Law, Climate Emergency and the Australian Megafires

Nicole Rogers

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000514735
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Law
• Thema: Law Theory & Practice

This book addresses the ways in which the Black Summer megafires influenced the development of climate narratives throughout 2020. It analyses the global pandemic, and its ensuing restrictions, as a countervailing force in the production of such narratives.

Lives and properties were lost in the spring and summer of 2019 and 2020, when catastrophic bushfires burnt through millions of hectares of mainland Australia. Nearly 3 billion native animals died. And for millions of Australians, and others worldwide, it was through the Australian megafires that the global climate emergency became tangible and concrete, no longer a comfortably deferred, albeit problematic abstraction which could be consigned to future generations to deal with. This book explores the legal and other implications of new understandings of climate emergency arising from the fires, and the emergence of a hierarchy of emergencies as the pandemic came to dominate global and domestic political discourses. It examines narratives of culpability, and legal avenues for seeking retribution from government and big fossil fuel emitters. It also considers the impact of the fires on the burgeoning phenomenon of climate activism, particularly in Australia, and the ways in which pandemic restrictions curtailed such activism. Finally, the book reflects on the fires through the lenses offered by climate fiction, and apocalyptic fiction more generally, in order to consider how these shape, and might shape, our responses to them.

This important and timely book will appeal to environmental lawyers and socio-legal theorists; as well as other scholars and activists with interests in climate change and its impact. It is recommended for anyone concerned about current and future climate disasters, and the shortcomings in legal, political and popular responses to the climate crisis.

1
Black Summer and all that followed

Nicole Rogers

DOI: 10.4324/b22677-1

In the spring and summer of 2019 and 2020, catastrophic bushfires burnt through millions of hectares of mainland Australia. These would be referred to, subsequently, as the megafires, and the period during which the fires raged is known as Black Summer.

Some prominent members of the federal government argued against any links between the bushfires and climate change, with the Deputy Prime Minister at the outset adopting an openly derisory tone towards the ‘pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies’ who drew such a connection.¹ Yet, as the megafires took hold throughout Black Summer, other federal and State politicians conceded that climate change was a causal factor.² In early December 2019, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a staunch supporter of Australia’s mining industry, notably acknowledged that climate change was playing a contributory role.³ In October 2020, the New South Wales Transport Minister, who had been forced to shelter on the beach with other fire refugees during Black Summer, identified climate change as the predominant cause of the ‘fire tsunami’.⁴

On the first day of hearings of the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements (hereinafter the Natural Disasters Royal Commission), established to investigate the Black Summer bushfires and, more generally, Australia’s capacity to respond to future natural disasters, the central focus was on the interconnection between the megafires and climate change. Witnesses addressed the changing global climate, and consequential risks. Karl Braganza, Head of Climate Monitoring in the federal government’s own statutory agency, the Bureau of Meteorology, explained the mechanisms by which climate change was ‘load[ing] the dice’ towards worse fire seasons,⁵ with longer seasons, an increased frequency of large-scale heatwaves, and more extreme fire danger days.⁶

The three Commissioners were left in no doubt that climate change was already causing ‘extreme weather and climate systems that influence natural hazards’, and that locked-in global warming over the next two decades will lead to rising sea levels, more intense tropical cyclones, and more frequent and intense floods and bushfires.⁷ They stated, in their Report, that catastrophic and unpredictable fire conditions, such as those experienced during Black Summer, will become more common in Australia.⁸ The causal contribution of climate change to the megafires was also recognised in the report of the 2020 New South Wales Bushfire Inquiry.⁹

The science was undeniable. A group of scientists reached the conservative conclusion that at least some of the drivers ‘show[ed] an imprint of anthropogenic climate change’.¹⁰ After assessing available, peer-reviewed, scientific publications, the authors of a 2020 Bushfires Project report acknowledged the causal link between a changing climate and worsening fire weather conditions, such as those experienced during Black Summer.¹¹ According to another group of scientific researchers, ‘scientific assessments that human-caused climate warming is virtually certain to increase the duration, frequency and intensity of forest fires in southeast Australia’ were borne out during Black Summer.¹²

For Australians of all political persuasions, including ‘quiet Australians’,¹³ the connection between climate change and the megafires was clear. During Black Summer, Liberal politicians were reportedly ‘bombarded’ with emails from ‘mainstream mums’ concerned about the government’s climate inaction.¹⁴ According to the authors of the Australia Institute’s 2020 Climate of the Nation report, published at the end of October, an increasing number of Australians believe that they are currently experiencing climate impacts;¹⁵ bushfires were the ‘climate change impact of concern’ for 82% of Australians surveyed several months after Black Summer finished.¹⁶ There was a demonstrable correlation between direct experience of the fires and climate change concerns.¹⁷

A group of 80 Australian Research Council Laureate Fellows wrote in an open letter in January 2020 that ‘[t]he tragedy of this summer’s bushfires’ had made it clear that ‘[c]limate change has arrived, and without significant action greater impacts on Australia are inevitable’.¹⁸ What, then, did this realisation mean for climate narratives in Australia: narratives at work in the political arena, in courtrooms, on the streets and through other forms of activism, and in fiction?

Black Summer

In the spring and summer of 2019 and 2020, as catastrophic fire danger ratings occurred at locations and times never yet recorded¹⁹ and temperature records were broken, fires raged through an estimated 19.4 million hect-ares²⁰ of mainland Australia. Some of this was World Heritage listed, with over 80% of the Blue Mountains World Heritage area and over 50% of the Gondwana World Heritage area impacted.²¹

Bushfires are commonplace in Australia, and a number of devastating fires have already occurred this century. These include the 2003 fires in Canberra, the Black Saturday fires in Victoria in 2009, which led to the deaths of 173 people, and the 2013 Red October bushfires in New South Wales. Yet the megafires were extraordinary by any measure: in duration, in magnitude and in sheer destructiveness. They burned through areas previously thought to be too wet to burn.²² They generated an exceptional number of pyrocumulonimbus events: fire-caused storms considered to be very rare.²³ The Gospers Mountain fire, which began on 26 October 2019 and burned until February 2020, was, at that point, the largest recorded forest fire in Australia²⁴ and, reportedly, Australia’s first ‘mega-blaze’.²⁵

The scale and impact of the fires is almost impossible to comprehend; this is symptomatic of what Timothy Clark has called the scalar framing of the Anthropocene.²⁶ Millions of Australians saw the fires, felt their heat, witnessed their destructive force and inhaled their smoke throughout that never-ending summer. The fires impressed themselves, strongly and irrefutably, upon ‘the given dimensionality of our embodied existence’.²⁷

Yet the fires were also a ‘planetary environmental reali[ty]’.²⁸ Satellite images depicted an enormous, ominous expanse of smoke and fire; one year later, John Kerry, newly appointed climate envoy to the Biden administration, stated that these images ‘ought to stop every single one of us in our tracks’.²⁹ One extraordinary aspect to the bushfires was the fact that the smoke travelled so far, allegedly circled the globe.³⁰ The fire-generated pyrocumulonimbus storms pushed a huge smoke plume 35 kilometres into the stratosphere; this vortex persisted for 13 weeks and travelled 66,000 kilometres.³¹ One of the researchers who documented the unprecedented phenomenon described it as ‘jaw-dropping’.³² Smoke from the fires was still detectable by satellite a year later.³³

The megafires brought devastating loss of human and nonhuman life, and property destruction. The impacts and after-effects of the fires, both short-term and long-term, transcend these immediate losses.

Impacts of the megafires

There is no Australian precedent for destruction of such extraordinary magnitude in such a short timeframe, although the effects of the colonisation process are comparable. In fact, the fires augmented the destruction wreaked by colonisation, with estimates of thousands of Indigenous cultural sites lost to the flames.³⁴

Australian wildlife and biodiversity were dealt a profound and potentially irreversible blow. A wildlife carer observed that ‘there is a scent of death in every breath’³⁵ and, similarly, Douglas Kahn described the communal inhalation of ‘hectares of endangerment’.³⁶ Scientists have estimated that 327 threatened species had a ‘significant portion … of their known distribution within the fire footprint’; 114 species lost at least half of their habitat, and 49 species experienced the destruction of over 80% of their habitat.³⁷ Animals that survived the blazes had to find food and avoid predators in a ‘moonscape landscape’,³⁸ and the magnitude of the destruction impeded resettlement by impacted populations.³⁹

Again, the scale of the disaster is difficult to comprehend. According to a scientific report commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature, nearly 3 billion native vertebrates,⁴⁰ including over 60,000 koalas,⁴¹ were killed or displaced by the fires: a figure far exceeding the initial estimate of 1 billion animals. The Fund’s Chief Executive has described the fires as ‘one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history’.⁴²

Human survivors – those who lost their homes, were trapped for hours and days on beaches, in lakes, in cars on blocked roads, and in evacuation centres, fought the...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Black Summer and all that followed
• 2 Narratives of emergency
• 3 Narratives of culpability
• 4 Narratives of activism
• 5 Narratives of fire and apocalypse
• Index