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Pitting profits and food supply against the natural world
Posted by Conversation: None Given on November 29th, 2013
Conversation: The arguments for increasing food demand are well publicised and well understood. By the middle of this century, the planet’s population will top nine billion, presenting a third more mouths to feed. Much of the world is getting richer, which leads to changes in diet such as increasing meat and dairy consumption, foodstuffs that use up more resources than crops. Countries are also becoming increasingly urbanised, leading people to want food that is cheap, convenient and, inevitably, wasted. Current...
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Indonesia sets a carbon time-bomb
Posted by Conversation: None Given on September 25th, 2013
Conversation: One of the world’s major terrestrial carbon pools is rapidly deteriorating as large parts of Indonesia’s peatlands are deforested and converted to oil palm and paper plantations. No longer a carbon sink, Indonesia’s peatlands are now a globally significant source of emissions.
The June fires in Sumatra once again drew international attention to Indonesia’s forests. At the fires' peak, 140,000 hectares were burnt in just one week.
Most fires were in peatland, much of it on land destined to become...
Australia: Who will speak up for climate change adaptation?
Posted by Conversation: None Given on March 10th, 2013
Conversation: As with the federal elections of 2007 and 2010, climate change appears set to feature again in the forthcoming September poll. Yet one of the most important aspects of the issue, that of adaptation to climate change, is again unlikely to garner any attention.
Climate change and its associated global changes (prominently sea level rise and ocean acidification) will produce profound social, economic, and environmental changes in Australia. Some of these changes will be gradual. Others will be abrupt...
Climate change will transform the bush … and we’ll have to think big to cope
Posted by Conversation: None Given on September 18th, 2012
Conversation: Within decades, environments across Australia will be substantially different from those that currently exist.
CSIRO research released today suggests that, by 2030, climate change stress on our natural environments will be significant. By 2070, the impacts will be more widespread and, in many places, more extreme. Many parts of Australia will have environments that do not exist today anywhere on this continent. Ecological stress
In a scientific first, we investigated how climate change will...