A seminar by Professor Will Steffen at Griffith University left many in the audience disturbed and angry. Disturbed at the extremely alarming nature of what he reported and angry that urgent action wasn’t happening right now.

Professor Steffen is one of the world’s leading climate scientists. He is the Executive Director of the ANU Climate Change Institute and a Science Adviser for the Department of Climate Change in the Australian Government. Professor Steffen provided a risk management approach to climate change looking at what needs to be done to adapt to and mitigate its effects. In relation to the effects on Australia’s terrestrial biodiversity it would be impossible to overstate the seriousness of what he had to say.  Here are some samples:

  • “Natural ecosystems will no-way be able to adapt.

  • Australia’s bio-diversity is approaching the limit of its capacity to adapt. We must mitigate vigorously and fast.

  • The goal should not be to conserve what we have now where we have it now even the ecosystems.

  • The goal is to conserve what is working at the ecosystem level

  • Effort at the species level will only be wasted effort

  • Dealing with climate change will need at least an order-of-magnitude increase in the conservation effort across the board

  • We are moving very rapidly into a changing world

  • The most effective adaptation approach is to increase the resilience of ecosystems and to make space for species and eco-systems to self-adjust as climate shifts

  • There is a blockage of old males in the system in Australia very resistant to change (in policy & practice)

  • Indigenous Australians were the only human culture to survive the last glacial with their culture intact

  • We have to be much easier on our political leaders and managers

  • We will need to frame management policy as experiment with the only failure is if you don’t learn from the experience

  • We will need to trial things make mistakes learn from the mistakes

  • Adaptive capacity will be critical

  • We are faced by daunting uncertainty

  • We need to identify and protect refugia

  • Seek to protect a representative array of ecosystems

  • Remove or minimise existing stressors

  • Build appropriate connectivity

  • Eco-engineer if possible (although this is expensive with a low success rate)

  • Business as usual isn’t going to work

  • We will need to be very agile resilient

  • The rate of change is unprecedented

  • We are dealing with ecological complexity characterized by:

    • Indirect effects rule!!!

    • Averages versus extremes

    • Synergistic effects and surprises

    • Nonlinearities time lags thresholds feedbacks rapid transformations

    • Surprises

  • Adaptation is not predictable and in very many cases won’t happen

  • Species with narrow ranges will go extinct

  • Threats from climate change arise from changes in the basic physical and chemical underpinning of all life (temperature precipitation CO2 concentration acidity)

  • It is very difficult for scientists to deliver fine-scale impact and vulnerability assessments because as yet the various modelling tools are coming up with wildly different predictions

  • Climate is shifting very strongly directionally. The overall trend is absolutely clear

  • We haven’t reached equilibrium – there is a lot of committed momentum

  • South-West Western Australia shows strong evidence of climate change

  • South-East Australia shows possible climate change signals but not yet conclusive

  • North-Eastern Australia shows no conclusive evidence of climate change at this stage

  • Australia is arguably the most vulnerable of the developed countries

  • Climate change impacts are NOT in the future tense – they are happening now

  • Many effects will be huge. For example Sydney faces an increase in the frequency of high sea-level events of a thousandfold (a thousand times greater) and Brisbane Airport will not be viable by 2100

  • It is likely we will reach the limits of system resilience and have to transform.