Australia burned this spring. Not the regular fires that the country sees every year at the height of summer, but a conflagration. These were fires so hot they started their own thunderstorms, with associated lightning starting yet more fires. At one point, the combined fire front was 6,000 kilometres long. If you drove from Bonn to Madrid, back to Bonn and then returned to Madrid again, you’d still be almost 700km shy of the length of the front. So far six people have died.
Vast swathes of national parks, farmland and ecosystems have been destroyed. An estimated 1,000 koalas have died. Rainforests – places once described as “permanently wet” – burnt for the first time. More than 500 homes were lost. And it’s not even summer yet.
Bushfires of this scale are unprecedented in spring. Driven by increasingly hot days and one of the most extreme droughts ever recorded, now in its 36th month, the realities of climate change have arrived for the Australian people, flora and fauna.
The impacts go beyond the direct threat to lives, farms and businesses. Smoke from the fires has seen the air quality in Sydney the worst in the world in November .The threat to health led to dozens of schools being closed, a hospital evacuated, and more than twice the usual number of presentations to emergency departments for asthma and breathing difficulties.
Black carbon particles with the smoke plume were lofted 12-13km and were tracked by NASA across the Pacific, across South America and even detected above the southern Atlantic Ocean. ECO thinks Australia needs to act on climate to stop spreading smoke pollution particles to other nations along with its climate damaging greenhouse pollution (Cough Cough).
This is what ‘loss and damage’ due to climate change looks like in nations like Australia. But will it change the stance of the Australian Government? ECO believes there is an urgent need to set up a financing facility under the Warsaw International Mechanism to deliver new and additional finance to address loss and damage in developing countries, who cannot rebuild as Australia can. This should include new and innovative sources of finance to generate additional resources (such as levies on air and maritime transport, and climate damages tax on fossil fuels) at a scale of $US50billion by 2022. The Australian delegation has undoubtedly seen the damage done by climate change in their very own backyards, surely it is not a stretch for them to support the delivery of very real support for their Pacific neighbours?
This year, the Australian delegation will be led by their Energy Minister Angus Taylor, whose record of inaction on climate change speaks for itself. Australians need action on climate change urgently, with the height of summer yet to come. ECO calls on Mr Taylor to stop his political point scoring and instead to deliver real and meaningful action on climate change, restart Australia’s contribution to the GCF and support serious action on loss and damage. Australia has a burning need for it.