23 May 2016, The Conversation, Coastal law shift from property rights to climate adaptation is a landmark reform. Coastal management in Australia is subject to competing interests and challenges. These range from land use and strategic planning issues to ecosystems preservation. Local councils are at the coalface as both key decision-makers and the first point of contact for communities. Exacerbating these day-to-day challenges for councils are risks to property. A quantitative assessment undertaken by the then-Department of Climate Change in 2009 identified impacts of sea-level rise as a serious threat to property. In New South Wales, under scenarios of a 1.1-metre sea-level rise, risks of damage or inundation to residential housing alone affected tens of thousands of properties, potentially costing millions of dollars. The NSW 2009 sea-level rise policy (now repealed) saw coastal councils considering this future risk when developing coastal zone management plans. These metrics, while important, say little of the wide-ranging benefits of a freely accessible coast. Going to the beach is a fundamental part of Australian identity; it’s a “special place” for Australians. Local councils are most exposed to the issues and challenges of a changing coastline in which there are many interests. Councils are often the first decision-makers for local development, asset management and land-use and strategic planning. Increased coastal erosion, storm events, more frequent and severe flooding impacts and higher tides can and will make these regular functions of councils more complicated. In this context, the tabling of the NSW Coastal Management Bill on May 3 marks the formalisation of Stage 2 of the most significant law reform to coastal management since the 1970s. The NSW state government saysthat, by better integrating coastal management with land-use planning, the legislation offers: … a modern, coherent coastal management framework that is responsive to current needs and future challenges. Read More here
Tag Archives: oceans
21 May 2016, Climate News Network, Antarctic glacier melt could raise sea level by 3m. A huge glacier in the frozen wastes of East Antarctica, a region previously thought stable, could melt much faster than expected, scientists say. One of Antarctica’s great glaciers could become unstable if global warming continues at the present pace. As warm seas wash the ice shelf, the land-based mass of ice could begin to retreat, cross a critical threshold in the present century and then withdraw 300 kilometres inland. In the course of doing so it would spill tremendous quantities of water into the oceans: enough to raise global sea levels by 2.9 metres and threaten cities that are home to billions. And here is the bad news: glaciologists have known for decades that West Antarctica’s ice sheets are unstable. But the Totten glacier is part of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, a mass of ice most researchers had believed to be stable and highly unlikely to lose much of its ice, even in a warming world. Scientists from Australia, New Zealand, the US and Britain report in Nature that they explored the underlying geology of the Totten glacier to build up a picture of its advance and retreat over many millions of years. Greater vulnerability “The evidence coming together is painting a picture of East Antarctica being much more vulnerable to a warming environment than we thought,” said Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. “This is something we should worry about. “Totten Glacier is losing ice now, and the warm ocean water that is causing this loss has the potential to also push the glacier back to an unstable place.” The identification of a weak spot in the bastion of frozen water that embraces East Antarctica is new. But alarm about the rate of melting and the potential for change across the world’s last largely uninhabited continent is not. In the past few years researchers have pinpointed the insidious effect of warming sea currents, and identified immediate hazards to the glaciers of the fast-warming West Antarctic region. Read More here
10 May, The Guardian, Headlines ‘exaggerated’ climate link to sinking of Pacific islands. Links between climate change and the sinking of five islands in the Pacific Ocean have been exaggerated, the author of a widely reported new study has said. The report, published on Friday, tracked the shapeshifting of 33 reef islands in the Solomon Islands between 1947 and 2014. It found that five had been washed away completely and six more had been severely eroded. The study blamed the loss on a combination of sea-level rise and high wave energy. Many media outlets, including the Guardian, jumped to the conclusion that the islands were lost to climate change. But this largely misinterprets the science, according to the study’s author, Dr Simon Albert. “All these headlines are certainly pushing things a bit towards the ‘climate change has made islands vanish’ angle. I would prefer slightly more moderate titles that focus on sea-level rise being the driver rather than simply ‘climate change’,” Albert told the Guardian. The major misunderstanding stems from the conflation of sea-level rise with climate change. As a scientifically robust and potentially destructive articulation of climate change, sea-level rise has become almost synonymous with the warming of the planet. However, as Albert’s paper points out, the ocean has been rising in the Solomon Islands at 7mm per year, more than double the global average. Since the 1990s, trade winds in the Pacific have been particularly intense. This has been driven partly by global warming and partly by climatic cycles – in particular the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. “These trade winds have basically pushed water up into western Pacific and have driven these exceptionally high rates of [sea-level rise] in the Solomons,” said Albert. “The trade winds are partly a natural cycle but also the recent intensification is related to atmospheric warming.” The proportion of the extra rise driven by climate change was not considered by Albert’s study. Read More here
7 May 2016, The Conversation, Sea-level rise has claimed five whole islands in the Pacific: first scientific evidence. Sea-level rise, erosion and coastal flooding are some of the greatest challenges facing humanity from climate change. Recently at least five reef islands in the remote Solomon Islands have been lost completely to sea-level rise and coastal erosion, and a further six islands have been severely eroded. These islands lost to the sea range in size from one to five hectares. They supported dense tropical vegetation that was at least 300 years old. Nuatambu Island, home to 25 families, has lost more than half of its habitable area, with 11 houses washed into the sea since 2011. This is the first scientific evidence, published in Environmental Research Letters, that confirms the numerous anecdotal accounts from across the Pacific of the dramatic impacts of climate change on coastlines and people. A warning for the world Previous studies examining the risk of coastal inundation in the Pacific region have found that islands can actually keep pace with sea-level riseand sometimes even expand. However, these studies have been conducted in areas of the Pacific with rates of sea level rise of 3-5 mm per year – broadly in line with the global average of 3 mm per year. For the past 20 years, the Solomon Islands have been a hotspot for sea-level rise. Here the sea has risen at almost three times the global average, around 7-10 mm per year since 1993. This higher local rate is partly the result of natural climate variability. These higher rates are in line with what we can expect across much of the Pacific in the second half of this century as a result of human-induced sea-level rise. Many areas will experience long-term rates of sea-level rise similar to that already experienced in Solomon Islands in all but the very lowest-emission scenarios. Read More here