Australia, you have unfinished business. It’s time to let our ‘fire people’ care for this land

by David Bowman and Greg Lehman, The Conversation:  https://theconversation.com/australia-you-have-unfinished-business-its-time-to-let-our-fire-people-care-for-this-land-135196

Since last summer’s bushfire crisis, there’s been a quantum shift in public awareness of Aboriginal fire management. It’s now more widely understood that Aboriginal people used landscape burning to sustain biodiversity and suppress large bushfires.

The Morrison government’s bushfire royal commission, which began hearings this week, recognises the potential of incorporating Aboriginal knowledge into mainstream fire management.

Its terms of reference seek to understand ways “the traditional land and fire management practices of Indigenous Australians could improve Australia’s resilience to natural disasters”.

Incorporating Aboriginal knowledge is essential to tackling future bushfire crises. But it risks perpetuating historical injustices, by appropriating Aboriginal knowledge without recognition or compensation. So while the bushfire threat demands urgent action, we must also take care.

Accommodating traditional fire knowledge is a long-overdue accompaniment to recent advances in land rights and native title. It is an essential part of the unfinished business of post-colonial Australia.

Grant Stewart, a ranger from Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa. The benefits of Indigenous fire practices are becoming well-known. Louie Davis

A living record

Before 1788, Aboriginal cultures across Australia used fire to deliberately and skilfully manage the bush.

Broadly, it involved numerous, frequent fires that created fine-scale mosaics of burnt and unburnt patches. Developed over thousands of years, such burning made intense bushfires uncommon and made plant and animal foods more abundant. This benefited wildlife and sustained a biodiversity  of animals and plants.

Following European settlement, Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their land and the opportunity to manage it with fire. Since then, the Australian bush has seen dramatic  biodiversity declines, tree invasion of grasslands and more frequent and destructive bushfires.

In many parts of Australia, particularly densely settled areas, cultural burning practices have been severely disrupted. But in some regions, such as clan estates in Arnhem Land, unbroken traditions of fire management date back to the mid to late Pleistocene some 50,000 years ago.

Not all nations can draw on these living records of traditional fire management.

Indigenous people around the world, including in western Europe, used fire to manage flammable landscapes. But industrialisation, intensive agriculture and colonisation led to these practices being lost.

In most cases, historical records are the only way to learn about them.

Aborigines Using Fire to Hunt Kangaroos, by Joseph Lycett. Indigenous people have used cultural fire practices for thousands of years. National Library of Australia

Rising from the ashes

In Australia, many Aboriginal people are rekindling cultural practices, sometimes in collaboration with non-indigenous land managers. They are drawing on retained community knowledge of past fire practices – and in some cases, embracing practices from other regions.

Burning programs can be adapted to the challenges of a rapidly changing world. These include the need to protect assets, and new threats such as weeds, climate change, forest disturbances from logging and fire, and feral animals.

This process is outlined well in Victor Steffensen’s recent book Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia. Steffensen describes how, as an Aboriginal man born into two cultures, he made a journey of self-discovery – learning about fire management while being guided and mentored by two Aboriginal elders.

Together, they reintroduced fire into traditional lands on Cape York. These practices had been prohibited after European-based systems of land tenure and management were imposed.

Steffensen extended his experience to cultural renewal and ecological restoration across Australia, arguing this was critical to addressing the bushfire crisis:

The bottom line for me is that we need to work towards a whole other division of fire managers on the land […] A skilled team of indigenous and non-indigenous people that works in with the entire community, agencies and emergency services to deliver an effective and educational strategy into the future. One that is culturally based and connects to all the benefits for the community.

Making it happen

So how do we realise this ideal? Explicit affirmative action  policies, funded by state and federal governments, are a practical way to protect and extend Aboriginal burning cultures.

Specifically, such programs should provide ways for Aboriginal people and communities to:

• develop their fire management knowledge and capacity
• maintain and renew traditional cultural practices
• enter mainstream fire management, including in leadership roles
• enter a broad cross section of agencies, and community groups involved in fire management.

This will require rapidly building capacity to train and employ Aboriginal fire practitioners.

In some instances, where the impact of colonisation has been most intense, action is needed to support Aboriginal communities to re-establish relationships with forested areas, following generations of forced removal from their Country.

Importantly, this empowerment will enable Aboriginal communities to re-establish their own cultural priorities and practices in caring for Country. Where these differ from the Eurocentric values of mainstream Australia, we must understand and respect the wisdom of those who have been custodians of this flammable landscape for millennia.

Non-indigenous Australians should also pay for these ancient skills. Funding schemes could include training, and ensuring affirmative action programs are implemented and achieve their goals.

Involving Aboriginal people and communities in the development of fire management will ensure cultural knowledge is shared on culturally agreed terms.

Indigenous people should be employed in mainstream fire management. AAP/Darren Pateman

Fire people, fire country

In many ways, last summer’s fire season is a reminder of the brutal acquisition of land in Australia and its ongoing consequences for all Australians.

The challenges involved in helping to right this wrong, by enabling Aboriginal people to use their fire management practices, are complex. They span social justice, funding, legal liability, cultural rights, fire management and science.

Fundamentally, we must recognise that Aborigines are “fire people” who live on “fire country”. It’s time to embrace this ancient fact.

Andry Sculthorpe of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre contributed to this article.

What a sustainable circular economy would look like

by Anne Velenturf, The Conversation:  https://theconversation.com/what-a-sustainable-circular-economy-would-look-like-133808

More than 100 billion tonnes of materials entered the global economy in 2017 to generate power, build infrastructure and homes, produce food, and provide consumer goods such as clothes and phones. There are now more phones than people on the planet, and the amount of clothes purchased is forecast to reach more than 92 million tonnes by 2030.

Some estimates suggest that 99% of the things people buy is discarded within six months of purchasing without the material being recovered. That’s because we have what you might call a linear economy. It works by extracting resources and manufacturing products from them, that are sold to people and then generally disposed of after a short period of use.

But the COVID-19 pandemic has upended normal economic activity, dipping the global economy into what may become the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Rather than try to revive a system that’s inherently wasteful, the European Commission has vowed to build a sustainable circular economy post-pandemic.

A sustainable circular economy in which production and consumption are optimised and embedded in the natural environment. Anne Velenturf, Author provided

The idea of a circular economy is simple: to make better use of resources, close loops of resource flows by fully recovering materials instead of wasting them, and prevent waste and pollution by better design of products and materials and keeping them in use for longer.

Sounds great, but how might it work? Our research programme supported the implementation of a circular economy in the UK and we discovered that three broad types exist.

1. Closing loops with energy from waste

The first strategy to “close” loops of material flows is energy from waste (EfW) – burning discarded material to generate electricity. This has replaced landfill as the main processing method for household waste in the UK. Local authorities in the UK collect 26 million tonnes of waste per year, of which 11 million tonnes goes to EfW while three million tonnes ends up in landfill. Between three to six times more waste plastic, food and textiles go to EfW than are recycled. One and a half times more paper and card go to recycling as go to EfW.

The shift from landfill to energy from waste (million tonnes per year). DEFRA and WRAP/Phil Purnell, Author provided

Burning materials that could be recycled means everything invested in them is lost, such as money, energy, water and labour. Materials such as nutrients in food and fibres in textiles are then replaced by virgin resources, perpetuating the unsustainable impacts of resource extraction.

Although a recent inquiry suggests EfW may have some social benefits – like providing heat to fuel-poor households – it creates fewer jobs than recycling, reuse, repair and remanufacturing and releases greenhouse gases.

But investment in the UK favours EfW. It’s the path of least resistance, requiring hardly any changes to supply chains or how goods are consumed and disposed of. The UK is practically heading for this pseudo circular economy that is effectively unchanged from the linear take-make-waste model, fitting in with the prevailing short-term economic thinking and a singular focus on GDP growth.

2. A circular economy based on recycling

One step up from EfW is the recovery of materials – recycling. In England, the volumes of municipal waste and the proportion that is collected for recycling has remained more or less unchanged (42%) for the past ten years. Some recycling rates have gone up (eg. from 5% to 11% for food) but others have dropped (56% to 53% for paper and card).

Changes in recycling rates for materials collected by local authorities. DEFRA and WRAP/Phil Purnell, Author provided

Textiles are particularly poor. The average UK citizen buys  26.7 kg of clothing annually – the most in Europe – and one million tonnes are discarded each year in England. Most binned clothes are incinerated, and increasingly less are recycled (from 17% to 11% since 2010). The recovered fibres are normally suitable only for lower-value applications, such as carpets and insulation. New clothes rarely contain more than a few percent of recycled material, sustaining demand for virgin natural resources.

In a circular economy that relies on recycling to close loops, people aren’t forced to change how much stuff they buy, but manufacturers and waste management companies would change more radically. For example, drinks bottles often use different plastics for the body, cap and label. If these mix in the recycling process they reduce the quality of the recycled material, but separating them is awkward. All products should be redesigned to ensure they are recyclable.

Manufacturers should use more recycled material in new products too, creating markets for recovered materials. Massive investment in recycling infrastructure would be required though. Just to meet plastic packaging recycling targets, more than 50 new recycling plants would be needed in England.

Although recycling normally is less energy-intensive than processing virgin resources, it still uses a lot of energy which produces carbon emissions. Even if all recycling used  renewable energy, the new infrastructure would require vast amounts of virgin materials to be built. In developed countries the total amount of materials within the economy has to be reduced.

3. A sustainable circular economy

To achieve a truly sustainable circular economy, consumption and production practices would need to change together. A  sustainable circular economy involves designing and promoting products that last and that can be reused, repaired and remanufactured. This retains the functional value of products, rather than just recovering the energy or materials they contain and continuously making products anew.

We have to do more with less material and consume responsibly. For example, people in the UK should buy fewer new clothes and wear what they already have more often. Repairing and restyling our favourite clothes can also help to use them more and waste less.

New ways of consuming opens up opportunities for circular economy business models, such as leasing clothes and producing things that people need on demand only. Business models based on reuse, leasing, repair and remanufacturing could generate four times more jobs than waste treatment, disposal and recycling. They generate local economic activity, helping to strengthen relations within communities.

The transition towards an increasingly sustainable circular economy radically changes the purpose of the economy. Anne Velenturf, Author provided

A sustainable circular economy represents a new economic model in which the aim shifts from narrow GDP growth to “multi-dimensional progress” – the broader strengthening of environmental quality, human well-being and economic prosperity for current and future generations. Only such a circular economy could potentially regenerate the environment.

How we use resources has transformed our economy and society in the past. A circular economy offers us a chance to deliver sustainable benefits for the future. Let’s not waste it.

Germany Is Leading the World Toward a Green Recovery: As Europe’s biggest economy reboots, it - and many others - are planning to transition away from fossil fuels

by Mitch Anderson, Reasons to be Cheerful:  https://reasonstobecheerful.world/coronavirus-lockdown-germany-green-economic-recovery/

Residents in some of the most polluted cities in the world have been startled by an unfamiliar atmospheric phenomenon: blue skies. “I look at the sky quite often and enjoy its blueness from my balcony,” retired English professor Sudhir Kumar told the  New York Times from his home in Delhi. “I don’t know how long this will last, but right now I feel much better.” 

Across the world, coronavirus lockdowns, while severe in their human costs, are leading to ecological rejuvenation. Wild goats have been seen grazing in the deserted streets in a Welsh village. A kangaroo was spotted hopping through the streets of downtown Adelaide. In Hong Kong, a pair of pandas, relieved to finally have some privacy, conceived a baby.  

The lockdowns are temporary, however. To preserve some of the gains the natural world has made in our absence, economies will need to reopen as far greener engines than before. This won’t happen everywhere - the U.S., for instance, is already using the crisis to roll back environmental protections. But in many other countries, the reboot could end up pushing forward the world’s green transition faster than before.

Accelerate the change

Late last year, this transition was already getting underway. The European Union announced in December a €1 trillion  European Green Deal aimed at transforming almost all aspects of their economy. Described by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as “Europe’s man on the moon moment,” the EU’s 27 member states created a plan to achieve net carbon neutrality by 2050 by overhauling transportation, construction, agriculture and energy.

Recovery efforts “will not just be a question of carrying on as we did before the pandemic,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Credit: Dirk Paehr-Heine / Flickr

The coronavirus crisis could have derailed it. Instead, a growing number of European leaders, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are calling for this plan to be accelerated as part of the economic recovery. “All politicians of all levels will be asked by their citizens … that we recover quickly from the Covid crisis,” said European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans last month. “We can do it in two ways. We can repeat what we did before and throw a lot of money to the old economy, or we can be smart and combine this with the necessity to move to a green economy. I think this is a huge opportunity. In the European Union, we see the Green Deal as our growth strategy.”

That strategy may prove prescient. Last month, the International Energy Agency announced that the pandemic has radically reconfigured the world’s power production landscape. “The plunge in demand for nearly all major fuels is staggering, especially for coal, oil and gas. Only renewables are holding up,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “The energy industry that emerges from this crisis will be significantly different from the one that came before.”

One country betting big on this future is Germany, Europe’s biggest economy. In a video summit on April 23, Chancellor Angela Merkel said recovery efforts “will not just be a question of carrying on as we did before the pandemic.”  

“The goal is a green recovery,” emphasized the German environment ministry.

Germany is planning to use the economic recovery to accelerate its transition to renewable energy. Credit: German Ministry of the Environment

Merkel called for the EU’s coronavirus recovery fund to invest in “climate action,” an aim that has the support of Germany’s business community. Over 60 German companies - including iconic brands like Bayer, ThyssenKrupp and Puma - issued a joint statement calling for any stimulus they receive to be tied to a green transition.

“We appeal to the federal government to closely link economic policy measures to overcome both the climate crisis and the coronavirus crisis,” they wrote. Some have offered specific proposals. Salzgitter, one of Germany’s biggest steel manufacturers, is lobbying the government to seize this moment to transition steel production from coal-powered to hydrogen-fueled.

Germany’s businesses aren’t alone. Fifty leading European financial firms recently endorsed a recovery plan to retrofit buildings, electrify transportation systems and build renewable energy and storage. They also propose decarbonizing industrial facilities, scaling up local food production and boosting research into new technologies such as hydrogen energy and non-carbon air transport. 

“The benefits of these green investments include improved air quality, population health and quality of life in cities. Successfully implementing this emergency plan will also give us greater legitimacy as active participants in the next European Green Deal,” read a statement from the Green Recovery Alliance, which includes the two largest insurance companies in Europe and several of the largest banks. “Let us use the present challenge we are facing together as an opportunity for us all to put the environment at the core of a collective rebound.”

Research co-authored by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern shows how going green in recovery can maximize the impact of any stimulus. The scholars interviewed 231 experts and examined over 700 stimulus plans since the 2008 economic meltdown, and found that investing in green projects will “create more jobs, deliver higher short-term returns per dollar spend and lead to increased long-term cost savings, by comparison with traditional fiscal stimulus … The Covid-19 crisis could mark a turning point in progress on climate change.” 

Even more of an outlier was where this advice was coming from. “The folks that they were surveying were not environmentalists and even environmental economists. They were … government finance economists and central bank officials,” noted Kathryn Harrison, professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. 

Even the International Monetary Fund - not always known for its forward-thinking approach to economic stimulus - is calling for recovery efforts to catalyze a green transition. “A ‘green recovery’ is our bridge to a more resilient future,” said IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva last month, echoing a similar sentiment expressed by the Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change, which collectively manages nearly half of all capital investments in the world worth over $34 trillion. “As governments pursue efforts to recover from this economic downturn, they should not lose sight of the climate crisis,” warned the IGCC In a May 4 statement. “Governments should avoid the prioritization of risky, short-term emissions-intensive projects.”

Such projects are already looking like riskier bets. Collapsing demand pushed prices for West Texas crude below zero, Exxon suffered its first quarterly loss in three decades and Shell was forced to cut investor dividends for the first time since World War II. Meanwhile, the sun keeps shining and the wind keeps blowing. Danish windmill giant Ørsted reported a  33 percent increase in profits over this time last year. Abu Dhabi Power Corporation is moving forward with the largest solar installation in the world aided by plunging production costs in the sector. The two-gigawatt project will provide power for only $1.35 per KWh - less than half that of coal generation.  

Credit: David Blaikie / Flickr

These tectonic technological shifts are driving public policy well beyond Europe. The ruling Democratic party in South Korea won a landslide re-election last month on its own Green New Deal platform. The country now aims to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, the first such pledge in East Asia. 

The moves are being driven by shifting public opinion among Korea’s politically active citizenry, as they are in cities around the world. Over half of the global population lives in cities with  dangerously poor air quality. In the last few months, billions have been able to breathe fresh air, many for the first time. A recent study documented how air pollution caused 8.8 million premature deaths in 2015 and reduced overall life expectancy by almost three years - as much as tobacco and HIV combined. Some researchers believe improved air quality due to lockdowns may have saved more lives than the quarantine itself.

No wonder 96 mayors from around the world have stated their intention to emerge their cities from the pandemic cleaner and greener than before. “We, as leaders of major cities across the globe, are clear that our ambition should not be a return to ‘normal,’” wrote the C-40 Cities coalition in a statement. “Our goal is to build a better, more sustainable, more resilient and fairer society out of the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.”

Representing over 700 million people and one-quarter of the global economy, these local leaders are now sharing ideas on how to pivot toward urban transformation. The easing of gridlock has allowed bold experiments that may persist after the lockdown. Milan has opened up 22 miles of streets for walking and cycling. The mayor of Paris dedicated 300 million euros ($325 million USD) towards expanding cycling lanes. Bogata is permanently closing 75 miles of streets to car traffic.

“There is now a hell of a lot of collaboration among very powerful politicians who do think a green economic recovery is absolutely essential,” said Mark Watts, the chief executive of C-40. “We are talking about collectively creating funds … which would then support electric vehicles, support rollout of cycle lanes [and] support retrofitting of buildings.”

Will the world be a greener place as a result of the pandemic? It’s too early to say for certain, and not all the news has been promising. In the U.S., the EPA suspended enforcement of environmental regulations, apparently at the request of the American Petroleum Institute. A $2.2 trillion aid package provided $500 billion in guaranteed loans to American businesses and $25 billion in grants to airlines, but zero funding to scale up renewable energy. 

But the pandemic has dramatically shifted our perspective on what kind of future is possible - a shift that is clearly reaching those who are in a position to shape that future. In this respite from the daily din, we hear the promise of what might be. Due to disease, emerging technology and dumb luck, a greener future may come sooner than expected.