Below experts respond.

There is more information about the listing online here. You can download the media release from the Minister’s office here.

 Feel free to use these quotes in your stories.  Any further comments will be  posted here.  If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 7120 8666 or by email.

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Dr Jonathan Rhodes is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography Planning and Environmental Management at The University of Queensland

“The decision to list the koala as vulnerable in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, the states where it is most threatened, is a welcome decision and is well justified by the scientific evidence. We have known for some time that koalas in Queensland and New South Wales, in particular, are declining rapidly, due primarily to clearing of their habitat and urban development. In addition, climate change is now appearing as an additional threat for koalas. Without greater protection, koalas in these states would almost certainly continue to  decline towards extinction. Although the new listing is great news in that it will help to limit the impact of new development on koalas, reducing threats from existing infrastructure, such as the high levels of koala deaths on roads, is  going to continue be critical for the conservation of this Australian icon.”

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Chris Johnson is a Professor of Wildlife Conservation and an ARC Australian Professorial Fellow in the School of Zoology at the University of Tasmania

“The decision to create a split listing for the koala is unusual but sensible. The problems facing koalas are very different across its geographic range. In the south, some populations are over-abundant and are damaging their habitat. In the north, koala populations are in decline for a multitude of reasons. Some of these reasons are quite well understood. For example, we know very well that koalas are threatened by cars and dogs in southeast Qld. Others are poorly understood: there is a strong possibility that rising atmospheric CO2 could be harming koalas by affecting the nutritional quality of gum leaves, but we don’t know how much this is contributing to declines.

 The northern and southern populations are now basically separate. There is little or no gene flow between them because koalas are so rare across southern New South Wales. We will need to think about the differing needs of northern and southern koalas almost as if they are two different species. Therefore it makes sense that they be given separate listings, and it is a reasonable assessment of the evidence to class the northern population as ‘vulnerable’.”

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Dr Greg Baxter is a Senior Lecturer in Wildlife Management in the School of Geography Planning & Environmental Management at The University of Queensland

“I welcome the Minister’s announcement. There is good evidence that koala populations in Queensland and NSW have suffered rapid and significant reductions since the early 1990s, while some populations in Victoria and South Australia are overabundant. Hence splitting the national population into management units that reflect these differences is a very sensible and worthwhile outcome. Recognition that the Queensland and NSW populations are vulnerable is a major step towards securing their future.”

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As wind farms spring up across the country in a bid to generate more renewable energy, new research from the US suggests that the wind farms themselves may be having a local warming effect on the climate. The researchers found that wind turbines can modify the local climate by producing a warming trend of up to 0.72⁰C per decade, particularly at night-time. The wind-farms modify surface-atmosphere exchanges and the transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. The researchers suggest this finding helps us to understand more about the impacts of wind farms to ensure the long-term sustainability of wind power.

 Feel free to use these quotes in your stories.  Any further comments will be posted here. If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 7120 8666 or by email.

The paper and media release are available on the registered area of our website.

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Professor Steven Sherwood is co-Director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales

“The result in the paper looks pretty solid to me, and shows that night-time temperatures went up by about a half a degree in the summer where the wind farm is. Daytime temperatures do not appear to be affected. This makes sense, since at night the ground becomes much cooler than the air just a few hundred meters above the surface, and the wind farms generate gentle turbulence near the ground that causes these to mix together, thus the ground doesn’t get quite as cool. This same strategy is commonly used by fruit growers (who fly helicopters over the orchards rather than windmills) to combat early morning frosts.”

 *Note: Steven is currently in Austria and so will have limited availability, however the AusSMC has other experts available who are also able to comment

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*Impacts of wind farms on land surface temperature, Zhou et al., Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1505

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Professor John Quiggin is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow at the School of Economics, University of Queensland

“A striking feature of the data is that aggregate emissions have remained unchanged since 2008, although GDP has increased by 15 per cent in that time. The fact that the link between GDP growth and emissions has been broken is encouraging evidence that we can achieve substantial reductions in emissions without damaging living standards.”

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Professor Kevin Parton is from the School of Management and Marketing at Charles Sturt University. He is a Strategic Professor in the Institute for Land, Water and Society

“The National Greenhouse Accounts reveal that the total greenhouse gas emissions in Australia rose by 0.6 per cent over the last year and Australia remains on track to meet its Kyoto Protocol target. This result is just about what was expected, and indeed is ‘no big deal’. This target itself is a straw man, given that it involves an increase in emissions, when we actually need to reduce them.

What is much more important is what is likely to happen in the future. The carbon pricing under the government’s ‘carbon tax’ policy should assist the effort to contain the growth in emissions. However, even with the carbon price, it is unlikely that there would be a fall in emissions during 2012 unless there is a dramatic fall in economic activity in the remainder of the year (which none of us want).

To reduce Australia’s carbon emissions significantly will need a change in the way the economy works and a transition, as soon as possible, to a low carbon technology. However, there is currently not great optimism about the rate of progress. Electricity generation is the sector with the largest emissions. The best renewable prospect in this sector is wind power, but we are at an embryonic stage when it comes to the roll-out of this technology. Coal will be king for many years to come. Even with the carbon price regime implied by the introduction of the government’s ‘carbon tax’, there will be little incentive for generators to replace coal fired power stations.”

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Adjunct Professor Rob Fowler is Chair of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law at the University of South Australia

“I note that whilst these latest accounts indicate we appear likely to meet our 2012 Kyoto target, Australia continues to increase the rate of its national GHG emissions, especially from electricity generation. The broad international consensus is that reductions in the range of 25-40% by 2020 are needed to avoid significant climate change, so we are a long way behind the chase. That objective also makes the current nationalcarbon tax goal of a 5% reduction by 2020 look pretty lame.

The immediate, key question is what target for GHG emissions  reductions by 2020 will Australia indicate to the Climate Change Convention meeting in December this year, when the next commitments beyond the Kyoto protocol targets will need to be defined. A target of 5% will not put us anywhere near the level of reductions expected of us by the international community.”

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Professor Graeme Wines is a Professor in Accounting in the School of Accounting, Economics and Finance at Deakin University

“The release of the National Greenhouse Accounts assists in putting into perspective the magnitude of the task facing Australia in its attempts to reduce emissions from 1990 levels. It also highlights the specific areas in which major reductions are required.

The Greenhouse Gas report reveals that total net emissions are now 13.6 percent higher than in 1990. But the percentage change over that period varies greatly between sectors, with some sectors actually exhibiting decreased emissions. The land use (including land use change and forestry) sector has emissions 59.2 percent lower than 1990 levels, although the decreasing trend here has mainly been driven by declines in the conversion of forest land to cropland and grassland. Decreased emissions are also recorded for the agriculture and waste sectors (down 8.1 and 19.1 percent respectively).

While these percentage decreases appear significant, they need to be put into perspective by comparison with the sectors exhibiting increases. The three sectors noted above exhibiting decreases represented reductions of 65.3 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, down from 196.9 tonnes in 1990 to 131.6 tonnes in 2010. The energy sector, though, recorded the greatest increase in emissions, with a 44.2 percent increase from 1990 levels. But this increase amounted to an additional 127.9 tonnes of emissions, an increase roughly twice the magnitude of the decrease in the three decreasing emissions sectors.

This highlights the magnitude of the task facing the energy sector in attempting to substitute renewable energy sources for current ones.”

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ONLINE BRIEFING – Thursday March 29 at 9.30am AEDT

Note: The State of the Planet declaration from the conference was released on 29th March. Download the declaration here.

More than 80 Australian scientists are in London this week attending a major international conference on the state of the planet and the most pressing issues faced by humanity – and climate change is only one of them! The relatively new field of Earth System Science takes a holistic view of the planet as a complex system, somewhat analogous to a human body. It may sound esoteric but the field is taken very seriously by scientists, who are concerned about the implications for life on earth if any part of the system is stressed or begins to fail. More than 3,000 of them have congregated in London to alert the world to trends and to discuss solutions. They monitor everything from the acidity of the oceans and the state of global fisheries to worldwide trends in deforestation and urbanization and the condition of the world’s rivers and try to understand the connections between them.

Two Australian scientists will stay up late in London to brief Australian journalists on the key findings of the conference and what politicians and the public need to consider in the lead up to the UN Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in less than three months.

Topics for discussion include:

• What are the pressure points on the Earth and why does it matter?
• Are we getting close to tipping points that, once reached, could trigger dramatic changes?
• What can be done to reduce pressure on the planet?
• What key scientific messages need to be heeded at Rio+20?

SPEAKERS:

• Dr Mark Stafford Smith, Conference co-chair and Scientific Director at CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship
• Professor Will Steffen, Director of the ANU Climate Change Institute

BRIEFING DETAILS:

DATE:  Thu 29 March 2012
START TIME: 9.30am AEDT
DURATION: 35 min
VENUE:  Online

Follow the full briefing here

*NB:  The AusSMC generally runs two different types of media briefings:
NEWS BRIEFINGS – Where new research or data will be released as part of the briefing
BACKGROUND BRIEFINGS – Where experts discuss an issue which is in the news or an issue we consider newsworthy, but no new research or data is being released

Scientists involved in the research are from The Australian National University, Canberra; James Cook University, Townsville; The University of Adelaide; The University of New South Wales; Monash University, Melbourne and The University of Tasmania.

Feel free to use these quotes in your stories. If you would like a copy of the research, please contact us on (08) 7120 8666 or by email.

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Chris Johnson, who is lead author of the research paper, is a Professor of Wildlife Conservation & ARC Australian Professorial Fellow in the School of Zoology at the University of Tasmania

“We are excited by this research not just because it helps us to understand why Australia’s megafauna went extinct. More importantly, it moves the question on by focussing on the ecological impacts of that extinction. Big animals have big impacts on plants. It follows that removing big animals should produce significant changes in vegetation.

Twenty years ago, Tim Flannery argued that one of the results of megafaunal extinction was increased fire in Australian landscapes, as fine plant matter that would have been eaten by giant kangaroos, Diprotodons etc accumulated and provided fuel for wildfires. Our results suggest that he may have been right, at least for some places. They also suggest that as well as releasing fire, taking out big herbivores had direct effects on the structure and composition of vegetation, making it more dense and uniform. Getting a better understanding of how environments across Australia changed as a result of megafaunal extinction is a big and interesting challenge, and will help us to understand the dynamics of contemporary Australian ecosystems.”

There are further quotes from Prof Johnson on request.

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Dr Judith Field, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at The University of New South Wales

Outlines her reasons why she finds the research’s conclusions invalid within a longer statement which is available to download here

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Dr Gavin Prideaux is a lecturer in vertebrate palaeontology in the School of Biological Sciences at Flinders University, South Australia

“This is an important contribution to our understanding of what happened 40,000 years ago or so when 90 per cent of our large terrestrial species disappeared, depriving us of the sight of giant short-faced kangaroos, marsupial ‘lions’, giant horned tortoises and herds of Diprotodons meandering through the outback.

The authors present a fascinating dataset from a sediment-filled crater in northeastern Australia and inject new data into a field of enquiry that aches under the strain of opinion pieces and the tired reworking of published data. From the significant drop-off in the abundance of a herbivore dung fungus, they make the reasonable inference that this corresponds to a substantial drop in local herbivore biomass around 40,000 years ago. They argue that this reflects the local loss of the larger Pleistocene species hitherto inhabiting the area and that the changes in vegetation and fire that followed were a direct result of the extinctions.

The timing of the inferred extinction coincides with early human presence in the region, but not with significant climatic change. This supports a mounting number of studies that have argued that climate change was not primarily responsible for the Late Pleistocene extinctions in other parts of the continent. To test the inferences from this paper we might look at similar lake records from other regions of Australia and seek fossil deposits in the northeast that preserve bones of the giant animals themselves.”

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Dr John Alroy is a Future Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science at Macquarie University, NSW

(Dr Alroy responds to our questions)

How strong are the implications of this research?

“Extremely strong. The data are superb and decisive: all you have to do is look at the diagrams showing the raw data (Fig. 1) and the conclusions become obvious. The key new data are the spore counts, and in combination with the charcoal and rainforest pollen data they tell the whole story. There is simply no reasonable way to argue with the authors’ conclusions.”

How reliable do you think the techniques used in the research are?

“The age model is excellent and the sampling is very intensive over a very long time interval. Wow. But the statistical analyses have all sorts of problems: in some cases the authors used unorthodox time series methods that are dubious, and in others they used relatively simplistic methods whose assumptions are violated by the data. Some key inferences about the very fine-scale timing of events were also drawn on the basis of an analysis that actually seems somewhat ambiguous (Fig. 2). But again, all you have to do is look at the diagrams. The statistics really don’t matter.”

How do the findings fit into the debate on how Australian megafauna became extinct?

“Wow. The debate really should be over now. Hunting did it: end of story.

Personally, though, I never understood what there was to debate because nothing else made sense.

First, most Quaternary paleoecologists immediately point to climate change whenever there is an interesting pattern to explain. But huge climate changes happened over and over again throughout the Pleistocene and there was no mass extinction. And the new data rule out any role for climate change at all.

Second, the only other viable hypotheses was the landscape burning idea. But that never really seemed plausible, if for no other reason than because all sorts of organisms including many small mammals with good fossil records also should have gone extinct if only fire was important. The fact that only very large mammals (and birds) went extinct only ever made any sense on the theory that hunting was the mechanism.

In reality, the debate should have started and ended with Paul Martin’s landmark analysis from 1967 (!). But it has dragged on for nearly a half-century now because the idea that stone age hunters could cause such utter havoc across three entire continents over very short time spans strikes many people as incredible. Like it or not, though, it’s the truth, and it’s time for us to all confront it.”

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*The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction: Ecosystem Transformation in Pleistocene Australia, Johnson et al., Science, Vol 335, 23 March, 2012