Climate change catastrophe: the importance of water

It isn’t that there is no good news available on the issue of water generally and its impact on rising sea levels. But why would we hear it when the wholesale plan of global media, the wealthiest few and politicians in the main, is that they want to bring it on. They want us to believe we are helpless. They want total control and where better to start than with water?

So you have to look between the cracks, for the hidden possibilities.
WATER: THE MISSING LINK TO SOLVE CLIMATE CHANGE A Global Action Plan is such a work. It describes the enormous impact of water runoff into the oceans on rising sea levels, the runoff being a consequence of  factors including deforestisation and, of course, urbanisation. The ways of dealing with this are incredibly simple and best for the land as well as for the ocean. After all, it is water that once upon a time stayed on the land. To quote:

November 2015: After five years of extreme drought, the long-desired rain is finally falling in California. What could actually be a blessing quickly develops into the next catastrophe. Torrential rain pours down onto desiccated land. In Lancaster, for example, 80 liters of rainwater per square meter fell in only half an hour. The rain hits sealed, developed, overgrazed, parched and hardened ground. Where once humus-rich forest floors absorbed and stored these waters, it now rushes down the slopes carrying with it the last remaining fertile soil. Straightened river beds are deluged, flooding streets and basements, causing millions of dollars in damages. The land is left even more bleak and barren.

What happens in California is the symptom of a global phenomenon. Forests are cut down; water is driven out as quickly as possible through drainage; soil is sealed; cities create “hot spots” whose thermal lift no longer allows the clouds to discharge its rain.

The author of this article Michal Kravcik, has been running one of those thankless campaigns that wonderful people around the world have committed their lives to: getting people to understand that they have power over water and how to exercise it.

People and Water NGO encourages Slovaks to take advantage of their newly-minted democracy by organizing town meetings where citizens questioned officials about the legality of water usage. As result, in November 1996, the Environmental Ministry canceled the dam proposal. It was Michal Kravcik, Chairman of People and Water NGO who showed how drinking reservoirs had not been used in full and how much water was wasted by an old and repair – needed distribution systems. His alternative plan outlined the repair of these problems while minimizing the impact on environment.

The mission of the undertaking “People And Water” is to provide services to municipal and rural communities, mostly within the Carpathian region. The goal is to solve the economic, social, cultural and environmental problems on a grassroots level by encouraging citizens to be active through development, renewal and promotion of the traditional culture and diversity of this region.

He participated in the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen from 7 – 18 December 2009 and, interviewed at the time, said

My expectations are simple: to incorporate in the Copenhagen Protocol a mechanism of using water for recovery of the climate based not only on local and regional – but also on continental and global level of the Planet Earth. Until now, all initiatives for solution of climatic changes addressed only CO2 reduction, and through this, to stop the breakup of the Earth´s climatic system.

Somehow we keep forgetting that water is the thermoregulator of heat. So where there is enough water, the landscape heats only slowly, while where is dry weather, the landscape overheats fast reaching big differences in temperature e.g. between night and day – or winter and summer. According to our estimates, each year over 700 billion m3 rainwater vanishes from continents – that in the past had been soaked and saturated in soil, and evaporated in the atmosphere. This is how rainwater kept the climate within limits – without any extreme floods, droughts or sudden shifts in climate.

It is hard not to smile when a person says his aim to save the planet is ‘simple’, but when you read about what he does and what others are also doing in micro ways around the world, the word that overwhelmingly applies is simple. It is all so simple that I’m starting to wonder why that explains how all these efforts are ignored by us. Because if the methods are simple and relatively non-technological, then what’s in it for big business? And if the answer is ‘nothing’, then one can see how the process of empowerment at local small level is never going to take on, certainly not in Australia.

Instead, Australia will stay as it is right now. Watching the burning, watching the drought, and hoping for handouts. Everything will be reactive, not proactive. We believe hogwash we’ve been told – it isn’t for us to change, there isn’t anything we can do, if the whole world does nothing, then what’s the point of us changing?

And while we sit about concurring on this, in the world there are villages in Slovakia, in India, in China, in Africa, which are dedicating their existence to changing how they do things….and it is working for them. But hey. Just because peasants in Africa, and India, and China, and Africa can backtrack on bad methods and turn arid land into that of green and plenty, why would we Australians be able to?

Catastrophic climate change: ideas for ‘making’ water

Rajendra Singh and the TBS have revolutionised the state of water in Rajasthan, India. They have done that by simple methods of low cost and low technology. This has led to their winning the Water ‘Nobel Prize’. The story starts like this, quoting wiki:

Alwar district, which once had a grain market, was at the time largely dry and barren, as years of deforestation and mining had led to a dwindling water table, minimal^{[clarification needed]} rainfall followed by floods. Another reason was the slow abandoning of traditional water conservation techniques, like building check dams, or johad, instead villagers started relying on “modern” bore wells, which simply sucked the groundwater up. But consistent use meant that these bored wells had to be dug deeper and deeper within a few years, pushing underground water table further down each time, till they went dry in ecologically fragile Aravalis. At this point he met a village elder, Mangu Lal Meena, who argued “water was a bigger issue to address in rural Rajasthan than education”.^[3] He chided him to work with his hands rather than behaving like “educated” city folks who came, studied and then went back; later encouraged him to work on a johad, earthen check dams, which have been traditionally used to store rainwater and recharge groundwater, a technique which had been abandoned in previous decades. As a result, the area had no ground water since previous five years and was officially declared a “dark zone”. Though Rajendra wanted to learn the traditional techniques from local farmers about water conservation, his other city friends were reluctant to work manually and parted ways. Eventually with the help of a few local youths he started desilting the Gopalpura johad, lying neglected after years of disuse. When the monsoon arrived that year, the johad filled up and soon wells which had been dry for years had water. Villagers pitched in and in the next three years, it made it 15 feet deep.^[5][1]

The battle was not just against nature, but was also political. Their efforts were being thwarted by mining. But unlike Australia, there is some backbone in parts of India to fight for water against mining interests.

A legal battle ensued, they filed public interest petition in the Supreme Court, which in 1991 banned mining in the Aravallis. Then in May 1992, Ministry of Environment and Forests notification banned mining in the Aravalli hill system all together, and 470 mines operating within the Sariska sanctuary buffer area and periphery were closed. Gradually TBS built 115 earthen and concrete structures within the sanctuary and 600 other structures in the buffer and peripheral zones. The efforts soon paid off, by 1995 Aravri became a perennial river.^[1][6] The river was awarded the `International River Prize’…

There is a lot more to the story, but for now observe that it is working. Areas that were bereft are now green again.

 

So, how about it, Australia??! If villagers in India can do this, why can’t we? As well as using low tech small scale methods, for harvesting rainwater, we also have the advantage of being able to build desalinisation plants and pipe water inland. Australia has to make water a priority, and it has to be a priority for the land itself, not for mining or other interests that are damaging to the land, to water supply, to food supply, to the very idea of existence in this country.

But perhaps Mimmi Jain has the last word on that:

“How can we make this movement – the bringing back of resource ownership into the hands of the common man – global? In India it’s possible. Is it possible in the west? That’s a tricky question, because it’s a different kind of system altogether. You have privatisation of companies, lots of vested interests, lots of big corporations. It’s a really stuck system,” she said.

The Australian population has to take control of water. It has to incorporate it into the notion of ‘rights’ both for us and for the water systems themselves. Question is, do we have what it takes to do that?

 

Catastrophic climate change: Preparing for the Era of Disasters

Last year Robert Glasser wrote his report: Preparing for the Era of Disasters. You can download it here. He is the former Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and now that he is back home in Canberra, he no longer has to pull any diplomatic punches.

It’s said that generals always fight the last war. This is the situation today with respect to climate change exposure: policymakers mistakenly base their strategies, policy assumptions, operational arrangements and funding allocations on experience of disasters in a stable climate or with the mistaken expectation that climate change impacts will increase gradually, rather than rapidly as the science suggests. The Australian Government’s 2011 National Strategy for Disaster Resilience states that ‘It is uncommon for a disaster to be so large that it is beyond the capacity of a state or territory government to deal with effectively.’69 Those words, and the systems, policies and funding underpinning them, will be out of date in little more than a decade.

Policymakers need to begin preparing now for this future. A first step should be to create a compelling narrative about climate and disaster risk reduction that explicitly recognises the changing scale of the threat and the new aspects we’re beginning to understand, such as the compounding, cascading effects that we—along with our South Pacific and Southeast Asian neighbours—are likely to experience. This is needed to lay the groundwork for more standardised, timely and frequent support from the Australian Government to the states and territories, and for changes in the posture and capability of our defence force and possibly the Australian Federal Police’s International Deployment Group.

An action plan to come from a national strategy:

1. the development of indicators of resilience at federal, state and local levels
2. the identification and implementation of incentives to promote private- and public-sector investments in resilient infrastructure and broader socio-economic and environmental resilience (for example, Suncorp has introduced discounts on insurance premiums for property owners in cyclone-prone areas who invest in strengthening homes against cyclone damage73)
3. an assessment of the exposure of critical infrastructure and other socio-economic assets to expected and emergent natural hazards (for example, critical infrastructure resilience should be strengthened through modularity and redundancy to cope with hazards and cascading impacts for which there’s no historical precedent)
4. initiatives to increase training and research (integrated across disciplines and stakeholders) at Australian universities and policy institutions into the compounding and cascading impacts of climate change, regional and subregional scale climate modelling and resilience-building74
5. financial support to the states for economic recovery following disasters and ‘fodder banks’ and ‘land banks’ to address the needs of communities in chronic crisis and the permanently displaced
6. the strengthening of disaster response capacity and planning at all levels, including in the Australian Defence Force (which will play an increasingly important role in the transport of firefighters and equipment, fodder drops from helicopters and the provision of shelters) and through joint taskforces to coordinate the ADF contribution, like the one established during the Black Saturday Victorian bushfires.

Of course this presupposes that we had leadership, which we don’t.

One of the prime objectives of the national strategy should be to scale up Australia’s efforts to prevent the effects of natural hazards, such as extreme weather, from becoming disasters. Currently, funding for mitigating disaster risk equates to only about 3% of what the Australian Government spends on post-disaster responses…

And this is exactly what happened recently. The Federal govt has done next to nothing preventative – infamously refusing to talk to senior fire fighting management during 2019 – preferring to react, whilst behaving as if it is ‘giving’ us something. ‘Giving us aid.’ Giving us the military.’ ‘Giving us money.’ ‘Giving us planes.’ Not giving us Danish firefighters.