Climate change is leaving its mark on Australia in diverse ways - from floods and deadly heatwaves to vanishing beaches. Sydney Correspondent Jonathan Pearlman looks at how it is changing the country's landscape and way of life.
Straits Times 10 Mar 12;
SYDNEY: Tourists and locals have long spent summers lazing on the lush stretch of golden sand at Kingscliff Beach on Australia's east coast, home to one of the country's oldest surf clubs.
Now the beach is gone. Hundreds of thousands of cubic m of sand have been swept away into waters to the north.
Mr Richard Adams, who runs a holiday park overlooking what used to be the 60m-deep beach at Kingscliff in northern New South Wales, said: 'This was all thick, fluffy, white sand, not this white water. It used to be one of the best beaches in Australia.'
Indeed, some of the most popular surfing and holiday spots along the coast have disappeared. Of 309 regularly frequented beaches, 38 now have beach areas that have shrunk to 10m or less.
'It was heartbreaking to watch,' said Ms Dot Holdom, who has lived in Kingscliff for 30 years. 'You're torn between Mother Nature and watching something that you love falling away. We have a love affair with the sea and the beaches, but we can't do any more what we have done in the past.'
The disappearance of beaches on this island continent is a dramatic sign of the changing climate and increasingly extreme weather - not a distant threat, but an unfolding danger taking a growing toll. Inland, there is more evidence - heavy rain and flooding are changing the face of the driest of Earth's inhabited continents.
Indeed, as I was surveying the lost beach of Kingscliff last month, record flooding struck inland, just a few hours' drive away. In the Queensland town of Roma, one woman stuck in her car with her seven-year-old son died after insisting that rescuers take him first.
Last week, the rain struck again, killing three people and causing the evacuation of thousands more across the three eastern states of New South Wales (NSW), Queensland and Victoria.
Even so, the human toll this summer was nowhere near as tragic as the Queensland floods of 2010 that killed dozens, virtually wiped out the entire town of Grantham, and brought the state capital Brisbane to a standstill as the city's main river overflowed and swamped suburbs.
Irony of flood and drought
THE cost of the damage to cotton, sugar, grain and livestock farmers, home owners, businesses and miners, as well as the tourism industry is still being counted - but the toll has been estimated at A$30 billion (S$40 billion).
Such floods have been occurring on the continent for thousands of years, but scientists say they are occurring more often and becoming more severe.
In the past 30 years, the El Nino and La Nina weather events that cause drought and flooding have been more frequent. In the past 18 months, Australia has endured two La Ninas - leading to the nation recording its wettest two-year period since instrumental records began in the 1880s.
It has all happened almost exactly as predicted by climate scientists when they first spelled out the long-term risks in the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990.
'Since about 1990, all the climate models have been producing the same or similar results, and that's what we are seeing now,' said climatologist Karl Braganza. 'There is more heavy rain in the tropics, as well as more drought in southern Australia.'
A great irony has played out across the country in the past two decades: While some areas have been inundated by sudden deluges and record flooding, others have become so dry that they have forced farmers off the land and devastated the nation's food bowl. The Murray-Darling basin, a land mass of more than a million sq km that produces 45 per cent of the nation's food, has seen less and less rain since 1990. Rivers ran dry and farmland turned to scrubland. It was the worst drought in 117 years of recorded history.
Water supplies to the cities plummeted. State authorities, fearing they were about to run out of water, began to spend billions of dollars on desalination plants. In Melbourne, where newspapers ran daily dam levels on the front page, there were bans on watering sports fields and households were restricted to watering their gardens twice a week.
The drought finally broke in 2010, cruelly, with floods that, for some farmers, were equally crushing. 'It is devastating,' said farmer Tony Wass, during flooding in NSW in 2010. 'For people having gone through a decade of drought, then to be looking at having one of the best harvests possibly ever, and then to have that snatched away - it's just heartbreaking.'
The drying up of the rivers and wetlands in the nation's heart left state governments and farmers battling over the dwindling water supply. It forced farmers to uproot and the nation to reconsider whether it can really think of itself as a country whose soul is on 'the land'.
Now the coastal cities face challenges that are no less daunting. As waters rise around a country where more than 80 per cent of the population live on the coast, the consequences are set to be catastrophic.
Entire suburbs of Sydney and other major cities are expected to be under water by the end of the century. Modelling by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency has provided a grim forecast of what could disappear: up to 247,600 houses, 33,000km of roads, 1,500km of rail lines and tramways and 14,800 business properties.
The analysis, released in a report last year, said that natural disasters cost Australia about A$1 billion a year but this will 'double or more in the next few decades' - and hundreds of billions of dollars of assets will be at risk.
'The exposure of coastal assets to sea-level rise associated with climate change is widespread and the hazard will increase into the future,' it said. 'Exposure will also increase as the population grows. Greater than A$226 billion in commercial, industrial, road and rail, and residential assets are potentially exposed to inundation and erosion hazards at a sea-level rise of 1.1m.'
This sort of threat is not merely a danger to property and infrastructure - it is a threat to the nation's way of life. Local councils have begun identifying areas at risk from storms, king tides and overloaded creeks and drains, which could then be used to eventually ban future development and even relocate housing.
Similar measures have been taken against bush fires which have ravaged parts of Australia in recent years. The country's worst bush fire occurred just three years ago, on Feb 7, 2009, when 173 people were killed and 2,000 homes lost in Victoria. But fires and heatwaves are set to become more severe and more extreme.
A report released last November by PricewaterhouseCoopers and government and meteorology experts said the government should consider a 'national heatwave plan', including public air-conditioned cooling rooms to provide respite from 45-plus deg C days. Other proposals included early warning systems and programmes adopted by cities such as Shanghai and Chicago to increase vegetation and promote rooftop gardens.
Associate Professor Janette Lindesay, a climate change scientist at the Australian National University, said: 'In Australia, because of where we sit, we get it all. We have tropical and subtropical systems - we straddle a whole range of latitudes and are prone to a high degree of variability in rainfall from year to year.'
She said Australia has been experiencing more extreme versions of cyclical weather patterns - and the trend will only worsen. 'What we are seeing and can continue to expect is increased variability - the floods and droughts are more extreme,' she added.
For some Australians, the effects are in plain sight. At the Kingscliff holiday park, where dozens of beachside cabins have been torn down or swept away, occupancy rates have fallen this year.
Professor Rodger Tomlinson, one of Australia's leading experts on coastal erosion, would not predict if the beaches would ever return to their former beauty.
'We don't know,' he said. 'We had pretty calm weather throughout the last three decades - now we are moving back into an era of stormy conditions, especially with La Nina.'
The only exception to the downturn in the numbers coming for the sand and surf is a new type of visitor - 'disaster tourists'. They are keen to see first-hand the beach that no longer exists.
Still, the residents along the coast are not yet ready to make a retreat - in part, perhaps, because there is nowhere to run.
On the balcony of Kingscliff's surf club, which locals jokingly say may have to be turned into a yacht club, Ms Holdom looks out at what was once the beach.
'Things here have not ended - they have just changed,' she said. 'People have had to adapt. To think that these things won't happen where you live is a flight of fancy.'
