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Wildcards face those planning expansion
Climate change will create a whole new set of parameters for the way Australia is planned and developed—and perhaps nowhere more so than in the tropical far north. Although recent months have seen revised interest in capitalising on the north’s vast water resources to support a greatly enlarged agricultural industry, predicted changes to the region’s future weather patterns could severely hamper the types of developments being envisioned today.
Even before the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report, warning signals about the north’s climatic wildcards were being issued by the CSIRO. CSIRO researchers have found that over the next 50 years, the region will need to brace itself for prolonged heatwaves, more cyclones, serious coastal flooding and erosion, fierce bush fires, and an entirely new selection of tropical diseases ranging from malaria and dengue fever to Japanese encephalitis and scrub typhus.
(For the first time this wet season WA health authorities also detected northern mosquitos carrying Kunjin—a virus similar to Murray Valley encephalitis.
No one has yet done the research on what the new weather patterns will do to commercial crops, but the CSIRO report does expect the impact to be tough on people, livestock, native fauna and flora. (The report is particularly concerned with the impact climate change will have on the 100,000 indigenous people who live in northern Australia’s remote communities. For more details download TransScan June 2007.)
The report’s author, Dr Donna Green, of the CSIRO’s Marine and Atmospheric Research division goes so far as to suggest that one group of northern Australians—those living in the low-lying islands of the Torres Strait—are likely to be the first in the country who will be obliged to adopt “radical strategies to adapt to climate change”.
Nonetheless the ferocity of Australia’s southern drought has encouraged increasing numbers of southern farmers to “look to the north” as a possible option for securing a reliable supply of fresh water.
At the same time, the Federal Government has established a “Northern Development Taskforce” to determine the prospects of tapping more of the region’s wet season rains and perhaps turning the North into “the future home of Australian farming”.(4)
Of course the north has already tapped some of that wet-season rain through the Ord River Irrigation Scheme. The ORIS now supports a $55 million p.a. industry of tropical agriculture with more expansion planned.
But the taskforce has bigger ideas. As its chairman, Senator Bob Heffernan explained to the ABC: “The terms of reference would be to look at the water resources of the three great catchments of the north: the Timor, Gulf and North Eastern Catchment, which together contain 60 per cent of Australia’s runoff of approximately 260,000 or 270,000 gigalitres of water, and look to see how we can combine that with the land resources of the north to value-add.
“This is the greatest adventure that Australia will embark on since Captain Cook decided that Australia should settle on the coast in the southeast.”
Without doubt such ideas have received an enthusiastic reception from some Kimberley business leaders. One Government official in the region reported the concept was prompting predictions of “new northern cities” being built—just to meet the demands of agricultural expansion.
But while “populating the north” has long had a popular following, the north now looks like becoming an even tougher place to settle. In fact according to Dr Green’s report, it may well turn out that if large numbers of people are moved it will be for the purpose of a future internal re-settlement in the region.
Not only could climate change turn some islands of the Torres Strait uninhabitable, but also the harsher weather could so impact remote aboriginal communities on the mainland that they too will need special assistance. That would include finding somewhere else for the communities to live with all the social and cultural disruptions that such a move would imply.
More will become known when another regional climate change study is completed. The State Government has just given the go-ahead for a five-year intensive research program by scientists from Indian Ocean Climate Initiative—a partnership between the WA Government, CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.
It was this group of scientists which pinned down the causes of changing weather conditions in the State’s south-west and the group which is now predicting that by 2030 the south-west’s winter rainfall could reduce by as much as 20%.
But in the north, the research group are hoping to go further. They will not just be looking at the local impact of global climate change but also at the possible impact on the region if Asia is able to rid itself of its “brown haze”—the pollution cloud caused largely by vehicle and industrial emissions.
As the February edition of TransScan reported (“Pollution and WA’s rain” page 18) if Asian governments are successful in solving the problem, then northern areas of WA will lose the benefits of the cooling effects of the haze—and the extra rain it helps to generate in Australia’s central region.
The scan also showed:
Is the north hiding oil?
With or without an agricultural expansion on the scale that Senator Heffernan has proposed (see above) the north today is booming. Within the region’s WA sector, 2008 will see developers starting work on the new farms that will more than double the size of the Ord River irrigation scheme. An extra 16,000 hectares of irrigated land is to be added to the scheme north of Kununurra. Today the existing irrigation area covers just 13,000 hectares although it generates earning of $55 million a year—primarily from sugar cane, chickpeas, hybrid seeds, melons and citrus trees. Meanwhile in Broome, the pearling and resort town has become one of the country’s fastest growing tourist centres. In March, WA’s Tourism Minister Sheila McHale, announced that Broome had 10 tourism projects either planned or under construction, worth more than $115million. Broome is also a magnet for growing numbers of “grey nomads”. In the resource sector the Argyle diamond mine is expanding and already contributes $30 million annually to the region in locally purchased goods and services. But when it comes to reshaping the north, the resource sector has a wildcard of its own that could profoundly affect the future. In a recent letter to the Federal Treasurer, State Treasurer Eric Ripper pointed out the possibility of petroleum discoveries in the Browse Basin off the Kimberley coast. If the explorers find major deposits, the need for infrastructure investment would be huge.
Water problems
The Northern Development Taskforce is not the first to assess whether the “empty north” can be turned over to farming. Back in 1947 when Nugget Coombes was Director General of Post War Reconstruction, much of the north was surveyed as far south as Katherine to pinpoint suitable farmland. But according to Libby Robin, a senior fellow with the ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society, the researchers found that only a quarter of the area offered “good prospect for dryland agriculture”. Speaking on ABC Radio National, Ms Robin said another problem is that today there is much more scientific knowledge available—and that would further limit the amount of northern land that could actually be developed. For example, areas along the Daly River southwest of Darwin were long viewed as potential farmland. But hydrology studies have shown that because of the presence of limestone, the Daly’s waters are dominated by calcium and magnesium ions. That makes the river unlike any others in Australia where sodium and chloride predominate. “Such ‘local’ bio-physical factors make the basin uniquely vulnerable to pollution from fertilisers and erosion-causing sediments—and therefore particularly unsuitable to farming,” says Ms Robin.
Existing industries threatened?
Other scientists have doubts that broad scale farming will work without causing considerable damage to the environment and local industries. Dr Michael Douglas, director of the Tropical Rivers and Coastal Research Hub at Charles Darwin University told ABC Science Online that the threat would come if any attempts were made to change the flows of existing northern rivers. “If you affect the fish in those systems, if you affect the wetlands and the productive parts of those systems, then ultimately, you’ll start to affect the industries that rely on those, so the recreational, commercial fisheries, the prawn fisheries and also the tourism that relies on those.”
Tapping a floating expertise
Apart from water, one thing the north has no lack of is “grey nomads”—at least 50,000 of the retired “50-or-60-somethings” are estimated to visit the region every year. So should anything be done to tap into this floating skills base to assist remote area development? According to Associate Professor Rosemary Leonard from the University of Western Sydney, most nomads when questioned like the idea of using their skills to help. A research study she is conducting with others from Sydney’s University of Technology and Volunteering Australia has found, for example, that most nomads would be happy to assist aboriginal communities through local land care projects, recreational area development and by teaching short courses in the nomad’s own area of expertise. Volunteer Australia is expecting to publish the “Grey Nomad Study” later this year.
Fatal attractions
There are other wildcards associated with global warming that could directly impact the north and its vast supplies of fresh water. In April they were spelt out in another context in the US Senate when a bipartisan resolution was passed requiring the country’s intelligence agencies to pool resources and produce an assessment of the security threats posed by global climate change.” According to co-sponsor of the resolution, Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat Illinios: “Many of the most severe effects of global warming are expected in regions where fragile governments are least capable of responding to them. Failing to recognise and plan for the geopolitical consequences of global warming would be a serious mistake.”
Decentralising pollution
ShenZhen, the fast growing Chinese city that does much to drive WA’s resources boom, has just announced radical plans for “decentralisation”. For years, ShenZhen just north of Hong Kong in Guangdong province has been one of the powerhouses of China’s economic expansion. Naturally enough it has also inherited a legacy of polluting and labour intensive industries. But a new list of planning goals just issued by the city government has put those industries on notice that they are to be found a new home away from the city centre. “The government will gradually guide the city’s companies to move out of town their labour-intensive assembly lines and retain their headquarters, research and development centres, procurement centres and financial centres in ShenZhen,” the government said in a media statement.
