I’ve spent 40 years studying Antarctica. The frozen continent has never needed our help more

After decades immersed in Antarctic science, I’ve learned that physical and biological changes rarely occur smoothly. More often than not, they unfold in sharp steps. Right now, Antarctica’s climate and ecosystems are experiencing disturbing changes.

Much of this winter’s sea ice is missing. A crucial ocean current is slowing down, and glaciers and ice shelves are disintegrating.

On land, fragile moss ecosystems are collapsing. Majestic emperor penguins may be headed for extinction. And pollution from human activity in Antarctica has left a toxic legacy.

It’s almost certain things will get worse. On Friday, hundreds of international scientists called for an urgent expansion – not contraction – of Southern Ocean science in response to the emerging climate crisis. This adds to the scientific chorus claiming we have only a narrow window to save the planet.

I’ve spent 40 years in Antarctic and subantarctic research. Some 22 of those were spent at the federal government’s Australian Antarctic Division; my final day there was last Thursday. No longer a public servant, I feel compelled, as a private citizen now, to publicly stand up for the icy continent and the benefit of Antarctic science to society.

Crucial To Life As We Know It

Antarctica matters. What happens there affects global weather patterns and sea levels.

But Antarctica’s climate is changing. Record-breaking stored heat is melting ice shelves from underneath, setting off a chain reaction. Without the buttressing of the ice shelves, glaciers flow faster to the sea. In West Antarctica, the Thwaites “doomsday glacier” is melting faster than predicted. In East Antarctica, lesser-known ice shelves have collapsed and glaciers are shrinking, adding to sea-level rise.

Antarctica is governed by the Antarctic Treaty, negotiated by 12 countries, including Australia, during the Cold War in 1959. Australia’s territory in Antarctica comprises 42% of the continent.

In my view, the treaty is magnificent. It represents a grand vision: a continent set aside for conservation, peace and science.

But Antarctica remains under threat. And the biggest threat of all is climate change.

In June this year, all treaty nations, including Australia, collectively stated:

changes in Antarctic and Southern Ocean environments are linked to, and influence, climate impact drivers globally.

They added “further irreversible change is likely” without “accelerated efforts” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientific research is crucial in the face of these threats, to help better understand these changes now and over the longer term, and to feed into policy interventions.

Surprisingly a budget shortfall appears to be inadvertently curtailing plans for science this summer, according to the Guardian Australia.

In July, the ABC reported the Antarctic Division told staff A$25 million in budget savings was needed this financial year. This led to a review of plans for field research this summer. Reportedly, two out of three permanent research stations (Mawson and Davis) will not be filled with the normal number of scientists this season. That means some planned and approved projects will not be going ahead this year, including surveys on sea-ice thickness and landfast sea ice.

The Greens claim the $25 million hit to the Antarctic Division represents a 16% cut to its operating budget for the current financial year.

Seizing an opportunity, the Greens and Liberal Party established a Senate inquiry into what they refer to as funding cuts, to report by November 30.

Generally speaking, Antarctic activities receive overwhelmingly bipartisan support. For many decades Australia’s record in Antarctic protection has been impressive. For example, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek recently tripled the size of the marine protected area around Macquarie Island.

Former Labor environment minister Peter Garrett advanced whale conservation. He was instrumental in the campaign against so-called “scientific whaling” in the Antarctic, backed by government scientists, which culminated in Australia’s successful challenge to Japanese whaling in the International Court of Justice in 2014.

Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull funded Australia’s new icebreaker and feral pest eradication from Macquarie Island. And Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, with treasurer Paul Keating, collaborated with French prime minister Michel Rocard in 1991 to ensure a mining ban and sign the Madrid Protocol to protect Antarctic ecosystems.

Support for Antarctic Division activities contributed to curtailing the illegal toothfish fishing in Antarctic waters. A regulated, sustainable industry is now in place. Krill fisheries operate according to science-based decisions. Efforts to reduce albatross bycatch in longline fishing were also led by Antarctic Division scientists.

Cleaning Up The Mess In Antarctica

The story of Antarctica serves as a compelling reminder humanity must end our reliance on fossil fuels. We must also do a far better job of environmental stewardship – including paying for the scientific research so urgently needed.

Failing to fully support vital Antarctic science in a rapidly unfolding climate emergency, in my view, is unwise.

Dana M Bergstrom, Honorary Senior Fellow, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Disease in the dirt: how mange-causing mites decimated a Tasmanian wombat population

More than 80% of Australian mammals are found nowhere else in the world. Many of these unique, iconic creatures are under threat.

The most important and well-known threats are invasive species (such as cats and foxes) and human-driven changes to the environment (such as land clearing and climate change).

Invasive pathogens – parasites, viruses, bacteria, fungi – often attract less attention, but they too can pose a significant threat to native animals.

Take sarcoptic mange, a parasitic disease that affects mammals around the world. In a new study published in the journal Biology Letters, we report on a sarcoptic mange outbreak in a population of bare-nosed wombats in central Tasmania, which caused a population decline of more than 80%.

What Is Sarcoptic Mange, And Where Did It Come From?

Sarcoptic mange is caused by the parasitic mite Sarcoptes scabiei, which burrows into the skin. These mites are happy to infest many mammals, including humans (in which case the disease is called scabies).

Research suggests the spread of the mites around the world is associated with European colonialism, although where they originally evolved is uncertain. In Australia, the mites were likely introduced multiple times over the past 230 years.

In southern Australia, sarcoptic mange is mostly a concern for wildlife health. It can be deadly to bare-nosed wombats, as well as some other species including koalas and quenda (also known as western brown bandicoots). In tropical northern Australia, scabies is a significant (although rarely life-threatening) human health issue.

How Does Sarcoptic Mange Spread Among Solitary Wombats?

In some animals, the mange-causing mites move directly from one animal to another when the animals come into direct contact. However, wombats are relatively solitary. It is rare for them to touch one another outside of mating.

Nevertheless, the mites still spread via “environmental transmission”. Wombats change burrows quite frequently, usually staying in one burrow for somewhere between one and nine days before changing.

When a mite-infested wombat stays in a burrow, it leaves some mites behind. Research shows mites can survive in the cool, humid soil of the burrow for between five and 16 days. If another wombat comes along during this period, the mites have found themselves a new host.

The Ratio Of Wombats To Burrows May Be The Key

When scientists study how pathogens are transmitted among animals, we often assume it will depend on the population density of the animals in question. At higher densities, individual animals come into contact more often so the pathogen is more likely to spread. And if population density is too low, a pathogen may “die out”.

However, it’s a different story for environmentally transmitted pathogens like S. scabiei. In our research, we found individual wombats continued to be infected and diseased even when population density declined.

Our research suggests the number of burrows per wombat likely influences how often they can encounter mites in the environment.

Because infested burrows are the likely source of the infections, the number of available burrows per wombat should be a more important determinant of whether a population decline from sarcoptic mange occurs.

How Big A Problem Is Sarcoptic Mange?

Our study is the third formally documented decline in a bare-nosed wombat population from a sarcoptic mange outbreak.

Does this mean bare-nosed wombat populations are threatened everywhere by this invasive pathogen – or even worse, at risk of going extinct? This does not appear to be the case.

There is no doubt mange causes immense suffering to wombats and is a serious wildlife health issue. However, a combination of factors such as wombat-to-burrow ratios and environmental conditions mean declines appear to be occasional events.

Understanding the spread and effect of the disease is not simple, but a growing body of research is revealing why some wombat populations are free of sarcoptic mange, some have disease but don’t decline, and why occasionally some do decline.

Another finding of our study was a potential indicator of the risk of population decline from sarcoptic mange. When more than 25% of a population show signs of the disease, based on systematic population surveys from multiple studies, it may mean population decline is possible.

What Can Be Done?

Can anything be done to help wombats and other wildlife affected by sarcoptic mange? The answer is yes for individual wombats and sub-populations, but not yet for larger scales.

Across southeast Australia a significant number of wildlife carers, rehabilitators, and rescue organisations make important contributions to the welfare of bare-nosed wombats. A small number of researchers also work on the issue, and the health of wombats has increasingly been supported by investments from state governments and industry, particularly over the past decade.

Help for wombats is predominantly through the use of treatments delivered to captive and wild individuals.

There are significant practical challenges in treating free-living wombats. To improve the chances of success, decisions must be made based on data and with collaboration among all stakeholders. Indeed, the last decade has seen significant advances through collaboration, research and engagement that are benefiting wombats.

There are also challenges that persist, such as confirmation-biases leading some well intended wildlife groups to treat sarcoptic mange in wombats with drug doses many times higher than the needed or recommended amount. This can have unintended results, such as toxicity to the wombat, pharmaceuticals entering the environment, and mites developing a resistance to the drugs.

The Australian Pesticide and Veterinary Management Authority makes important decisions about granting permits for management of mange in wombats. The authority must be astute in interpreting the strengths and limitations of evidence when making these decisions, and seek input where additional expertise is needed.

Scott Carver, Associate Professor, Wildlife Ecology, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What harm could one coal mine do? Plenty – 1.7 million Hiroshima bombs of heat for starters

This year, the Australian government rejected Clive Palmer’s coal mine proposal – but approved three others. Over 100 more fossil fuel projects are in the decision pipeline.

Why are we still approving coal projects when climate impacts are intensifying? There is, as the International Energy Agency has pointed out, no place for new fossil fuels if we have a chance of holding global heating to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels. Our existing fossil fuel infrastructure is enough to blow our remaining carbon budget.

Unusually, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek and her department were required to account for climate impacts in a recent decision.

They decided the climate effects did not have “relevant impact”. One of the key reasons they gave for this was that the emissions from burning the coal from a single mine will, they claim, have a “very small” impact on warming – just 0.00024℃ over the lifetime of the mine.

As a physicist, this argument does not stack up. What seems like a minuscule amount of warming to a politician is, to scientists, very concerning. It’s no wonder environmental organisations are filing lawsuits to try to stop these mines.

One New Mine Is The Same As Millions Of Nuclear Bombs Of Heat

Right now, Plibersek and her department are weighing up final approval for the expansion of the Mount Pleasant coal mine in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley. If approved, it would let the mine’s owners MACH Energy Australia double its extraction rate to 21 million tonnes of coal per year.

So far, the project has breezed through environmental approvals. But how can Australia’s environment minister reason that new coal mines won’t do too much damage to the climate?

Plibersek gives two main arguments. One is the assumption that if we don’t dig up fossil fuels, someone else will. Known as “the drug dealer’s defence”, this rationale has been rejected in a growing number of fossil fuel court cases, for example in in NSW, Queensland and the United States.

The second – the “very small” impact on warming – is worth a closer look.

By the mining company’s calculation, the expanded project will add 535 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) to our atmosphere over the lifetime of the mine. That’s about a year’s worth of Australia’s entire domestic emissions.

The department took this CO₂e figure and estimated how much this would change Earth’s global temperature. That’s where they got the “very small” figure of 0.00024℃.

To a politician, this small number may seem insignificant. But to a physicist it is truly remarkable. What it actually means is we are able to alter an entire planet’s temperature with this single mine extension.

Changing a planet’s temperature takes an enormous amount of energy.

If it weren’t for the greenhouse effect, Earth would be too cold for life. The problem is humans have been steadily increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, causing Earth to retain more and more of the Sun’s vast energy, heating the planet to dangerous levels.

Burning fossil fuels is responsible for most of this.

Our planet is now warming at a rate of 0.018℃ per year.

If we compare that to the department’s figure of 0.00024℃, we see the total warming effect from the Mount Pleasant mine would be about 1.3% of one year’s global warming.

Doesn’t sound like much? Consider this. Human activity is causing about 7.8 zettajoules of extra heat to be added to the Earth’s climate system every year. So, 1.3% of a year’s global warming gives roughly 0.1 zettajoules worth of extra heat through burning the output of an expanded Mount Pleasant coal mine.

Now, 0.1 zettajoules is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy. This number is so large we can’t relate to it. We can think of it instead as around 1.7 million Hiroshima bombs worth of extra heat. From one single mine extension.

So, it is not a “very small” amount of energy. And that’s just one mine. If the 25 proposed new coal mines and three recently approved projects go ahead, they would add 12,600 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions to the atmosphere. That, in turn, would trap heat equivalent to roughly 43 million Hiroshima bombs. And this doesn’t even count the planned gas and oil projects, or projects approved at the state level.

We Can’t Claim We Don’t Know

New fossil fuel project approvals at a time when global heating is accelerating seem like a remarkable disconnect.

It’s for this reason we’re seeing a spike in climate lawsuits. The Environment Council of Central Queensland is taking Plibersek to court, aided by Environmental Justice Australia.

Central to their case will be the claim the minister acted unlawfully when she “refused to accept the climate harm these projects are likely to cause, as outlined in thousands of scientific reports, including from the IPCC and her own department.”

The lawsuit has stopped the Mount Pleasant extension and Whitehaven’s Narrabri mine from proceeding further until the case has been heard.

We can’t predict the outcome of the case – it could go either way.

But we can predict the outcome of new fossil fuel projects. Dig up coal, burn it, heat the planet. We can’t argue our way out of the laws of physics. 

Simon Campbell, Senior research fellow and lecturer, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Greenhouse gases are changing air flow over the Pacific Ocean – raising Australia’s risks of extreme weather

After a rare three-year La Niña event brought heavy rain and flooding to eastern Australia in 2020-22, we’re now bracing for the heat and drought of El Niño at the opposite end of the spectrum.

But while the World Meteorological Organisation has declared an El Niño event is underway, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is yet to make a similar declaration. Instead, the Bureau remains on “El Niño alert”.

The reason for this discrepancy is what’s called the Pacific Walker Circulation. The pattern and strength of air flows over the Pacific Ocean, combined with sea surface temperatures, determines whether Australia experiences El Niño or La Niña events.

In our new research, published today in the journal Nature, we asked whether the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had affected the Walker Circulation. We found the overall strength hasn’t changed yet, but instead, the year-to-year behaviour is different.

Switching between El Niño and La Niña conditions has slowed over the industrial era. That means in the future we could see more of these multi-year La Niña or El Niño type events. So we need to prepare for greater risks of floods, drought and fire.

An Ocean-Atmosphere Climate System

La Niña and its counterpart El Niño are the two extremes of the El Niño Southern Oscillation — a coupled ocean-atmosphere system that plays a major role in global climate variability.

The Walker Circulation is the atmospheric part. Air rises over the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (a region of the ocean that stays warm year-round) and flows eastward high in the atmosphere. Then it sinks back to the surface over the eastern equatorial Pacific and flows back to the west along the surface, forming the Pacific trade winds. In short, it loops in an east-west direction across the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

But the Walker Circulation doesn’t always flow with the same intensity — sometimes it is stronger, and sometimes it is weaker.

Periods of stronger or weaker Walker Circulation have major impacts on Australian climate. A stronger Walker Circulation means stronger-than-average trade winds, and generally La Niña-like ocean conditions. This often brings wetter weather to eastern Australia.

On the flip side, a weaker Walker Circulation brings weaker-than-average trade winds, and El Niño-like ocean conditions. A weak Walker Circulation is often associated with drier weather across northern and eastern Australia.

So far, the Walker Circulation is what’s missing from the current El Niño event developing in the Pacific Ocean: it has not weakened enough for the Bureau to declare an El Niño event.

What’s Happening To The Walker Circulation?

The Walker Circulation is a major influence on weather and climate in many places around the world, not just Australia.

A stronger-than-usual Walker Circulation even contributed to the “global warming slowdown” of the early 2000s. This is because a stronger Walker Circulation is often associated with slightly cooler global temperature.

So we need to know how it is going to behave in the future. To do that, we first need to know if — and if so, how — the Walker Circulation’s behaviour has changed due to human activities. And to do that, we need information about how the Walker Circulation behaved before humans started affecting the climate system.

We reconstructed Walker Circulation variability over the past millennium. We used global data from ice cores, trees, lakes, corals and caves to build a picture of how the Walker Circulation changed over time.

We found that on average, there has not yet been any industrial-era change in the strength of the Walker Circulation. This was surprising, because computer simulations of Earth’s climate generally suggest global warming will ultimately cause a weaker, or more El Niño-like, Walker Circulation.

There are a few possible reasons for this. One is that a buildup of fine particles in the air, such as smoke or industrial pollution, may be driving a stronger Walker Circulation, hence “cancelling out” the weakening effect of global warming.

Another is there may have been some weakening, but so far it is too small to be detectable among the Walker Circulation’s large year-to-year variability.

Our research also does not rule out the possibility that with future increases in global temperature, the Walker Circulation will indeed weaken, in a trend to more El Niño-like conditions. In that scenario, Australians might expect decreased rainfall in the north and east, as well as warmer temperatures across the continent, and less snow in the Australian Alps.

Even though the average strength of the Walker Circulation has not changed in the industrial era, there has been a subtle change in the length of time taken for the Walker Circulation to switch from one state to the next.

The Walker Circulation now switches more slowly between weak and strong phases, and we suspect this is influenced by climate change. This has potentially important implications for climate extremes, as El Niño and La Niña conditions could hang around for longer.

Our research also found that major explosive volcanic eruptions — at least as big as the 1982 eruption of El Chichón — can trigger an El Niño-like weakening of the Walker Circulation one to three years after the eruption. Unfortunately, volcanic eruptions remain extremely difficult to predict, so this doesn’t help our long-term climate predictions.

What Is The Message For Australians?

In terms of predicting how the Walker Circulation will change in the future, we can now focus attention on the particular climate models whose outputs most closely match what we discovered from our reconstruction.

That is, models that show no industrial-era weakening trend. This approach might help us get more accurate predictions of future Walker Circulation change.

The other thing we can do is to be prepared for more consecutive-year El Niño and La Niña events, and the sustained wet or dry spells they could bring to Australia.

And if there is a major volcanic eruption? Be prepared for a couple of years of weak Walker Circulation, and the warm, dry weather that can bring. 

Georgina Falster, Postdoctoral Fellow, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Murray-Darling Basin Plan to be extended under a new agreement, without Victoria – but an uphill battle lies ahead

Federal Minister for Water Tanya Plibersek today announced a new agreement to restore Australia’s largest and most important river basin. It comes just months before the original Murray-Darling Basin Plan was to be completed.

This was a plan to benefit people and nature, to protect river communities, industries and the environment against future droughts. It was forged in response to the gruelling Millennium Drought, when the Murray River stopped flowing to the sea.

It was clear too much water was being taken out of the system and everyone would suffer if Basin states could not find a better way to share. But it has been much harder to strike the right balance than first hoped.

When it became clear in July it was no longer possible to deliver the plan in full and on time, the federal government started hatching a new plan.

Now Plibersek is offering “more time, more money, more options, and more accountability”, acutely aware that “the next drought is just around the corner”. But she faces an uphill battle, with Victoria still holding out. Further, the legislation is yet to go before parliament and needs to be passed before Christmas.

How Did We Get Here?

Management of the Basin rivers today is a far cry from the hope engendered in 2007 when Prime Minister John Howard announced the National Plan for Water Security, at the peak of the Millenium Drought.

He proposed reforms to Basin water governance, saying “nothing can change the basic facts of our continent” and calling for action to end “the tyranny of incrementalism and the lowest common denominator” governance. These “once and for all” reforms were intended to prevent “economic and environmental decline”.

But the Basin states were loathe to hand their powers over to the Commonwealth. Victoria and New South Wales resisted reallocating water from agriculture. Amid navigating the complex science and trade offs, it was another five years before the controversial Basin Plan was adopted in 2012.

Unfortunately, the plan then languished over the past decade as the federal, New South Wales and Victorian governments frustrated measures originally agreed to return water from agricultural use to the environment.

This week’s announcement represents the federal government taking firm steps to implement the first part of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s five-point election commitment for the Basin.

Now the federal government has reached agreements with most states who share management of the river system – Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia – but not Victoria. The Victorian government appears to be rivalling the National Party in its opposition to buying more water entitlements from irrigators (water buybacks).

The federal government is looking to purchase water entitlements from willing sellers. This is because past investments in water efficiency projects have proven to be too slow, very expensive and have had unexpected outcomes for agricultural industries and the rivers.

Victoria continues to argue its irrigation-based industries would be harmed by more water buybacks, and that the state has borne an unfair share of the burden compared to New South Wales. The Victorian government has knowledgeable staff and is well resourced, and resistance could be fierce.

Plibersek appears to be counting on her alliance with other states enabling required amendments to the Water Act and Basin Plan to be passed before Christmas. Given almost certain rejection by the Opposition of more water reallocation, she will require the support of cross bench Senators who may demand stronger environmental measures. The Greens have already criticised the minister’s announcement as a move that “kicks the can down the road”, but buying such a large volume of water will take years.

If the legislation is not amended, and existing deadlines remain, the federal government may be forced into recovering even more water. In particular, they would need to respond to the states’ failure to deliver on projects that are supposed to conserve wetland with less water by building water supply infrastructure.

A Welcome Development

The new agreement is welcome in doubling down on the original plan to recover 3,200 billion litres a year of additional water essential to maintain the health of the rivers and the people who rely on them. The federal government has focused on recovering 450 billion litres a year of water within this target that was agreed with the former South Australian premier. Premier Jay Weatherill drew on scientific advice to insist the minimum volume of water was recovered that is needed to keep the lower River Murray floodplain, lower lakes and Coorong healthy.

Unfortunately, the past decade of stalling by the federal, NSW and Victorian governments means the 2023-24 Basin Plan deadlines must be extended by two to three years if key projects are to be completed.

Much greater public assurance with transparency and accountability measures is needed if the new targets are to be met. The federal government needs to find more effective carrots and sticks to engender state compliance. This time it would be wise to withhold payments to the states until they deliver the promised action.

The federal government’s intention to redouble efforts to “relax constraints” and enable more water to flow to where it’s most needed to conserve flora and fauna is crucial. This is essential to get the most benefits for freshwater ecosystems by allowing environmental water to spill out of river channels onto floodplain wetlands. Despite a recent flurry of activity, NSW and Victoria have not delivered promised agreements with river side land owners to enable this watering.

The one disappointing aspect of the agreement is the proposal to allow more water offset projects (under the Sustainable Diversion Limit Adjustment Mechanism). These ecologically dubious projects have been problematic, with at least one being abandoned and many delayed. It is inconceivable that new projects could be identified and delivered by 2026.

But the new agreement only deals with the most immediate problems in implementing the Basin Plan. The Plan is due to be revised in 2026. The current measures do not deal with two major issues. First, ways need to be found to restore the rights of Indigenous nations to own and manage water. Currently they hold only 0.2% of issued entitlements. Second, a new Plan is needed to manage the project loss of a lot of water to climate and other environmental change.

The federal government’s agreement with most states (but not Victoria) is a really welcome initiative to get Basin Plan implementation back on track. However, even harder decisions await.

Jamie Pittock, Professor, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bushfires focus public attention on climate change for months, but it’s different for storms and floods

As the world warms and the climate changes, people are experiencing more frequent and intense extreme weather events. Just this year, heatwaves blasted southern Europe, the United States and China; wildfires lit up Greece, Canada and Maui in Hawaii; and winter storms froze large parts of the US.

Our new research explores the connection between extreme weather events in Australia and public interest in climate change or global warming between 2009 and 2020. We found that bushfires, storms and floods tended to focus attention on climate change. But, crucially, the effect was short-lived and varied depending on the type of weather event.

In between extreme events, the level of interest in climate change does not appear to be increasing over time. This is despite developments in the science attributing extreme weather events to climate change, and the growing tendency of the media to make these connections.

Climate activists and policymakers may be able to use these “focusing events” to raise awareness and harness support for stronger action.

Do Bushfires, Storms And Floods Garner Attention?

We collected data on extreme weather events from the Australian Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub, which is managed by the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience.

We concentrated on the bushfires, storms and floods that occurred in Australia between 2008 and 2020.

Using the Google Trends intensity index to measure people’s attention, we analysed the use of the search terms “climate change” and “global warming” in the months following each event.

We found more searches for climate change and global warming during the month of, and immediately after, an extreme weather event.

However, such heightened attention was rather short-lived. And there were differences in the intensity and duration of this attention, depending on the type of weather event.

Major bushfires generated intense and sustained interest. During the month of a major bushfire, attention to climate change increased. The level of attention was higher still one month after the bushfire, and remained elevated for about four months.

Extreme storms prompted the most intense search activity but the effect did not last long. Attention to climate change dissipated one month after the storm.

Major flooding events did not appear to generate significant attention to climate change. This suggests Australians are more likely to think of climate change in terms of its tendency to cause hotter, drier weather, and less inclined to appreciate how it can cause wetter weather as well.

Although there is a growing trend within the media to underscore the connection between extreme weather events and climate change over the past decade, this does not seem to be generating more climate attention. For instance, while the Black Summer bushfires drove an exceptional uptick in climate attention, the same occurred during the Black Saturday bushfires a decade earlier.

It’s Worth Paying Attention To Attention

Australia has been described as “the petri-dish of climate change”. Our continent is prone to a variety of severe climate impacts such as droughts, floods, fires, storms and coral bleaching, and yet we’re also one of the world’s worst climate laggards.

Understanding how Australians respond to extreme weather events could serve as a much-needed catalyst for national climate progress.

But increased climate ambition is not guaranteed to flow from these destructive events. That’s because climate attention is quite short-lived, and not always as intense as one might hope.

We believe our research can help activists and policymakers capitalise on the increased intensity and duration of public interest in climate change following extreme events and translate that attention into a sustained appetite for climate policy action.

Christopher Crellin, PhD Student / FNRS Aspirant, Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) and Robert MacNeil, Lecturer in Environmental Politics, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Is it worth investing in a battery for your rooftop solar? Here’s what buyers need to know (but often can’t find out)

Recent electricity price increases of 20–30% have hit households hard. Some are installing rooftop solar systems and batteries to reduce or even end their reliance on energy providers.

However, Australia’s uptake of household batteries lags well behind rooftop solar installations. The high upfront cost of batteries is a key reason.

A household battery stores excess electricity generated by your solar power system. You can use it later when solar generation can’t meet your needs – for example, at night or on cloudy days. This reduces the amount of power you buy from the grid.

But how long will the battery take to pay for itself, in the form of lower power bills? The answer varies. It depends, among other things, on where you live, your solar system size and design, how much electricity you use and at what times, network tariffs, and limits on how much surplus electricity you can feed into the grid.

Our current research project has found cases in which a solar panel and battery system will save you money in Western Australia. But the situation varies across Australia. Here, we take a look at what to consider before you buy.

A Tricky Transition For Consumers

Almost a third of Australian households have rooftop solar systems – the highest rate in the world. Households can now generate electricity on a massive collective scale.

This capability is key to the clean energy transition. But when solar systems aren’t generating enough power, households must draw electricity from the grid or a battery.

Battery costs vary with brand, size and location. On average, you’ll pay around A$1,420 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to install 1–5kWh of storage capacity. That’s down from $1,710 per kWh in 2017. The point at which buying a battery makes sense for most households is estimated at around $700 per kWh (for a lithium battery with a ten-year warranty).

At current prices, online advice suggests the warranty will typically expire before the battery pays for itself. So consumers might conclude they are better off buying solar systems only and waiting for battery prices to drop.

That’s not always the case. Our modelling found the payback time is less than the warranty period in Perth for at least two cases: using 50kWh per day with a 13.5kW solar system and 13kWh per day Tesla Powerwall 2 battery, and at 30kWh per day with a 6.6kW system and 6.5kWh LG Chem RESU battery. These batteries will cost you around $12,900 and $5,300 respectively, plus installation.

Our research also found that while there can be other reasons to get a battery, most people care about the financial benefits. But it’s not a simple decision. Some situations are good for batteries, but many people can’t use them effectively.

The amount of sunshine where you live and electricity prices also matter a lot.

In many cases, batteries might need government subsidies to be worth it.

What You Need To Know To Design The Optimum System

Installers usually advise householders on what size solar and battery system is best for them. To get this right, installers need to know:

• household load profile – its energy use at different hours of the day and times of the year
  
• daily load – the household’s average total energy use in 24 hours
• tariffs – how much the household is charged for electricity from the grid, with higher tariffs at times of peak demand
• grid sales limits – households might be paid for energy they export to the grid. However, retailers may restrict the level of exports, change the feed-in tariff at different times of the day, and block feed-in to maintain grid stability.

Most households will not know their load profile. Even if they do, it might change in response to energy providers’ demand management programs – which give households incentives to reduce electricity consumption at peak times.

A system that was optimally sized might not remain so. And once installed, systems are difficult and costly to modify.

Also, customers can’t control tariff changes and grid sales limits. These can have huge impacts on the returns from their solar investments.

Unless all these factors are considered, a household might end up with an unsuitable solar panel and battery system and never recover the costs.

All this means consumers need a reliable source of information. The problem is not a lack of information but an overwhelming amount from a wide range of sources. It can be hard to tell who has a vested interest in promoting certain choices and who is offering independent advice.

Many consumers will leave the decisions to their installer. They must then choose their installer with care.

How To Fix This

Householders are not the only ones who will benefit from widespread adoption of solar batteries. Network operators will too.

WA has one of the world’s largest isolated electricity grids. It also has a high uptake of rooftop solar. This threatens grid stability when solar generation surges and exceeds the capacity the network is designed to handle. Network operators are permitted to disconnect systems installed after March 14 last year as a last resort.

If more households installed batteries, they could store surplus energy that otherwise could destabilise the grid. But households want to be sure it’s a good investment. As recommended by Energy Consumers Australia, a trusted “one-stop shop” is needed to provide independent, tailored advice to consumers and refer them to government programs and measures.

Retailers and installers should provide households with consumer-friendly technology such as home energy management systems, including smart meters, to help them understand and manage their energy use.

Households should also be informed of alternatives. One option is community batteries, which store and supply energy to a neighbourhood of homes with solar power. Another is virtual power plants – energy-sharing networks that connect thousands of household batteries.

Armed with all this information, consumers could make more informed decisions about investing in the energy transition. Until then, many will defer the decision. And that could increase costs for both households and electricity networks.

Asma Aziz, Lecturer in Power Engineering, Edith Cowan University and Daryoush Habibi, Professor and Executive Dean, School of Engineering, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

5 tips for getting off gas at home – for a cleaner, cheaper, healthier all-electric future

Burning gas in our homes to cook food or heat air and water has become a contentious issue. Gas is an expensive, polluting fossil fuel, and there’s mounting evidence to suggest it’s also bad for our health.

Five million existing Australian households will need to get off gas within the next 30 years. But for homeowners, the upfront cost can be a major barrier to action. Renters rarely get a say over the appliances installed in their homes. And apartment owners can struggle to make individual changes too.

In most cases it’s worth making the switch, for the energy bill savings alone. For example, analysis suggests a household in Melbourne switching from gas to electricity can save up to A$13,900 over a decade.

If you’re contemplating upgrading gas appliances in your home, or even disconnecting from the gas network altogether, here are a few handy tips and resources to cut through the confusion.

Tip 1 – Find Trusted, Independent Information

There is no shortage of information on how to make the switch from gas to all-electric appliances. The challenge is finding trusted and independent information.

Not-for-profit organisation Renew has compiled a range of presentations, guides, case studies and research. Choice provides independent reviews of household appliances, including operating costs. The Australian government’s Energy Rating website provides information on appliances to help consumers compare performance. Some local councils and community groups also provide information, support and bulk-buying schemes.

You could also visit some of the all-electric homes open to the public for Sustainable House Day. This can help you learn what works from people who have already made the change.

The My Efficient Electric Home group on Facebook is another active and helpful forum.

If you are going all-electric as part of a wider retrofit, consider an independent Residential Efficiency Scorecard assessment. This will help you understand what to else you can do to maximise thermal comfort, environmental benefits and financial outcomes.

Tip 2 – Plan Your Approach

Once you understand what to do, the next step is planning how to go about it. Think about what is most important to your household. What is driving the change? If it’s your health, you might like to start by eliminating indoor air pollution from the gas stove. Or if you want to save money, start using reverse-cycle air conditioning to heat your home, rather than gas.

There are three main ways to go all-electric:

• Replace all your gas appliances at once. Making the change quickly minimises disruption to your home. You may save money on installation costs by doing everything in one go. You will avoid ongoing fixed gas supply charges once you disconnect from the gas network, but you may be required to pay an “abolishment fee” for permanent disconnection. That fee can vary significantly, depending on your location and gas provider. Costs could be up to $1000 (or more) but some states like Victoria have capped the price a household can be charged at $220. Renters wouldn’t be able to permanently disconnect without permission from the landlord, so they would still be open to paying the daily connection fee even if they found alternative electric options for everything else.

• Replace your gas appliances one at a time, as finances allow. However, there will come a point where financially you will be better off replacing all the remaining gas appliances. This is largely because it will not be affordable to keep paying the daily connection cost for gas if you just have one gas appliance remaining.

• Just stop using gas appliances in favour of existing electric appliances that do the same job, such as a reverse cycle air conditioner for space heating. You may have – or can buy – plug-in electric alternatives, such as a microwave ovens, portable induction cooktops, air fryers and heaters. These can be a good option for renters when landlords won’t make changes.

You could even borrow portable appliances to see how they work before committing to buying your own.

Tip 3 – Access Available Rebates And Resources

Most states offer various rebates for households to reduce the upfront cost of replacing gas appliances. These could reduce costs by thousands of dollars. Some rebates also target rental housing. Here is a list of key rebates available in different states:

• Queensland
• New South Wales
• ACT
• Victoria
• Tasmania
• South Australia

Some not-for-profit organisations (such as the Brotherhood of St Laurence) offer financial and other support for lower-income households struggling to pay their energy bills.

Tip 4 – Wait For A Sale Or Negotiate A Better Deal

It might sound simple but you can always save money by waiting until these electric appliances are on sale. If you are buying multiple appliances you can try to negotiate a better price. Factory seconds outlets offer lower prices as well.

Tip 5 – Know The Issues

While the shift to all-electric will likely provide many benefits there are some things you need to consider:

• The carbon emissions from electricity are falling fast, and many homes have rooftop solar. Combining all-electric with solar panels will maximise returns.
• You may have to adjust to how new technologies operate and perform. For example, you may need new, metallic cookware for an induction cooktop and become familiar with their fast response. Additionally, some people find heat from reverse cycle air conditioners to be drier and/or draughtier than gas heating. Floor-mounted units heat more effectively.
• It is not just the energy performance of appliances that matters. For example, noise from heat pump hot water services can vary across different brands. They can also require more space for installation.
• Undertaking a wider energy retrofit (for example, increasing insulation in walls, ceiling and underfloor, upgrading windows to double glazing) may mean you can buy a smaller, cheaper reverse cycle air conditioner when replacing gas heating.
• Electric appliances also need maintenance to make sure they perform optimally. For example, reverse cycle air conditioners have filters that must be regularly cleaned. While this can be done by households, it can be hard for people with mobility issues.
• Depending on the capacity of your electricity switchboard or wiring, extra electric appliances may require upgrades.
• For renters, while you could use portable appliances, you may not be able to disconnect from gas completely, meaning you would still have to pay a daily connection fee.
• Gas and electricity prices can change over time, for many reasons. For example, if fixed gas distribution costs are spread over fewer customers.

A Worthwhile Investment

Australian states and territories have started banning gas in new builds. Victoria and the ACT will soon require new housing and major renovations to be all-electric. Others are likely to follow.

For people in existing housing around Australia, it can be daunting to make the switch. Many of us have grown up with gas in our homes and when one appliance breaks, the easiest thing to do is replace like-for-like. But the weight of evidence shows it’s worth taking the time to look at the alteratives and invest in upgrading to all-electric appliances. The benefits far outweigh the costs. 

Trivess Moore, Senior Lecturer, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University; Alan Pears, Senior Industry Fellow, RMIT University, and Nicola Willand, Senior Lecturer, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Intergenerational report highlights the threat of a hotter, less productive Australia due to global warming

Global warning threatens to have major impacts on Australia’s labour productivity, agriculture and tourism over coming decades, according to the Intergenerational Report, which makes climate change a major focus of its projections for the early 2060s.

Climate change and the international energy transition will also have extensive implications for Australia’s resources sector, with demand for thermal coal falling dramatically and that for critical minerals increasing substantially.

The report, which projects four decade ahead, stresses the need for effective mitigation of further temperature increases and targeted investment in adaptation.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries have committed to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C.

The report, to be released by Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Thursday, says over the next 40 years, under a scenario where global temperatures increase by up to 3°C by 2100, Australia’s average temperature is projected to rise by 1.7°C. But there would be regional variations.

The average temperature in parts of central and northern Western Australia is projected to rise by 1.8°C, but only a 1.3°C increase is projected for Tasmania.

“This suggests Western Australia could be more directly affected by the labour productivity impacts of higher temperatures than some other Australian states and territories,” the report says.

“Similarly, some regional and remote communities, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, are expected to be particularly exposed to higher temperatures.”

If global temperatures were to increase by up to 3°C or more than 4°C, without changes to present ways of working, Australia’s aggregate labour productivity levels could decrease by 0.2%-0.8% by 2063.

This would reduce economic output over this period by $135 billion - $423 billion (in today’s dollars), through the direct impacts of higher temperatures on labour productivity.

In contrast, if global action limits temperature increases to 2°C, Australia could benefit from up to an extra $155 billion in GDP, compared with a scenario where temperatures increase up to 3°C. This is equal to 26 to 41 million more hours of work in 2063, the report says.

It notes that investing in measures to limit worker heat exposure, such as tree planting or altering building designs to enhance passive cooling, can also mitigate to some extent the impacts on labour productivity of higher temperatures.

If global action limits temperature increases to 1.5°C, reduced demand for thermal coal could cut Australia’s exports of it to less than 1% of present levels by 2063.

But if temperature increases are limited to 2°C this century, Australia’s thermal coal exports are estimated to fall by 50% by 2063.

The fall in international demand for Australia’s thermal coal would be slower if global action fails to deliver on the Paris Agreement, resulting in warming above 2°C this century, the report says.

Without adaptation measures Australian crop yields could be up to 4% lower by 2063 if global action fails to keep temperature rises below 3°C this century. These reductions could be largely avoided if global temperatures rise less than 2°C.

The report says some impacts on crop yields could be mitigated by measures such as changing the crops planted in particular areas and improving water efficiency.

It says other countries in our region might be even more affected than Australia by climate change, which could result in more demand for Australian agricultural exports.

Australia’s services sector will also be affected by rising temperatures, with tourists adjusting where and when they decide to travel.

“Australia has a large number of natural attractions at risk of environmental degradation which may attract fewer tourists in a world of higher global temperatures. At least 50% of Australia’s sandy coastline, a major drawcard for tourism, is under threat of erosion due to climate change.

"Many of Australia’s top attractions are also in regions likely to be increasingly susceptible to natural disasters, risking travel disruption and reputational harm. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the 2019–20 bushfires, an estimated 80,000 tourists cancelled or postponed activities,” the report says.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Leakage or spillover? Conservation parks boost biodiversity outside them – but there’s a catch, new study shows

It’s easy to assume protected areas such as national parks conserve wildlife – that seems obvious. But what is the proof? And how does park success vary across different ecosystems – in deserts versus tropical rainforests, or wetlands versus oceans?

While we can use satellite imagery to measure the effect of protected areas in reducing human impacts such as logging, you can’t see the animals from space. In particularly dense tropical rainforests, it was nearly impossible to accurately monitor wildlife, until remotely triggered camera traps became available in the past decade.

There is a longstanding conservation debate on the benefits that protected areas such as national parks have for biodiversity.

Some scientists have argued that conservation success inside park boundaries may come at the expense of neighbouring unprotected habitats. Essentially, they suggest parks displace impacts such as hunting and logging to other nearby areas. The technical term for this is leakage.

On the other hand, marine parks have often reported higher biodiversity nearby. Fish reproduce successfully inside park boundaries and their offspring disperse, benefiting surrounding habitats in a “spillover” effect.

We set out to see which of those effects actually prevails in protected land areas and their surrounds. Our new study, published today in Nature, shows parks do enhance bird diversity inside their borders. Large parks also support higher diversity of both birds and mammals in nearby unprotected areas.

What Did The Study Look At?

We recruited an international team of scientists to conduct a comprehensive analysis of bird and mammal diversity inside and outside parks across South-East Asia. We used more than 2,000 cameras and bird surveys across the region.

South-East Asia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth, but hunting is a key concern. It’s a prime suspect for why diversity has often been assumed to decline outside protected park areas.

Hunters are mobile, so hunting bans within park boundaries may only displace these activities to nearby unprotected areas, undermining their net benefit. To be honest, we were surprised mammal diversity was higher outside large parks. It’s common to see hunters both inside and outside parks in many countries.

We expected hunters’ removal of game animals would reduce diversity outside parks. However, it appears large parks limit the impacts of hunting so it does not completely remove these animals. Specifically, when comparing unprotected areas near large reserves to unprotected areas that didn’t border large reserves, we found large reserves boosted mammal diversity in unprotected areas by up to 194%.

However, a sad note from our study was the finding that only larger parks significantly enhanced mammal diversity, casting doubt on the effectiveness of smaller parks for mammal conservation. Recent work in the region suggests many large mammals persist in small parks, but our study shows the presence of a few resilient animals in small parks doesn’t scale up to higher biodiversity overall.

Not All Parks Are Equal

These findings are especially timely for the United Nations, which recently announced more ambitious biodiversity targets, including significant expansions of global protected areas. The UN strategy is to conserve 30% of Earth’s lands and waters by 2030 – the so-called “30 by 30 goal”. Massive expansions of the global area of protected land will be difficult and expensive, but our results support this approach.

The work provides a clear case for park design to consider size. Larger parks routinely had higher bird diversity. Large mammals such as tigers and elephants travel huge distances and don’t see park boundaries drawn on maps. Larger parks support these wide-ranging animals that move across entire landscapes.

Considering the UN’s goal of increasing protected area to 30% of the world’s surface, our findings support the creation of fewer larger parks, rather than many smaller ones.

Next Steps In South-East Asia And Australia

Our findings also provide a much-needed conservation “win” for South-East Asia. Despite being a biodiversity hotspot, the region suffers from high rates of forest loss and hunting, which pose threats to birds and mammals.

Our team built a collaborative network and massive database to conduct the analysis, and this can also be used to answer other questions. Our next project will quantify shifts in abundance – the numbers of animals rather than numbers of species – inside and outside parks. We suspect parks will support increased mammal and bird abundances, even more than increased in wildlife diversity.

Based on the success of the Asian collaborative network project, a related team is now building a domestic collaborative network and database to conduct similar analyses, called Wildlife Observatory of Australia. Key questions will include the impact of fire and climate change on Australia’s wildlife diversity and abundance.

Matthew Scott Luskin, Researcher and Lecturer in Conservation Science, The University of Queensland and Jedediah Brodie, Research Fellow, Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak; Associate Professor and John Craighead Endowed Chair of Conservation, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How bees can monitor pollution for us – everything from toxic metals to antimicrobial resistance

Our cities are complex places of work, industry and residential activities. This often makes it hard to pin down the spread of different contaminants throughout them.

This can be a concern, especially given mounting evidence there is no “safe” limit of exposure for many of the chemicals we use in our daily lives. The connections between contamination, food, water and human health add to these concerns.

Measuring contamination in soil or dust is a good start. But this can only tell us the level of a contaminant at the place it was sampled. Our two new studies have used backyard bees to better monitor contamination in urban environments.

The Buzz Behind Biomonitoring

When it comes to understanding contamination, honey bees can do the hard work for us. While foraging for nectar, pollen and water, bees are constantly picking up contaminants from their environment. Because we know their lifespan and approximate foraging range, chemical analysis can provide a snapshot of the levels of contaminants in their foraging area at that time.

With the help of backyard beekeepers, our two studies traced toxic metals and antimicrobial resistance genes across two urban centres: Sydney, Australia, and Nouméa, New Caledonia.

European honey bees have long been used as sentinel species to monitor for pests and diseases, including Varroa mites and chemicals at airports. Bees can also be used as biomonitors to understand contaminants across our urban environments.

As the popularity of urban beekeeping has grown, there has been more research on honey bee biomonitoring of a range of contaminants, including metals, pesticides and so-called “forever chemicals”, known as PFAS, in honey.

How Bees Help Us Map Pollution

Honey bees can reveal patterns of contamination that might otherwise go unnoticed.

In Nouméa, we used honey bees to map impacts from the local nickel smelter. We found levels of metals associated with the smelter – nickel, chromium and cobalt – were elevated next to the smelter and decreased farther away.

This might not sound surprising given the smelter is a major source of pollution. However, comparing the data from bees to soil and dust samples revealed bees were the most sensitive and effective marker of smelter contamination.

By mapping trace metals in honey bees in Sydney we could look at the specific factors contributing to metal pollution within their foraging range. For the neurotoxic metal lead, we found residential and industrial activity were key influences, especially in heavily populated inner-city areas.

In contrast, less populated locations and larger areas of parks or farms had higher levels of manganese. This likely came from natural soil sources and pesticide use.

We also examined how bees can help us understand emerging concerns such as the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes. It’s a key concern in urban areas, driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics.

We found these AMR genes were common across Sydney – 83% of bees examined had ingested one or more of the genes we looked for. The source was not strongly linked to industrial activity, but rather the area of water bodies available for the bees to drink from. This may be because these genes can enter the environment through human wastewater and runoff and then be absorbed by foraging bees.

How Do Contaminants Affect Bees?

We also wanted to know if bees that contained contaminants were actually ingesting them. Our analyses showed contaminants build up within the bee over time and were not present on their exterior. We compared metal concentrations in matched samples of washed and unwashed bees and they were no different, indicating contaminants were inside the bee. Further, metal concentrations were higher in older, dead bees at the end of their lives than in the younger bees.

Using high-resolution imaging, we found only organic non-metal particles on the outside of bees. This may be because bees have very good self-cleaning habits. These behaviours also keep hives free from parasites and fungi brought in by foraging bees.

Research has shown exposure to contaminants including metals and neonicotinoid insecticides can impair honey bee development, foraging ability and survival.

And What’s In Their Honey?

Both honey producers and consumers want to know if their honey is safe to eat. While we previously identified some commercial honeys are adulterated with sugar syrups, this new work focused on potentially toxic trace metals in the honey.

The good news is we found trace metals in honey at very low levels that do not pose a concern. In Nouméa, the main smelter element, nickel, was more than 30 times lower in honey than in the bees.

We found similar outcomes in the mining town of Broken Hill, Australia where lead levels in honey were ten times lower than in the bees themselves.

Bees Aren’t The Only Biomonitors

The lessons from this work have led the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria, with which we are all affiliated, to explore the use of biomonitors (honey bees, house sparrows and birds of prey) in its ongoing environmental contaminant research. As a science-based regulator, the EPA uses these types of studies to better understand the presence, uptake and dispersal of contaminants and protect environmental and human health.

Earth is facing a multitude of interlacing environmental challenges including biodiversity loss, climate change, population growth and pervasive chemical pollution. More comprehensive monitoring, including surveillance using bees, will allow us to respond more quickly and effectively to environmental health challenges.

Mark Patrick Taylor, Chief Environmental Scientist, EPA Victoria; Honorary Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University; Kara Fry, Adjunct Fellow, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, and Max M Gillings, PhD Candidate, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Painting the unfamiliar: why the first European paintings of Australian animals look so alien to our eyes

In 1772, Joseph Banks commissioned the foremost painter of animals in England, George Stubbs, to paint a dingo and a kangaroo.

To our modern eyes the paintings lack the vitality and strength of the animals we are familiar with in Australia. The kangaroo more closely resembles a rodent than a bipedal marsupial. The dingo’s glassy-eyed stare lacks any animation.

Stubbs was renowned for how well he captured horses and dogs. Even today, those paintings of his capture the lifelike individual essence of his subject. So why did his paintings of the dingo and kangaroo – some of the earliest European representations of Australian animals – look so strange?

‘To Compare It Would Be Impossible’

Stubbs had not travelled with the 1768 Endeavour expedition to the South Seas. Instead, Banks commissioned him to paint from skins collected during the voyage.

While the journey was officially to chart the transit of Venus across the Sun from the vantage point of Tahiti, King George III also secretly instructed James Cook to search for the fabled Terra Australis Incognito and

with the consent of the Natives […] to take possession of a Continent or Land of great extent […]in the Name of the King of Great Britain.

Banks collected the skins of a “large dog” and a “kongouro” (thought to be a misinterpretation of the Guugu Yimidhirr word gangurru, which refers to the Grey Kangaroo) when the Endeavour pulled into safe harbour for repairs after striking the Great Barrier Reef in June 1770.

Banks recorded his first impressions of this very unfamiliar animal in his journal entry dated July 14 1770.

To compare it to any European animal would be impossible as it had not the least resemblance of any one I have seen. Its fore legs are extremely short and of no use to it in walking, its hind again as disproportionately long; with these it hops 7 or 8 feet at each hop in the same manner as the Gerbua, to which animal indeed it bears much resemblance, except in size […]

Sydney Parkinson, one of the artists who accompanied Banks, made five sketches of the dead animal after it was shot by one of the ship’s gamekeepers.

These sketches, the flayed (and possibly inflated) skins, Banks’ journal entry and his personal memories were the material that informed Stubbs as he made his preparations to paint these very unfamiliar animals.

The Semantic Memory

Stubbs was lauded for his anatomically correct forms of horses and dogs. On occasion, Stubbs also painted exotic animals like the lions housed in the Royal Menagerie.

But his paintings of the dingo and kangaroo were the first time he painted animals he had never studied from life.

Stubbs capitalised on the swell of interest in the return of the Endeavour by exhibiting the paintings at the Society of Artists in London 1773.

This brought the dingo and the kangaroo to the scientific community and public’s attention. The animals became the two most associated with the new world of Australia – adding greatly to Great Britain’s sense of national pride as the conqueror of new worlds.

Stubbs’ kangaroo painting set the standard for future representations of the animal until well into the 19th century, serving as a model for engravings and illustrations used in scientific and popular publications.

But Stubbs’ kangaroo more closely resembles the rat-like Gerbua of Banks’ description than the creature we know today. This can perhaps be explained by Stubbs’s unfamiliarity with the animals.

As an artist who had made a lifelong study of the anatomy and movement of animals, he would normally have relied on what psychologists refer to as “implicit memory” when painting his subject in the studio. That is, the unconscious memory he would instinctively rely on from years of painting animals he was familiar with.

It’s a bit like riding a bicycle: once learned, it’s never forgotten.

In this case, Stubbs primarily relied on “semantic memory”, or general knowledge of his experiences in the world, to paint the unfamiliar by utilising the knowledge, written material and personal recollections Banks had given to him.

Having been told a kangaroo was a giant rat-like gerbua by Banks, it is understandable that Stubbs also relied on his implicit memory of rats and gerbuas to depict the kangaroo.

Rendering The Unfamiliar

As an artist, I can relate to this. My paintings of unfamiliar landscapes in Scotland and Ireland always seem to depict trees that look like eucalypts.

Despite using the same brand of watercolours I have used my whole artistic life, the way I paint the interplay of light, shadow and hue on mountain passes, birch groves and fields of heather and gorse usually seems more gaudy than the dull blue-grey colours of the Australian bush.

Unconsciously, I overlay the hues of the Australian landscape onto my paintings of the British landscape in order to tone the gaudiness down – much like the English painters who conversely depicted the Australian bush as English landscapes.

Rendering the unfamiliar familiar. 

Janelle Evans, Senior Lecturer, Critical and Theoretical Studies, Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trampling plants, damaging rock art, risking your life: taking selfies in nature has a cost

In the age of the selfie taking photos of yourself has become an everyday occurrence. Half of all teenagers regularly post selfies. Driven by social media algorithms, many of us now flock to natural places for the best selfie background.

But what happens when our pursuit of the perfect selfie starts damaging nature – or even ourselves? Many people have been severely injured or killed by taking risky selfies and photos in dangerous locations. Indian researchers catalogued 259 selfie-related deaths worldwide as of 2018.

And the search for the perfect selfie can injure animals like quokkas, crayfish and glow-worms, protected plants and even First Nations rock art. Selfies have even become a biosecurity threat.

Spare a thought for our land managers, tasked with caring for the natural places sometimes despoiled for a photo and emergency workers entrusted with rescuing selfie-seekers. As our new research has found, Australia’s land managers are often at their wit’s end trying to keep people safe in nature.

The problem? Fences and warning signs don’t work well. Hardcore selfie-seekers jump the fence and perch on the edge of the cliff to get the shot. We may well need selfie educational campaigns.

Selfies Make A New Brand Of Tourist

Social media tourism is drastically changing who and how many of us go to places such as Figure Eight Pools in Sydney’s Royal National Park or Josephine Falls not far from Cairns.

As one land manager told us:

We noticed a massive increase in the number of people, and the kind of visitor that we were getting. We’re getting a lot more people who are maybe urban based, didn’t spend a lot of time in national parks, weren’t particularly familiar with the concept of bushwalking

Land managers told us these new kinds of tourist were motivated to seek out photos and selfies. The problem was, many were willing to ignore warning signs or bans on drones to get their photos.

You know, it’s all just to get that photo, really. That’s it. People definitely, more so now than ever, I think, are coming for the photo. They’re not coming for a bushwalk and to look around at the trees and to experience nature.

Drone use is common, even when it is banned.

They break the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) rules [on drones], every flipping day, they annoy the people, the guests, the wildlife […] I’ve got eight crashed drones in the park currently [risking] environmental harm to the park if they catch fire or the batteries leak in the World Heritage area, in the creeks where the rare crayfish are.

For other land managers, the challenge is the damage to the environment. Plants get trampled, wildlife disturbed, and in some cases, delicate ecosystems suffer long-term damage.

Someone goes swimming, puts it on social media and suddenly there’s 100 people a day coming to go wild swimming where the platypus and the glow-worms live. And in a wet year, suddenly all the vegetation around the rock pool is trampled, it turns into a muddy mess

Mainstream tourism bodies can make the problem worse by promoting social media hotspot locations.

I was horrified the other day noticing promotions for these Figure Eight pools. I just thought, “You’ve gotta be kidding me. How many times have we told the tourism industry to stop it?”

Safe Selfies?

Perhaps the thorniest challenge for land managers is accommodating increased interest while keeping people safe. That’s because selfie-seekers sometimes deliberately avoid safety measures like fences. As one land manager told us:

They want to get a photo without a fence in it. Look at me with my toes over the edge of the crumbly sandstone cliff.

Other land managers are working to assist this new demand by reshaping nature to make better scenery – and keep visitors safer. At Moran Falls in Queensland’s Lamington National Park, a famous view across the gorge had been obscured by vegetation. That drove some visitors to jump the fence at the viewing platform and stand directly on top of a very tall cliff.

As a solution, land managers got an arborist to trim the trees blocking the view and then use the fallen limbs to hide the goat track made by selfie-seekers.

Once we improved the view and the photo shot, people were happy to take the photo from the platform. But when the view was impeded from the platform, they would undertake risky behaviour and stand on top of a 300ft cliff, right on the edge, to get the photo.

Why do traditional measures like signs and warnings often prove ineffective? The answer may lie in social validation. For many, the risk seems worth the reward if it means garnering admiration on social media.

Nature-based content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok often performs very well, giving other would-be influencers the incentive to seek out new locations.

What Can We Do?

Land managers have repeatedly told us signs aren’t working for these new tourists. As a result, there’s an urgent need to communicate risk and safety information in novel ways which resonate.

The tools land managers have are often preventive – barriers, boardwalks and signs, coupled with punitive measures such as fines. But this isn’t working.

Better risk communication, as New South Wales authorities are doing with time-sensitive risk warnings for Figure Eight Pools, may help.

Our research points to the need for fresh strategies to tackle social media hotspots and selfie-seeking by understanding what drives social-media tourists, improving risk communication and developing partnerships.

This problem has been created by the confluence of social media and human psychology. It may well be that the solution lies in the same intersection.

Responsible selfie and tourism campaigns on platforms like TikTok and Instagram could be a start.

After all, it’s not that national parks shouldn’t have visitors. It’s finding ways to deal with this spurt of interest which doesn’t harm people - or nature.

Samuel Cornell, PhD Candidate, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney and Amy Peden, NHMRC Research Fellow, School of Population Health & co-founder UNSW Beach Safety Research Group, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Birdwatching, immune responses and evolutionary mapping honoured at 2023 Eureka Prizes

Hundreds of scientists from across the country have gathered at the Australian Museum in Sydney for the presentation of the Eureka Prizes. Awarded annually since 1990, the prizes recognise outstanding contributions to science and the public understanding of science.

Some highlights from this year’s ceremony were awards for one of the world’s biggest wildlife monitoring programs, a rescue project for endangered orchids, and research on how our bodies fight COVID-19. Also honoured were software for sustainable energy and mining, a method for turning waste carbon dioxide into useful molecular building blocks, and an open-source tool for linking DNA sequences to the evolution of life.

In a statement, Australian Museum chief executive Kim McKay said:

As the world faces unprecedented challenges such as accelerating climate change, Australian scientists continue to lead, innovate and inspire. Scientific knowledge and innovation is key to progress. Researchers and scientists help us understand how our universe works and how we can protect it.

Waterbirds, Orchids And Immune Responses

The prize for applied environmental research went to the Waterbirds Aerial Survey Team from UNSW and the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment. This team has carried out one of the world’s largest and longest-running wildlife surveys. Their work has had a significant influence on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan as well as the management of wetlands and national parks.

Noushka Reiter from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria was awarded the prize for excellence in botanical science. Reiter leads an orchid conservation program that has propagated more than 20,000 plants from 80 endangered species. Fourteen of these species have been reintroduced to the wild, with populations increasing by as much as 260%.

A team of three researchers from the University of Melbourne and the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity took home the prize for infectious diseases research. The Corona Queens – Katherine Kedzierska, Louise Rowntree and Oanh Nguyen – were recognised for their work on the immune response to COVID-19 in high-risk groups, such as children, older people and cancer patients.

Getting To Net Zero, Transforming CO₂ And Mapping Evolution

The prize for innovative research in sustainability went to the Economic Fairways Mapper Team from Monash University and Geoscience Australia. They have built a set of open-source tools to identify the most sustainable locations for renewable energy and mining projects, to aid the transition to net zero emissions.

Fengwang Li at the University of Sydney received the prize for outstanding early career researcher. He has developed a more efficient process to make ethylene – a basic chemical component of plastic – from waste carbon dioxide captured from industrial processes.

The prize for excellence in research software was awarded to Minh Bui and Robert Lanfear from the Australian National University. They created open-source software that analyses DNA data to map evolution. It has been used by life scientists around the world to everything from ancient life to the development of the SARS-COV-2 virus.

Research, Leadership And Communication

There were plenty of other prizes given out as well. A full list is below.

• Emerging leader in science: Stephanie Partridge from the University of Sydney

• Leadership in science and innovation: Michael Kassiou, University of Sydney

• Outstanding mentor of young researchers: Renae Ryan, University of Sydney

• Excellence in interdisciplinary scientific research: Cystic Fibrosis Lung Health Imaging, University of Adelaide; Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Adelaide; 4D Medical Pty Ltd; and Monash University

• Innovative use of technology: IMAGENDO, University of Adelaide; and OMNI Ultrasound and Gynaecological Care

• Outstanding science in safeguarding Australia: MetaSteerers Team, University of Technology Sydney; Defence Science and Technology Group; and Macquarie University

• Scientific research: Tim Thomas and Anne Voss, WEHI

• Innovation in citizen science: 1 Million Turtles, Western Sydney University; La Trobe University and University of New England

• Promoting understanding of science: Toby Walsh, UNSW

• Science journalism: Jo Chandler, Griffith Review

• STEM inclusion: That’s What I Call Science

• School science – primary: Anna P, PLC Sydney

• School science – secondary: Darcy B, Ashfield Boys High School

• The Australian Museum Research Institute Medal: Jodi Rowely.

Michael Lucy, Deputy Science + Technology Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This cave on Borneo has been used for 20,000 years – and we’ve now dated rock art showing colonial resistance 400 years ago

The islands of South-East Asia record a long and dynamic human history of technological innovation, migration and conflict.

The region’s rock art stretches back more than 45,000 years. It’s a unique source of information about this complex human past.

But rock art doesn’t just record ancient history. Researchers have identified artwork documenting the more recent past, including Indigenous resistance to colonial occupation, violent frontier conflicts and enslavement.

Our new study, published today, shines a new light on rock art of Sarawak (a state of Malaysia on the island of Borneo). The rock art we have dated records resistance to colonial forces in Malaysian Borneo during the 17th to 19th centuries.

Rock Art In Borneo

Black drawings of people, animals, ships and abstract geometric designs dominate caves throughout Borneo’s north-west.

Gua Sireh is one of the region’s best-known rock art sites, attracting hundreds of visitors each year. The cave is about 55 kilometres south-east of Sarawak’s capital, Kuching.

Hundreds of charcoal drawings cover the walls of Gua Sireh. People are shown wearing headdresses. Some are armed with shields, knives and spears in scenes of hunting, butchering, fishing, fighting and dancing.

Excavations in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s revealed people intermittently used Gua Sireh for around 20,000 years, before abandoning the site around 1900. The Indigenous people who used the cave were the ancestors of the contemporary Bidayuh (inland tribal people), also known as “Land Dayaks” in early ethnographic accounts.

Malayo-Polynesian Austronesian speakers (whose language originates in Taiwan) spread across Island South-East Asia and the Pacific starting around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Austronesian influence at Gua Sireh dates from about 4,000 years ago, indicated by the first appearance of charred rice and pottery.

The presence of Austronesian communities at Gua Sireh is a part of broader evidence for dynamic human migrations in the region over thousands of years.

Further cultural interactions at the site occurred around 2,000 years ago, with grave goods, such as glass beads, showing contact between the Bidayuh and coastal traders.

In the 17th to 19th centuries, there was a period of increasing conflict when Malay elites controlling the region exacted heavy tolls on local Indigenous tribes. Using radiocarbon dating, we have been able to date two large, elaborate human figures to this period. They were drawn between 1670 and 1830.

We interpreted our results informed by the oral histories of the Bidayuh, who have continuing custodial responsibilities over the site today.

Our findings sit alongside other recent archaeological work that has highlighted Indigenous resistance to colonial occupation.

Carbon Dating The Images

In addition to radiocarbon dating and oral history, another strand of evidence we used to interpret these new dates were the images themselves.

One figure we looked at in our carbon dating brandishes two short-bladed Parang Ilang, the principal weapon used during the warfare that marked the first decades of white rule in Borneo. We have dated this figure as drawn between 1670 and 1710 when Malay elites dominated the Bidayuh.

In another image we studied, large human figures are shown holding distinctive weapons such as a Pandat – the war sword of Land Dayaks, including the Bidayuh. Pandat were used exclusively for fighting and protection, never in agriculture or handicrafts, suggesting the drawing relates to conflict.

We have dated this figure to between 1790 and 1830. This was a period of increasing conflict between the Bidayuh and Iban (Indigenous peoples from the coast, also known as Sea Dayaks) and Brunei Malay rulers.

During this period many Indigenous Sarawakians moved into the upland interior, including the Gua Sireh area, to escape persecution.

Brunei rulers were known to not only bully and enslave people but also allowed expeditions of Ibans to attack the Bidayuh. The Ibans were said to keep the heads of the people they slaughtered and handed over the “slaves” they captured to the Brunei authority.

An example from Bidayuh oral histories of the cave being used as a refuge during territorial violence comes from 1855. The British diplomat Spenser St John was shown a skeleton in Gua Sireh. A local tribesman said he had shot this man years earlier, before the rule of James Brooke, which began in 1839.

The shooting resulted from a skirmish with a very harsh Malay chief who had demanded the Bidayuh hand over their children. They refused and retreated to Gua Sireh where they held off a force of 300 armed men.

Suffering some losses (two Bidayuh were shot, and seven were taken prisoner and enslaved), most of the tribe escaped through the far side of the cave complex, saving their children.

Oral histories combined with the figures holding weapons of warfare contextualise the ages we now have for the rock art.

The direct dates we have produced demonstrate distinct periods of drawing can be identified.

The ubiquity of black drawings across the region and their probable links to the migrations of Austronesian and Malay peoples opens exciting possibilities for further understanding the complexities of rock art production in Island South-East Asia.

This article was coauthored with Mohammad Sherman Sauffi William from the Sarawak Museum Department.

Jillian Huntley, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University; Andrea Jalandoni, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social Cultural Research, Griffith University; Emilie Dotte-Sarout, ARC DECRA Research Fellow in Archaeology, The University of Western Australia; Fiona Petchey, Associate Professor and Director, Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory, Te Aka Mātuatua - School of Science, University of Waikato, and Paul S.C.Taçon, Chair in Rock Art Research and Director of the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU), Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Just the beginning: 7 ways the Women’s World Cup can move the dial on women’s sport forever

So, that’s it then. The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, hosted on Australian and New Zealand soil for the first time, came to an end on Sunday night as Spain beat England 1-0 in the final, after the Matildas lost 2-0 to Sweden on Saturday to finish fourth, their best ever result.

On top of the historic result, the Matildas captured the hearts of a nation. They broke television streaming records, with the semi-final match against England becoming the most-watched program since the current rating method was established in 2001.

Jubilant scenes erupted at live sites, pubs and homes across the nation. One viral video even captured a flight full of international travelers tuning in mid-air to watch the Matildas’ penalty shootout against France.

The Women’s World Cup has also delivered an estimated A$7.6 billion boost to the Australian economy.

Through countless instances such as these, we’re experiencing not just a great sporting moment, but a great cultural one too.

But, as anyone in and around women’s football knows, the Women’s World Cup needs to be more than a four-week football festival.

It needs to move the dial on the treatment of, and investment in, women’s sport, including with the following big-ticket items.

1. Celebrate And Extend The Cultural Shift

The “Olympic Games effect” often sees coverage of women’s sports increase during the Olympics, where people are cheering on not their usual men’s or women’s teams, but their country.

But the Women’s World Cup has generated something incredible: women inspiring girls, women, boys, and men with feats that simultaneously position gender front and centre and inspire changing attitudes around the skills, capability, and value of girls and women.

Encouraging and continuing this cultural shift will be equally, if not more, game-changing.

For starters, it will ensure young girls have idols to look up to – which women’s football greats such as Brazil’s Marta missed out on.

We must cement such a shift with good policy and investment to promote further inclusion. This should have implications beyond sport, including extending to improving women’s representation in boardrooms.

2. Acknowledge No Single Event Can Fix Everything

In speaking about AFLW, but in a sentiment equally applicable to football, sports journalist Neroli Meadows noted that one day the concept of women not being able to play football, or their playing being seen as a novelty, will be as foreign a concept as women not being allowed to vote.

The 2023 Women’s World Cup has gone at least partway to achieving that normalisation.

But it’s imperative not to overplay what the team and the tournament have brought. No single sport event can neatly address all gender equality issues (we’ve heard such optimism and hype around women’s sport and its gender-equality-advancing ability before).

So while it’s important to celebrate the wins, it’s equally important to recognise the tournament isn’t the endgame but an important next step.

3. Use The Data To Align Value With Investment

Until recently, the absence of investment in women’s football and the failure to broadcast matches meant the resulting data have only ever shown us what women’s football is not.

That lack of data is also why broadcasters were able to lowball FIFA when it was trying to sell the 2023 Women’s World Cup broadcast rights. It’s also why Channel 7 was able to secure the rights to screen 15 matches for just A$4–5 million (since described as “the deal of the century”).

It’s likewise why women’s football hasn’t been considered important enough to warrant inclusion under anti-siphoning laws, which facilitate events of national significance being broadcast on free-to-air television to ensure maximum accessibility.

That cannot be allowed to happen again. The astonishing viewership data and record ticket sales must be leveraged into real commercial and gender-equality change possibilities.

4. Invest In Gender-Specific Research And Gear

A spate of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries extinguished the tournament dreams of some of the world’s top women’s footballers.

Oft-cited research confirms women are up to eight times more likely to suffer ACL injuries than men. But there remains little women-specific research into ACL injury causes, much less prevention. Addressing this glaring absence is urgent.

This is symptomatic of wider issues around research overlooking women. For example, it was only last week that the world’s first study into period product absorption that used actual blood, not saline or water, was released.

The need to address other barriers is similarly important. For example, poorly fitting kits contribute to a high attrition rate for girls and women from sport. A Victoria University study confirmed what most girls and women already knew: done well, uniforms imbue comfort and confidence. But done poorly, they cause discomfort and self-consciousness and can put girls off wanting to continue sport.

Girls and women want flexibility and self-determination in uniform selection, and shorts and T-shirt options rather than skirts or dresses. Also, breathable dark material that masks sweat – so we should get rid of white shorts.

There’s also a glaring need to consider kits beyond outfield players: women referees remain overlooked.

Likewise, women’s goalkeeper kits have been unavailable for purchase this Women’s World Cup, despite many ‘keepers nation-inspiring defensive efforts. If ever there were something that summed up how women’s football simultaneously excels while being thwarted, this is it.

5. Appoint Women To Senior Positions, But Avoid The 'Glass Cliff’

England coach Sarina Weigman was the only woman coach in the final four, and women remain a long way from holding apex positions such as the president of FIFA.

This tournament needs to open the door for women to be making decisions for women’s sport.

At the same time, we need to be measured and sustainable in the approach we take. We need to steer clear of the “glass cliff” phenomenon – where women are awarded senior positions only during tumult and the men who usually hold those roles are abandoning ship.

Establishing solid, steady training and mentoring programs and networks is a must.

6. Pay Them Properly

Providing a public holiday if the Matildas were to have won the final is all well and good. But there remains one key missing element for them, as it is for all women’s sports: pay and prize money commensurate with their contributions and talent.

Having achieved pay parity in 2019 and now earning base payments and bonuses for progressing to the knockout stages, the Matildas are in a slightly better position than their netball peers the Diamonds. The latter won the netball World Cup last week but received no pay and no bonuses for their efforts.

However, FIFA Women’s World Cup prize money, still a fraction of the men’s prize money, remains the elephant in the room. Total prize money for this year’s women’s tournament was US$110 million (A$165 million), while the total for the 2022 men’s edition was US$440 million (A$688 million).

FIFA has paid lip service to achieving prize money parity in coming years, but there’s little to stop it getting there now — especially off the back of record ticket sales.

7. ‘Correct The Internet’

Women’s contributions have traditionally been devalued or overlooked (a phenomenon known in science as the “Matilda effect”). This has happened across many domains, including women’s football.

For example, often the historical record has seen football records such as the world’s leading international goalscorer misattributed to men. This is actually Canadian forward Christine Sinclair, having scored 190 international goals, not Cristiano Ronaldo, who’s scored 123.

Former New Zealand international footballer Rebecca Sowden has launched a campaign to “correct the internet”, aided by a gender-bias-correcting approach Google announced in July.

Efforts such as this aim to accurately place the women at the centre of this cultural and sporting revolution, appropriately affording them their place in history.

Fiona Crawford, Adjunct Lecturer at the Centre for Justice, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Edwardian local press invented the ‘middlebrow’ with a lively mix of local news, reviews and fiction

As the provincial press has declined in Britain, so too has local arts and cultural criticism. In the 19th and early 20th century, regional newspapers regularly published reviews of theatre productions and a wide variety of books including history, science, travel writing, poetry and fiction.

Starting in the late 19th century and coming to a head in the Edwardian period (1901-1914), regional newspapers even experimented with a different style of reviewing, which was shorter, chattier and more personal – a shift from the more formal style of the Victorian era.

Historians have traced the sad decline in the fortunes of the local and regional newspaper press with interest. In the 19th century, it was impossible to get a London paper to distant towns or cities by breakfast, because the train system didn’t yet run quickly enough. This gave local newspapers a clear advantage in distribution.

Transportation began to change at the turn of the 20th century, however, and by the 1950s, the national dailies dominated the British market. As a result, local and regional papers had to consolidate titles. The computerisation of the newspaper workforce meant further lost jobs in the 1980s and 1990s. And today, they struggle to compete with social media for classified ad revenue.

Access to these local and regional papers can be gained through inexpensive databases such as the British Newspaper Archive, which is available at many local libraries. A brief perusal of this database shows that many different sorts of papers published book reviews, from major regional titles such as the Glasgow Herald to smaller titles, including the Walsall Advertiser.

These reviews were published before the reviews in esteemed national quarterlies or monthlies and could therefore set the tone. A reader could turn to their local morning paper for ideas of theatre productions to purchase tickets to, or books to borrow from circulating libraries.

Although newspaper syndications existed during this period and reviews of monthly magazines were often repeated verbatim in several local titles, reviews of individual books were overwhelmingly original. This means that someone, probably local to the area, received a copy of the book and was paid to report on the reading experience for a wide variety of readerships.

Since these reviews had no byline, it is difficult to trace who wrote them. Book reviews were also printed on the same page as articles about economics, politics, or sports, which made them seem more like news and less like a rarefied topic divorced from the issues of the day.

The Changing Review

In the Edwardian period, when the number of readers had risen due to the establishment of public libraries and state-funded primary education, reviews in local and regional newspapers began to change and become more experimental in style.

Due to competition from an ever-growing number of newspapers and magazines, reviews were generally published earlier and became shorter. Various cultural commentators, including Edith Wharton and T.S. Eliot, bemoaned the lowering of the national tone through these shorter reviews.

Edith Wharton, for example, complained that reviewers supplied plot summaries rather than judging the books: “Whether real criticism be of service to literature or not, it is clear that this pseudo-reviewing is harmful, since it places books of very different qualities on the same dead level of mediocrity, by ignoring their true purport and significance.”

Wharton and others attributed this different style of reviewing to the cultivation of a different style of reading, which became known as “middlebrow”. Reviews in provincial papers targeted their remarks about books at the leisure reader, complaining when a title was too long, disliking a book when it seemed too gloomy, or praising an author who seemed to be writing for women.

Such reviewing catered to a new, less reverent form of reading. Although many cultural critics of the day (and today) sneer at middlebrow taste, I view it as a democratisation of the reading experience.

The loss of the local paper was also a loss for local readers, who could no longer rely on receiving reviews from someone in their area. Some newspaper historians argue that modern local papers will have to seek new business models to survive, given that they are no longer able to compete with social media.

Forms of media are always changing. Today anyone can publish a review on sites like Goodreads. The local press must consider many factors as it carves a place for itself in the new media landscape – and perhaps the vibrant arts scene of the past can serve as food for thought.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Stephanie Palmer, Senior Lecturer, School of Arts & Humanities, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As ABC chair, Ita Buttrose stood up for the broadcaster’s independence. It’s time others did the same

Ita Buttrose has announced she will not seek a second term as ABC chair, which means her term will expire in March 2024.

Buttrose’s appointment as chair of the ABC in February 2019 was tainted by being a “captain’s pick” on the part of then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, yet at crucial moments she was to prove a strong defender of the ABC’s independence against the predations of his government.

It was the issue that came to define her tenure. It had also brought down her predecessor, Justin Milne. The manner of her appointment continued the Coalition’s contemptuous disregard of the independent merit-based selection process for ABC board appointments, and she inherited a board stained by political patronage.

Four of the seven non-executive directors already there had been appointed outside the merit system by Mitch Fifield as minister for communication.

Buttrose herself put ABC independence at the centre of her commitments. In a sharp departure from Milne’s temporising approach to government pressure, Buttrose stated soon after her appointment:

I will fight any attempts to muzzle the national broadcaster or interfere with its obligations to the Australian public. Independence is not exercised by degrees. It is absolute.

Within months, this declaration was put to the test when the Australian Federal Police raided the ABC headquarters in Sydney as part of an investigation into who had leaked information about alleged war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. Buttrose attacked the police raid as a clear attempt to intimidate journalists.

In November 2020, it was put to the test again. Four Corners broadcast a program called Inside the Canberra Bubble. In it Rachelle Miller, a former staffer to acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge, said she had had an affair with him. She also alleged that Christian Porter, who was to become attorney-general, had been seen cuddling a staffer of another minister in a Canberra bar in 2017. Porter denied the claim.

On November 30, Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher wrote to Buttrose demanding answers within 14 days to 15 questions mostly about the program’s impartiality.

On the 14th day, December 14 2020, Buttrose sent him a reply, hitting back hard. She dismissed the 15 questions and accused the government of a pattern of behaviour that “smacks of political interference”.

The ABC’s managing director, David Anderson, subsequently told a Senate estimates committee hearing that Buttrose had seen the program before it went to air and had supported the decision to broadcast it.

Then in late February 2021, Four Corners broke a related story saying the Australian Federal Police had been notified of a letter sent to Scott Morrison detailing an alleged historical rape by a cabinet minister in the federal government.

In early March, Christian Porter outed himself as the cabinet minister referred to, and strongly denied the allegation.

He sued the ABC for defamation but the ABC defended it vigorously and he discontinued the action.

In late 2021, Buttrose went on the attack again, this time over an attempt by Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg to launch a Senate inquiry into the ABC’s complaints process, while an internal inquiry into the same issue was already on foot. She called it out as a “partisan political exercise” and Bragg’s effort foundered.

It is clear that far from behaving like a Liberal Party stooge, Buttrose has stood up courageously for the ABC’s independence, as she said she would. That will be an important part of her legacy.

Yet she has not been able to imbue the organisation’s editorial leadership with the same spirit. This was shown in two recent cases where editorial independence was again under attack.

The first concerned the coverage of King Charles III’s coronation in May. For about 45 minutes in the lead-up to the ceremony, the ABC ran a panel discussion about the contemporary relevance of the British monarchy to Australian lives. The nine guests on the program included Stan Grant, a Wiradjuri man and celebrated ABC journalist.

The panel discussion provoked a backlash and drew about 1,800 complaints to the ABC. After investigating these, the ABC ombudsman found the program had not breached the ABC’s editorial policies.

Much of the backlash focused on Grant, and in late May he stepped aside from his role as moderator of Q+A on ABC television, writing in his ABC column:

No one at the ABC — whose producers invited me onto their coronation coverage as a guest — has uttered one word of public support. Not one ABC executive has publicly refuted the lies written or spoken about me. I don’t hold any individual responsible; this is an institutional failure.

He has since left the ABC and taken up a position at Monash University.

It was not until Grant announced his decision to step back from Q+A that the head of the ABC’s news division, Justin Stevens, finally made a public statement in Grant’s defence, apologising for not having done so “ten days earlier”. Anderson’s apology to Grant in a staff email had come only one day sooner.

The second case concerns Nicole Chvastek, an experienced journalist who, until March, had presented ABC Radio Victoria’s Statewide Drive program for almost a decade.

Her career ended abruptly in July after a 17-month saga set in motion by a complaint from a National Party politician, Darren Chester, telephoned directly to a senior ABC executive in Sydney. It concerned the way Chvastek had covered the Morrison government’s handling of flood relief payments to victims in northern NSW: those who lived in the National seat of Page got more, initially, than those in the neighbouring Labor-held seat of Richmond.

The details of Chvastek’s case have been traversed elsewhere. It remains only for me to declare that for eight and a half years I was a guest on her program discussing media issues, and the charge of misconduct arising from Chester’s complaint was not upheld.

In both cases, at the most senior levels of ABC editorial leadership there was a failure of an editor’s first responsibility, which is to provide a safe environment within which staff can do good journalism.

There have been many analyses of how nine years of Coalition government attacks demoralised the ABC. But with Buttrose’s departure now on the horizon, it is time for others at the top to stand up.

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Champagne is deeply French – but the English invented the bubbles

In 1889, the Syndicat du Commerce des Vins de Champagne produced a pamphlet promoting champagne at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, claiming that Dom Pérignon, procurator of the Benedictine Abbey of Hautvillers from 1668, was the “inventor”, “creator” or discoverer" of sparkling champagne.

“Come, Brothers! I drink stars!” is the famous quote often attributed to him.

The story of a blind monk having an epiphany, accidentally happening upon the secret to effervescence, was seductive. It combined divine revelation and French winemaking expertise to produce a national symbol deeply rooted in the French landscape.

However, the truth is slightly different. Dom Pérignon did contribute to improving the still wines of the Champagne region, but he did not discover effervescence – he was trying to get rid of the bubbles.

The Champagne Myth

The expo where the champagne myth was propagated marked the 100-year anniversary of Bastille Day and is best known for the debut of another icon of French culture, the Eiffel Tower. The Pérignon story gained traction at the same moment these other symbols of nation-building reinforced the uniqueness of French culture and history.

The basis for the myth can be traced to a letter from Dom Grossard of Hautvillers Abbey to the mayor of Aÿ, in the heart of the Champagne region. Grossard claimed that Pérignon had perfected the method for making perfectly white wine from pinot noir grapes (blanc de noirs), pioneered the technique for effervescence, and championed the use of bottles and corks.

Only the first of these claims is true. At the abbey, wooden stoppers and canvas soaked in grease were used to seal bottles, and French glass was too weak to contain the pressure from effervescence. A bigger problem was that French winemakers – and consumers – considered bubbles a fault, a trick to distract the drinker from bad wine.

Prominent French wine merchant Bertin de Rocheret advised a client who inquired about sparkling wine:

effervescence obscures the best characteristics of good wines, in the same way that it improves wines of lesser quality.

Bubbles, Bottles And Corks

The method for effervescence, strong glass bottles and the use of corks all came from England in the 17th century. English consumers imported wine in barrels from France because bottles were taxed at a higher rate than wine imported in bulk.

The wines often deteriorated during the journey across the channel and once opened, they oxidised quickly, developing an unpleasant flavour. To improve the taste, consumers added honey, syrup made from raisins or sugar. The additional sugar content caused a secondary fermentation – and effervescence.

In 1662, Christopher Merrett, a founder of the Royal Society, published a paper titled “Some Observations Concerning the Ordering of Wines”, in which he described the method for effervescence:

Our winecoopers of latter times use vast quantities of sugar and molasses to all sorts of wines, to make them drink brisk and sparkling, and to give them spirits, as also to mend their bad tastes.

To produce sparkling wine and retain the effervescence, three things are necessary: bubbles, strong glass bottles and corks.

Merrett’s method provided the fizz, and corks were already used in England for bottling cider and perry. Strong glass in England was a by-product of a prohibition on using wood in industrial furnaces, decreed by King James I in 1615.

Timber was too valuable to be burned for glassmaking, reserved for building ships for the merchant fleet. Using sea coal, English glass furnaces reached higher temperatures and produced stronger glass. These bottles could withstand pressure (as much as a car tyre) without bursting.

The Paradox?

The only ingredient the English lacked was wine, prompting French wine historians to refer to their contribution as “The English Paradox”. How could a country with no winemaking tradition pioneer the technique for effervescence? The “paradox” label, however, only makes sense if the traditions and standards of French winemaking are presumed to be superior.

Bound by tradition, French winemakers were unwilling to contemplate a fault as a desirable innovation. Driven by necessity, and without any winemaking rules, English consumers were free to experiment.

But necessity was only part of the equation – English culture did play a part in the success of effervesce. Reserving timber for the English fleet made for stronger glass, and cider and perry production provided corks to seal the bottles.

The French champagne industry now claims effervescence was not invented, but is a natural product of the soil and climate in a strictly defined region.

Natural fermentation does produce some fizz, but rarely enough to pop a cork without the intervention of a winemaker. The emphasis on nature reinforces the exclusivity and unique geographic attributes to distinguish champagne from all other sparkling wines.

A more complex history of the origin of effervescence challenges preconceptions about national identity, even in matters of taste. This does not diminish champagne’s luxury status, but it does reveal the influence of cultural traditions on innovation, and the many influences that pave the way to novelty.

Garritt C Van Dyk, Lecturer, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Taking more than 5 pills a day? ‘Deprescribing’ can prevent harm – especially for older people

People are living longer and with more chronic health conditions – including heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and dementia – than ever before. As societies continue to grow older, one pressing concern is the use of multiple medications, a phenomenon known as polypharmacy.

About 1 million older Australians experience polypharmacy and this group is increasing. They may wake up in the morning and pop a pill for their heart, then another one or two to control blood pressure, a couple more if they have diabetes, a vitamin pill and maybe one for joint pain.

Polypharmacy is usually defined as taking five or more different medications daily. In aged care homes, 90% of residents take at least five regular medications every single day. That can put their health at risk with increased costs for them and the health system.

Adding Up Over Time

As people age, the effects of medications can change. Some medications, which were once beneficial, might start to do more harm than good or might not be needed anymore. About half of older Australians are taking a medication where the likely harms outweigh the potential benefits.

While polypharmacy is sometimes necessary and helpful in managing multiple health conditions, it can lead to unintended consequences.

Prescription costs can quickly add up. Taking multiple medications can be difficult to manage particularly when there are specific instructions to crush them or take them with food, or when extra monitoring is needed. There is also a risk of drug interactions.

Medications bought “over the counter” without a prescription, such as vitamins, herbal medications or pain relievers, can also cause problems. Some people might take an over-the-counter medication each day due to previous advice, but they might not need it anymore. Just like prescription medications, over-the-counter medications add to the overall burden and cost of polypharmacy as well as drug interactions and side effects.

Unfortunately, the more medications you take, the more likely you are to have problems with your medications, a reduced quality of life and increased risk of falls, hospitalisation and death. Each year, 250,000 Australians are admitted to hospital due to medication-related harms, many of which are preventable. For example, use of multiple medications like sleeping pills, strong pain relievers and some blood pressure medications can cause drowsiness and dizziness, potentially resulting in a fall and broken bones.

Prescribing And Deprescribing Are Both Important

Ensuring safe and effective use of medications involves both prescribing, and deprescribing them.

Deprescribing is a process of stopping (or reducing the dose of) medications that are no longer required, or for which the risk of harm outweighs the benefits for the person taking them.

The process involves reviewing all the medications a person takes with a health-care professional to identify medications that should be stopped.

Think of deprescribing as spring cleaning your medicine cabinet. Just like how you tidy up your house and get rid of objects that are causing clutter without being useful, deprescribing tidies up your medication list to keep only the ones truly required.

But Care Is Needed

The process of deprescribing requires close monitoring and, for many medications, slow reductions in dose (tapering).

This helps the body adjust gradually and can prevent sudden, unpleasant changes. Deprescribing is often done on a trial basis and medication can be restarted if symptoms come back. Alternatively, a safer medication, or non-drug treatment may be started in its place.

Studies show deprescribing is a safe process when managed by a health-care professional, both for people living at home and those in residential aged care. You should always talk with your care team before stopping any medications.

Deprescribing needs to be a team effort involving the person, their health-care team and possibly family or other carers. Shared decision-making throughout the process empowers the person taking medications to have a say in their health care. The team can work together to clarify treatment goals and decide which medications are still serving the person well and which can be safely discontinued.

If you or a loved one take multiple medications you might be eligible for a free visit from a pharmacist (a Home Medicines Review) to help you get the best out of your medications.

What’s Next?

Health care has traditionally focused on prescribing medications, with little focus on when to stop them. Deprescribing is not happening as often as it should. Researchers are working hard to develop tools, resources and service models to support deprescribing in the community.

Health-care professionals may think older adults are not open to deprescribing, but about eight out of ten people are willing to stop one or more of their medications. That said, of course some people may have concerns. If you have been taking a medication for a long time, you might wonder why you should stop or whether your health could get worse if you do. These are important questions to ask a doctor or pharmacist.

We need more public awareness about polypharmacy and deprescribing to turn the tide of increasing medication use and related harms. 

Emily Reeve, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Medicine Use and Safety , Monash University; Jacinta L Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, University of South Australia; Janet Sluggett, Enterprise Fellow, University of South Australia, and Kate O'Hara, PhD student, Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Calories and kilojoules: how do we know the energy content of food, and how accurate are the labels?

Everything we consume contains energy our bodies use to move, grow and maintain health. To work out how much energy is in different foods and drinks, we need to first look at a few core concepts.

Firstly, you’ve probably heard of the units of measurement for energy – calories – as well as the metric equivalent, which is joules. One calorie is defined as the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1℃.

In human nutrition, the amounts of energy needed to maintain health, and to fuel a body, are much larger than the tiny singular calories used to heat up a gram of water. So, the term “calorie” in nutrition commonly refers to a kilocalorie (or kcal), which is 1,000 calories. When you see the word “calories” on a nutrition label, it’s likely referring to kcals.

The energy stored in food and drinks is released when the body breaks down one or more of the four macronutrients inside the food (carbohydrates, proteins, fats, alcohol). The body then uses that energy for activities such as keeping our heart beating, our lungs breathing and our muscles moving.

When energy in food is estimated, it is the amount of energy food and drinks provide for these bodily processes. The four macronutrients provide different amounts of energy:

1. 1 gram of carbohydrate provides about 4 kcal of energy
2. 1 gram of fat provides about 9 kcal of energy
3. 1 gram of protein provides about 4 kcal of energy
4. 1 gram of alcohol provides about 7 kcal of energy.

How Are Calories Estimated?

There are two ways to estimate the amount of energy in food and drinks.

The first is called “bomb calorimetry”. This gold-standard method involves placing a small sample of food or drink inside a device known as a bomb calorimeter. The food is burned in the presence of oxygen, releasing heat.

The amount of heat released is directly related to the amount of energy in the food, allowing a calculation to be made. This method is most commonly used for foods rich in fats and is considered the most reliable (but expensive) method.

The second method, the Atwater system, is a much less expensive method for estimating energy content. It is more commonly used when calculating energy of most food and drinks sold in supermarkets. Named after legendary food researcher Wilbur Atwater, this system uses a standard conversion factor for each macronutrient found in food and drinks. By estimating the amount of each of the four macronutrients, an approximate calculation of the total energy can be made.

However, this method requires detailed knowledge of the ingredients within composite foods (such as muesli bars or hamburgers) – which may reduce accuracy. There is also a margin of error to expect with the Atwater system, because it assumes each ingredient is always the same in composition.

For example, a cup of oats grown in one part of the country won’t necessarily have the exact same nutritional content as another cup of oats grown elsewhere, due to climate and soil differences. So, this system is an estimation based on an average.

Importantly, both methods estimate the amount of energy in food and drinks. But the actual energy our bodies extract from these foods and drinks can vary due to factors such as individual differences in digestion and absorption, as well as food processing and cooking methods.

Why Do Foods Have Calories Written On Them?

In Australia, it’s a legal requirement for packaged food items to have a nutrition information panel that displays the number of kcal it contains.

However, homemade food items sold at places like a fresh market may not be required to provide a nutrition information panel. This will depend on the type of food being sold and the scale of the business operation.

Fresh foods such as fruit, vegetables and meat also don’t require a nutrition information panel. To find out the number of kcal in them, you can either run an experiment with a bomb calorimeter or look up an estimated value in an online nutrition database.

Food composition databases such as CalorieKing compile information about the energy and nutrient content of various foods. Dietitians and other health professionals often use these databases to estimate the energy content of foods to inform dietary recommendations.

Different International Standards

Both kJ and kcal refer to energy – they are just two different units of measurements (such as how inches and centimetres are two different units for measuring length). Kilojoules (kJ) is part of the International System of Units (SI).

Australia, New Zealand and some parts of Europe use kJ. The United States and the United Kingdom use kcal. To convert between calories and kilojoules you use the conversion factors:

• 1 kcal = 4.184 kJ
• 1 kJ = 0.24 kcal (about ¼).

For example, if you have a packet of chips with an energy content of 200 kcal, you can convert it to kJ as follows: 200 kcal × 4.184 = 836.8 kJ.

As for how many calories are acceptable to eat, the Australian Guidelines for Healthy Eating estimate the average adult requires about 7,000kJ or 1,670Kcal every day. However, differences in age, gender, size, health and physical activity will influence how much energy a person needs.

To estimate your personal energy requirements, you can use this nutrients and dietary energy calculator.

Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland; Emily Burch, Dietitian, Researcher & Lecturer, Southern Cross University, and Katelyn Barnes, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ballet flats are back. Here’s what the research says about how they affect your feet

Ballet flat shoes – those thin-heeled lightweight slip-on shoes – are making a fashion comeback. And it’s not hard to see why: they’re versatile, easy to wear, soft, flexible and often worn by celebrities.

We have often been warned of the dangers of high-heeled shoes, so you might think ballet flats are problem-free.

When you look at the research, however, a complicated picture emerges. There’s no definitive evidence to show ballet flats are generally harmful to foot health in the long-term. But ill-fitting ballet flats can be a problem.

Make Sure It Fits, Especially In The Toe Box

An estimated 70% of the population are wearing ill-fitting shoes. This mismatch between foot and shoe shape can increase foot pain, reduce stability, and can mean more blisters, corns and calluses. And habitual wearing of tight shoes has been associated with bone changes in the toes and feet over time.

Many flats feature a shallow and narrow toe box (the part of the shoe where the toes go). A too-small toe box often doesn’t align with the shape of a foot and ends up squishing the toes. It can also increase pressure on top of and under the foot, and restrict the movement of the forefoot during walking.

But a too-big toe box is also a problem. Too much foot movement within the shoe can cause pressure and friction on the skin, which can also lead to calluses, corns, blisters, and wounds.

A poorly fitting toe box can also cause micro trauma to toenails which, ultimately, can change their look and thickness.

So if you’re wearing flats, make sure you choose a shoe with the right sized toe box.

What About The Heel?

Health professionals often recommend a small heel over a completely flat shoe. Very flat shoes can place more strain on the soft tissues that support the foot arch – specifically, the plantar fascia.

Research has shown moving from a completely flat shoe to a small, raised heel reduces the tension force on the plantar fascia during standing activities.

On the other hand, other research has shown most people will adapt their ankle and knee motion to accommodate shoes of different heel heights.

What About Support?

Ballet flats tend to have very flexible, thin soles and heel counters (the part, coloured red in this picture, that hugs the heel and the back part of the foot).

These thin and flexible structures mean flats are often accused of lacking support. But debate rages among foot and shoe experts about how important support is in the first place.

Research on barefoot-style shoes has shown walking in these types of shoes significantly reduces some loads on the knee compared to more stable supportive shoes.

Minimalist shoes have also been found to increase strength in certain foot muscles used when we push off during walking, running or jumping.

However, other research found stable supportive shoes can improve knee pain when walking more than flat flexible shoes.

The thin soles in flats mean there is little cushioning under the foot. While more cushioning can improve comfort, and reduce stress and strain on your foot sole skin, there is no evidence it reduces loads across the lower leg.

In fact, walking in cushioned shoes has been shown to increase the load on the knee compared to flat, flexible shoes.

So, What’s The Verdict?

The verdict is mixed. Yes, there’s evidence poorly fitting shoes and a flat heel can be detrimental, with consequences seen in the rearfoot (around the ankle) and knee.

But there’s also no hard evidence ballet flats cause long-term foot health problems.

What matters is choosing a well-fitted shoe to suit your foot shape and needs.

If you’re shopping for ballet flats, try to:

• choose a pair with a toe box that does not cramp your toes and has a sole at least as wide as your foot

• choose flats that offer at least some structure and support

• choose a pair with a small heel rather being than completely flat.

Kristin Graham, Lecturer in Podiatry, University of South Australia; Helen Banwell, Lecturer in Podiatry, University of South Australia, and Saravana Kumar, Professor in Allied Health and Health Services Research, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Our older population will triple in 40 years. But a social insurance model won’t fix the aged care funding crisis

Preliminary data from the 2023 Intergenerational Report shows Australia’s population aged 85 and over is set to more than triple over the next 40 years. This will exacerbate existing strains on the aged-care system.

The government’s Aged Care Taskforce is investigating aged-care funding options to develop a “fair and equitable” system, while exploring efficiency, affordability and sustainability.

The government will spend more than A$146 billion on aged care in the next four years. General tax revenue will cover that cost, mostly funded by individual income tax receipts. But the government is concerned general tax revenue won’t be enough to fund the expected growth in aged care, in the near future and longer term.

There are three primary options to increase aged-care funding. The government can either increase its contribution, ask consumers to pay more, or use a combination of both.

The need for more consumer contributions has dominated recent aged-care debates. The less asked, but more important, question is whether the general tax revenue model the government uses to fund aged care is an appropriate model to promote sustainability.

While a social insurance model is the main alternative, it won’t be the silver bullet we’re looking for to fix our aged-care funding crisis.

How Would Social Insurance Work?

A social insurance model would use either voluntary or compulsory contributions from worker salaries to cover the cost of aged-care services.

It could include a prior build-up of funds, where consumers draw on accumulated savings to purchase aged-care services. Alternatively, it could operate as a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) system, where consumers draw on worker contributions each year, with an understanding that workers will draw on future contributions when they require aged care.

The first social insurance model was established in 1883 by the first chancellor of the German Empire, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. He wanted blue-collar workers to remain healthy and productive by providing access to health-care services.

The “Bismarck” model has since permeated throughout Europe, funding health-care systems in Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

While this model works reasonably well in these countries, whether a social insurance model is right for funding aged care in Australia is debatable. How social insurance levies are applied matters to efficiency and equity.

Is Social Insurance Efficient?

An efficient funding model collects and distributes revenue for the least cost possible. A social insurance model would require new legislation and a government agency managing reserves, increasing administration costs.

Less visible but more substantial funding model costs are from market distortions associated with the revenue collection mechanism such as personal income tax or a levy.

Whether a social insurance model is more efficient from a market perspective depends on how the government would otherwise increase general tax revenue.

The impact on efficiency from a social insurance model would be equivalent to an increase in income tax rates under a general tax revenue model. Both would reduce take-home pay and potentially reduce the incentive to work, for example, by reducing the willingness to work overtime.

Efficiency differences would occur if the government increased tax rates faced by businesses. This could distort business decisions, potentially reducing investment.

The size of the impact would depend on the size of the tax increase. The Victorian government introduced the mental health and wellbeing surcharge on payroll tax in 2022 to raise funds for improved mental health-care services. While business suggested it would harm growth, there is no indication this has occurred.

Is Social Insurance Equitable?

Other differences exist between general tax and social insurance models when assessed against equity. An equitable funding model requires people with similar financial means to pay similar amounts, and those with greater financial means to pay more.

Differences primarily result from our ageing population. Under a general tax revenue model, current workers pay for current aged-care services, but may receive more and better quality aged care when older. They will pay less compared to their future cost of care.

A social insurance model that builds up funds may better match contributions with future costs. But this requires a big ask from workers, to simultaneously build up the fund for future aged-care costs and pay for current aged-care costs.

Future aged-care costs are also uncertain. Underestimating costs mean the government will still need to spend more on aged care. Overestimating costs means workers contributed more funding than needed, losing some opportunity to spend on other goods and services, such as holidays.

What Else Should The Government Consider?

A social insurance model is a departure from our broader tax system. The government does not ask workers to contribute to their future health-care costs, nor to future social payments such as the aged pension. Both are funded by general tax revenue.

A social insurance model that required a prior build-up of funds would also take years to establish. It would not help with current underfunding problems in aged care, which have provoked poor quality and provider financial distress.

There is no strong evidence to suggest social insurance is more efficient or equitable than a general tax revenue model. Like general tax revenue models, social insurance models are exposed to shifting political winds.

The best path toward sustainable aged-care funding is for the government and consumers to pay more. The problem of securing aged-care funding may lie less in the funding model and more in securing government commitment when fiscal priorities change.

Henry Cutler, Professor and Director, Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.