Understorey: Five Climactic Reports

Understorey brings one report on five reports, all to do with the climate. The news is not good, but there is a glimmer of hope – if only Australia will join with it. There is the Sustainable Development Report for 2021, gives Australia 10 marks out of a hundred for its climate policies, plunging us into equal last place. There’s the Climate Change Performance Index, identifying Australia as a climate laggard, hooked on fossil fuels, rich, and wilfully ignorant about the climate action needs of the poorest nations to survive. Out only yesterday was Jubilee Australia Research Centre’s “Hot Money” report on Export Finance Australia’s gift to fossil fuel companies – maybe $1.69 billion of finance credit, 2009-2020, when renewables only managed $20 million over that time – or one eightieth of the coal, oil and gas level of financing. Report 4 is the leaked IPPC Report, due out in 2022, warning that the worst is yet to come, a future world beset by species extinction, widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, and inundated species. And so we finish with Report Number 5: in February 2021 the fifth United Nations Environment Assembly met, encouraging countries to be “Making Peace with Nature” to stave off species extinction, climate collapse and global pollution. So there are steps we can take. Understorey this week listens in to former Liberal opposition leader Dr John Hewson (speaking in Bowral in 2019 for a Climate Action Now Wingecarribee public forum); Stephan Singer, from Climate Action Network International, shares the latest Climate Change Performance Index in December 2020; and UN Secretary-General António Guterres urges us to act, at the time of the 5th United Nations Environment Assembly, in February 2021. No one can say Australia hasn’t been warned – or shown a way out. Image: A Glamorgan