• Professor Lesley Hughes, Chair, Tasmanian Climate Action Council: Tasmania’s climate change opportunities fading, unless decisive action taken
1 April 2014
The Tasmanian Climate Action Council (the Council) has welcomed yesterday’s release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II Fifth Assessment Report. The report, representing the collective evaluation of hundreds of scientists around the world, examines how communities, industries and ecosystems will cope with the predicted impacts of climate change.
The IPCC identified a number of key risks for Australia’s natural and human systems, and found that significant mitigation efforts, combined with effective adaptation policies are required to manage substantial impacts on water resources, biodiversity, infrastructure, health and agriculture.
Tasmanian Climate Action Council Chair, Professor Lesley Hughes, is one of the lead authors of the Australasian chapter of the IPCC report.
“Impacts on the Tasmanian community will range from increased coastal erosion, more frequent and intense bushfire and storm events and changes to agricultural productivity. Many of the mitigation and adaptation actions required to minimise the impact of these changes were identified through the wide consultation process undertaken to create Climate Smart Tasmania: A 2020 Climate Change Strategy,” Professor Hughes said.
The IPCC also found that some impacts will be managed only by significant cuts in emissions, including threats to coral reef and mountain ecosystems, as well as species extinctions. Professor Hughes noted that Tasmania is in a good position to achieve these cuts.
“Tasmania also enjoys significant natural renewable energy advantages. By taking swift action, the State will be in a position to plan for, and capitalise on, economic opportunities arising from climate change. The actions we take now will have important impacts on the risks of climate change decades into the future,” she said.
Given the strength of the IPCC’s findings, the Council urges the new Tasmanian government to take action on emissions reduction and to facilitate adaptation to manage the social and economic risks and opportunities presented by climate change.
• Guardian, Monday, March 31, Climate change is a threat to food, security and humankind as a whole:
Warming is leading to more volatile weather patterns that are already reducing crop yields, the IPCC has warned
A United Nations report raised the threat of climate change to a whole new level on Monday, warning of sweeping consequences to life and livelihood.
The report from the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change concluded that climate change was already having effects in real time – melting sea ice and thawing permafrost in the Arctic, killing off coral reefs in the oceans, and leading to heat waves, heavy rains and mega-disasters.
And the worst was yet to come. Climate change posed a threat to global food stocks, and to human security, the blockbuster report said.
“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC.
Monday’s report was the most sobering so far from the UN climate panel and, scientists said, the most definitive. The report – a three year joint effort by more than 300 scientists – grew to 2,600 pages and 32 volumes.
The volume of scientific literature on the effects of climate change has doubled since the last report, and the findings make an increasingly detailed picture of how climate change – in tandem with existing fault lines such as poverty and inequality – poses a much more direct threat to life and livelihood.
This was reflected in the language. The summary mentioned the word “risk” more than 230 times, compared to just over 40 mentions seven years ago, according to a count by the Red Cross.
At the forefront of those risks was the potential for humanitarian crisis. The report catalogued some of the disasters that have been visited around the planet since 2000: killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in Australia, and deadly floods in Pakistan.
“We are now in an era where climate change isn’t some kind of future hypothetical,” said Chris Field, one of the two main authors of the report.
Read the full Guardian story here
• John, in Comments: “But risk, and the management of it, is the key issue. Why is this important? Because for the last several decades, those opposed to climate action – primarily the fossil fuel industry and those in the business and political world that hang on to its coat-tails – have asked us to ignore this risk. They have managed (quite successfully) to cast doubt over specific and detailed forecasts to suggest that the risk either does not exist, or can be safely ignored – as though people should decide not to insure their house or car because the insurer couldn’t tell them when the goods were likely to be stolen or damaged.”
