Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
for climate change impacts typically assess the costs of local damages, including
infrastructure, and do not provide an adequate consideration of cascade effects
(for example, value-added chains and supply networks) at national and regional
scales' (Schellnhuber et al., 2012: xvii). Across the country, areas exposed to
frequent serious flood, coastal storms, and bushfires, will probably have to be
abandoned. Reconstruction will become unviable. Communities will move or
be uprooted. Weather-related insurance will be harder and more expensive to
get - and more households, communities and businesses will be left vulnerable
to having to meet the costs of damage and adaptation from their own resources.
Australian governments will be called on more frequently to fund emergency
relief and reconstruction at a time when revenues may remain under strain from
a general global economic downturn and the additional economic impacts of
global warming. Meeting these costs will require dedicated levies, steeper taxes
to fund adaptation and disaster relief, compulsory insurance - or the acceptance
that climate change will produce increased poverty and greater inequality in
life chances. Moreover, as Stern and Garnaut note, the longer mitigation and
adaptation are deferred, and the more that impacts are displaced on to future
generations (and other species), the greater the costs they will have to bear.
State governments are financially vulnerable to catastrophic climate-related
risks, while the Commonwealth is exposed through the Commonwealth's
National Disaster Relief Recovery Arrangements. It has been said that this
growing exposure points to the need for alternative 'risk transfer solutions',
perhaps via capital markets through new instruments such as new securities, like
a catastrophe bond (AOL/WSP, 2013: 6). One-off levies are ad hoc responses to
a pattern of crisis. Increasing pressure on limited state finances also points to the
need to create an additional source of funding - a Climate Adaptation Future
Fund - which will enable governments to reliably assist households, businesses
and communities with the future costs of adaptation, emergency relief and
reconstruction.
Beginning the shift
This chapter has suggested that an Australian 2020 emissions target which is
responsive to the findings of recent climate science and which reflects Australia's
economic and technological capacities would need to be no less than -41 per
cent below 2000 levels, and preferably closer to -45 per cent.
To achieve such a significant outcome, Australia needs simultaneously to
pursue two complementary approaches towards emissions reduction. Recent
research has indicated that, with a modest carbon price of around $25 per
ton, Australia has the potential to achieve up to 170 Mt CO
2
-e in emissions
reductions through improved domestic, industrial, transport and agricultural
infrastructure and energy efficient practices (CW, 2010). The second involves
the replacement of at least half of its fossil fuel power generation - which
in
toto
contributes approximately half of Australia's greenhouse emissions with
renewable energy - by 2020, including by employing additional measures such
