Climate of fear: summit aims to create action consensus

WHEN Google released its list of “most searched” terms in Australia for 2019, the phrase “fires near me” stood at the summit – far ahead of searches for sporting events, celebrity deaths, and other tragedies.

This is hardly surprising given that all of the major capital cities on Australia’s east coast were blanketed in bushfire smoke for most of the summer. Canberra, the “bush capital”, took pride of place as the city with the worst air quality in the world for days at a stretch. These plumes of smoke that bore witness to catastrophic fires were so shocking that the situation made headlines globally.

The Australian Academy of Science described this bushfire season as “unprecedented”, pointing out that while past fires have burned greater land areas (the Central Australian fires of the 1974–75 season eventually burned over 100 million hectares), those involved largely grasslands. Grassland fires are typically less intense and allow ecosystems to recover more quickly. They also have a far lesser economic impact, as they burn out in vast remote landscapes.

By contrast, the infernos in the long 2019-2020 fire season were hotter, travelled faster, affected dense and diverse ecosystems and touched the lives of up to 80% of all Australians.

Research just published in Nature Climate Change finds that a staggering 21% of all Australian forests – excluding Tasmania – has burnt so far in the 2019-20 bushfire season. This is far larger than the percentage of forest area burnt on other continents over the past 20 years, which for most continents and forest types has a median of 4-5% annually, with some particular Asian and African forest types showing higher medians of 8-9%.

To make things worse, heat records were broken. In mid-December, Australia recorded its hottest average temperature since records began at 41.9°C, with an incredible maximum of 50°C in the Nullarbor region. In the nation’s capital, the heatwave and suffocating smoke conditions were broken only by a violent hailstorm that pummelled Canberra with the largest hailstones in 20 years. To cap off the catastrophic Australian summer, the sky opened, with dangerous flooding resulting from rain of biblical proportions – up to 3m of rain fell in parts of NSW over a few days – again drawing international media attention.

Yet while these catastrophic events were unprecedented, they were not unexpected. A dozen years before this deadly season, economist Professor Ross Garnaut had released his climate change review. In that exhaustive document, Garnaut predicted that without adequate action on climate change, Australia would begin to experience more frequent and catastrophic bushfires by 2020. Right on cue Australians had a taste of their possible climate future, with estimates of the economic effect of this summer’s disasters reaching $100 billion.

The events of this summer – drought, heat, upheaval, and widespread uncontrolled fires and floods – are predicted to become more common with climate change affecting our country. As the Climate Council points out:

“Australians are already seeing the effects [of climate change], including more frequent, longer lasting and more intense heatwaves, harsher droughts, coastal flooding and longer, more dangerous bushfire seasons.”

Health advocacy groups such as the Australian Medical Association and the Public Health Association of Australia released statements of the adverse health effects that might be expected with climate change.

One of your authors [SR] was on-call for much of the Christmas–New Year period and into the early part of 2020: this was the peak of the fire season. During that time, Canberra was blanketed in acrid smoke – so dense that it infiltrated operating theatres and birth suites. The experience of delivering babies in a birth suite thick with smoke was alarming, to say the least. That was not the worst though; for the first time in a 30-year obstetric career, we were hearing new parents express concern about the climate future that lay in wait for their children. Potential parents were saying that concerns about the climate and the future were affecting their decision-making around starting their families.

As part of the medical profession – and, as an obstetrician, having special responsibility for bringing the next generation of Australians into the world – it is almost impossible not to feel a profound responsibility for children’s welfare. We all want our children’s future to be bright and better than our own, but the season’s “climate anxiety” was affecting Australians in unprecedented numbers. When a young couple asks you, “doctor, do you think we should have another baby with all of this awful climate news?” what, exactly, is the right answer?

The two of us first met at a government wellness meeting in 2019. It is natural for scientists such as ourselves to sidestep the spin and politics to focus on the best available evidence. For us, climate change is not political, though some powerful forces have attempted to frame it as a dividing, rather than uniting issue.  Could the unity that the Australian community felt in the shared trauma of this summer, be mirrored in a common determination to act on the climate science for the good of all?  If the broad community could agree, could reach a consensus for effective climate action – then our political leaders have no excuse not to follow that citizen leadership.

Many individual organisations and groups, individually, have issued “climate statements” and calling for action. Passionate and respected groups such as Doctors for the Environment and Lawyers for Climate Justice, have advocated for climate action for some time. We wondered if it was possible to bring together groups and organisations that are not necessarily known for passionate climate advocacy, expose them to the best scientific and economic information available and ask them if they could create consensus for climate action.

The result was the Australian Climate Consensus Forum that we are holding in Canberra on Thursday 12 March. To say the event was “hastily organised” is an understatement, but the response this event has stimulated has taken us by surprise. In this first step, we wanted the best speakers to engage a selected, diverse, invitation-only group with the most trustworthy and up-to-date science and economics. Speaking at the forum will be Fire Commissioner Greg Mullins, farmer and climate advocate Anika Molesworth, burns surgeon and national treasure Fiona Woods, climate economist Frank Jotzo, and earth system scientist Will Steffen.

Those who responded to our invitations – the organisations that we hope will find a unified voice – represent the most diverse group of individuals either of us have ever worked with: faith groups, business peak bodies, workers groups, health organisations and colleges, nursing staff, economics experts, community services, migrant and refugee groups, and Indigenous advocates. All will be spending the day responding to the best information we have and trying to reach a consensus for responsible climate action.

Where will this lead? We don’t know. Our ideal outcome would be a reasoned, rational and responsible call for specific actions that put our children’s – and their children’s – welfare first.

The stakes are high. The changing climate can adversely affect out health directly through the effects of the weather extremes we all have experienced recently. But. more broadly, we face adverse health consequences that are, “traumatic, infectious, nutritional, psychological … that occur in demoralised and displaced populations in the wake of climate-induced economic dislocation, environmental decline, and conflict situations”.

We’ve heard the argument that it doesn’t make sense for Australia to reduce its emissions because Australians are just pawns in a game dominated by China and the USA. We don’t agree. Sure, Australia’s total contribution to carbon emissions is about 1.3% of overall global emissions. Yet we’re only about 0.3% of the world’s population so, on an individual level, we’re big emitters.

If we look at all our actions, including exports and consumption, Australians have a huge role to play in limiting climate change. Australia is the world’s third largest fossil fuel exporter, making up 7% of all fossil fuel exports, behind only Russia and Saudi Arabia.  The biggest miners of fossil fuel carbon are China, the USA, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. We are among the top five countries in the world that could stop carbon emissions at their original source: the mine.

And all that doesn’t take into account our “carbon shadow” – all of the carbon emitted manufacturing goods that are shipped back to Australia for consumption. Health care in Australia is responsible for a whopping 7% of all our carbon emissions, so all of us are part of the problem and need to be part of the solution.

As Matt McDonald of the University of Queensland puts it:

“As a nation so proud of ‘punching above its weight’ in fields such as sport and technology, Australia is missing a big chance to show global leadership on climate.”

This summer – a summer of extremes that we have been anticipating since Ross Garnaut’s report a dozen years ago – gave us a taste of what life could be like for the next generation of Australians. This generation has a responsibility to be good stewards of our environment for our children and their children. It is a privilege we must not waste. The Climate Consensus Forum is a beginning; a beginning of what we hope will be a broad, determined, consensus for effective Australian action on climate change. A microcosm, perhaps, but one that reflects a grand collaboration of trust, leadership and stewardship across all Australian society.

We’re not sure how it will go, or whether anyone will be able to agree on anything. But there’s no way that the two of us are going to die wondering. Because the one thing we do all agree on – whatever your background and wherever you’re from – is that we want the best possible Australia for our kids.

Professor Steve Robson is an obstetrician and gynaecologist, and immediate past-President of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

Professor Penny Sackett is a physicist and former Chief Scientist for Australia.

The statements or opinions expressed in this article reflect the views of the authors and do not represent the official policy of the AMA, the MJA or InSight+ unless so stated.