Photo: A high, high tide on the Gold Coast.
Is this what rising sea-levels will look like?
by Brendan Condon
I have just returned back from a month travelling over 6000 kilometers across our vast and beautiful country, scoping the route for the national Run for a Safe Climate. I started at Cooktown in Far North Queensland, through the Wet Tropics and Daintree, along the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef, Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra. From here I headed to the alpine areas, spent a glorious two days in the rooftop of Australia at Kosciusko and picked up the pristine waters of the Upper Murray and followed it across three states to the Coorong, heading back to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road. On the way I met indigenous landowners, surfers, farmers, emergency service workers, politicians and the climate and sustainability community. At each community I visited I worked hard to establish what the impacts of global warming are for that region, what is at risk, who are the people rising to the challenge, what are the likely clean energy and climate solutions for that region.
This huge trip is a journey that every Australian should do – travel the length of the country and talk to our scientists and solutions experts, and visit our agricultural regions, communities and ecosystems at great risk, and see the enormous potential for Australia to move to a safe climate future. Not everyone has the time to do such a trip, so the Run for a Safe Climate will make it easy for you – by bringing this story to your desktop, laptop and handset, in blogs and tweets and images and film and words, interpreted by the emergency services workers who are performing this staggering physical feat. They are not climate experts – they are ordinary people like you and I, except they have been dealing with global warming in a very direct way, by responding to extreme climate events like the February Black Saturday fires. Through them we hope this story comes through loud and clear.
One of the really positive things coming from my national trip was to meet some of the wonderful scientists and researchers working on assessing the risk profile for Australia in coming decades, mapping the impacts that are happening now, and understanding the changes we will need to make quite quickly to implement a thorough solutions framework for a safe climate for Australia. This trip helped me to understand what the experts mean when they say that Australia is the country most at risk to global warming – we are clearly highly vulnerable and dramatic changes have happened already. On the positive, it has also helped me understand that if we as a society choose to take comprehensive action, Australia can quite quickly become a leader in the global movement towards a sustainable, safe climate future. Through the run you will hear from these scientists and experts – everything from how to sink large amounts of carbon in soils, how does solar thermal and wind power work, how do we integrate clean energy sources with a national smart grid to power a clean future, what are the risk profiles for our very large coastal cities and our national “food bowl.”
By following this national odyssey, you will be with us when we are in the Daintree Rainforest and at the Heron Island Research Centre on the Great Barrier Reef, or running across our national food bowl through the Murray Darling Basin. You will be at the wind farms and solar thermal plants, and in zero carbon houses and carbon sinking farms. It is critical that our whole community learns a lot about global warming risks and solutions quickly as time is running out to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change, so our group is putting their bodies on the line to link our national climate change story across vast distances, to bring these places to you, and to provide a platform for the best information on the science and solutions. We look forward to meeting you all at the community engagement events we will hold over the length of the run.
The run will be solutions focused and apolitical – and a challenge to all Australians to step up to the challenge of reclaiming a safe climate. We hope this run assists us to raise the funds for Safe Climate Australia, which is pulling together some of the best brains in Australia to develop a comprehensive solutions framework for Australia to deal with the threat of global warming. If we get the support and raise our budgets we will be able to deliver this transition plan within 12 to 18 months time. We hope you can help us get there.
Global warming is the outstanding community safety issue facing Australia, and one we can move on decisively and quickly. Through our run you will find out how you can become part of the climate solution. We look forward to having you with us on this great adventure.
