Rally to save Ferny Forest, FRIDAY FROM 16:00-18:00 – Pioneer Park, Caloundra St, Landsborough
08:30-11:00 – Mackenzie Bushcare Group Working Bee – Mt Petrie Road Park, Mackenzie
15:30-17:30 – Lagonda Park Bushcare Working Bee – Lagonda Park, Fairfield
08:30-10:30 – Bushcare working bee – Eugene Street Reserve, Eugene Street Bellbird Park
In this bulletin
Once a political party dedicated to the ideology of a free-market that operates with minimal government intervention, the Liberal Party this week announced that it will oppose moves by investors and financial institutions to replace coal fired electricity generation with renewables. In announcing that it would use foreign-investment and competition veto powers to stop tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes from purchasing AGL and closing down coal fired power stations, Scott Morrison said, “our government is very committed to ensure we sweat those assets for their life [to keep] energy prices affordable ”. Cannon-Brookes has consistently pointed out that renewables are bringing energy prices down.
This move by the party is consistent with the politically engineered sacking of the CEO of AGL in 2018 when he announced that the company would close the Lidell power station early and replace it with renewables. Banks, private equity firms and insurance companies have all damned the Liberal Party for allowing the influence of the coal lobby to set policy that limits sensible economic investment in energy solutions that address the climate emergency.
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2022/02/26/the-case-buying-agl/164579400013402#hrd
Yesterday we globally celebrated the contribution made by women through events such as the National Art Gallery announcing that it has reached gender equity in its collection and the newspaper Big Issues publishing a list of 50 feminist books to smash the patriarchy. Many thoughtful women have been more cautious, however, identifying that some of the fundamentals have not changed, especially the ongoing and weekly murder of Australian women, generally by ex-partners. Last IWD, Dr Quek and Dr Tyler pointed out on the ABC’s Mindfield that one of the world’s most prominent IWD websites claims, “Equality is not a women’s issue, it’s a business issue.” The Times of India directly confronted the “misogynist patriarchy in which we live” with a wide ranging vox pop listing “what women really want.”
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/should-we-stop-celebrating-iwd/12021834
https://www.internationalwomensday.com/
The government has announced that it will outlaw media and speech that does not follow the US-NATO line in unilaterally damning the Russian military action in the Ukraine despite a highly complex situation involving multiple ethnic and political groups and decades of struggle. In a statement yesterday, Foreign Minister Marise Payne said, “The Australian Government is placing new sanctions on Moscow’s propagandists and purveyors of disinformation, who are trying to legitimatise Russia’s unprovoked, unjustified invasion with false narratives such as the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine.”
The announcement follows an ABC press release defending its censorship and exclusion of a Russian born Australian who asked a Q and A panel last Thursday night, why the media ignores the activities of the Azov regiment.
Al Jazeera described the Azov Regiment as ultra-nationalist, right wing fighters integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces in 2014 after fighting against Russia in the Crimea. The Ukrainan president at the time Perozhenko described them as “our best warriors” at an awards ceremony where he gave them official status and funding. Putin has stated that one of the aims of Russia in the Ukraine is to de-militarise and de-Nazify the Ukraine. The Azof regiment have terrorised Roma and Jewish community, gay groups, and left-wing organisations. They smear their bullets with pig fat to dishonour Chechen Muslims who are in the Ukraine specifically to fight them.
https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/marise-payne/media-release/further-sanctions-russia
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/1/who-are-the-azov-regiment
Australia’s East Coast rain bomb is actually an atmospheric river, dragging warm water evaporated from the coral sea down the east coast of Australia where it is dumped as the air rises and cools on contact with the coast. The phenomenon causes many floods in the West Coast of the USA and is known as the pineapple express because the warm water comes from Hawaii.
The local phenomenon is caused when an east coast low is held against the Australian coast by a stationary high over New Zealand. The effect of climate change has been to increase the amount of water in the atmosphere and to push it further south reaching Newcastle, Sydney and Woollongong.
The Betoota Advocate joked this week that these towns form the acronym N.S.W. which is the region the Liberal Party considers to be the ‘real Australia’ and that the Prime Minister now understands that there is a climate emergency because the floods have reached Cronulla.
The Prime Minister is visiting Lismore today, where residents are arguing whether to greet him with actual pitchforks or with a damages bill.
AAP article about atmospheric rivers available at this link
Ecowarrior organisation Extinction Rebellion, also known as XR, has put together a competition to find a song that best encapsulates “Reef Grief” and deal with the phases of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Entries from members of the public, including 4ZZZ listeners, are welcome but must be submitted by this Friday, Details are available at http://reefgrief.org/competition/
Like the Rings that rule Tolkein’s Middle Earth, the challenges of implementing the SDGs are manifold but there is one challenge that ‘binds them all’. That challenge is our addiction to economic growth.
Here’s Dick Smith talking to me in 2008. There is a longer version of that interview on this site. In the longer interview Dick talks about attempting to run the Australian Geographic magazine as a non-growth company. He believes that the tenets of capitalism, even the most destructive of its characteristics, are a function of human nature.
In 2010, running for the Federal seat of Richmond, I talked a lot about the relationship between economic growth and environmental harm. As I say in this clip, the maths are simple. You cannot keep using finite resources for ever, it just does not add up.
The obvious challenges of increasing economic growth on a finite planet led to a recasting of the debate and a lot of attempts to introduce sustainable growth and green growth. Abundance became a popular catch word.
That emphasis on consumers and consumer choice making green purchasing decisions underpins a lot of advertising.
Consider this advertisement from 2019 selling SodaStream, a product that ships carbon dioxide around the planet in aluminium containers. The environmental benefits of SodaStream are the packaging that it replaces. Whether that justifies the claims made in this ad, you will have to determine yourself.
A more sophisticated response to the blunt mathematics I used in the 2010 election are that we can decouple economic growth from environmental harm. That is, we can have economic growth and a clean environment by focusing on green growth. Here is Ross Garnaut explaining to me how decoupling works.
The challenges of decoupling are too complex to go into here, but they include the amount of time it takes to change what we are doing compared to how fast we need to change to avoid environmental catastrophe as well as the gap between what is technically feasible and what we manage to achieve.
If you watch the discussion after the SodaStream advertisement, above, you will hear Sabrina Chakori discussing Jarven’s paradox which explains that when we get efficient at managing a precious resource we start using more of it instead of saving it for a rainy day. Here is Sabrina chatting to me on EcoRadio about other ways that we might look at the economy instead of putting growth in conflict with our existential survival.
These different views of the relationship between the economy, especially economic growth, and the environment are useful starting points for discussion about what is greenwash and what are genuine attempts to build a sustainable future.
There are longer versions of the interview with Ross Garnaut, Dick Smith, and Sabrina Chakori available on this site.
Deforestation is a significant contributor to climate chaos, biodiversity loss and depletion of groundwater. It requires significant effort on a number of levels.
There are global certification bodies that provide a form of policing, including the capacity to interrogate the source of timber products using a chain of custody, or record of the handling of the product from forest to retail product. They are far from perfect, however.
There are also significant global reforestation projects that deserve examination for both their success and their failures.
This article provides a quick overview
The European Comission provides some clear definitions of sustainable management and the degrees of damage that we need to avoid.
Some of the facts presented by the EC demonstrate the nature of the problem.
Unsustainable management in many tropical countries has led to forest degradation and deforestation, and has contributed 17.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2009, the forest certification schemes covered some 74.7 Mha or 42% of EU forests. Globally, they cover only 15% of forests. More than 90 % of certified forests are in OECD countries.
While the figures have changed in the last decade, it is clear that the problem of tropical forest management remains a major challenge.
Next, lets identify the two major forest certification bodies.
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) claims to be the most rigorous form of certification and facilitates and supports a chain of custody, as a commercial service provided by certifying agencies.
The Program for Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) collects and collates information and efforts by national certification authorities. It is known in Australia as Responsible Wood and you can get the general tenor of their approach in this article from 2017.
Natasha Stevenson posted this handy summary of the differences between the two organisations on her linked in feed. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-differences-between-fsc-pefc-natasha-stevenson/
FSC is an international standard which is nationally adapted to act as an independent monitoring body, ensuring forestry is working to certain standards -> a “top down” approach
PEFC is active in over 30 countries and assesses independent forestry management schemes against international criteria for sustainable forestry -> a “bottom up” approach
FSC covers 187 million hectares of forest (30 000 certificates)
PEFC covers 260 million hectares of forests (17 800 certificates)
FSC was created to prevent illegal timber being consumed and is more focused on the environmental aspects
PEFC is essentially a build on from FSC to facilitate certification of sustainable forestry, but adapted especially for small scale land owners
FSC: Forest management, chain of custody and controlled wood
PEFC: Forest management, chain of custody and project certification
FSC is a second party certification; the organisation issues the certificates
PEFC is a third party certification; they use certified institutions
The following article is taken from Yale 360 e, an environmental publication of the University.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/greenwashed-timber-how-sustainable-forest-certification-has-failed
In a 2014 report, Greenpeace, an FSC member, accused FSC-certified logging companies in Russia of “wood-mining” forests the way they might strip-mine coal, as a non-renewable resource, and of harvesting “areas that are either slated for legal protection or supposed to be protected as a part of FSC requirements.”
The cases in China, Peru, and Romania all resulted from undercover operations by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. “We didn’t mean to go after FSC,” says David Gehl, that group’s Eurasia programs coordinator. FSC just kept turning up in the same places as a lot of illegal logging, he says. Many logging companies appeared to obtain an FSC certification for management practices on one forest, and then use it to cast a halo over their far more extensive dealings in forests elsewhere, with little regard for sustainability or even legality.
Started in 2007, the Great Green Wall is an enormous project intending to plant a “barrier against climate change running across the Sahel region. This semiarid region of western and north-central Africa extends from Senegal to Djibouti. It forms a transitional zone between the arid Sahara desert to the north and the belt of humid savannas to the south.”
The United Nations and the World Bank have worked with 11 nations across Africa and spent billions of dollars with mixed success.
https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/blog/scaling-great-green-wall
The challenges faced in such an ambition project include failure to engage local land management practice, exclusion of marginalised groups such as youth, women, or ethnic minorities because of local culture, economics and politics, predatory land trading and agricultural interference, a lack of measurement methods to monitor outcomes, and lack of follow through to ensure that planted forests remain cared for until well established.
The international organisations have worked hard to learn lessons from these struggles and overall, most people consider the project a significant success. The world bank independent assessment group writes …
Many unqualified statements have and continue to attribute Sahelian greening entirely to the actions of farmers.
There are a number of academic studies of the impact of the project. Leonardson et al (2021) available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105656. quote a range of research.
One specific example of this is described by FAO specialists Moctar Sacande and Nora Berrahmouni (2016). Investigating four cross-border regions of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger located in dryland ecosystems of the Sahel, they used local farming expertise to identify the selection of suitable native species for large-scale natural capital restoration in the framework of the GGW. Starting from the assessment of local farming needs, the most environmentally well-adapted and economically relevant species were prioritized, quality seeds were collected, and nursery seedlings produced, all under the technical supervision of the villages. Consequently, ‘‘from 2013 to 2015, 55 woody and herbaceous species were planted to initiate restoration of 2,235 ha of degraded land. On average, 60% of seedlings survived and grew well in the field after three rainy seasons” (Sacande & Berrahmouni, 2016:479).
It is clear then, that while European nations have implemented highly monitored and sophisticated forest management practices, the rest of the world has a long way to go and we have much to learn about supporting nations with limited resources to participate in this important global project.
https://au.fsc.org/en-au/about-fsc/faqs
https://www.greatgreenwall.org/results
https://e360.yale.edu/features/greenwashed-timber-how-sustainable-forest-certification-has-failed
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-differences-between-fsc-pefc-natasha-stevenson/
Urban farmers in Jordan’s capital, Ammam, have harvested a second crop of wheat grown in the ancient city’s glamorous shopping district.
The food sovereignty initiative was begun by a social enterprise, Al-Barakeh, in 2019 when bread became scarce during a strict CoViD lockdown. Until the 1960’s Jordan was a significant wheat exporter, but urbanisation, globalisation and an end to government subsidies means the nation now imports 97 percent of its wheat. Al Barakeh now sell’s 700 bags of bread every day, made with local wheat. Al-Barakeh founder, Rabee Zureikat, says that the word Barakeh means blessing, “a value system based on sharing and cooperation, being a part of a community and part of nature.”
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis published a report this week showing that governments are not reducing their use of coal as promised at Paris and, even if they did, it would not be enough to meet the emission reduction promises consistent with 2degrees of warming.
The graphs outlining the energy descent required to meet the Paris targets are so far removed from the actual projections of governments, it is almost certain that climatic chaos will seriously undermine civilisation.
On the other hand, there are indications that the use of coking coal, used to make steel, is beginning to decline as new, cleaner methods of steel production come online. Electric arc furnaces can be used to recycle existing steel and direct reduction processes using hydrogen are moving into production. The decarbonisation of the economy is beginning, but is not happening fast enough, according to the report.
The real kicker in the conversation, though, is that urgent as greenhouse gas emissions are, they are only one of the existential threats to human life. Biodiversity loss, falling water tables, microplastic pollution, nutrient imbalance and a string of other challenges are just as significant and a lot more difficult to solve. Australia and the US need to reduce our emissions by seven eighths to make the Paris targets, we need to limit our overall consumption by a similar amount to help restore other global systems to balance.
You can read a longer version of this article, based on the on air analysis linked above, at Geoff Ebbs’ blog. Here are links to some of the sources, used to put this together.
https://productiongap.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/PGR2021_web_rev.pdf
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/f1d724d4-a753-4336-9f6e-64679fa23bbf/Coal2021.pdf
https://www.globalreporting.org/about-gri/news-center/cop26-avoiding-carbon-tunnel-vision/