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Perth Now
28 minutes ago
- Perth Now
The long, winding road to a climate-resilient Pacific
Helen Tony's life in a small and low-lying coastal village in the South Pacific is made increasingly difficult by a changing climate. Not only do rising seas and intensifying storms monster the shore and threaten homes, the global consequences of emitting more greenhouse gases extends to food and income security concerns for her family. Ms Tony lives in the village of Unakap on Nguna, one of Vanuatu's small islands off the north coast of Efate and about 4000km east of Cairns. In the 15 years she's resided there, growing fruit and vegetables has become harder especially after cyclones that bring destructive insects in their wake. Her husband is also catching fewer fish due to reef and ecosystem damage from extreme weather, higher seawater temperatures and ocean acidification. Their family of five is able to make money to buy food from local markets but one of their income sources, the mats Ms Tony makes from pandanus leaves, has taken a hit. To weave them, along with fans, purses and baskets, the leaves need to be dry but more rain than is typical has been shrinking her output and the cash she generates selling her wares. Living in an archipelago vulnerable to volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and landslides, ni-Vanuatu are no strangers to disaster and the long road to recovery that follows. But the addition of climate change impacts and extreme weather events including more intense cyclones and storms are making it harder to bounce back. World Vision humanitarian emergency security affairs manager Pallen Abraham Philip says the country has always experienced cyclones but they are becoming stronger and increasingly hitting out of season. "They're still in the recovery mode, then the next hits," he tells AAP. Category five system Pam, to which Australia was a first responder, devastated the country in 2015, and there have been other severe storms since including twin tropical cyclones Judy and Kevin that tore similar pathways just days apart in 2023. A lot of money is needed to help vulnerable regional and rural communities recover and adapt and there is at least some funding funnelled into Vanuatu through a complex web of instruments and programs. On Nguna and neighbouring islands, dedicated global project the Green Climate Fund is supported by the Vanuatu government and humanitarian organisation Save the Children. Australia's $50 million contribution is part of its broader $100 million package of initiatives to foster preparedness including the Pacific Resilience Facility. This, in turn, allows the Pacific to invest in small-grant but high-impact initiatives to help make communities disaster-ready. Whitely Tasaruru, who is the Nguna and Pele area climate change manager within Vanuatu's Community-based Climate Resilience Project, says each village has its own set of issues and preferred fixes. His job is partly about making sure various adaptation measures like coastal tree planting, sea wall construction and coral restoration mesh cohesively. For Nguna, gradually relocating low-lying villages to higher ground on the island is the long-term goal. In the meantime, the community wants to buy extra time by protecting buildings and infrastructure, including the road connecting communities close to the shore. Planting more vegetation and trees along the shoreline should help, Mr Tasaruru says, as will a planned sea wall in a spot known to be vulnerable to erosion. But sometimes climate impact solutions can unintentionally create new problems. For example, work under way to build a road to higher ground for relocating households has been reliant on mining sand on the island's beach for the slab cement structure. But extracting the sand has created openings and channels on the beach that are leaving nearby settlements more exposed to storm surge and wash damage. "Many community members here have concerns," Mr Tasaruru tells AAP. He believes sourcing sand from Port Vila, the city on the mainland island of Efate, is a better option. On neighbouring Pele, Salome Kalo from Pilliura village has been instrumental in getting solar-generated food drying up and running. Located on sandy and therefore less productive soil, food security has become an issue for the village, especially when compounded by storms and unfavourable weather. To give themselves more flexibility, villagers have been preserving fruit, vegetables and other produce using a solar-powered dryer that blows warm air to prevent moisture. "It helps us a lot," Ms Kalo says. But a few months ago, the dryer in her village was destroyed in a storm. "We have to build that again this month." Like on the neighbouring island, Pele communities have scouted out higher ground to move to over time. Edward Lani, also from Pilliura village, expects their way of life to change when forced to relocate away from the beach. "There are people who live along the coast, they depend entirely on the ocean for food but if they move inland, it would change their way of getting food for the household," he says. But for Mr Lani, moving inland is not his biggest concern. He is more worried young people will leave the island entirely to avoid worsening environmental conditions.
ABC News
2 hours ago
- ABC News
Weekend rainbands soak Australia as weather bureau doubles down on wet spring
There are multiple indications the record drought across southern Australia is finally loosening its grip. Firstly, a much-anticipated rainband is engulfing most of the country and will stretch nearly 3,000 kilometres this weekend from tropical Queensland to Tasmania, falling as heavy snow across the Alps. Essential, though, for drought recovery is follow-up falls, and a second bout of rain is predicted from Sunday to Thursday, ensuring this month becomes the wettest for southern Australia since June 2023. Hope of a more permanent drought relief is also backed by the latest long-range outlooks, which now firmly favour wetter conditions this spring. The current rain event commenced through Wednesday and Thursday as a powerful cold front surged well north across Western Australia to the Pilbara, drenching parts of Perth with more than 50 millimetres and spawning a destructive tornado. The extreme northward penetration is the key to this system — it allowed the front to not only drag in tropical moisture, which is a prerequisite for inland rain, but also cause the formation of a low-pressure system near the WA south coast. The low then traversed the South Australian coast on Friday, spreading the rainband across the interior and into south-east states. Clare in the Mid North welcomed more than 25mm — already the town's heaviest rain since late 2023. By sunset, the parched Mallee had picked up 10mm, hardly a deluge, but for Mildura, already the heaviest fall so far in 2025. The front has now shifted the band well into Tasmania, Queensland and New South Wales. However, because a low is trailing near the southern coast, showers will continue across SA and Victoria for at least another 48 hours. By late Monday, the southern Murray Basin and most farming regions of SA are likely to receive between 15 and 30mm of rain, including what has already fallen in the past 24 hours. The deep low is also generating strong winds and heavy alpine snow, which will not completely clear until later on Monday, when the low retreats into the Southern Ocean. For the Alps, around 50 centimetres of fresh snow should accumulate on the higher slopes during the next three days, continuing a much-improved ski season relative to the past two years. While the current rain event is crucial, a rebound from drought requires more than just an aberration — and thankfully, modelling is promising follow-up falls during the coming week. Yet another vigorous front, the third in less than a week, will arrive on the WA west coast tomorrow, and like its predecessor, will lead to the formation of a low near the state's south coast. However, this next system will only draw in a small plume of tropical moisture and therefore, for most areas, rainfall intensity will be limited. Nonetheless, the low will still bring widespread showers, starting in WA on Sunday, reaching western SA on Monday, then spreading throughout south-east Australia from Tuesday to Thursday. This will boost the weekly totals to around 25 to 50mm across most of southern Australia — comfortably the most widespread week of rain in two years. For the Alps, the arrival of another low means more snow, and an injection of polar air could lower the snow level to around 1,000 metres along the Great Dividing Range. Full recovery from the worst drought on record will require sustained wet months, a scenario becoming more likely according to the latest extended outlooks issued this week. The Bureau of Meteorology's (BOM) long-range model called ACCESS–S now shows up to an 80 per cent chance of above-median falls through parts of eastern Australia from August to October. Using one model in isolation can be problematic in forecasting. However, an ensemble of nine different global models, shown below, supports the wet outlook. The model average indicates a 70 to 90 per cent chance of above-median rain across the whole of central and eastern Australia. But why are models consistently tipping the following months will be wet？ One clue is ocean temperatures across the tropical Indian and Pacific oceans. Long-range forecasts are hinting at both a weak La Niña and a weak negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) signal — both drivers of wet conditions in Australia. However, without a clear consensus and no observable trend so far indicating their development, basing forecasts on either La Niña or a negative IOD would be premature. So, can we trust the outlook? Seasonal rain forecasts without active climate drivers should be viewed with caution, but when analysed in conjunction with the current wet weather, it is becoming increasingly likely the worst of the drought, at least from a meteorological perspective, is coming to an end.
Sydney Morning Herald
2 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
A megaflood devastated early Sydney. An even worse catastrophe is hidden in the city's ‘bathtub'
A thousand horses drowned. Gunshots blasted throughout the night to alert rescue boats to the locations of the stranded while floodwaters nearly 20 metres high swallowed even the homes on top of hills. The deluge that almost engulfed the entire western Sydney suburb of Windsor summoned torrents that ripped away buildings, bedsteads, tables, chairs, the bodies of pigs and a child seated upon a sack of flour. The Hawkesbury-Nepean flood of 1867 killed 20 people – including 12 from the same family – and left hundreds of survivors half-naked, starving and 'paralysed' with trauma, according to newspaper reports. It's the biggest flood ever recorded in Sydney and has acted for decades as the benchmark for emergency planners for just how catastrophic a flood can be. But there are tales of an even greater deluge. First Nations oral histories spoke of a flood so great in 1780 that even the few islands of high land in Windsor spared by the 1867 flood, which 2000 people used as refuge, went underwater. 'There was a big flood before European settlement, in which the Aboriginal peoples climbed the tallest trees, but were still swept away,' said Dr Stephen Yeo, a flood risk specialist at the NSW Reconstruction Authority. Based on these anecdotes, Yeo believes the 1780 flood could have been two to three metres higher than the 1867 disaster, reaching 22.3 metres at Windsor. If verified, adding the deluge to the flood record would have profound effects on what we know about disaster risk. Based on current knowledge, for example, the 1867 flood has a one-in-500 chance of happening each year. Add in the 1780 flood and that chance jumps to one-in-200. 'Perhaps that 1867 flood actually can happen more frequently. And if the same happened again today, it would be much more catastrophic because there's so much more development in western Sydney on that vast floodplain,' Yeo said. Today a disaster on that scale would force the evacuation of 114,000 people, damage or destroy 19,000 homes, and inflict $7.5 billion in damage, according to the Reconstruction Authority. At least 2200 homes and other buildings were damaged in the 2022 Hawkesbury-Nepean flood. Verifying the 1780 flood would also raise '1-in-100-year flood' levels expected in the Hawkesbury-Nepean, which are events that have a 1 per cent chance of happening each year. These are the flood levels used to decide the height of floors for properties built in flood-prone areas. At Windsor, if the 1780 flood was indeed two metres higher than that of 1867, it would increase the expected 1-in-100-year flood level by 1.3 metres, to 18.6 metres. These estimates are crucial for emergency planning. The Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley is one of the highest-risk flood zones because it's built like a 'bathtub', with five major tributaries gushing in and narrow sandstone gorge choke points that cause floodwater to back up and rise rapidly. That's why archaeologists and river experts have hitched a ride on State Emergency Service boats to a sandy riverbank on the Nepean, about 45 minutes up into the Blue Mountains National Park from Penrith. Here the Reconstruction Authority is leading a 'paleoflood' research project, which refers to the study of past or ancient floods, to see if it can confirm stories of the 1780 flood by analysing sediment. Geomorphologist Tim Cohen, with an akubra hat and a passion for dirt, is in a square-hewn hole dug into a hill about 30 metres above the river. There are layers of dark chocolate soil and light caramel sands, with the paler layers a mark of powerful past floods that carried heavy sand high up onto land. 'Here you see a really perfect layer cake stratigraphy. So you see muds, sands, muds, sands. And the sands represent the big floods,' Cohen, an associate professor at the University of Wollongong, said. 'This could represent a flood that's 30 metres deep,' he said, gesturing to a thick sandy stripe. 'That's an extraordinary rain event. But I guess the question is, 'How extraordinary is it? How often does it happen?' ' To answer that question, Cohen and colleague Dr Daryl Lam from Water Technology are capitalising on an extraordinary quirk of physics: grains of sand keep a record of when they last saw sunlight. 'Every grain of sand is like a rechargeable battery,' Cohen said. 'When it's buried, it receives the radioactive decay of surrounding minerals, and that's the charge. And what releases the charge is sunlight.' Cohen hammers stainless-steel tubes into the sediment to collect cylinders of sand without exposing them to sunlight. Each end of the tubes is quickly covered in foil. From here, the samples go to a red-light lab, where scientists scour the sand with corrosive baths of hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide and hydrofluoric acid to remove skerricks of dirt, bugs, charcoal and tree roots. What's left is pure quartz. A laser is fired at each grain, which simulates the sun and triggers the release of the radioactive 'charge' as a tiny flash of electrons measured by a photomultiplier. Back at the dig site, Cohen measures the amount of radioactive uranium, thorium and potassium in the dirt, and the level of cosmic radiation hitting the ground from space, to establish how much 'charge' the grains were receiving during their time underground. Knowing the amount of natural radiation the grains of quartz were exposed to, and how much 'charge' they released in the lab, allows the researchers to calculate how long ago the sand was buried. 'That's what we're after; when we date the time of deposition, that tells us about the time of the flood,' Cohen said. Radiocarbon dating can go back 50,000 years; this method can go back a million. Loading A flood so big it brought sediment this high would be 'nuts' but is theoretically possible, said Cohen. As flooding turns deadlier under climate change, looking back at past disasters can help us understand when and why deadly floods may strike. 'The longer your record, the better your capacity to predict the likelihood of rare extreme events,' Cohen said.
