What can we do in the climate and biodiversity crisis? There are solutions, if we act now, in this crucial decade.
THANK YOU to everyone who joined us for this series of presentations on climate and environment issues held at Edendale Community Farm in Eltham, Victoria, Australia in March 2024. It was great to see you all there!
And a huge thank you to all or our fantastic speakers. Every presentation was informative, thought provoking and inspiring and we appreciate the time and effort put into each one.
We heard from 7 speakers over two weekends: Saturday 2, Sunday 3, Saturday 16 and Sunday 17 March 2024.
Below is a summary of each presentation, and a link to a presentation where available.
- Positive Everyday Choices – Session 1: Saturday 2 March
Lucinda Flynn, Accredited Scorecard Assessor, Energy Efficiency Trainer, Clean Energy Nillumbik member, owner Growing Green Solutions, spoke about positive everyday choices we can all make in our everyday lives to have a positive impact on reducing climate harm. These are practical steps that make a contribution, and need not involve a large financial outlay. It can be as simple as changing who we bank with. Areas covered included:- buying sustainable products and services (e.g. choose businesses that are B Corp certified – businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency)
- making ethical banking and superannuation choices by not supporting financial institutions that invest in fossil fuels
- choosing a green energy provider (e.g.Diamond Energy)
- modifying the home for maximum energy efficiency
- switching to electric home appliances
- Lucinda also talked about how communities can become more resilient through circular economy networks such as repair cafes, tool libraries, community gardens, food share initiatives, seed banks etc.
- Lucinda provided links to workshops and events coming up.
- Hope and Courage in the Climate Crisis – Session 2: Saturday 2 March
Prof John Wiseman, Senior Research Fellow with Melbourne Climate Futures at the University of Melbourne, addressed the question of what ideas and actions can help us face a harsh climate future with wisdom, hope and courage? Some examples of ideas and actions discussed included:- 1. the unflinching honesty of climate scientists
2. the tenacity and solidarity of climate justice advocates
3. Indigenous and First Nations resistance and wisdom
4. the transformational power of creativity and imagination
5. learning from spiritual, faith-based and ecological traditions
6. the astonishing, fragile beauty of life on earth - John invited the audience to share their thoughts with one other person in the room; firstly on what gave them strength, courage and inspiration in the climate crisis, and secondly, on what future actions would be most effective in dealing with the crisis. Some of these reflections were then shared with the room at large.
- John’s inspiring and very helpful book, Hope and Courage in the Climate Crisis, “draws on his broad experience as a climate activist, researcher and policy maker to provide a wide ranging, accessible and provocative guided tour of ideas which can inspire and sustain radical hope and defiant courage in the long emergency which now lies before us.” It is also available at Eltham Bookshop.
- John kindly shared his presentation slides with us.
- 1. the unflinching honesty of climate scientists
- Regenerative Farming – Session 3: Sunday 3 March
Jessica Conlan is a young regenerative farmer, and Nuffield Scholar, who has seen amazing results from using biological approaches on her farm in Elmore. Jessica spoke about the joys and pitfalls of produing sheep using holistic farming principles. She and her mother Jo began their transition to regenerative farming four years ago, and have already seen significant benefits in the productivity of their farm in Elmore in central Victoria.- Jess began a trial with mixed species cropping via disc ploughing, to avoid unnecessary disturbance of the soil. The plant selection of grains and legumes provides almost year round variety of feed for her sheep, allowing them to pick and choose which crop is the most nutritious for that time of the year. She is now experimenting with summer crops of native perennial grasses. In the four years since starting this journey, the soil health on her farm has improved on almost every parameter tested, and her sheep are flourishing.
- She described the process of problem-solving that goes on with a non-mainstream method of farming – there is a lot of trial and error, as it is not possible to buy products off the shelf. The process requires patience, ingenuity, creative solutions and careful observation. An intimate knowledge of your farm’s microclimate and soil biochemistry is needed, which is where Jess’s PhD in biochemistry comes in handy. Throughout, the essential need to balance productivity and sustainability is ever-present.
- Fire Impacts on Fauna – Session 4: Sunday 4 March
Prof Mike Clarke, Emeritus Professor, Zoology, La Trobe University, opened his talk with a focus on the Black Saturday bushfires and outlined their effects on flora and fauna.- The reality is that now more than half of Victoria’s public land is below the Minimum Tolerable Fire Interval, which means that with the increasing severity and frequency of bushfire, land is being burnt more often than it has capacity to regenerate fully after fire. Land within the limit of a Tolerable Fire Interval is correspondingly decreasing over the state, which leaves ecosystems highly vulnerable and indeed threatened.
- Mike outlined his research into how animals and plants respond to fire and now its increased incidence. We see a picture of decreasing resilience. We now need to understand and cater for the needs of both flora and fauna, as we endeavour to mitigate and adapt to fire and the changing circumstances, and know that the picture is nuanced – different vegetation and animal communities possess evolutionary adaptations to cope with different fire regimes – frequency, season, severity, extent, patchiness of fire.
- Urban Trees for Heat Mitigation – Session 5: Saturday 16 March
Dr Greg Moore, senior researcher from the University of Melbourne about the Significance of Urban Tree Canopy and Climate Change:- Greg pointed out that the tree cover of greater Melbourne is by no means as dense as many Melburnians might think, or perhaps wish. While tree cover on public land is relatively stable, we are losing canopy cover on private land due to tree losses in urban and suburban private open space (in-fill development, along roads and in heavily urbanised places). He asserted that the target canopy cover for urban cities in Australia under climate change scenarios should be no less than 30%. In practice, the canopy cover in many urban local government areas falls far short of this (19 Local Government Areas have a tree cover of less that 20%; most in the west, north and inner parts) – even Nillumbik, which is one of the more treed LGAs, is losing canopy cover at the rate of 1% per year.
- Greg pointed out that this is not always local government’s fault – state government planning regulations override local government authority in many cases. Planning and tree removal applications that are turned down by council are often approved by VCAT, the state planning authority.
- The value of large old urban trees is not sufficiently recognised or taken into account in urban planning decisions. These trees give us so much more than a younger tree in terms of carbon sequestration, shade and evapotranspiration benefits, and habitat value.
- We need to look after our trees until they are greater than 30 years old – only at that age does a tree reach carbon neutrality, i.e is large enough to have become carbon positive and sequestered more carbon than has been used in getting it to this age. In practice, many trees that are planted in urban areas die before they reach this age. Greg observed that this situation is unsustainable environmentally and ludicrous economically, but seems to go largely unnoticed.
- Greg briefly touched on the value of trees in reducing the urban heat island effect, and how failure to curb the loss of tree canopy cover will result in higher social, health and economic costs for future generations to bear. Trees are allowed to be removed for minor nuisance or infrastructure reasons, with no cost/benefit analysis done to justify this.
- Heatwaves are bigger killers of people than any other natural disasters, and the greatest number of deaths is correlated with the absence of trees and greenspace. An increase in trees and greenspace is the least costly and most sustainable way of cooling urban spaces, and improves health and wellbeing on almost every parameter measured. In addition, trees add to the value of our properties, save us money on air-conditioning, reduce wind speed and hence damage from storms, reduce erosion in urban waterways and contribute many other benefits.
- Greg kindly shared his presentation with us.
- Healing Land and Sea – Session 6: Saturday 16 March
Jane Morton, Clinical psychologist, co-convenor of Darebin Climate Action Now and Elly Hanrahan, Forest fire fighter and project officer for Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action on Healing Land and Sea:- This session delved into the topic of drawdown, and offered some nature-based solutions to reducing carbon in the air and in the oceans. It is now becoming clear that reducing emissions to net zero, even if this is done before 2050, will not be enough to avert the catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis. We need to rapidly draw down carbon from the air and from the sea to restore our climate to safe levels for humanity.
- After Jane set the scene by describing the risks we are facing of breaching irreversible climate tipping points on our current trajectory, Elly talked about her research into rehydration projects. This process involves re-creating the ‘chain of ponds’ that was a common feature of our waterways in pre-colonial times. Leaky weirs are constructed, which slow the run-off of water following storm events. The reduced rate of flow (without stopping water flow altogether as in a conventional dam), allows water to spread out across the land, drain away slowly, rehydrate the soil and allows vegetation to grow. Erosion is reduced, and dangerous flooding of flood plains downstream (with damage to towns built on those flood plains) is minimised.
- Increased hydration of the land helps to calm the atmospheric conditions that create extreme weather events. These extreme events are becoming more frequent and intense due to the increased water vapour that is retained in the warmer air as a consequence of rising global temperatures. Dry land produces increased evaporation of moisture into the atmosphere, exacerbating the atmospheric ‘rivers’ or currents that produce extreme flooding events. By rehydrating the land, creating the conditions for vegetation to thrive, the moisture stays on the earth and the ‘rivers’ become less energy-intense. Forests and tree cover play an integral part in this system, as it has been demonstrated that forests create their own landscape-scale microclimate by attracting rain.
- Jane then discussed some exciting new drawdown possibilities for dealing with excess carbon dissolved in the oceans. She referenced the work of Peter Fiekowsky in his book Climate Restoration, which describes several technologies for rapidly sequestering carbon, including:
a) ocean iron fertilisation;
b) synthetic limestone;
c) seaweed permaculture;
d) enhanced atmospheric methane oxidation using iron chloride (see images and description below).
These technologies build on existing geo-mechanisms that the earth has used to capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in the past, and amplify them to create the rapid drawdown that will be needed. - The technologies chosen have to meet three criteria; they need to be: 1. permanent — so the CO2 stays out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years; 2. scalable — the method must be able to remove at least 25 billion tons of CO2 a year; 3. financially viable — funding for at-scale carbon removal must be in place.
- Jane talked about the work being done by Sir David King from the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge, UK. He stresses that we only have a few years left to cool the Arctic, Antarctica and the Himalayas, and he has developed a technique called Marine Cloud Brightening. This technology increases cloud cover by spraying droplets of water into the atmosphere over these critical areas. Clouds are formed which reduce the rate of melting of ice.
- Jane and Elly have made available some resources:
Elly’s rehydration research proposal
The best research Australia has on rehydration methodologies - A video of their presentation is available for viewing here.
- Health Impacts of Heat – Session 7: Sunday 17 March
Dr Kristen Pearson from Doctors for the Environment Australia presented on how heat affects the body and the measures we can take to adapt to and mitigate the effects of heat.- Kristen stressed the urgency of acting to address accelerating climate instability, for if our action is not strong or soon enough, extreme heat waves will only become more frequent and intense.
- Kristen outlined categories of heat effects on the body and provided descriptors – heat stress results in heat discomfort, tiredness, weakness, cramps and dizziness, heat exhaustion results in nausea, vomiting, headache and fainting. Internal body temperature rises over 38 deg C and there is reduced sweating because of insufficient fluid in the body.
- Heat stroke produces confusion, reduced alertness and red hot dry skin, and body temperature rises over 40.5 deg C. This quickly becomes life threatening. Health impacts of heat were described, including effects on social function and mental health.
- We were made aware about a number of factors which compound the effects of heat. These are high humidity, high night time temperatures, high temperatures early in the season, disruptions to essential services, smog and bushfires.
- The last part of the presentation included mitigation and adaptation measures against heat and measures to mitigate against climate breakdown and adapt as far as we can. An excellent website that looks at how we can better design cities and suburbs is swelteringcities.org/cooler-suburbs/.
- Another very useful website to look at how today’s current temperature compares to the average is isithotrightnow.com/.
- Dr Pearson’s slide presentation can be viewed here.
Thank you to Nillumbik Shire Council for supporting this event through their community grants program.
Nillumbik Climate Action Team 