Australian cities roasting

Australia’s cities are roasting and choking beneath the worsening strain of population growth, which is having a significant impact on the environment, a “shocking” new report has revealed.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has released the 2021 State of the Environment report, which was prepared for the previous government but hidden from public view since late last year. As well as detailing how a combination of factors is damaging the country’s natural world and wildlife populations, it also paints a picture of worsening conditions in urban landscapes.

“The report is a shocking document,” Ms Plibersek said.

“It tells a story of crisis and decline in Australia’s environment and a decade of government inaction and wilful ignorance.”

A summary of the document’s findings — which complies the scientific assessments of a five-year period of time by 30 leading experts — reveals most of Australia’s eight major cities are growing at faster rates than many other developed cities internationally.

That rapid and largely unmanaged growth has led to greater urban heat, choking congestion, rising pollution and waste, and greater pressure on “increasingly scarce” resources like water and energy.

“These impacts expand to the natural environment surrounding our urban areas and the biodiversity (and) green and blue spaces within them,” the summary findings reveal.

Population growth is the major driver of environmental issues within cities, the report said. For example, Sydney has lost 70% of native vegetation cover due to development. Stormwater infrastructure across the city has created pollution hotspots in Sydney Harbour that are 20 times greater than pre-human disturbance.

“Waste going to landfill in New South Wales increased by 10% over past 10 years, with hazardous waste almost doubling,” according to the summary findings.

Outside of cities and major regional areas, a lack of water standard regulation is putting communities at risk. This is particularly the case in remote areas — particularly indigenous communities in the Northern Territory — where a shameful lack of access to good-quality drinking water is linked to lower life expectancies, the report found.

Dan Metcalfe, director of the Oceans and Atmosphere team at the CSIRO and co-lead author of the State of the Environment report’s extreme events chapter, said the impact of acute weather events are being felt “widely across the built and natural environment”.

Dr Metcalfe warned those impacts “affect biodiversity, production systems, industry, and community”.

“The State of the Environment report found the intensity, frequency, and distribution of extreme weatherrelated events are changing,” he said.

“Impacts of extreme events have been exacerbated by habitat fragmentation, land management practices, and invasive species, and extreme events are demonstrably impacting our environment, ecosystems, society, and our wellbeing.”

The report analysed a number of key areas – biodiversity, coastal areas, climate, extreme events, air quality, indigenous knowledge, inland water, land, marine, urban environments, heritage, and Antarctica.

In an interview with ABC News Breakfast, Ms Plibersek repeated her description of the findings as “disturbing” on multiple fronts.

“It says that our environment is in a poor state and it’s getting worse, and that if we don’t change the laws and the systems that we have to protect it, that decline will continue.”

A major component of the report is analysing the unprecedented destruction caused by the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires, which burned through more than eight million hectares of native vegetation.

Alarmingly, it is estimated that up to three billion animals were killed or displaced. As well as the damage or loss of fragile koala habitats, ash and sediment entering waterways led to significant fish deaths. More broadly and outside of that disaster, increasing land and ocean temperatures in general are causing harm to a number of species.

“Since the early 20th century, average Australian land temperatures have increased by 1.4 degrees celsius,” the summary findings said.

“Sea-levels rise is impacting many low-lying areas, including the Kakadu wetlands. Mangroves are encroaching on saltmarsh across much of Australia’s coast. Further loss of saltmarsh is expected as the rate of sea level rise accelerates.”

During an extreme heatwave in November 2018, some 23,000 spectacled flying does died and another 10,000 black flying foxes died over a two-day period.

Meanwhile, marine heatwaves caused mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016, 2017, and 2020.