climate change

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Diplomats from all over the world are returning home after a hard-won agreement in Durban, South Africa.

They agreed to do nothing to save our climate from disaster.

Our governments will talk until 2015, and then maybe do something serious about greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. By then, as Radio Ecoshock listeners know, we will be committed to at least 3 and a half degrees Centigrade hotter world in 2100, than our ancestors knew in 1750. It will only get hotter after that.

One World TV interviewed Sione Taulo Fulivai from the small Pacific Island state of Tonga on the last day of the UN climate negotiations at COP17 in Durban. Small Island states face rising atmospheric and sea surface temperatures, rising sea levels spoiling freshwater reservoirs and agriculture and threatening to innundate their land, and changing rainfall pattens. They are on the frontline of global warming.

Tonga is a nation of 100,000 people with a GDP per capita of US$3711. Tonga and Vanuatu are at the top of a UN list of countries most vulnerable to natural disasters in the Pacific.

Related: Pacific climate change: temperatures rise, sea levels increase, rainfall changing

                                  Conservationists in tree canopy lead way for tiny Leadbeater’s Possum

Logging has been halted today in the Toolangi State Forest, in the Central Highlands just an hour and a half north of Melbourne. 

“The forests of the Central Highlands have been decimated by years of unsustainable logging and more recently by bushfire. Any forest left standing must be immediately protected from logging”, said spokesperson for the group, Luke Pavia.

The carbon sink capacity of urbanized river estuary and coastal environments to mitigate climate change has reduced by 100 fold according to scientists from the University of Technology Sydney. The Scientists used core samples from Botany Bay in Sydney to reconstruct the sedimentation changes in the past 6000 years, highlighting the changes in the ecology. The plant samples in the sedimentation changed as rapid industrialisation occurred around Botany Bay during the 1950s.

"We have effectively gone back in time and monitored carbon capture and storage by coastal ecosystems, finding a 100-fold weakening in the ability of coastal ecosystems to sequester carbon since the time of European settlement. This severely hampered the ability of nature to reset the planet's thermostat." said Dr. Peter Macreadie, University of Technology, Sydney Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow.