117 / Population & Climate - any correlation?
When we discuss that Australia's population will reach appr. 36 million in 2050, what does that have to do with climate predictions?
Thanks for asking. Clive Hamilton says it has everything to do with climate and climate change (I have blogged before about his book Requiem for a Species). In that debate we seem to predict that in 2050 Australian society will have grown and with it our affluence, other than that things will have stayed the same, more or less. But the fact is climate change will mean our world will look radically different then. Australia would hardly be able to support its current level - 22m - of population, let alone 50% more. Read on, if you're interested in whether climate change will affect us …
Population debate misses the facts - SMH, by Clive Hamilton, April 19, 2010
If further proof were needed that, despite
their pious words, our political leaders do not take climate change seriously,
the recent population debate provides it.
The argument over whether we should aim for 36
million people by the middle of the century is conducted as if the world in
2050 were going to be a richer version of what we have now. This is the grand
delusion of the climate change debate.
None of our political or business leaders is
listening to what the scientists are saying. More surprisingly, nor are our
leading demographers, economists and Treasury officials. All have joined the
debate but seem oblivious to the sort of world the growing population is
expected to inhabit.
In truth, Australians in 2050 will be living in
a nation transformed by a changing climate, with widespread doubt over whether
we will make it to the end of the century in a land that is recognisably
Australian.
Over the next decades hundreds of thousands of
Australians will try to escape those parts of the continent that have become
too unpleasant or dangerous to live in and migrate to those that have better
water supplies, fewer days of extreme heat and adequate protection from floods,
fires and rising seas.
What will drive these waves of internal
migration? No one has studied it in detail, but the primary factors are well
known.
The Garnaut Review anticipates the drying of the
Murray-Darling Basin will end irrigated agriculture and reduce the population
of the region. Water shortages in Perth and Adelaide will make them less
liveable.
Elsewhere, severe impacts of a changing climate
on industries as diverse as livestock, wheat farming, wine-growing and tourism
will cause some regions to decline as employment opportunities shrink.
Many low-lying coastal regions will become
unsuitable for habitation as seas rise and storm surges damage infrastructure,
commercial buildings and housing. Increases in the number and intensity of
extreme floods - especially in Queensland - will render some areas unsuitable
for development. Declining services and the difficulty of insuring against
losses will induce many to move. The high risk of extreme fires will make many
regional areas too dangerous for habitation.
Many Australians will be on the move. But where
will they go? Many will be leaving the wide brown land for the narrow green
strip down the eastern seaboard, and many more will be heading from the north
of the green strip to cooler southern climes. As less of the continent is suitable for human
habitation, the pressure on southern cities and regional areas will become
intense. And it won't let up any time soon.
We are also likely to face more pressure to
accept people displaced from low-lying Pacific islands inundated by rising
seas. Tuvalu is already asking Australia to accept homeless islanders as its
atoll sinks. In 2008, the Maldives government said it was looking to buy real
estate to establish a new homeland and Australia was on the list of potential
targets.
We will be lucky if we can restrict our
obligations to climate refugees from our immediate region and not have to deal
with a tide of people forced out of the mega-cities of south-east Asia and
China, where 100 million people will be displaced by a metre rise in
sea-levels, the expected rise this century even if the world could agree on
drastic emission cuts.
Yet the population debate is carried on as if
all this is irrelevant, as if Australia in 2050 or 2100 will be as it is today
but with higher living standards.
It is not only the impacts of a changing climate
that escape our leaders' comprehension, but the implications of a rapidly
expanding population for climate policy.
The Labor government has committed to reducing
Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, from about 500
million tonnes to about 200 million tonnes. With a population of 22 million
that means we would be allowed nine tonnes each every year. If there are 36 million of us we will be allowed
5.5 tonnes each.
In truth, 60 per cent is not enough. However
much we are forced to cut our emissions, doubling the population means halving
the emission we are allowed each year.
So when Kevin Rudd says he believes in ''a big
Australia'' he is promising us a future with many more people squeezed into an
ever-shrinking patchwork of liveable areas. The quality of life we value so
much will become a scarcer commodity.
Clive Hamilton is the author of Requiem for a
Species and a panellist in a Sydney Writers' Festival
event on May 21: ''Have We All Been Conned?''