The Dust Bowl Returns

FRESNO, Calif.

EVERY Saturday in late December and January, as reports of brutal temperatures and historic snowfalls streamed in from family in Vermont, New York and even southern Louisiana, we made weekly pilgrimages to our local beer garden to enjoy craft brews and unseasonably warm afternoons.

Normal winters here in Fresno, in the heart of California’s Central Valley, bring average highs in the 50s, steady periods of rain and drizzle, and the dense, bone-chilling Tule fog that can blanket the valley for days and even weeks on end.

But not this year. Instead, early 2014 gave us cloudless skies and midday temperatures in the 70s. By the end of January, it seemed like April, with spring trees in full bloom.

Read the full artcle By BLAIN ROBERTS and ETHAN J. KYTLE in The New York Times

Local Councils responding to Climate Change – just don’t call it adaptation or mitigation!

As with many local Councils around Australia, Randwick Council in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs has been developing and delivering comprehensive environmental programs via an innovative environmental levy program for 8 years. Many of these programs involve close collaborations with neighbouring Councils and are targeting community and operational initiatives aimed at responding directly or indirectly to the impacts of human-induced Climate Change.

Over the years these initiatives include: providing financial incentives for energy changes in local homes; the first attempts to establish carbon trading between 12 NSW Councils; installation of 1330kilowatts of renewable energy including small scale wind; recycled and waste water re-use projects saving around 450 million litres of potable water a year; and major programs aimed at achieving measurable behavioural change in community sectors coving households, businesses and schools.

Working on the practical responses that respond to Climate Change issues is not always premised or articulated around Climate Change. The measures underway and their results however are often those identified by researchers and policy-makers as fundamentally important or necessarily creative as a means of responding to changes underway from increased greenhouse gases altering our climate over coming decades.

Peter’s presentation brings forward the practical responses underway and some of the results of projects and measures implemented ‘on-the-ground’ by Randwick City Council, more often than not in the face of uncertainty surrounding Climate Change scenarios, scepticism by decision-makers at different levels, and strong expectations by the community and other tiers of government that the changes that need to be made to adapt and respond to Climate Change will be implemented primarily at the Local Government level around Australia.

Mr Peter Maganov, Manager, Sustainability and Strategic Waste, Randwick City Council, will present at:

Two Conferences! Three Days! One Location!

The Sustainability Conference: “Taking Care of Business: Sustainable Transformation 2” will be held in conjunction with the 6th Making Cities Liveable Conference, in a new era of collaboration, information sharing and professional networking. The conference is being held from the 17th – 19th June 2013 at Novotel Melbourne St Kilda.

Climate impacts– analysing infrastructure interconnectivity and flow-on effects for Australian cities

Manidis Roberts, KPMG and The Climate Institute (TCI) collaborated to undertake an exercise to credibly identify, quantify and cost, climate impacts on city infrastructure (Melbourne) as a result of extreme heat event. We modelled the impacts on infrastructure and their interdependencies under a specified climate event.

This provided a case study of the flow-on impacts of the damage to infrastructure from future climate events. We explored the interdependencies that play out between businesses and infrastructure owners and operators under future climatic conditions, such as an extreme heat, sea level rise or extreme rainfall events. The exercise identified nodes of interconnectivity and interdependency and where there are critical infrastructure vulnerabilities to future climatic events. It also analysed flow-on effects throughout the economy of any resulting disruption to services and performance of assets as a consequence of these events. There have been very few exercises of this nature carried out to date, and this now forms an important body of research for the TCI Resilience Flagship Project and more widely.

An analysis found businesses and organisations are largely unprepared for a heatwave event of magnitude. 2030 predictions doubling both frequency and severity of impacts would severely overstretch budgets, infrastructure capacity, coping ranges and system interactions and would be unmanageable. The potential impact on individual businesses in terms of effect on total revenue was calculated. The exercise also shows that the responsibility for planning and actions to reduce vulnerabilities lies with multiple parties and not just those initially impacted. Systems resilience rather than sector resilience is required.

Ms Nicki Hutlley, Chief Economist, KPMG, will present at the combined Liveable Cities and Sustainability Conferences in Melbourne in June 2013

Two Conferences! Three Days! One Location!

The Sustainability Conference: “Taking Care of Business: Sustainable Transformation 2” will be held in conjunction with the 6th Making Cities Liveable Conference, in a new era of collaboration, information sharing and professional networking. The conference is being held from the 17th – 19th June 2013 at Novotel Melbourne St Kilda.