Leaders must be shocked into climate action

Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director of Forum for the Future

Even today’s climate optimists acknowledge that there are going to have to be some traumatic ‘shocks to the system’, induced by accelerated climate change, to jolt politicians the world over to move up a gear (well, several gears).

These shocks will come, and from the perspective of our long-term prospects, they need to come as rapidly as possible.  And to be as traumatic as possible – otherwise, politicians and their electorates will rapidly revert to the current mix of non-specific anxiety and inertia.

Post-Katrina, for instance, public opinion in the US provided the best example of this phenomenon.  It took just two years for Fox News and other right-wing shock-jocks to straighten out deviant US citizens who’d started to think that it really might be time for the US to get stuck in on climate change.

But Australia provides an even more compelling story.  Over the last few years, it’s had more than its fair share of traumatic shocks.  Earlier this year, Melbourne broke its record February temperature by a full 3°C to hit 46.8°C.  This was also the day of Australia’s worst ever bush fires, with 173 people killed and 2000 homes destroyed.  The Murray-Darling Basin (Australia’s food bowl, with nearly 40% of Australia’s agricultural production based around its waters) has been in so-called ‘drought’ since 2002.  Flow levels are now down to 5% of their long-term average.  As a result, it’s now assumed that the globally significant wetlands and lake system at the river’s mouth will face ecological collapse over the next few years.

And now there’s a new report out in Australia, featured in the Guardian on Wednesday, (‘Managing Our Coastal Zones in a Changing Climate’) which reveals that more than £80 billion of property is at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent storms – and that’s going to send a bit of a shock wave down the backbones of the 80% of Australian citizens who live along the coastline!  The report’s principle policy proposal is that there should be a ban on any further development at beach level.

So what’s been the net impact of all these shocks on Australian politics?  The victory of Kevin Rudd over John Howard in the most recent general election in Australia was attributed in part to his relatively progressive stance on climate change.  But since then, there’s been one set back after another in terms of introducing appropriate policy interventions, with Australia’s mining and coal industries in full-on defensive mode, and its equivalent of the CBI acting exactly like our CBI did under the Neanderthal leadership of Digby Jones a few years ago.

The outcome of which is that Australia is still doing very little on climate change, and has no chance whatsoever of meeting its Kyoto targets.  It still pursues its dreams of unbridled affluence, California-style, and is about as far from adopting a leadership role as it is possible to get.

Clearly the shocks to their systems just haven’t been bad enough – which gives us some sense of just how bad future climate shocks are going to have to be to drive any serious transformation.