Save articles for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

New York: Foreign Minister Penny Wong admits Australia needs to be better prepared for another dangerous bushfire season, as a spring heatwave leaves parts of the country edging towards disaster.

Speaking after attending a United Nations climate action summit in New York, Wong acknowledged that while the Albanese government had provided additional funding for emergency preparation and management, this year’s unseasonably hot and dry weather had sparked growing concern about the country’s readiness to deal with another catastrophic summer.

Australia faces the prospect of more devastating climate-fuelled bushfires if global warming is not reined in.Credit: Getty.

“In September we’ve got bushfires, and that’s pretty frightening for Australians,” she said.

“We’re working with the states to make sure we are better prepared – and we’re going to need to be.”

The minister’s comments came after UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned on Wednesday that “humanity has opened the gates of hell” by unleashing worsening heatwaves, floods and wildfires across the globe, but that action was being dwarfed by the scale of the challenge.

“The future of humanity is in our hands,” Guterres said. “We must turn up the tempo, turn plans into action and turn the tide.”

Foreign Minister Penny Wong says Australia needs to be better prepared for the summer ahead. Credit: AP

But the UN climate summit was partly emblematic of the shortfall in effort, with the heads of state of some of the biggest emitters in the world – including China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi – skipping the summit, while the US sent in Climate Envoy John Kerry even though President Joe Biden, who did not attend, was in New York for the UN General Assembly.

Also absent was British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has come under criticism after he announced a watering down of the UK’s policies to reach net-zero emissions, as well as French President Emmanuel Macron.

What’s more, the nations who qualified for a speaking spot at the summit only represented a fraction of global polluters.

Asked if she agreed with the secretary-general’s concerns about the lack of global effort, assistant minister for climate change, Jenny McAllister, who is also part of Australia’s delegation, agreed that more needed to be done.

“There is no doubt that this is a critical decade for climate action,” she said. “The IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has made it very clear that there is a gap between the action that is presently being taken and the action that is required to keep the world’s temperature safe.”

Fortescue Future Industries, the company run by Australian mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, argued that the UN “has to be more aggressive” when it comes to climate negotiations.

Fortescue is one of the biggest emitters in the world but has an ambitious decarbonisation plan to be net-zero by 2030, and this week announced that it would no longer buy carbon offsets.

Chief executive Mark Hutchinson told this masthead that he hoped the upcoming Climate Change (COP28) summit in Abu Dhabi would result in bold action, “such as definitive targets that say: ok we’ll come off oil, we’ll come off gas, we’ll come off coal.”

A signboard warning of extreme heat in Death Valley, California.Credit: Reuters

“The other part to this, which people don’t always talk about, is the solutions. It’s all very well to say we’ll come off fossil fuels, but if you don’t have the solutions, what are you going to do?” he said.

Back in Australia, three weeks after the official start of spring, fire danger zones have spread across the east coast where temperatures have soared 10 to 15 degrees above the September average.

Schools in some towns have been forced to close, ski resorts have shut down weeks ahead of schedule and firefighters have been battling dozens of blazes in the Northern Territory, Queensland and NSW.

Authorities have also formally declared the arrival of the El Nino weather pattern, in an ominous sign for the months ahead.

However, concerns about the country’s readiness to tackle yet another brutal summer have re-emerged, particularly regarding the lack of action when it comes to land management and mitigation.

Local Government Minister Kristy McBain, who represents the Eden-Monaro electorate devastated by the 2019-2020 bushfires, said on ABC radio this week that she understood residents’ frustrations.

“I think that would be the frustration that land management is still not a priority,” she said. “That doesn’t come down to the last couple of months – that’s the last three years that we should have been preparing.”

Wong admitted more effort was needed, but added: “What you won’t get from our government is the sort of denial, unfortunately, about this that we saw from the previous government.

“We are listening and we are actively working with states … in terms of emergency management and additional funding.”

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.

Most Viewed in Politics

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article