A similar proportion would favour reducing Australian coal exports to other countries.
“Australian views of coal exports and coal mines … appear to have shifted significantly in recent years,” the report says.
Only three in ten people would back the federal government providing subsidies for building new coal-fired power plants.
There are notable age differences in attitudes to coal. More than seven in ten (72%) of those aged 18–44 support banning new coal mines, but only 55% of people over 45.
The government’s “gas-fired recovery” has majority support – 58% back increasing the use of gas for generating energy.
The poll found most people want Australia to have more ambitious climate policies ahead of the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow late this year.
Seven in ten people say Australia should join other countries, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, to increase its commitments to address climate change.
Some 60% say Australia is doing too little to combat climate change. But Australians are critical of other countries for not doing enough – 82% say China is doing too little. The figures for the US and India doing too little are 71% and 81% respectively.
Nearly eight in ten Australians (78%) support setting a net zero emissions target for 2050.
Scott Morrison has been edging towards embracing this as a target and is likely to do so before Glasgow, although he faces some resistance within the Coalition. All the states and territories have this target.
The federal government is coming under considerable pressure from the Biden administration and the Johnson government over the climate issue.
Climate questions will be a feature of the G7 summit in June to which Morrison has been invited.
The Lowy poll found 74% believe the benefits of taking further action on climate change would outweigh the costs.
More than nine in ten people (91%) support the federal government providing subsidies for the development of renewable energy technology, while 77% favour the government subsidising electric vehicle purchases.
More than half (55%) say the government’s main priority for energy policy should be “reducing carbon emissions”. This was an 8 point increase since 2019.
Six in ten people agree with the proposition “global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now, even if this involves costs”. This was a 4 point increase from last year
Six in ten Australians (64%) support “introducing an emissions trading scheme or carbon tax”.
The report, authored by Natasha Kassam and Hannah Leser, says: “While the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to temper concerns about climate change in 2020, the issue has risen to prominence again in 2021. The majority of Australians (60%) say ‘global warming is a serious and pressing problem…we should begin taking steps now, even if this involves significant costs’. This represents a reversal of the dip in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic, but remains eight points below the high watermark of concern in 2006.”
The climate poll was taken in mid and late April with a sample of 3,286.
Wildlife tourism is an important segment of Botswana’s tourism industry, representing 80% of the total annual revenue of trips to Botswana. Key to this are protected areas which have led to the growth of the country’s wildlife tourism.
Wildlife tourism can take place either in the animals’ natural environments such as national parks, game reserves or other protected areas or in captivity, such as zoos or rehabilitation centres. Activities during these tours can be classified into two main groups; non-consumptive (viewing and photographing of wild animals) and consumptive which refers to activities such as trophy hunting and fishing.
Since the start of trophy hunting operations in 1996 in Botswana, trophy hunting has grown steadily. The industry employed an estimated 1,000 people, received 350 hunters annually and sold more then 5,500 hunting days per year. In 2011, a year before the trophy hunting ban was announced in the country, the industry netted Botswana US$20 million in revenue annually from 2,500 animals sold to trophy hunters. Botswana specialised in big game such as elephants, buffalo and leopard which generated higher hunting fees from few animals.
The main reason given by the Botswana government for the trophy hunting ban was the decline in the number of wildlife due to trophy hunting – a reason that was widely questioned by trophy hunting operators.
The ban on trophy hunting had an adverse impact as highlighted by various data sources. We therefore set out in 2018 to study the impact of the ban of trophy hunting on local communities. We chose two communities, Sankuyo (400 inhabitants in Northern Botswana) and Mmadinare (12,000 inhabitants in Eastern Botswana). The two communities that were selected for the study, had prior involvement in hunting.
We collected data through interviews with community members and leaders of the community-based organisations trusts. These are legal entities established to represent interests of communities and are often made up of multiple villages of close geographical proximity.
We also interviewed former employees from the hunting sector and small business owners. Some of the questions asked were: how did hunting tourism benefit the community? Was hunting seen as a positive impact on the community? What are the current challenges that the community face since the ban of trophy hunting? Have attitudes toward wildlife changed from the times of trophy hunting?
Human-wildflife conflict
Participants said they’d lost income as a result of the trophy hunting ban. The study didn’t focus on determining how much or what percentage was lost. Participants said the ban also led to more instances of human-wildlife conflict.
In addition, community members said wild animals were a risk to their livelihoods as they were a danger to livestock and crop production. The 2016 Review of Community Based Natural Resources Management in Botswana, indicated that the top three most important livelihood sources for communities were livestock, social welfare and crops. This can undermine conservation efforts, especially if the benefits of co-existing with wildlife are minimal.
Another finding was that both communities were outraged that they weren’t consulted on the trophy hunting ban in 2014. One of the participants, a business owner, said:
Aah, I don’t know I just heard them saying it will be the last hunting season and they didn’t explain why.
Another participant, former hunting employee, reiterated the business owner’s sentiments:
What I remember is them informing us that hunting is being stopped. As for asking for our opinions, I don’t remember them coming to do that.
The results of the study also showed that the two communities experienced the benefits of trophy hunting differently. Community tourism benefits from trophy hunting are more pronounced in smaller communities.
In Sankuyo community members, former hunting employees and small business operators all said that they benefited through employment contribution, the sale of meat, as well as financial contribution to community development. But in Mmadinare, the larger community, the members felt they didn’t benefit that much from trophy hunting. Although some former hunting employees did mention benefits such as sale of meat, employment and skills development.
The study found that both communities experienced challenges as a result of the ban on trophy hunting. The participants decry an increase in the number of wildlife in the areas and expressed that this has led to an escalation of human-wildlife conflict. This conflict involve mostly elephants, kudus, antelopes and buffaloes which invaded people’s farms.
A former hunting employee in Sankuyo said:
In the past because of trophy hunting it was not easy to see animals around. Nowadays, they are everywhere, sometimes we see them in our yards.
The result was that almost half of the participants (47.8%) of in both communities expressed that their attitudes were negative towards wildlife as a result of escalation in such conflicts. This puts the sustainability of wildlife resources in jeopardy.
Last year Botswana’s parliament passed a motion to lift a ban on elephant hunting, which had been in place since 2014. This will only allow the hunting of elephants and hunting licenses were auctioned in February 2020 as elephants were seen as the main contributors to animal and conflicts with in certain areas.
Our research supports this, and further recommends the lifting of the ban on the remaining animals listed under the ban. This can help to alleviate challenges experienced by households in communities like Sankuyo, where trophy hunting was a key source of income. The lifting of the ban will also reverse the negative attitudes within communities that threaten conservation efforts.
We are all familiar with the concept of “fake news”: stories that are factually incorrect, but succeed because their message fits well with the recipient’s prior beliefs.
We and our colleagues in conservation science warn that a form of this misinformation – so-called “feelgood conservation” – is threatening approaches for wild animal management that have been developed by decades of research.
The issue came to a head in February when major UK-based retailer Selfridges announced it would no longer sell “exotic” skins – those of reptile species such as crocodiles, lizards and snakes – in order to protect wild populations from over-exploitation.
Banning the use of animal skins in the fashion industry sounds straightforward and may seem commendable – wild reptiles will be left in peace, instead of being killed for the luxury leather trade.
But decades of research show that by walking away from the commercial trade in reptile skins, Selfridges may well achieve the opposite to what it intends. Curtailing commercial trade will be a disaster for some wild populations of reptiles.
How can that be true? Surely commercial harvesting is a threat to the tropical reptiles that are collected and killed for their skins?
Actually, no. You have to look past the fate of the individual animal and consider the future of the species. Commercial harvesting gives local people – often very poor people – a direct financial incentive to conserve reptile populations and the habitats upon which they depend.
If lizards, snakes and (especially) crocodiles aren’t worth money to you, why would you want to keep them around, or to protect the forests and swamps that house them?
Women raise Burmese pythons at a small farm on Hainan Island, China. Daniel Natusch, Author provided
The iconic case study that supports this principle involves saltwater crocodiles in tropical Australia – the biggest, meanest man-eaters in the billabong.
Overharvested to the point of near-extinction, the giant reptiles were finally protected in the Northern Territory in 1971. The populations started to recover, but by 1979-80, when attacks on people started to occur again, the public and politicians wanted the crocodiles culled again. It’s difficult to blame them for that. Who wants a hungry croc in the pond where your children would like to swim?
Saltwater crocs are the reason many beaches are not open for swimming in northern Australia. Shutterstock
But fast-forward to now and that situation has changed completely. Saltwater crocs are back to their original abundance. Their populations bounced back. These massive reptiles are now in every river and creek – even around the city of Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory.
This spectacular conservation success story was achieved not by protecting crocs, but by making crocs a financial asset to local people.
Eggs are collected from the wild every year, landowners get paid for them, and the resulting hatchlings go to crocodile farms where they are raised, then killed to provide luxury leather items, meat and other products. Landowners have a financial interest in conserving crocodiles and their habitats because they profit from it.
Saltwater crocodile eggs collected in the Northern Territory, Australia. Daniel Natusch, Author provided
The key to the success was buy-in by the community. There are undeniable negatives in having large crocodiles as neighbours – but if those crocs can contribute to the family budget, you may want to keep them around. In Australia, it has worked.
The trade in giant pythons in Indonesia, Australia’s northern neighbour, has been examined in the same way, and the conclusion is the same. The harvest is sustainable because it provides cash to local people, in a society where cash is difficult to come by.
A collector captures a yellow anaconda in Argentina. Emilio White, Author provided
So the evidence says commercial exploitation can conserve populations, not annihilate them.
Why then do companies make decisions that could imperil wild animals? Probably because they don’t know any better.
Media campaigns by animal-rights activists aim to convince kind-hearted urbanites that the best way to conserve animals is to stop people from harming them. This might work for some animals, but it fails miserably for wild reptiles.
We argue that if we want to keep wild populations of giant snakes and crocodiles around for our grandchildren to see (hopefully, at a safe distance), we need to abandon simplistic “feelgood conservation” and look towards evidence-based scientific management.
We need to move beyond “let’s not harm that beautiful animal” and get serious about looking at the hard evidence. And when it comes to giant reptiles, the answer is clear.
The ban announced by Selfridges is a disastrous move that could imperil some of the world’s most spectacular wild animals and alienate the people living with them.
Single-use plastics are a blessing and a curse. They have fueled a revolution in commercial and consumer convenience and improved hygiene standards, but also have saturated the world’s coastlines and clogged landfills. By one estimate 79 percent of all plastic ever produced is now in a dump, a landfill or the environment, and only 9 percent has been recycled.
This growing legacy poses real risks. Plastic packaging is clogging city sewer systems, leading to flooding. Abandoned plastic goods create breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and can leach toxic additives such as styrene and benzene as they decompose. Single-use plastics are killing birds and harming marine life.
One attractive strategy is pursuing a legally binding phase-out of most single-use plastics at the global level. I believe this approach makes sense because it would build on current national and municipal efforts to eliminate single-use packaging, and would create opportunities for new small and medium-sized businesses to develop more benign substitutes.
Plastic bag litter along the Jukskei River, Johannesburg, South Africa. NJR ZA/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
Single-use plastic bans
About 112 countries, states and cities around the world have already imposed bans on various single-use plastic goods. Of these measures, 57 are national and 25 are in Africa. And the list of these restrictions continues to grow.
Most of these bans target thin single-use plastic carrier bags or imports of non-biodegradable bags. Some, such as the one in Antigua-Barbuda, include other single-use or problematic items, such as foam coolers and plastic utensils. A few measures – notably, Kenya’s plastic bag law – impose stiff punishments on violators, including jail time and fines of up to US$38,000.
Groups of states are starting to enact regional policies. The East African Legislative Assembly has passed a bill to ban the manufacture, sale, import and use of certain plastic bags across its six member states, with a combined population of approximately 186 million people. And in October 2018 the European Union Parliament approved a ban on a number of single-use plastic items by 2021, along with a requirement to reduce plastic in food packaging by 25 percent by 2025 and cut plastic content in cigarette filters 80 percent by 2030.
Most of these bans are quite new or still being implemented, so there is limited research on how well they work. However, researchers at the United Nations who have reviewed 60 “national bans and levies” estimate that 30 percent of these measures have reduced consumption of plastics.
Plastics manufacturers contend that better recycling is the most effective way to reduce the environmental impact of their products. But many factors make it hard to recycle plastic, from its physical characteristics to insufficient market demand for many types of recycled plastics. In many instances, single-use plastics can only be recycled, optimistically, 10 times before their fibers become too short to be reprocessed.
Estimated number of new regulations on single-use plastics entering into force at the national level worldwide. UNEP, CC BY
Lessons from other global bans
Several global bans and product phase-outs offer lessons for a treaty banning single-use plastic goods. The most successful case is the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. This treaty phased out production and use of chlorofluorocarbons in a variety of products, including refrigerators and spray cans, after they were shown to harm Earth’s protective ozone layer.
Today scientists predict that stratospheric ozone concentrations will rebound to 1980 levels by the middle of this century. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Montreal Protocol has prevented millions of cases of skin cancer and cataracts from exposure to ultraviolet radiation. In 2016 nations adopted the Kigali Amendment, which will phase out production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, another class of ozone-depleting chemicals.
Why has the Montreal Protocol worked so well? One key factor is that every nation in the world has joined it. They did so because alternative materials were available to substitute for chlorofluorocarbons. The treaty also provided financial support to countries that needed help transitioning away from the banned substances.
Sir David Attenborough narrates the extraordinary history of the Montreal Protocol.
Where countries trying to reduce use of these chemicals fell short of their goals, the Protocol provided institutional support rather than punishing them. But it also included the option to impose trade sanctions on nations that refused to cooperate.
Another pact, the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, banned or severely limited production and use of certain chemicals that threatened human and environmental health, including specific insecticides and industrial chemicals. Today 182 nations have signed the treaty. Concentrations of several dangerous POPs in the Arctic, where global air and water currents tend to concentrate them, have declined.
Nations have added new chemicals to the list and created “elimination networks” to help members phase out use of dangerous materials such as PCBs. And producers of goods such as semiconductors and carpets that use listed chemicals are working to develop new, safer processes.
Even though the United States has not signed the Stockholm Convention, U.S. companies have largely eliminated production of the chemicals that the treaty regulates. This shows that setting a global standard may encourage nations to conform in order to maintain access to global markets.
Other international bans have been less successful. In 1989, seeking to reduce the slaughter of elephants for their tusks, parties to the Convention in Trade of Endangered Species banned ivory sales by ending trade in African elephant parts. Initially demand for ivory fell, but in 1999 and 2008 treaty states allowed African nations to sell ivory stockpiles to Japan and China, ostensibly to fund conservation. These two sales reignited global demand for ivory and created unregulated domestic markets that stimulated high levels of poaching.
Malaysian customs officials display smuggled tusks seized at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in 2017. Demand for ivory continues to fuel poaching and illegal trade despite an international ban on sales of elephant parts. AP Photo/Vincent Thian
An opportunity to lead
What lessons do these treaties offer for curbing plastic pollution? The Montreal Protocol shows that bans can work where substitute products are available, but require reliable monitoring and the threat of sanctions to deter cheating. The Stockholm Convention suggests that industries will innovate to meet global production challenges. And struggles to curb the ivory trade offer a cautionary message about allowing exceptions to global bans.
I believe the rapid spread of single-use plastic bans shows that enough political support exists to launch negotiations toward a global treaty. Emerging economies such as Kenya that are aggressively tackling the problem are especially well placed to take a lead at the U.N. General Assembly in calling for talks on stemming the tide of plastic pollution.
The Anangu people actually offer visitors a range of eco-cultural tourism activities that focus on sharing Indigenous culture, knowledge and traditions. Leo Li/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Closing Uluru to climbers empowers Indigenous people to teach visitors about their culture on their own terms, which is more sustainable for tourism in the long run.
Uluru is a drawcard for international and domestic tourists, and is visited by over 250,000 people per year. A substantial number of these choose to climb the rock. On busy days, the number can be in the hundreds. This is despite being asked by the traditional owners, the Anangu people, to respect their wishes, culture and law and not climb Uluru.
The Anangu people actually offer visitors a range of eco-cultural tourism activities that focus on sharing Indigenous culture, knowledge and traditions, which don’t involve planting feet on a sacred place. These activities including nature walks, painting workshops, bush yarns and bush food experiences.
This decision to close the rock to climbers comes after many years of conceding rights back to the Anangu, and is possibly one of the few times where Indigenous values have truly been prioritised over other interests.
Giving power back to Uluru’s traditional owners
The Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, declared in 1950, was handed back to the Anangu on October 26, 1985. While the agreement required the park to be leased to the Australian Parks and Wildlife Services under a co-management arrangement, the handover was a symbolic high point for land rights.
In practice, however, aspects of the park’s operations were contrary to the traditional owners’ approach to conservation and management. For instance, park management models stated the need to place:
… emphasis on developing acceptable patterns of use of the physical environment and not on recognition of social and spiritual values of land to Indigenous people.
In 2010, the park’s management plan proposed to close the rock if the proportion of visitors who wished to climb Uluru was below 20%. An independent analysis of track counter data and visitor statistics undertaken by the Griffith Institute for Tourism over a four year period revealed that in almost all circumstances (and even with allowance for track counter inaccuracy) the proportion was under 20%.
Finally on November 1, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Board of Management, consisting of eight traditional owners and four government officials, voted unanimously to close Uluru (Ayers Rock) to climbers. The local tourism industry supported the decision.
Indigenous tourism on the rise
Increasingly, visitors around the world are seeking such opportunities to experience various aspects of Indigenous culture. Not surprisingly, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are realising the sociocultural and economic opportunities of tourism and have now become an integral part of the Australian tourism industry.
But for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, getting involved in the tourism industry comes with its own set of problems. They have been tasked with juggling their heritage, customs, culture and traditions with government initiatives that prioritise economic over socio-cultural development. For example, as Quandamooka Dreaming “targets big dollars from tourism” in SE Queensland, the traditional owners are successfully balancing their socio-economic aspirations with cultural lores by determining that some sacred sites will remain accessible only to elders and initiated Indigenous Quandamooka people. But other sites will be open to eco-tourists.
Given the considerable pressure tourism places on local resources and places, the involvement of local communities and different groups within them is now considered critical for achieving sustainable tourism.
A recent report concludes that participation and empowerment of local communities are success factors to managing tourism growth. It’s the local community that looks after the destination, and it can make or break a tourist’s experience. The report finds developing tourism without input from the local people has often led to conflict.
Closing Uluru for climbing should be seen as a shining example of sustainable tourism being a vehicle for the preservation, maintenance and ongoing development of culture, traditions and knowledge.
And when reconciliation principles are practised not preached, traditional custodians of the land are afforded due respect. This then leads them to share their 60,000 year old knowledge of the management of the land we are privileged to utilise as tourism destinations.
The Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park board of management has announced that tourists will be banned from climbing Uluru from 2019. The climb has always been discouraged by the park’s Traditional Owners (the Anangu people) but a number of tourists continued to climb the rock on a daily basis. Below, in English and Indigenous language, Sammy Wilson, chairman of the park board, explains why his people have decided to ban the climb outright.
THE Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Board has announced tourists will be banned from climbing Uluru, an activity long considered disrespectful by the region’s traditional owners.
Anangu have always held this place of Law. Other people have found it hard to understand what this means; they can’t see it. But for Anangu it is indisputable. So this climb issue has been widely discussed, including by many who have long since passed away. More recently people have come together to focus on it again and it was decided to take it to a broader group of Anangu. They declared it should be closed. This is a sacred place restricted by law.
It’s not just at board meetings that we discussed this but it’s been talked about over many a camp fire, out hunting, waiting for the kangaroo to cook, they’ve always talked about it.
The climb is a men’s sacred area. The men have closed it. It has cultural significance that includes certain restrictions and so this is as much as we can say. If you ask, you know they can’t tell you, except to say it has been closed for cultural reasons.
What does this mean? You know it can be hard to understand – what is cultural law? Which one are you talking about? It exists; both historically and today. Tjukurpa includes everything: the trees; grasses; landforms; hills; rocks and all.
You have to think in these terms; to understand that country has meaning that needs to be respected. If you walk around here you will learn this and understand. If you climb you won’t be able to. What are you learning? This is why Tjukurpa exists. We can’t control everything you do but if you walk around here you will start to understand us.
Tourists have previously used a chain to climb Uluru, but from 2019 the climb will be banned.
Some people, in tourism and government for example, might have been saying we need to keep it open but it’s not their law that lies in this land. It is an extremely important place, not a playground or theme park like Disneyland. We want you to come, hear us and learn. We’ve been thinking about this for a very long time.
We work on the principle of mutual obligation, of working together, but this requires understanding and acceptance of the climb closure because of the sacred nature of this place. If I travel to another country and there is a sacred site, an area of restricted access, I don’t enter or climb it, I respect it. It is the same here for Anangu. We welcome tourists here. We are not stopping tourism, just this activity.
On tour with us, tourists talk about it. They often ask why people are still climbing and I always reply, ‘things might change…’ They ask, ‘why don’t they close it?’ I feel for them and usually say that change is coming. Some people come wanting to climb and perhaps do so before coming on tour with us. They then wish they hadn’t and want to know why it hasn’t already been closed. But it’s about teaching people to understand and come to their own realisation about it. We’re always having these conversations with tourists.
And now that the majority of people have come to understand us, if you don’t mind, we will close it! After much discussion, we’ve decided it’s time.
Visitors needn’t be worrying there will be nothing for them with the climb closed because there is so much else besides that in the culture here. It’s not just inside the park and if we have the right support to take tourists outside it will benefit everyone. People might say there is no one living on the homelands but they hold good potential for tourists. We want support from the government to hear what we need and help us. We have a lot to offer in this country. There are so many other smaller places that still have cultural significance that we can share publicly. So instead of tourists feeling disappointed in what they can do here they can experience the homelands with Anangu and really enjoy the fact that they learnt so much more about culture.
Whitefellas see the land in economic terms where Anangu see it as Tjukurpa. If the Tjukurpa is gone so is everything. We want to hold on to our culture. If we don’t it could disappear completely in another 50 or 100 years. We have to be strong to avoid this. The government needs to respect what we are saying about our culture in the same way it expects us to abide by its laws. It doesn’t work with money. Money is transient, it comes and goes like the wind. In Anangu culture Tjukurpa is ever lasting.
Years ago, Anangu went to work on the stations. They were working for station managers who wanted to mark the boundaries of their properties at a time when Anangu were living in the bush. Anangu were the ones who built the fences as boundaries to accord with whitefella law, to protect animal stock. It was Anangu labour that created the very thing that excluded them from their own land. This was impossible to fathom for us! Why have we built these fences that lock us out? I was the one that did it! I built a fence for that person who doesn’t want anything to do with me and now I’m on the outside. This is just one example of our situation today.
You might also think of it in terms of what would happen if I started making and selling coca cola here without a license. The coca cola company would probably not allow it and I’d have to close it in order to avoid being taken to court. This is something similar for Anangu.
A long time ago they brought one of the boulders from the Devil’s Marbles to Alice Springs. From the time they brought it down Anangu kept trying to tell people it shouldn’t have been brought here. They talked about it for so long that many people had passed away in the meantime before their concerns were understood and it was returned. People had finally understood the Anangu perspective.
That’s the same as here. We’ve talked about it for so long and now we’re able to close the climb. It’s about protection through combining two systems, the government and Anangu. Anangu have a governing system but the whitefella government has been acting in a way that breaches our laws. Please don’t break our law, we need to be united and respect both.
Over the years Anangu have felt a sense of intimidation, as if someone is holding a gun to our heads to keep it open. Please don’t hold us to ransom…. This decision is for both Anangu and non-Anangu together to feel proud about; to realise, of course it’s the right thing to close the ‘playground’.
The land has law and culture. We welcome tourists here. Closing the climb is not something to feel upset about but a cause for celebration.
Let’s come together; let’s close it together.
In Pitjantjatjara language
Anangungku iriti kanyiningi ngura Tjukurpa tjara panya. Tjinguru kulipai, ‘ai,ai, ah, nyaa nyangatja? What is Tjukurpa?’ Putu nyangangi panya. Palu Tjukurpa pala palula ngarinyi Ananguku. Ka palunya kulira wangka katiningi tjutangku. Kutjupa tjuta not with us panya. Kuwari wangka katiningi, wangka katiningi munuya kaputura piruku wangkanyi ka wiya, Anangu tjutangka piruku wangkara wangkara kati. Uwa ngalya katingu Anangu tjuta kutu. Ka Anangu tjutangku wangkangu palya, patila. Ngura miil-miilpa.
Not only the board meeting kutjuya wangkapai, meeting time kutju but meeting out in the campfire, waru kutjara. Waru kutjaraya malu paulpai tjana wangkapaitu still.
Uwa Tjukurpa wati tjutaku uwa… wati tjutangku patini, that’s it, Tjukurpa palatja patini.
Only Tjukurpa kutju, uwa Tjukurpa tjarala patini, miil-miilpa. If you ask some people, kutjupa tjapini ka, you know they can’t tell you, palu tjinguru patini, Tjukurpa.
Nyaa palatja, nyaa panya? You know sometimes it’s hard to understand panya: Tjukurpa nyaa? Which one? Ngarinyi tjukurpa, iriti tjinguru ngarinyi, Tjukurpa and he’s still there today. You know Tjukurpa is everything, its punu, grass or the land or hill, rock or what.
Palula tjanala kulintjaku, uwa kulinma nyuntu: ‘Uwa ngura Tjukurpa tjara’. Respect ngura, the country. You walk around, you’ll learn, understand. Tatini nyuntu munu putu kulini, nyaa nyuntu? What you learning? Pala palutawara; Tjukurpa. Ka we can’t tell you what you’re doing but when you walk around you understand. Kulini.
Some might be… you know, tourism, government-ngka, ‘no, leave it open, leave it’ Why? palumpa tjukurpa wiya nyangakutu. This is a very important place nyangatja panya. Not inka-inka, not to come and see the Disney land. Wiya come and learn about this place.
Rawangkula kulilkatira kulilkatira everywhere.
Ngapartji ngapartjila tjunu, to work together, but they gotta kulinma panya. Munta-uwa, tjana patini nyangatja, ngura miil-miilpa. Uwa. If I go some sort of country tjinguru ngura miil-miilpa, some place in the world they got miil-miilpa, I don’t climb panya, I respect that place. Pala purunypa nyangatja Ananguku panya. Ka tourist nganana stop-amilantja wiya; tourist welcome palu these things, nyangatja nyanga, panya.
Uwa, tour-ngkala ankupai. Visitors-ngku kulu kulu wangkapai, you know sometimes we was working with tourism panya, tourist-angka and, ‘why these people climbing? Kana, ‘Something is coming’. I always talk panya. Ka, ‘why don’t they close it?’ Ka uwa its coming always, ngaltu tourist tjuta, visitors. Some people, ‘I want to climb’ sometimes visitors climb Uluru munu ngalya pitjala on tour, why I climb? Alatji, why don’t they close it. Ka wiya, it’s coming now you know, nintintjaku, visitors kulintjaku munta-uwa. Uwa minga tjutangka wangkapai, always.
Uwa kuwari nyanga kulini, kulini, everybody kulinu, munta-uwa wanyu kala patila. Wangkara wangkarala kulini, munta-uwa.
Visitors-ngku panya kulilpai, ‘ai nyangatjaya patinu ka nganana yaaltji yaaltji kuwari? Nganana wai putu kulilpai’. Wiya, Tjukurpa ngarinyitu ngura, outside. Not only this park unngu kutju palu tjukurpa nganananya help-amilalatu ngapartji ngapartji ka nganana ngapartji katinyi visitors tjuta. Some reckon nobody living in the homelands but this good story to tell to the visitors panya. Ka nganananya help-amilantjaku kulu kulu. Government gotta really sit down and help. We got good places up here.
Ngura kulunypa tjuta nyarakutu ngarinyi but he got Tjukurpa tjara. Not Tjukurpa panya nyanga side but only this side, the public story. Uwa. Uwa. Ka tourist tjinguru kulilpai, ‘ah, I done nothing in this place’ but katira nintini, sit down and talk on the homeland, uwa. Nyinara wangkara visitors kulira kulira, they’ll go happy, ‘munta-uwa I learnt a lot about Anangu’.
Money is the land whitefella see, ka Anangu see the ngura, the land is Tjukurpa. Tjukurpa wiyangka tjinguru wiya. Culture kanyintjikitjala mukuringanyi. Culture tjinguru mala, another fifty years tjinguru panya, another hundred years, culture is gone, ma-wiyaringanyi. Nyara palula we gotta be strong. Ngapartji ngapartji panya government will understand, munta-uwa, what they saying. It doesn’t work with money. Money will go away, it’s like blowing in the wind, panya. Walpangku puriny waninyi. Culture panya Ananguku culture – Tjukurpa is there ngarinyi alatjitu.
Iriti Anangu bin go and work on the stations. They work for the station manager he want his land, block of land and uwa munta-uwa nyangatja nyangatja. Anangu was camping there, putingka. Building their fence because its boundary. Boundary palyanu that’s the law, whitefella-ku law to look after cattle or sheep or whatever oh that’s the law, Anangu was building it, Anangu working and Anangu now is sitting outside, he can’t get in! malaku, ngura nyakuntjikitja. Putulta kulini, ‘ai? Why? nyaakula fence-ingka patinu? That was me! I built a fence for that bloke and that bloke don’t like me, I’m outside now. Munta nyanga purunypa, same, what I’m saying.
Tjinguru nyaa kulintjaku you know… I built a coca cola factory here. That coca cola factory might say no! Hello, close it otherwise he’ll take me to court. Pala purunypa is Ananguku panya.
Iriti they bring this rock without knowing. They bring the rock from Devil’s Marbles to Alice Springs. Palunya ngalya katingu ka Anangu tjutangku putu wangkara wangkara that tjinguru paluru iriti righta ‘wai! Why that thing from here is over here?’ Wangkara wangkara wangkara wangkara wangkara wangkara, some pass away-aringu palu purunypa people understand, ‘hey we gotta take this back!’ Tjukurpa paluru tjana kulinu.
That’s the same as here, wangkara, wangkara hello, palya patinila. You know, ngura look out-amilani tjungu, still the same panya, government and Anangu. Anangu is the government too but this government, whitefella government, panparangu nguwanpa. Wiya, panparangkuntja wiya please, we gotta be tjungu. Respect.
Iritinguru Anangu nguluringanyi nguwanpa, nguluringanyi, ah! someone is watching us like with a gun: ‘Don’t close it please’… don’t point me with a gun. Pukularintjaku Anangu and piranpa, together, tjungu, uwa munta-uwa, patinu palya nyanganyi the playground.
Sunrise over the Earth. Hydrofluorocarbons were created to protect the ozone layer, but their stable nature makes them an extremely potent greenhouse gas. NASA
On October 28, Australia ratified the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. Australia is the tenth country to ratify, joining others as diverse as Mali, the United Kingdom and Rwanda in a global commitment to dramatically reduce hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in the atmosphere. Once 20 countries have ratified the amendment, it will become binding.
HFCs were designed specifically to replace ozone-destroying compounds previously used in air conditioners and refrigerants. Unfortunately, we now know that HFCs are massively potent greenhouse gases – thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide (albeit released in far smaller quantities).
If the Kigali Amendment becomes binding, the hunt will begin for a replacement for HFCs and their uses in industry. In a strange twist, the least environmentally harmful option may well be carbon dioxide.
Where do HFCs come from?
HFCs are made of carbon, fluorine and hydrogen. They are exclusively synthetic, meaning they have no known natural sources. To understand why they came into existence requires a quick history lesson.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, another class of compounds called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were widely used. CFCs are very stable, which made them ideal for many practical uses, including in refrigeration, foam packaging, and even aerosol cans for hair spray.
However, scientists soon discovered that CFCs had a major downside. Because they are so stable, they can survive in the atmosphere long enough to eventually reach the ozone layer. Once there, they break down in sunlight and destroy ozone in the process.
The Montreal Protocol was a global agreement developed to stop this harmful ozone destruction. The protocol mandated a time frame to completely abolish CFCs. To replace them, new compounds were developed that do not destroy ozone: HFCs.
The usage of CFCs and their replacements, including HFCs, since 1950. UNEP 2011. HFCs: A Critical Link in Protecting Climate and the Ozone Layer
But the solution to one environmental problem became the cause of another: these replacements are potent contributors to warming the climate.
Why are HFCs so bad?
All greenhouse gases work by absorbing infrared radiation, which would otherwise escape into space. But not all greenhouse gases are created equal. The potency of a greenhouse gas depends on three properties:
how long it remains in the atmosphere (its “lifetime”)
how much radiation it absorbs
whether the specific wavelength of radiation it absorbs would otherwise be absorbed by something else in the atmosphere (like water).
Combined, these three properties can be used to determine the global warming potential for each greenhouse gas. This is a measure of how potent the gas is relative to carbon dioxide (CO₂). By definition, CO₂ has a global warming potential of 1. Methane, commonly considered the second most important greenhouse gas, has a global warming potential of 34 – meaning that 1 tonne of methane would trap 34 times more heat than 1 tonne of CO₂.
The global warming potentials for the three most abundant HFCs range from 1,370 to 4,180. In other words, these gases trap thousands of times more heat in our atmosphere than an equivalent amount of CO₂.
What will replace HFCs?
The nearly 200 countries that signed the original Montreal Protocol have unanimously agreed that the climate risks posed by HFCs are too significant to ignore. Developed countries will begin phasing out HFCs in 2019. Developing countries will follow suit between 2024 and 2028.
So what will our refrigerators and air conditioners use instead? Several replacements are being considered.
Some groups are promoting another class of fluorine-containing compounds called hydrofluoroolefins (or HFOs). These have a short lifetime in the atmosphere and so pose much less of a climate risk. However, environmental groups have raised concern about the potentially toxic chemicals produced when HFOs break down.
Another option is to use mixtures of hydrocarbons such as butane. Hydrocarbons pose safety risks as they are highly flammable and may also adversely affect air quality. Ammonia is another alternative that has been used as a refrigerant for a long time but is highly toxic.
And, finally, there is the surprise candidate: CO₂. Although using CO₂ as a refrigerant poses technical challenges, it is non-toxic and non-flammable and a much weaker greenhouse gas than the HFCs it would replace. Strangely, from an environmental perspective, CO₂ may actually be the “best” refrigerant available.
A cooler future ahead?
The Montreal Protocol has long been considered one of the greatest environmental success stories of all time. It brought together the world’s governments and chemical industries to protect the ozone layer.
The adoption of the Kigali Amendment will be another feather in the cap of this important agreement. HFCs aren’t overly prevalent yet – but without Kigali they are expected to grow rapidly. By banning them now, we will avoid their impacts before it is too late.
The recent decision by Australia’s big two supermarkets to phase out free single-use plastic bags within a year is just the latest development in a debate that has been rumbling for decades.
So far, so good. But are there any downsides? Many of you, for instance, face the prospect of paying for bin liners for the first time ever. And while that might sound tongue-in-cheek, it shows the importance of considering the full life-cycle of the plastics we use.
However, the ACT government also noted an increase in sales of plastic bags designed specifically for waste. These are typically similar in size to single-use shopping bags but heavier and therefore contain more plastic.
Ireland’s tax on plastic shopping bags, implemented in 2002, also resulted in a significant increase in sales of heavier plastic waste bags. These bags are often dyed various colours, which represents another resource and potential environmental contaminant.
Keep Australia Beautiful, in its 2015-16 National Litter Index, reported a 6.2% reduction in the littering of plastic bags relative to the previous year, while also noting that these represent only 1% of litter.
Meanwhile, alternatives such as paper or canvas bags have environmental impacts of their own. According to a UK Environmental Agency report, a paper bag would need to be re-used at least four times, and cotton bags at least 173 times, to have a lower environmental impact than single-use plastic bags in terms of resource use, energy and greenhouse outcomes.
This illustrates the importance of considering the full life cycle of shopping bags to arrive at an evidence-based decision rather than one based on emotion or incomplete data. I am not suggesting this is the case with plastic shopping bags; I’m just pointing out the value of proper analysis.
Simply banning a certain type of bag, while this may be a good idea in itself, could result in other knock-on impacts that are harder to manage. Replacing shopping bags with heavier, more resource-intensive ones may solve some environmental impacts but exacerbate others.
Plastics, not plastic bags
In a 2016 discussion paper, Western Australia’s Local Government Association suggested that the focus of action should be plastics in general, not just shopping bags.
As the Keep Australia Beautiful data show, plastic bags are just a small part of a much bigger problem. Many other plastic items are entering the litter stream too.
With this in mind, it pays to ask exactly why we are banning plastic shopping bags. Is it the litter issue, the potential impact on wildlife, the resource consumption, all of the above, or something else? Is it because they are plastic, because they are disposable, or because it saves supermarkets money?
The answers to these questions can guide the development of an effective strategy to reduce the environmental (and perhaps economic) burden of taking our shopping home. With that in place, we can then develop an education strategy to help shoppers adapt and make the scheme a success. But this costs money.
The triple bottom line
There should be plenty of money available. The Victorian state government’s Sustainability Fund, for instance, has A$419 million to spend over the next five years on researching alternatives to shopping and household waste management. Developing a shopping bag strategy would consume only a small part of this and would be money well spent.
The concept of the “triple bottom line” – ensuring that decisions are based equally on environmental, social and economic considerations – needs to be applied to decisions about whether to ban single-use plastic bags, and what alternatives will result. The problem with simply announcing a ban is that this leaves it up to shoppers themselves to work out what to do to replace them.
Evidence-based policy is crucial. We first need to find out how many people already use re-usable bags, whether they always take them to the shops, and what items they put in them. Do people generally know how many times each type of bag should be re-used in order to be an environmentally better choice than the current plastic bags? What’s the best material for re-usable bags, taking into account not only their environmental credentials but also their ability to get your shopping home without breaking?
When it comes to environmental impacts, it’s important not to simply exchange one problem for another. If all we’re doing is swapping between different types of plastic, it’s hard to see how we’re solving anything.
On your way home tonight, you might stop at the supermarket to grab some ingredients for the evening meal. If you’re like many shoppers, you’ll pass through the self-service checkout, scan your items, and hurriedly place them in the conveniently waiting thin, grey plastic bag before finalising the purchase.
At home, the purchases are packed away or lined up for immediate preparation. The plastic bag is scrunched into a little ball and stuffed away with others in your collection, to be used as bin liners or otherwise thrown away. All of these behaviours are, by and large, done without a great deal of thought.
One of the most challenging tasks for marketers is to bring about changes in consumer behaviours that have become habitual, routine and “low involvement” – why spend time stopping and considering various brands of laundry detergent, for instance, when you can just quickly grab the one you’ve always used?
The very nature of habitual behaviour means that responses to the same situational cues happen automatically and with little conscious thought. Habits are powerfully ingrained. One study estimates that around 45% of our daily actions are habitual, and most of our purchases and consumption is of the low-involvement variety.
Repetitive consumer behaviour is a tough cycle to disrupt. And it is the very nature of these habitual responses that make many standard interventions relatively ineffective.
But this is the task facing supermarkets in taking away customers’ access to free plastic bags.
Banning the bags
The recently announced plans by supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths to ban single-use plastic bags seem admirable enough, but the environmental benefits will only be fully realised if the ban drives a permanent change in shoppers’ behaviour.
Many countries have tried a variety of strategies to get rid of single-use plastic bags, including bans, educational campaigns, and levies. Most have had mixed results. There is no overwhelming evidence to suggest that any of these approaches has fully broken shoppers’ disposable bag habit.
Even where use has been dramatically reduced, the environmental impact has been mitigated by unintended consequences such as a 65% increase in the purchase of bin liners, and the disposal of re-usable bags. And despite a general shift in attitude towards environmentally sustainable consumption, this “intention-behaviour gap” still prevails.
Breaking the habit
Here is where some behavioural psychology can be brought to bear on the problem. We know that habitual behaviours are learned and reinforced through repeated responses to particular situations. Theoretically, if these behaviours are learned, they can be unlearned by providing different situations.
One potentially useful technique is called “nudging”. A nudge gives people a gentle prod to change their behaviour, through encouragement rather than coercion. This sometimes controversial subject is most familiar in terms of behavioural economics – a classic example being the small refunds offered by drink bottle recycling schemes – but nudges can be purely behavioural as well as economic.
Behavioural nudges aim to make people stop and think about what would otherwise be an unconscious behaviour. Often this takes the form of a short, simple message. Electricity providers have been known to use this method of nudging. Power usage by their customers will drop when they are shown that the usage rate of a similar-sized household is more efficient than their own.
But it can also involve a minor adjustment to the environment in which the behaviour occurs. Such a strategy could be applied in supermarkets where “footprints” could lead to reusable bags that are available for purchase. Repeating this over time could result in consumers associating the footprints with a reminder to bring their own bags. Varying the location of the footprints, or even their colour or shape, might encourage shoppers’ curiosity and thus increase the likelihood of consciousness about the plastic bag ban.
Economic nudges can also be used to help shoppers quit plastic bags – as in the case of Toronto, which introduced a 5-cent levy on plastic bags. There are many ways to gently encourage shoppers to make better decisions.
Australia’s big shopping brands
Given that much of the problem involves challenging current behaviours, it stands to reason that the big brands’ responses to this question will hinge on what their customers are already used to.
Retailers such as Bunnings and Aldi have never provided their customers with free, disposable plastic bags. Their customers learned quickly from the outset to use alternatives, such as the stash of old cardboard boxes typically found behind the checkouts at Bunnings.
Woolworths and Coles, on the other hand, face a tougher challenge. They are taking something away from shoppers, and some customers may be resentful and resistant to change as a result.
To avoid a repeat of Target’s aborted effort to remove free bags in 2013, Coles and Woolworths might find that the best way to avoid a similar customer revolt is to use in-store cues as behavioural nudges, alongside the economic incentive of offering durable plastic bags for a price. Many consumers will be willing to pay for plastic bag alternatives during the transition phase. Combining this with gentle reminders such as in-store “footprints” will aim to gradually change those low-involvement, highly habitual shopping patterns.
Whether economic or non-economic, messages to shoppers need to be as pervasive and repetitive as the ingrained behaviours they are trying to change.
The world’s coral reefs face unprecedented threats. Their survival depends on how well they can cope with a long list of pressures including fishing, storms, coral bleaching, outbreaks of coral predators and reduced water quality. Together, these disturbances have caused the Great Barrier Reef to lose half of its coral cover since 1985.
One often-used way of protecting marine ecosystems is to close parts of the ocean to fishing, in no-take marine reserves. From research, we know that by reducing fishing you end up with more and bigger fish (and other harvested species such as lobsters).
But other benefits of protection might be more surprising. In a new study, we show that no-take reserves helped the Great Barrier Reef’s corals to resist a range of disturbances, such as bleaching, disease and crown-of-thorns starfish, and to recover more quickly from damage.
More exposure, but better protection
Our study used observations between 1993 and 2013 of 34 types of coral and invertebrates and 215 fish species on 46 reefs spread across the Great Barrier Reef. Among the 46 study reefs, 26 were open to fishing and 20 were in no-take marine reserves.
During the study period, several occurrences of coral bleaching, coral disease, storms and outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish were recorded.
The total number of disturbances affecting our study reefs increased in recent years (2010-12), mostly due to severe storms affecting the central and southern sections of the Great Barrier Reef. Among our study reefs, those located inside no-take marine reserves were more exposed to disturbance than those outside no-take marine reserves.
Our study showed that, inside no-take marine reserves, the impact of disturbance was reduced by 38% for fish and by 25% for corals compared with unprotected reefs. This means that no-take marine reserves benefit not only fish but entire reef communities, including corals, and might help to slow down the rapid degradation of coral reefs.
Damaged coral reef around Lizard Island a few days after cyclone Ita. Photo by Tom Bridge, http://www.tethys-images.com
Faster recovery
In addition to greater resistance, reef organisms recovered more quickly from disturbance inside no-take marine reserves. After each disturbance, we measured the time that both coral and fish communities took to return to their pre-disturbance state.
We found coral communities took the longest to recover after crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks. Outside no-take marine reserves, it took on average nine years for these communities to recover. It took just over six years inside no-take marine reserves.
Although there is more work to be done, one reason that reefs inside no-take zones are able to cope better with disturbances is that they preserve and promote a wider range of important ecological functions. Where fishing reduces the numbers of some species outside protected areas, some of these functions could be lost.
Coral reef showing signs of recovery. Photo copyright Tom Bridge/www.tethys-images.com
Knowledge for conservation
Marine reserves (including no-take zones) currently cover 3.4% of the world’s ocean, which is still well below the 10% target for 2020 recommended by the Convention on Biological Diversity. The slow progress towards this target is partly due to the perceived high costs of protection compared to true ecological benefits, which can be difficult to gauge. While some surprising benefits are beginning to be revealed in studies like ours, such benefits remain little understood.
Our results help to fill that gap by showing that no-take marine reserves can boost both the resistance and recovery of reef communities following disturbance. In ecology, resistance plus recovery equals resilience.
Our work suggests that the net benefit of no-take marine reserves is much greater than previously thought. No-take marine reserves host not only more and bigger fishes, but more resilient communities that might decline at slower rates.
These results reinforce the idea that no-take marine reserves should be widely implemented and supported as a means of maintaining the integrity of coral reefs globally.
Our conclusions also demonstrate that we need long-term monitoring programs which provide a unique opportunity to assess the sustained benefits of protection.
And when reconciliation principles are practised not preached, traditional custodians of the land are afforded due respect. This then leads them to share their 60,000 year old knowledge of the management of the land we are privileged to utilise as tourism destinations.
Wiya, come together, wiya come together patintjaku.
Estimates suggest that phasing out HFCs will 
When it comes to environmental impacts, it’s important not to simply exchange one problem for another. If all we’re doing is swapping between different types of plastic, it’s hard to see how we’re solving anything.
Whether economic or non-economic, messages to shoppers need to be as pervasive and repetitive as the ingrained behaviours they are trying to change.
Kevin's Walk on the Wild Side 
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