Page 4924 - Week 11 - Thursday, 21 October 2010
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councils know that within the lifespan of the building the land is likely to be under water. We have all seen the very scary maps of Australia and other parts of the world showing possible inundation of our major cities, the vast majority of which are located on the coast. What will happen as we have the sea level rise? Most of the cities in the world, the major cities in the world, and a lot of our agricultural regions are within a few metres of sea level. This will have a huge impact and a huge cost on the world if we do not do anything about this.
The longer we delay doing something, the more expensive it will be. I note in this regard that the CEO of BHP Billiton, Marius Kloppers, recently called for a clear price on carbon to be established in Australia. I agree that he did not talk about the amount of mitigation, but I think it is very clear from all parties that we know there will be a cost if we go down the track of not mitigating, and we need to look at those costs as seriously as we look at the costs of doing something.
Mrs Dunne mentioned weathering the change. I would be the first to agree that it is not the be-all and end-all of climate analysis. But even this has quite a lot of very interesting and potentially scary things about what might happen in Canberra. It says that the temperature in the ACT and surrounding regions is likely to become warmer. The number of days above 35 could average six to 14, and it is now five. That will mean we will have, particularly among older people, more vulnerable people, more deaths from heat issues. That is what has happened in the rest of the world, and that is the sort of thing that would happen here.
We all know about droughts, and I think we have all seen the CSIRO projections for droughts as a result of climate change. Very fortunately, the drought that we were just part of seems to have stopped, but it is a real issue with real costs.
There is a section about climate change health impacts. It says that these are going to include, as I said, temperature-related illness and death due to increased temperatures and heatwaves, food and water-borne diseases due to changes in water quality and a range of bacteria and pests, respiratory disease due to increased pollution and mental health disorders due to social disruptions.
On that note, we are so lucky that it has started raining again because had the drought not broken we would in a few years have seen the street trees in Canberra start dying en masse. I think Canberra would have been an incredibly psychologically distressing place to live in with all the trees dead. That is the sort of thing that could happen if we do not address climate change.
With respect to vector-borne disease, we are likely to have mosquitoes and things like that in Canberra in real numbers. Another impact would be injury, trauma and related effects from an increase in extreme weather events. These are just the things that weathering the change talks about for Canberra. We are already seeing climate-related impacts on human beings in the rest of the world. We are fortunate that we are an affluent community and it has not hit us much yet, but I think that in this debate we need to look at all the costs. We need to look at the costs of inaction with as much energy and nit-picking as we look at the costs of action. I would urge the Assembly and the Canberra community to look at all of the costs as part of this debate.
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