Climate change
Australia’s shifting mood on climate change
At the beginning of 2020, Australia’s national conversation was dominated by the catastrophic bushfires raging throughout the country. The fires killed at least 34 people, burned…
Climate change makes Covid-19 politics look easy
Covid-19 has been an extremely difficult challenge for national policymakers. If policy and politics are about managing competing interests and prioritising different…
Can Covid-19 response be a model for climate action?
In 2020, the world will see the largest annual drop in carbon dioxide emissions in history. The havoc wreaked by the coronavirus and its accompanying lockdowns has seen fleets of…
Despite headwinds, China prepares for world’s largest carbon market
In late 2017, China released its national emissions trading system (ETS) plan, laying out a three-stage transition from regional pilot systems that began in 2013. The national ETS…
Bob May – Professor of Everything
I have known two “professors of everything”: George Seddon and Robert May. Seddon, who ended his days in Fremantle, Western Australia, had chairs in geology, English, environment,…
Parallel plotlines: The evolving stories of climate change and corona
I am writing this from inside an apartment in Melbourne, Australia. A crisp, cool breeze ripples in through the window, as it has done in all autumns past and will do in autumns…
Winds of change: Rethinking disaster relief after Cyclone Harold
Wind speeds over 215 kilometres per hour, more than 180,000 people affected, communities and their infrastructure hit hard, and countries in lockdown – Cyclone Harold is the most…
Solastalgia: A malady for our age?
Some words capture the zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times. We’ve been talking about “globalisation” for decades now, until it’s become a comfortable part of our intellectual…
Learning from extinction
They called the last one Martha. I’d never heard of the passenger pigeon until a couple of years ago, these small birds that once flew in great nomadic flocks across North America…
Japan has struck low in climate ambition
Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has repeatedly pledged that his country would lead global efforts to address climate change. Increasingly, however, Japan is facing scrutiny…