 Okay, we're here at ANU today discussing a new report that's come out from the Lancet, the highly prestigious medical journal about environmental health, and they commissioned 60 scientists to study the effects of the environment, changes that we're seeing on health, and we have a wonderful panel with us here today to discuss that. We have Archie Clements, the director of the Research School of Population Health. We have Jeanette Lindsay, the deputy director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society. We have Liz Hanna, also from the Research School of Population Health, and Mark Howden, the director of the Climate Change Institute at ANU. So I'll perhaps start with Liz because you were the director of the Climate Change Adaptation Network to tell us a little bit about what this report means for the world. Thanks. Yes, they put out a report in 2009 which was absolutely groundbreaking. This was the first time that something as prestigious as the Lancet drew attention to the world that climate change is a human health issue. And in that report they were mainly highlighting all the specific health risks and how climate change was going to manifest into health problems. And so some years later, now it's 2015, the new report has been released, and what they're showing there is that, A, very concerned that the projections of health outcomes are much more severe and are occurring much sooner than they possibly imagined. And this time, rather than only focusing on these are the health risks and these are the health outcomes that are likely to happen, it's what are we going to do about it. So they're moving very much forward to suggesting solutions and trying to actually get across into people's minds that if we actually do the serious mitigation and we actually sort of follow a pro-health approach to all this, we actually get coincidental health improvements. So it ends up being very cost effective and it saves a lot of help. What are some of the dangers that we're seeing? What have they outlined? Just tops of the waves. Tops of the waves are the main ones, of course the peak deaths, changes to agriculture, changes to storms and floods and indeed fires and all the ramifications that that has, except that they're more frequent and more intense even in that short time frame. So moving to Mark, agricultural adaptation is your field. What do you read from this report? I guess we start from a point where Australian farmers and businesses across the value chain are already well adapted to climate variability so they've dealt with past variability quite well. But what we're finding is that they're becoming increasingly stressed and the conditions they find themselves in now are beyond the historical experience and so they haven't necessarily got adaptive strategies for the things that are happening now. So one of the things that this results in is a significant psychological stress as well as financial stress and also can stress the natural resource base on which future production is dependent. So once you start to look at this and start to think we need new adaptive systems, then you can also get those sort of co-benefits that Liz has talked about in health but in agriculture about how to maintain production in more difficult times and so we have technologies to do that nowadays. How to maintain the viability of rural communities when they're under stress. They're very fragile aren't they? They can be because they're very highly dependent on the money flows from the farming community that surrounds them and so when that farming community is in stress themselves there is no money flow and the townships also suffer. And it's not just an economic suffering from what I'm hearing it actually moves to a psychological burden on the community? Indeed and so various surveys and studies have shown that a lot of Australian farmers are already feeling very stressed, very disempowered and so they're not able to control their futures and climate is part of that and so in those circumstances they can actually go into a state of denial where they start to omit strategically important things and that actually increases their vulnerability in the long term. So when we do those studies we actually find those farmers who are more cognizant of the accumulating risks including climate they actually feel empowered in terms of their own future and they actually feel a lot happier and so there are psychological stresses and ways of managing those stresses. So are we well placed to meet some of these challenges coming on from an agricultural point of view? Yes and no I think. So some of these are difficult issues. As I mentioned before there's relationships between stress and climate factors so work here at ANU showed that as drought stress increased suicide rates of males in rural communities increased significantly. And so that's a very difficult topic for farming communities to deal with but it also tells you something which is really important that there are particular times, there's particular gender groups and there's particular age groups that you can actually target for counselling and so from the policy response it actually says you can use your money very efficiently to actually target those groups and so there's some good news that actually comes out of understanding what's going on in terms of the relationship between climate stress and farming communities. So Archie as we see agricultural conditions changing that's the kind of area that you study in sort of global health and environments what do you see coming from this report? Well firstly I think that this is, I fully endorse this report I think it's a holistic look at the problem of climate change from the perspective of health and I think as Liz mentioned the health effects of climate change I think are a really compelling argument for the Australian government, for the Australian public for the global community to really take this problem seriously and deal with the issues that are leading to climate change. The health effects of climate change are very diverse they come from the direct effects of heat for example at the moment and in recent weeks and months we've seen serious heat waves impacting in the Indian subcontinent that have resulted in large numbers of deaths and also events such as cyclones and flooding I lived in Brisbane during the recent flooding event which tragically resulted in a loss of life but also was extremely disruptive to the Queensland economy and those types of natural events which are directly related to climate change are part of the health picture associated with climate change but there's also then the impact as you say on food production and on security and stability, geopolitical stability and those problems that are associated with climate change undermine health systems and undermine the capacity of countries to deal with public health problems and from my perspective I think that's actually probably the biggest climate change related impact on health it won't be so much through say for example changing weather patterns, increased warming and increased rainfall for example in Northern Australia it will be more through the undermining of health systems and the ability of countries to actually provide health care to their citizens So you're saying there might be a change in the health patterns an outbreak of some unusual disease and they just don't have the capacity So disease outbreaks are part of the story, yes so if countries, particularly countries in our region the capacity to deal with major infectious disease outbreaks limited by the need to divert resources to food production the instability, the geopolitical instability that's created through natural disasters, through food scarcity that will then impact on the ability of countries to deal with emerging threats like infectious diseases like SARS like influenza and that creates a biosecurity risk for Australia in our region and I think that's really where the big public health impact of climate change will be for us particularly if we're thinking about infectious diseases it won't be so much because of diseases like dengue moving south from Cairns down through Brisbane and into New South Wales for example similar to the situation around agriculture Australia is in a relatively strong position we have a strong health system where we'll be able to adapt to those types of challenges but the health and biosecurity of Australia is intimately linked with the health and biosecurity of our region and countries like Indonesia, like PNG like the Philippines dealing with natural disasters with health systems that are not as strong as ours will mean that diseases like dengue, malaria, influenza will be much harder to deal with and Australians will be at risk through our links in the region through our tourism, through our economic links and I think that's where the real problem will be If I may just on that point like for example Cyclone Pam that went through Vanuatu almost all the schools were flattened or damaged so the health buildings, the infrastructure once you wired that out it's very difficult for any system to operate and hence the fact that all the development that that actually had many, many years of progress towards the millennium development goals reversed in an instant and it's very, very hard and this is why they're much more likely to get outbreaks which of course spread around the region and Philippines, they get hammered on a regular basis and if you think of it in terms of they struggle, they try to improve their systems get things working, set up safety zones etc along comes another typhoon coming through it knocks the country down and you know the people there's interruptions again in their food supplies so you get more stunting and less lowered resilience in terms of their ability to withstand diarrhea and infectious diseases and then start to build themselves up again then comes another one and so it's very easy to imagine a scenario where they just constantly just get worn and worn down hence the absolute necessity for certainly strong mitigation efforts but also an awareness to the global health risks and indeed to security in many forms because a standard thing that people have done historically of course is if their world goes belly up they try to move and it's understandable they want to feed their families they must feed their families if they can and so there will be many people looking for somewhere to live we're going to see a lot of displaced refugees and it's not just a matter of we will see we actually are seeing this already it's a public health challenge that we're facing now which is a direct result of climate change a direct result of our inability to deal with carbon emissions and we're seeing the health effects now it's not something that's going to happen in the future of course it will happen in the future it will be much worse in the future but it's happening now the evidence presented in this report is compelling but it's happening now and Australia can't sit here and think we're safe and we can have borders that actually protect us from all the nastiness that's happening out there we are a big global community and as Ashley said it is happening now so for example to our north there's already some islands which have been depopulated because of sea level rise that's the Carterette Islands and so this is not a future scenario this is a prison scenario although that wasn't done for health reasons even if we did try to seal our borders we're still within Australia seeing things happening aren't we? Oh absolutely so what we're seeing in Australia is what we're seeing in many other parts of the world that temperatures are rising they have been doing all through the last century and into this one and what's really concerning is that the rates of change are increasing and that's not only happening elsewhere places like the Arctic where you see it very clearly with the ice melt but right here in Australia we're seeing that in recent years we've had a massive increase in the land area of Australia affected by high temperatures in the summer for instance and that's very marked and quite distinctive and together with the rising temperatures and the increased incidence of heatwave events for example which have severe impacts on health and lead to excess deaths and that sort of thing we're seeing that rainfall is decreasing in eastern Australia and has decreased quite substantially in some areas and in the southwest in WA for instance but it's increasing in the northwest so we're getting hotter, drier conditions in many areas and hotter, wetter conditions in others and it's all quite complex to deal with and has big impacts on water supplies and food production and is that where the risks are for us? Absolutely, absolutely and those risks come from the individual extreme events such as the heatwave or the flood or the big storm but they also come from the slow onset events like droughts which are not quite so dramatic perhaps because they don't happen quickly but they have very serious consequences for us for instance the sort of very large bushfires that we've been seeing in recent years such as the Black Saturday fires outside Melbourne those sorts of fires with big extent and very high severity, very difficult to control are much more likely when you've got a hotter environment and one that's drier overall because those are the kinds of conditions where if you get a fire ignition it becomes very difficult to control those particular circumstances So we're at risk not only from the sort of the broader, the population the epidemiologists here who study large populations are seeing things changing but also the sort of extreme event that's going to be a one-off, two-off, five-off, ten-off it's becoming a regular Well that's the thing so the frequency as we've moved through this warming period that we've had already and as we go into the future the return period of these extreme events decreases substantially so what we're seeing is that one in 20 year events we have presently so where you might get a huge wave occurring of a particular magnitude or a particular size of flood that currently would happen maybe once every 20 years or once every 50 years those periods become halved or even smaller so that the one in 20 year event by 2030, 2050 becomes a one in two or three year event and that's something that we're just not equipped to deal with at the moment What can our children expect? Well that's it One of the things of course is that a child born today by the time they're 32 years old the weather extremes that we're seeing now today in 2015 is going to be the norm for them and so it's very difficult to imagine what their extreme weather will be if that's another order of magnitude or more over and above what we have and as far as heat is concerned we have a thermoregulatory limit and we need to keep our core temperature around about 37 degrees now because our muscles 80% of the energy produced by our muscles is heat we have to share that to the environment it's very difficult to do that when it's hot and humid but it's increasingly difficult to do it when it's over about 35 in fact your peak muscular performance actually works at about if the ambient temperature is around 11 or 12 degrees and so people are having to go out shopping looking to climb up telephone poles and look after the sheep and accident and emergency and district nurses and all those people very important tasks that they're doing to keep the community safe and alive and if they're finding it difficult to go out and function then society as a whole and once we get up to over 35 and dare I say 45 degrees it restricts life it restricts society's function one of the things you mentioned at the beginning is that this actually has given us somewhere to go it's given us some positives to work with so what are those positives that it's given us so the document it's a very positive document it does outline a number of strategies that we can adopt the obvious one is that we need to reduce carbon emissions so we need to stop burning coal we need to invest more in renewable energy now as a population health specialist have you seen from the huge incidents of wind farms coming up that there's any health effects so I think it's a nonsense to suggest that wind farms actually create major health effects or that there are major health consequences for the construction of wind farms and if you compare even a miniscule health impact of wind farms with the massive health impact which is documented in this report from the burning of coal there is no way that they can be considered on an equivalent basis in fact I think it's it's really a diverting attention from the real issue and if we talk about health effects of wind farms what we really should be talking about is health effects of climate change that are driven by the burning of coal but this document takes a holistic approach so it doesn't just talk about the need to reduce consumption of coal and the need to invest in renewable energy it also talks about the types of things that we can do to improve health in parallel with that and it takes a multi-sectoral view so it looks at it suggests that we need to do things like strengthen health systems particularly in developing countries where much of the health burden of climate change is going to occur at least initially investing in research public health research to work out ways that we can actually mitigate the impact of climate change it talks about the provision of water and sanitation it talks about looking at nutrition and the way that we can work with the agricultural sector and food production in order to mitigate the nutritional effects of climate change how we can build environment how we can build our cities so that we can lead healthier lives and thereby mitigate some of the effects of climate change because part of that is trying to promote more active living and active transport and there's a slide I tend to use in my presentations there's an inverse relationship between national obesity and proportion of transport trips that are done by photo bicycle when you compare country by country by country the evidence is absolutely overwhelming and of course once you get people out either walking the streets or indeed bicycling around there's much more community engagement and the area is cleaner because you're not having all the pollution coming out of the cars they're fitter it's improved diabetes and cardiovascular disease and mental health and so the benefits are astronomical and I think one of the one of the other figures that was published in this report and has been released earlier is that annually the ignoring the health costs from the fossil fuel industry is effectively a subsidy to the point of 5.3 trillion dollars globally annually a huge figure and with the climate and health alliance that I'm president of we commissioned a report last year to examine the health costs of the the hunter coal alone and that's a cost of 600 million dollars per annum just in that region in terms of health costs and that's what kind of things does that manifest as? it's largely respiratory respiratory and cardiovascular and if you incorporate a more broad view and think of the social costs that go along with that that's up to 6 billion dollars per annum and so the figures are enormous so it makes economic sense for us to get ourselves off fossil fuels and towards the renewables and active transport the evidence is there, the World Bank World Health Organization it's not as if it's sort of fireflug and freaky evidence here, it's the major organizations that are really solid economic paces have provided the evidence so it's lunacy for the Australian Government not to keep pushing this really hard and we would like them to take it up so in terms of food security and water security is that another issue that comes out of this? yes, again most of this would come from the changes in supply which of course will be rainfall and evaporation and as far as food security is concerned everything that Marcus said is true but there's the other issue that people tend not to think of and that's that plants have an upper temperature tolerance as well, they don't do well and if you drive around some of those areas you see vineyards now wearing little shell caps up and down on top of them to keep the heat off they literally wither on the vine and the fruit and vegetables which is enormously sensitive so it's not this is what's going to lower the yields and therefore interrupt people's nutritional levels and of course their economics and round and round so it's there's upper temperature thresholds for all of us and we're heating those more frequently more severely and if it hits a plant at a critical stage of its growth you can lose the whole year's crop so there's how are we positioned with that mark to go forward as I mentioned before there's a huge amount of capacity to adapt agriculture in Australia and elsewhere and Australia in many ways has been world leading in that in the past the challenge is that as these changes continue and it's not just climate change but many other changes that we need to be able to continue to be innovative and keep ahead of the game otherwise Australia we've got a difficult farming environment we will drop behind the challenge in Australia and globally is that the research and development for agriculture and agriculture and environment is actually reducing and there's a relationship which shows that when you start to reduce your research and development you forego future growth in productivity and so that reduction in R&D now and for some years but when it cuts in it actually lasts for a long time so there is a R&D challenge which goes well beyond the issue of climate change but there is also a just following on from what Liz says there's actually some specific links between what we're seeing with climate and health issues so for example Australia used to be a net exporter in commodities like vegetables and fruit and because of climate and price factors as well we've actually become net importers in terms of fruit and vegetables this is in terms of the value of the imports versus exports and this is exactly the same time we're actually being told we need to eat more fruit and vegetables for health benefits so that climate signal which has actually turned us to be a net importer than an exporter essentially makes us less soft sufficient in terms of these nationalised critical foods for good health I was just thinking I'm part of that which I was done in Shepparton at the time 2003 was a major hail storm it took up the stone fruit the major supermarkets realised that they were vulnerable if the SPC region was wiped out in a major storm hence they then decided to start outsourcing from other countries which had again rural community problems for the people in our food bowl and so it therefore makes Australia more vulnerable to changes if we're needing our vital food sources dependent on the goodwill of other countries particularly for long lived plants also industrial equipment so if you knock out your orchards or your vines or any other long standing crop perennial in the nut tree it takes many years to actually get that back and also if you take out your cannery or your rice processing plant effectively in the current economic environment it just doesn't come back and so you can very quickly ratchet down your ability to actually produce high value commodities and then that flows through to your local economy and all the stresses that occur from that sort of starting to be collapse of rural towns etc so there's a lot of effects from what seem to be relatively minor climate signals as they start to be taking into account in terms of value chains so someone I was just going to comment on water we've got such a good example of what can happen with water supplies with what's happened around Perth for instance so Perth's inflow into Perth water supply was at a particular level in the mid 1970s that abruptly changed and this is very clearly attributable to climate change and changes in weather patterns and established a new level that was not quite half of what it had been before and then that has dropped again more recently and the response given a growing population and all the mining boom that we're also familiar with and the changes that have happened there socially has been of course that you need water you've got to have water security so they've been putting in diesel so desalination and that in itself it's a solution it gives you fresh water but it takes a lot of energy to run them and you're producing fresh water but there's a lot of very saline byproduct which then you have to dispose of and if you put that back into the ocean then you don't mix it well you're ending up with a high salinity layer in the ocean which is dead in terms of marine productivity so there's all sorts of consequences around us and we're seeing them right here in Australia right now so with this report where would you like to see it go, what's the effect you'd like to see it have? One of the main things I'd like is I'd like this to be broadly received and read and if the Australian public we'd like it to get out far and wide so if the Australian public were to become more fully aware of the impacts that it's having and the fact that there are solutions then I think we get a little bit more political pressure because let's face it the current policies are working in the exact opposite direction to what this report recommends and so that if the politicians realise that the people actually value their own future they want their children to grow up and have a happy and healthy life much as we've enjoyed all our lives then it would be good for the Australian government to recognise that we won't have a bar of it I mean they can't trifle with our future Any other comments? Well I think that the report it's about the health impacts it's written by medical professionals by doctors, by public health experts it's highly credible and I would love to see the government take this seriously I would love to see Australia become a leader globally in dealing with the health impacts of climate change partly because of the moral obligation where we are one of the biggest exporters of coal part of the problem additionally we've got a highly trained public health workforce we have some of the best health and medical research in the world happening in Australia we need to take a lead internationally in generating research in supporting countries in our region to deal with the health impacts of climate change I'd like to see more funding for health and medical research particularly around global health, public health and the health impacts of climate change and I think this documents a really compelling presents a really compelling argument for why Australia needs to show leadership in that way Sounds like a great place to wind up