Adaptation To Global Warming in Australia

Adaptation To Global Warming In Australia

According to non-governmental organisations such as Greenpeace and global scientific organisations such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the frequency and intensity of disasters brought about by greenhouse gas emissions and climate change will grow rapidly in the world. The risks are particularly severe in some regions of Australia, such as the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, the Macquarie Marshes in New South Wales. The Department of Climate Change said in its Climate Change Impacts and Costs fact sheet: "...ecologically rich sites, such as the Great Barrier Reef, Queensland Wet Tropics, Kakadu Wetlands, Australian Alpine areas, south-western Australia and sub- Antarctic islands are all at risk, with significant loss of biodiversity projected to occur by 2020". It also said: "Very conservatively, 90 Australian animal species have so far been identified at risk from climate change, including mammals, insects, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians from all parts of Australia." Australia is already the driest populated continent in the world.

Climate change is recognised as one of the largest global crises. The issue has gained traction around the world as the world becomes increasingly urbanised. This is because urbanisation brings irreversible changes in our patterns of resource/waste production and consumption. Therefore, how to plan, manage and live in cities in the light of global warming largely determines and depends on the progress of the climate change phenomenon.

According to projections by the Department of Climate Change in Australia, it is expected that national average temperatures would increase by 0.4 to 2.0 °C . Rainfall patterns and the degree of droughts and storms brought about by extreme weather conditions are likely to be affected.

Research has suggested that nearly three quarters of global energy consumption occur in cities, while emissions of greenhouse gases that cause global warming come from urban areas. Nearly a third of these emissions are caused by the burning of fossil fuels used in urban transportation. Another third is formed from the energy used to regulate building temperature and to run personal appliances. The final third is contributed by the industrial sector. The main emitters of greenhouse gases are the construction, real estate, agriculture and metallurgical industries, the transportation sector, the industrial uses of fossil fuels and the burning of biomass. Some examples of daily activities that contribute to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere include the use of carbon-based electricity in street lighting, driving motor vehicles, cooking, and the lighting, heating and cooling of housing.

If the policies of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries remain unchanged, specifically Australia and the United States, and also China and India, carbon dioxide emissions, which represents 72% of all greenhouse gas emissions, will increase by a third in the year 2020 instead of the 5% reduction as was approved in the Kyoto Protocol.

With the current path of climate change, the world population is entering an era of growing urban vulnerability. The accelerated pace of urbanisation and the fact that a growing segment of the world's population now live in cities has significantly increased the vulnerability of urban areas as anthropogenic hazards and agents for climate change. It will become increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is caused by humans and what is natural because both risks are overlapping.

Read more about Adaptation To Global Warming In Australia:  Five Dangers of Climate Change, Reducing Emissions of Greenhouse Gases, Adaptation, Projects Concerning Adaptation To Climate Change in Australia, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words adaptation to, adaptation, global, warming and/or australia:

    The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.
    Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)

    In youth the human body drew me and was the object of my secret and natural dreams. But body after body has taken away from me that sensual phosphorescence which my youth delighted in. Within me is no disturbing interplay now, but only the steady currents of adaptation and of sympathy.
    Haniel Long (1888–1956)

    Ours is a brand—new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased, “space” has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening.
    Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)

    Under that wide hearth
    a nest of rattlers,
    they’ll knot a hundred together,
    had wintered and were coming awake.
    The warming rock
    flushed them out early.
    Robert Morgan (b. 1944)

    I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)