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**Short article on the Webblog**
Posted by Anouk Liautaud on 2008/09/26
Dr. Melissa Nursey-Bray
Director, Social Science for Climate Change Research Network (SSCCRN)
National Centre for Marine Conservation and Resource Sustainability Australian Maritime College
University of Tasmania, Australia
Introduction
Climate change is a global problem that affects everyone. Globally, 1.2 billion people live within 100 km of the coast. Indeed, these populations are increasingly being exposed to natural event such as flooding, tsunamis, hurricanes and the introduction of marine related disease (Adger et al. 2005). The costs of addressing climate change however are likely to fall disproportionately on local government, industries, communities, and workers. Responding to these changes will require more than good science, but the development of institutional strategies and political solutions that address the social, cultural and economic factors that profoundly influence how a problem of this magnitude can be resolved at local levels.
Challenges for Local Governments: Climate Change, Threatened Species and Management
Local governments face many challenges in dealing with climate change. These include the range of available technological options, (ii) the available resources and their distribution across the municipal population, (iii) the structure of critical institutions and the criteria for decision making, (iv) the human and social infrastructures, (v) the access to risk-spreading mechanisms, (vi) the ability of decision-makers to manage credible information and their own credibility, and (vii) the public’s perception of the source of the impact (Crabbe and Robin 2006). Overall, Australian local governments have recently been active in initiating policy responses to climate change. For example, in 1989, a coalition of 15 councils formed in NSW called the Sydney Coastal Councils (SCC) group. This group was designed to ‘promote co-ordination between member councils on environmental and natural resource management issues relating to the sustainable management of the urban coastal environment’ (SCC 2005). SCC has agreed on a collective approach to climate change. The Western Port Greenhouse Alliance (WPGA) is another example; a coalition of Victorian local governments, formed in June 2004 to establish a regional framework for local stakeholders to work together on greenhouse gas abatement and climate change projects in the Western Port region.
In Tasmania, research has found that while climate change is an established problem (DPIWE 2004, 2006, Sharples 2006), local government still face additional challenges in not knowing the exact range and scale of the predicted impacts of climate change in their own regions. Moreover, local planning schemes and state based instruments such as the State Coastal Policy, (currently under review) offer limited opportunity to build climate change management into existing frameworks. This has implications for the natural systems and species within them that local governments manage as well as implications for the people living alongside these systems, or wanting to move there. The widely held perception that Tasmania is a pristine and green place to visit and live adds to the pressure local governments face to facilitate management that ensures protection of threatened species and systems as much as ensuring livelihoods and social well being for their rate payers. For example, 600 species are listed as threatened in the Tasmanian Threatened Species Protection Act 1995. Many of these species are dependent on coastal, estuarine and marine habitats. Moreover, many threatened species that are land based, such as the Pedra Branca skink, the New Holland mouse and the striped marsh frog are in fact either island based or influenced by the sea. Other species such as Sub-Antarctic fur seal or the wandering albatross require healthy oceans and lands (where they breed). Totally marine species include the spotted handfish and the Port Davey skate.
For local governments living at the coal face of these regions, yet having limited responsibility over their management of the species, nonetheless have to manage the processes that impact on these species. Key processes include: (i) direct destruction of animals and plants, (ie via land clearing for development or dredging; (ii) the loss of habitat, (ie via siltation or excess nutrient loads; and (iii) compromise of breeding sites, hence inhibiting the capacity to breed adequately, (ie via disturbance of nesting sites). Finally, as with climate change, there are high levels of uncertainty about threatened species in Tasmania, so it is not only harder to build management regimes per se, but very difficult to manage the relationship between climate change and its possible impact on threatened species.
Nonetheless, despite these challenges, local governments are beginning to build their own solutions to managing climate impacts in their regions. These solutions are broad and able to encompass the different demands that are placed on them by both human and natural systems. In Tasmania, three local governments have developed different approaches.
Councils in Focus
Clarence Council
Clarence Council, located near Hobart, Tasmania has taken active steps to address climate change effects such as erosion and sea level rise along its foreshores by commissioning a socioeconomic assessment and response project for climate change impacts on Clarence Foreshores. The outputs from this project will inform the development of a coastal management strategy, based on a risk assessment of climate change impacts such as storm surges coastal erosion and sea level rise that may occur over the next 20 to 100 years. The social and institutional assessment project will complement and integrate with a scientific consultancy that involves identifying the hazards, analyzing the risks, evaluating the risks and identifying and assessing possible responses including their costs. This project is ongoing and due for completion in 2008. Kingborough Council Development in Kingborough Council, a local government near Hobart, Tasmania, is administered via the Kingborough Planning Scheme. This is the primary regulatory mechanism by which Council can take account of climate change. The Kingborough Planning Scheme addresses climate change and sea level rise in Schedule 1 of the Environmental Management Schedule, which says:
To avoid or mitigate the impacts of any potential rise in the level of the sea or ocean along the coast and inshore, particularly with respect to existing and future physical and social infrastructure.
Kingborough has embarked on a risk assessment process to enable it to assess risk in relation to climate change impacts. The risk assessment issue mainly relates to a mapping exercise to identify areas at risk across the municipality from flooding, storm surge, sea level rise and bushfire. This work has included estimations of the potential economic loss to Council owned assets that might be caused by predicted sea level rise. This is based upon a 800mm rise over 100 years. Council estimates indicate that overall, sea level rise has the potential to cost $50 million, and as such there is an incentive to implement management measures sooner rather than later. Kingborough aims to produce a tool that will help its staff to undergo a risk assessment process when they need to make an important decision, for example on a development application or over a natural ecosystem with threatened species.
West Tamar Council
West Tamar Council is another local government active in addressing climate change issues through amendments to its planning scheme. In this case, an application for a retirement village along the banks of the West Tamar River was rejected on the basis that it was within an area subject to the possibility of a 1 in 10 year flood and was likely also to be subject to climate change impacts. This decision was unanimously supported by the West Tamar Council in 2006.
The West Tamar Planning Scheme (2007) now has formal sections addressing climate change. For example, in the Strategic Directions sections that look at the protection of unique and finite resource, key action and indicator A5 is to “investigate the potential implications of sea level rise caused by climate change on the foreshore of the estuary and coast and ensure that development takes sea level rise into account”.
Summary
Addressing the issue of how to manage for climate change is a complicated challenge for local government because they have to address both human and ecosystem needs, yet their literal capacity to enforce regulations is limited when it comes to species management. Nonetheless, given that communities of treated specie swill be affected by climate change, adaptive mechanisms implemented by local government will need ot take account of this issue. In Tasmania, where the imperative remains to be seen as clean ad green, this creates even more pressure to address both human and natural systems in climate change decision making. A good start has been made.
References
1. Adger, W.N., Hughes, T., Folke, C., Carpenter, S. & Rockstrom, J. 2005. Social-ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters. Science: 309, No 5737, pp 1036 – 1039.
2. Crabbe, P. and Robin, M. 2006. Institutional Adaptation of Water Resource Infrastructures to Climate Change in eastern Ontario. Climatic Change, 78, pp. 103 – 133.
3. DPIWE. 2004. Sea level Change Around Tasmania, Hobart.
4. DPIWE. 2006. Draft Climate Change Strategy For Tasmania, Tasmanian Government.
5. Sharples, C. 2006. Indicative Mapping of Tasmanian Coastal Vulnerability to Climate Change and Sea-Level Rise: Explanatory Report (Second Edition); Tasmania
For further information on this article please contact: Dr. Melissa Nursey-Bray (m.nursey-bray@amc.edu.au or Mobile: 0437 738 635).
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