The Great Barrier Reef isn't listed as 'in danger' – but it's still in big trouble

In a somewhat surprising decision, UNESCO ruled this week that the Great Barrier Reef – one of the Earth’s great natural wonders – should not be listed as “World Heritage in Danger”.

The World Heritage Committee praised the Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan, and the federal minister for the environment, Josh Frydenberg, has called the outcome “a big win for Australia and a big win for the Turnbull government”.

But that doesn’t mean the Reef is out of danger. Afforded World Heritage recognition in 1981, the Reef has been on the warning list for nearly three years. It’s not entirely evident why UNESCO decided not to list the Reef as “in danger” at this year’s meeting, given the many ongoing threats to its health.

However, the World Heritage Committee has made it clear they remain concerned about the future of this remarkable world heritage site.

The reef is still in deep trouble

UNESCO’s draft decision (the adopted version is not yet releasesd) cites significant and ongoing threats to the Reef, and emphasises that much more work is needed to get the health of the Reef back on track. Australia must provide a progress report on the Reef in two years’ time – and they want to see our efforts to protect the reef accelerate.

Right now, unprecedented coral bleaching in consecutive years has damaged two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. This bleaching, or loss of algae, affects a 1,500km stretch of the reef. The latest damage is concentrated in the middle section, whereas last year’s bleaching hit mainly the north.

Pollution, overfishing and sedimentation are exacerbating the damage. Land clearing in Queensland has accelerated rapidly in the past few years, with about 1 million hectares of native vegetation being cleared in the past five years. That’s an area the size of the Brisbane Cricket Ground being cleared every three minutes.

About 40% of this vegetation clearing is in catchments that drain to the Great Barrier Reef. Land clearing contributes to gully and streambank erosion. This erosion means that soil (and whatever chemical residues are in it) washes into waterways and flows into reef lagoon, reducing water quality and affecting the health of corals and seagrass.

Landclearing also directly contributes to climate change, which is the single biggest threat to the Reef. The recent surge in land clearing in Queensland alone poses a threat to Australia’s ability to meet its 2030 emissions reduction target. Yet attempts by the Queensland Government to control excessive land clearing have failed – a concern highlighted by UNESCO in the draft decision.

Land clearing can lead to serious hillslope gully and sheet erosion, which causes sedimentation and reduced water quality in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.
Willem van Aken/CSIRO

A time for action, not celebration

The Reef remains on UNESCO’s watch list. Just last month the World Heritage Committee released a report concluding that progress towards achieving water quality targets had been slow, and that it does not expect the immediate water quality targets to be met.

The draft decision still expressed UNESCO’s “serious concern” and “strongly encouraged” Australia to “accelerate efforts to ensure meeting the intermediate and long-term targets of the plan, which are essential to the overall resilience of the property, in particular regarding water quality”.

This means reducing run-off of sediment, nutrients and pollutants from our towns and farmlands. Improving water quality can help recovery of corals, even if it doesn’t prevent mortality during extreme heatwaves.

The Great Barrier Reef is the most biodiverse of all the World Heritage sites, and of “enormous scientific and intrinsic importance” according to the United Nations. A recent report by Deloitte put its value at A$56bn. It contributes an estimated A$6.4bn annually to Australia’s economy and supports 64,000 jobs.

Excessive landclearing in Queensland, which looks like being a core issue in the next state election, has been successfully curbed in the past, and it could be again.

But the reef cannot exist in the long term without international efforts to curb global warming. To address climate change and reduce emissions, we need to act both nationally and globally. Local action on water quality (the focus of the Reef 2050 Plan) does not prevent bleaching, or “buy time” to delay action on emissions.

We need adequate funding for achieving the Reef 2050 Plan targets for improved water quality, and a plan to reach zero net carbon emissions. Without that action, an “in danger” listing seems inevitable in 2020. But regardless of lists and labels, the evidence is clear. The Great Barrier Reef is dying before our eyes. Unless we do more, and fast, we risk losing it forever.

James Watson, Associate Professor, The University of Queensland and Martine Maron, ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Environmental Management, The University of Queensland

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The real reasons why British workers won't pick fruit

Pick your own. PA/Humphreys

Farmers are used to looking into the future. Their livelihoods depend on taking a decent guess about everything from the weather to market forces. But a recent survey reveals that a new level of uncertainty looms on the horizon for post-Brexit farming in Britain.

Many in the survey said they were experiencing increased difficulty in recruiting seasonal workers since the EU referendum. Some suggested these labour shortages could result in a decrease in domestic food production followed by inflated prices of some produce caused by a total reliance on imports.

These shortages are not the result of any enforced changes in legislation, as Brexit negotiations have yet to be completed. This means that even if something like the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) (which enabled a set quota of Eastern European workers to come and work on labour-short farms) is reintroduced, the industry might still be in hot water.

A lack of seasonal labour has long been an issue for British agriculture. Farms have sought workers from further afield as far back as the 14th century, when the industry relied on itinerant workers from Ireland. And while some British workers engaged in seasonal labour up until the end of the 20th century, their desire to do so appears to have waned dramatically – hence the current reliance on migrant workers.

Other reports of post-EU referendum labour shortages are indicative of things to come, as fewer migrant workers want to work in the UK. This has been attributed in part to the expectation of an unwelcome reception in Britain due to possible racism and xenophobia, as well as the economic impact of the fall in value of the pound.

To combat this the former environment secretary, Andrea Leadsom, suggested a return to land work for British youths, an idea met with derision by many. A parliamentary report also examined labour constraints in farming and suggested a long-term agenda of returning seasonal farm work to native British workers.

But the truth is, British people are highly unlikely to fill any positions left by migrant workers. It isn’t as simple as there being sufficient labour available in the UK to perform the work. The situation is far more complex.

The country commute

The entire working culture of the UK has transformed since British workers last filled seasonal farm work jobs to any significant extent. Rural communities have been transformed due to the “drift from the land” of locals, and people from cities moving to the country or buying second homes, pricing potential farm workers out of the local housing market.

As a result, physically able unemployed people are now less likely to live anywhere near the farms requiring workers. Transport systems in rural areas are limited, and basic, temporary housing is unlikely to attract people away from comfortable, permanent housing situated close to friends and family.

The current benefits system also deters the unemployed from engaging in any kind of seasonal work due to the inflexibility of signing on and off. Add this to the inconsistency of work availability itself, and there is little wonder why no compulsion exists to pick fruit.

Fruits of hard labour

The conditions of seasonal work – low pay, physically demanding, long and unsociable hours – do not help. They are far from the expectations of the typical British worker, who is now culturally tuned to a 40-hour Monday to Friday schedule. There is also a greater desire for career progression, which is unlikely to occur in the world of fruit picking. These expectations contrast starkly with how farmers perceive the work ethic of Eastern Europeans. It is from this gap that the “lazy” label has grown and been perpetuated by farmers and the media towards British workers.

But even if conditions and incentives of picking fruit and veg were improved, British workers would still be unlikely to perform it because of how this kind of work is perceived. Among other things, the task has become negatively associated with migrant workers and slave labour. Farmers have repeatedly tried to employ locals, with a drastically low rate of return, telling stories of few turning up for interviews and even fewer returning after just several days of work.

And while some gangmasters, who find and provide workers at very low rates, and land managers are guilty to some extent for embedding the cheap-labour cycle of migrant work within the industry, farmers have little power over price setting against the whim of supermarket control. This cost squeeze leaves many farmers with their hands tied in terms of increasing worker pay – the effect of which would be higher prices for the consumer (with whom some of the responsibility lies).

Without enormous adjustments to the benefits system, rural social housing, pay and conditions, the underlying culture and ideology surrounding seasonal farm labour, and transformations in consumer buying habits, a future without migrant workers does not look bright.

Mechanisation might one day be the answer, but due to the fragility of soft fruits, that is not yet feasible. Instead, without a quick solution, it is quite possible that Britain’s fruit farms are destined to follow the same sorry path already paved by dairy, where lack of profitability and debt has caused mass closure.

Caroline Nye, PhD Candidate, University of Exeter

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

When Trump met Putin, and how the Russian won the day

The much-anticipated meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump finally took place at the G20 summit in Hamburg.
Reuters/Carlos Barria

It was the meeting we’ve all been waiting for. US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met on Friday during the G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

The key question was whether Trump or Putin would emerge as the stronger leader, with most backing Putin’s ability to manipulate and control the exchange. Trump’s lack of diplomatic or political experience, and his unwillingness to prepare for the encounter, inspired very little confidence that he would walk away with any serious concessions from Putin.

The meeting was scheduled to take half-an-hour. In fact it lasted more than two hours, and an indication the two leaders found a significant amount to talk about. The only other people present were US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and two interpreters. The little we know of what was actually discussed has come from statements Lavrov and Tillerson gave to the press following the meeting.

Russian interference in the US election

Tillerson said Trump pressed Putin over Russian interference in the 2016 election, but seemed to accept his denial that Russia did any such thing.

President Putin denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past.

Tillerson said the White House was not “dismissing the issue” but wanted to focus on “how do we secure a commitment” that there will not be interference in the future.

The big question going in to the meeting was whether or not Trump would raise the accusation with Putin. While he clearly did, the ease with which he appears to have accepted Putin’s protestations of innocence, and his reassurance that it won’t happen again, is remarkable.

According to journalists’ reports on Twitter, Lavrov had a slightly different spin on Trump’s reaction to the issue. He said:

In light of Trump’s remarks in Poland the day before, when he called into doubt the reliability of US intelligence on the issue, this has further undermined the credibility of the US intelligence community. That Trump did this during a face-to-face meeting with Putin can only deepen the mistrust between the CIA and FBI have for the White House, and further damage morale.

It can also be read as a clear victory for Putin, who came away from the meeting without having to seriously address charges that Russia systematically engaged in what is a gross violation of the democratic integrity and sovereignty of another country.

Syria

There was a clear opportunity for Trump to use the meeting to pressure Putin over his continuing support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

While any significant agreements over how to resolve one of the most complex conflicts in the region were highly unlikely, the two leaders did agree to support a ceasefire in an area of southwestern Syria. There were no other details, and Tillerson himself admitted that ceasefires in Syria have tended to fall apart very quickly.

While Russia and the US have a shared interest in fighting Islamic State in Syria, they disagree over the almost every other aspect of the conflict, particularly the future of Assad and the role of Iran.

Trump has recently ratcheted up to anti-Iranian rhetoric and it seems the Russian relationship with Iran could become a significant point of conflict between the US and Russia in the future.

No transcript of the meeting is available so it’s impossible to know exactly what was discussed here. But if Putin was not pressed on these points, it is certainly a missed opportunity.

Shared interests

While both Lavrov and Tillerson highlighted the shared interests the two countries have, neither Ukraine nor the ongoing nuclear crisis in North Korea could be counted among them.

North Korea’s testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile guaranteed that it would be high on the list of issues that would be discussed. Russia has contradicted the consensus among the other G20 leaders over the missile’s range, and blocked a resolution by the UN Security Council calling for “significant measures” in response to the test.

So, what do we make of this highly anticipated meeting?

With very little detail about what was actually discussed, and with the narrative firmly controlled by Lavrov, Trump would seem to have gained very little while conceding much.

Putin has come away with an implicit agreement to move on from the question of election meddling, without promising more than “dialgue” on Ukraine, no agreement on how to deal with North Korea, and no real movement on the horrific human tragedy in Syria.

Along with Tillerson’s affirmation that the two leaders shared “a clear positive chemistry”, it’s hard not to recall George W. Bush’s claim to have seen into Putin’s soul, and conclude that Putin has once again expertly played a US president.

Kumuda Simpson, Lecturer in International Relations, La Trobe University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

How the Nazis destroyed the first gay rights movement

‘Damenkneipe,’ or ‘Ladies’ Saloon,’ painted by Rudolf Schlichter in 1923. In 1937, many of his paintings were destroyed by the Nazis as ‘degenerate art.’

Very recently, Germany’s Cabinet approved a bill that will expunge the convictions of tens of thousands of German men for “homosexual acts” under that country’s anti-gay law known as “Paragraph 175.” That law dates back to 1871, when modern Germany’s first legal code was created.

It was repealed in 1994. But there was a serious movement to repeal the law in 1929 as part of a wider LGBTQ rights movement. That was just before the Nazis came to power, magnified the anti-gay law, then sought to annihilate gay and transgender Europeans.

The story of how close Germany – and much of Europe – came to liberating its LGBTQ people before violently reversing that trend under new authoritarian regimes is an object lesson showing that the history of LGBTQ rights is not a record of constant progress.

The first LGBTQ liberation movement

In the 1920s, Berlin had nearly 100 gay and lesbian bars or cafes. Vienna had about a dozen gay cafes, clubs and bookstores. In Paris, certain quarters were renowned for open displays of gay and trans nightlife. Even Florence, Italy, had its own gay district, as did many smaller European cities.

Films began depicting sympathetic gay characters. Protests were organized against offensive depictions of LGBTQ people in print or on stage. And media entrepreneurs realized there was a middle-class gay and trans readership to whom they could cater.

Partly driving this new era of tolerance were the doctors and scientists who started looking at homosexuality and “transvestism” (a word of that era that encompassed transgender people) as a natural characteristic with which some were born, and not a “derangement.” The story of Lili Elbe and the first modern sex change, made famous in the recent film “The Danish Girl,” reflected these trends.

For example, Berlin opened its Institute for Sexual Research in 1919, the place where the word “transsexual” was coined, and where people could receive counseling and other services. Its lead doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld, also consulted on the Lili Elbe sex change.

Connected to this institute was an organization called the “Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.” With the motto “justice through science,” this group of scientists and LGBTQ people promoted equal rights, arguing that LGBTQ people were not aberrations of nature.

Most European capitals hosted a branch of the group, which sponsored talks and sought the repeal of Germany’s “Paragraph 175.” Combining with other liberal groups and politicians, it succeeded in influencing a German parliamentary committee to recommend the repeal to the wider government in 1929.

The backlash

While these developments didn’t mean the end of centuries of intolerance, the 1920s and early ‘30s certainly looked like the beginning of the end. On the other hand, the greater “out-ness” of gay and trans people provoked their opponents.

A French reporter, bemoaning the sight of uncloseted LGBTQ people in public, complained, “the contagion … is corrupting every milieu.” The Berlin police grumbled that magazines aimed at gay men – which they called “obscene press materials” – were proliferating. In Vienna, lectures of the “Scientific Humanitarian Committee” might be packed with supporters, but one was attacked by young men hurling stink bombs. A Parisian town councilor in 1933 called it “a moral crisis” that gay people, known as “inverts” at that time, could be seen in public.

“Far be it from me to want to turn to fascism,” the councilor said, “but all the same, we have to agree that in some things those regimes have sometimes done good… One day Hitler and Mussolini woke up and said, ‘Honestly, the scandal has gone on long enough’ … And … the inverts … were chased out of Germany and Italy the very next day.”

The ascent of Fascism

It’s this willingness to make a blood sacrifice of minorities in exchange for “normalcy” or prosperity that has observers drawing uncomfortable comparisons between then and now.

In the 1930s, the Depression spread economic anxiety, while political fights in European parliaments tended to spill outside into actual street fights between Left and Right. Fascist parties offered Europeans a choice of stability at the price of democracy. Tolerance of minorities was destabilizing, they said. Expanding liberties gave “undesirable” people the liberty to undermine security and threaten traditional “moral” culture. Gay and trans people were an obvious target.

What happened next shows the whiplash speed with which the progress of a generation can be thrown into reverse.

The nightmare

One day in May 1933, pristine white-shirted students marched in front of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Research – that safe haven for LGBTQ people – calling it “Un-German.” Later, a mob hauled out its library to be burned. Later still, its acting head was arrested.

When Nazi leader Adolph Hitler needed to justify arresting and murdering former political allies in 1934, he said they were gay. This fanned anti-gay zealotry by the Gestapo, which opened a special anti-gay branch. During the following year alone, the Gestapo arrested more than 8,500 gay men, quite possibly using a list of names and addresses seized at the Institute for Sexual Research. Not only was Paragraph 175 not erased, as a parliamentary committee had recommended just a few years before, it was amended to be more expansive and punitive.

As the Gestapo spread throughout Europe, it expanded the hunt. In Vienna, it hauled in every gay man on police lists and questioned them, trying to get them to name others. The fortunate ones went to jail. The less fortunate went to Buchenwald and Dachau. In conquered France, Alsace police worked with the Gestapo to arrest at least 200 men and send them to concentration camps. Italy, with a fascist regime obsessed with virility, sent at least 300 gay men to brutal camps during the war period, declaring them “dangerous for the integrity of the race.”

The total number of Europeans arrested for being LGBTQ under fascism is impossible to know because of the lack of reliable records. But a conservative estimate is that there were many tens of thousands to one hundred thousand arrests during the war period alone.

Under these nightmare conditions, far more LGBTQ people in Europe painstakingly hid their genuine sexuality to avoid suspicion, marrying members of the opposite sex, for example. Still, if they had been prominent members of the gay and trans community before the fascists came to power, as Berlin lesbian club owner Lotte Hahm was, it was too late to hide. She was sent to a concentration camp.

In those camps, gay men were marked with a pink triangle. In these places of horror, men with pink triangles were singled out for particular abuse. They were mechanically raped, castrated, favored for medical experiments and murdered for guards’ sadistic pleasure even when they were not sentenced for “liquidation.” One gay man attributed his survival to swapping his pink triangle for a red one – indicating he was merely a Communist. They were ostracized and tormented by their fellow inmates, too.

The looming danger of a backslide

This isn’t 1930s Europe. And making superficial comparisons between then and now can only yield superficial conclusions.

But with new forms of authoritarianism entrenched and seeking to expand in Europe and beyond, it’s worth thinking about the fate of Europe’s LGBTQ community in the 1930s and ‘40s – a timely note from history as Germany approves same-sex marriage and on this first anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges.

In 1929, Germany came close to erasing its anti-gay law, only to see it strengthened soon thereafter. Only now, after a gap of 88 years, are convictions under that law being annulled.



John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Climate and the G20 summit: some progress in greening economies, but more needs to be done

Protests at the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin, against the US withdrawal from the Paris climate change deal. Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

On July 7, G20 leaders will gather in Hamburg for their annual meeting. One likely outcome: another clash over climate change between the host government, Germany, and United States president Donald Trump.

As the Chinese did last year, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel has prioritised climate on the G20 agenda, just when the US administration is rolling back many environmental policies.
President Trump has announced that he wants his country to leave the Paris agreement, saying that the international accord is unfair to the US.

A report to evaluate progress

The question of what is fair in climate politics is hugely important.

Trump’s definition of fairness – “America First” – is probably not mutually acceptable to most other nations. But countries will hesitate to scale up their ambitions unless they are convinced that others are doing their fair share.

To address this question, we have put together our third annual stocktake on their progress in a report – coordinated by the global consortium Climate Transparency – that determines how far the G20 has come in shifting from fossil fuels to a low-carbon economy.

The report, compiled with 13 partners from 11 countries, draws on a wide spectrum of published information in four main areas (emissions, policy performance, finance and decarbonisation) and presents it concisely, enabling comparison between these 20 countries as they shift from dirty “brown” economies to clean “green” ones.

The G20 is crucial to international action on climate change. Together, member states account for 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and, in 2014, accounted for about 82% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.

All member countries signed on to the 2015 Paris agreement, with its long-term temperature goals of keeping global warming to below 2˚C, ideally limiting it 1.5˚C..

The G20 have also proven to be a nimble policy forum, where soft policy making can happen. And there is less concern than in the past that the group would seek to replace the multilateral process.
This means these governments must lead the way in decarbonising their economies and building a low-carbon future.

The beginning of a transition

According to the Climate Transparency report, the G20 countries are using their energy more efficiently, and using cleaner energy sources. Their economies have also grown, proving that economic growth can be decoupled from greenhouse gas emissions.

So we are beginning to see a transition from brown to green. But the report also reveals that the transition is too slow; it does not go deep enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals.
In half of the G20 countries, greenhouse gas emissions per capita are no longer rising. A notable exception is Japan, where emissions per person are ticking upward.

Canada has the highest energy use per capita, followed by Saudi Arabia, Australia and the US.
India, Indonesia and South Africa all have low energy use per capita (India’s per capita rate is one-eighth that of Canada). Poverty in these countries can only be addressed if people have access to more energy.

Today, renewable energy is increasingly the cheapest option. Still, we found that many G20 countries are meeting their increasing energy needs with coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

According to the Climate Action Tracker, which monitors progress toward the Paris agreement’s temperature goals, coal should be phased out globally by 2050 at the latest.

Between 2013 and 2014, the G20 countries’ public finance institutions - including national and international development banks, majority state-owned banks and export credit agencies - spent an average of almost US$88 billion a year on coal, oil and gas.

Yet many of the G20 countries are now looking at phasing out coal, including Canada, France and the UK, which have all established a plan to do so.

Coal power remains an important source of energy in some G20 countries. Author provided

Germany, Italy and Mexico, too, are considering reducing their use of coal or have taken significant action to do so. India and China continue to be highly dependent on coal but have recently closed and scaled back plans for a number of coal plants.

Countries at the bottom of the rankings are Japan, Indonesia and Turkey, all of which have substantial coal-plant construction plans, and Australia.

Subsidies

Despite their repeated commitment to phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, the G20 countries are still heavily subsidising fossil fuels. In 2014, together, the G20 provided a total of over US$230 billion in subsidies to coal, oil and gas.

Japan and China provided, respectively, about $US19 billion and $US17 billion a year in public finance for fossil fuels between 2013 and 2014.

There is good news, though: renewable energy is on the rise. The G20 countries are already home to 98% of all installed wind power capacity in the world, 97% of solar power and 93% of electric vehicles.

In most G20 countries, renewables are a growing segment of the electricity supply, except in Russia, where absolute renewable energy consumption has decreased by 20% since 2009. China, the Republic of Korea and the UK have all seen strong growth.

Generally, the G20 countries are attractive for renewable energy investment, especially China, France, Germany and the UK – although the UK has now abandoned its policy support for renewables.

National experts asked by Germanwatch, a Climate Transparency partner, generally agree that their respective G20 country is doing quite well on the international stage (with the exception of the US) but lack progress in ambitious targets and policy implementation.
China, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Mexico and South Africa are ranked the highest for climate action. Countries with the lowest climate policy performance are the US, Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Dealing with global data

Putting together this G20 stocktake has had its challenges. The choice of indicators involves value judgements, which often become only apparent once national experts begin discussing them.

Enabling the international comparisons necessary to measure progress on climate requires information that is accurate, verifiable and comparable. The underlying data comes from very diverse economies with different legal systems, different regulations and reporting methods.

International organisations, such as the International Energy Agency, have often done extensive and very careful work to develop comparable data sets but these may not always be consistent with data from in-country sources. Exploring these differences helps us to improve our understanding of the data and the underlying developments.

The existing reporting and review system of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the source of much of the data that makes these comparisons possible.

The real challenge the UNFCCC process faces in the next few years as it finalises the “rule book” for the Paris agreement is how to develop an enhanced transparency system that will be robust and detailed enough to provide the relevant information for its five-yearly assessment of global progress on addressing climate.

Even so, the UNFCCC is constrained by the extent to which countries are able to see beyond their narrow interests.

Independent assessments such as Climate Transparency’s, which remains mindful of different perspectives but is not limited by national interests, can play a vital role in helping to increase the political pressure for effective climate action.

Niklas Höhne, Professor of Mitigation of Greenhouse Gases, Wageningen University; Andrew Marquard, Senior Researcher on energy and climate change, University of Cape Town, and William Wills, Research Coordinator, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
This article was originally published on The Conversation.