a short pdf from The Australia Institute. In part it reads:
Australia is a nation of migrants; the first intake sought no permission to settle here. Migration is, and is likely to remain, an important part of what makes the Australian population the diverse and dynamic society that it has become. But the benefits of migration should not be conflated with the benefits of an ever-increasing population. As the data presented above show, there is no reason for Australians to be forced to choose between being open, inclusive and rapidly growing or being closed, exclusive and stable.
The onus of proof should be on those who wish to see our population burgeon to make the case for it. Similarly, if we are to increase our population by 60 per cent in the next four decades we should invest in the infrastructure we will need before we invite new citizens, not after they arrive.
In this era of evidence-based policy, it seems strange that for all the government inquiries that have been held there is yet to be a major scientific, social and economic analysis of the impact of rapid population growth in Australia. While it might be hard to agree on exactly how many people Australia can handle, it may be much easier to agree that much of our infrastructure, natural, physical and social, is already showing signs of stress.
Image credit: Christopher Chan.
Interesting resource from RMIT’s Adaptnet program (RMIT University’s Global Cities Research Institute’s Climate Change Adaptation Program network focused on urban climate change adaptation). It is produced in partnership with Nautilus Institute. This decentralized network creates a set of common knowledge and reference points for participants in the network; it offers information, analysis, and methodology to undertake urban climate change adaptive policy research and analysis. AdaptNet highlights best practice and demonstration projects. It focuses on cities in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, but acknowledges the global network of cities.
Can Australian hospitals adapt to climate change?
They produce a free weekly e-bulletin that includes 5 recent reports related to urban climate change adaptation and information on one adaptation conference. It also publishes analytic papers, critiques and explanations of climate change adaptation practice to support the development of creative thinking in relation to urban climate change adaptation challenges and to facilitate an open exchange of views and ideas.:
A paper in their November 3rd 2009 issue caught my eye – it is about adapting Australian healthcare facilities to the challenge of climate change. The blurb says that the paper outlines the status of current knowledge regarding the likely impact of climate change-related extreme weather events on the Australian healthcare infrastructure. It identifies a range of strategies to effectively manage these challenges, and maximize the opportunities for health-care continuity and quality during an extreme weather event.
Adapting Australian Health Facilities to Cope with Climate-Related Extreme Weather Events, Jane Carthey, Venny Chandra, and Martin Loosemore, Journal of Facilities Management, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 36-51, 2009 [752 KB, PDF] .
As I explored the site I felt like a child in a candy shop (or more truthfully, man in a hardware store) because there were SO MANY excellent resources. Sections that I particularly liked were the ones on scenario analysis (including links to scenario planning articles, tools, and specific climate change scenarios) and the mind-mapping and visualisation tools (including Truthmapping and an excellent summary diagram of web-based mind-mapping tools including several free ones).
Mindmaps are useful cognitive tools
The TOC of the most recent Adaptnet update (November 10 2009) :
Adaptation at the Local Government Level: Great Barrier Reef; Urban Planning and Urban Responses to Climate Change – Australia; Current Rainfall Conditions and El Nino Teleconnections 2009; Adaptation Finance under a Copenhagen Agreed Outcome; Climate Change, Conflict and Security: International Law Challenges; Malaysia-Thailand Conference on Southeast Asian Studies 2010.