Antinuclear

Australia likely to lose National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility

Nobody Mentioned It, But Do We Stand To Lose Our Best Defence Against Climate Change? Huff Post, Anthony Sharwood, 11 May 17  Good luck, Australia. We’re going to need it.  10/05/2017 You’ve probably never heard of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. We hadn’t. And after reading the 2017 Federal Budget, the indications are we never will again.

Here’s why this matters.

This means it’s Australia’s only government-funded body which takes established climate science, assesses the likely impacts of climate change, then tells us what the heck we should do about it.

Budget Paper No. 2 confirms confirms that its modest funding of $600,000 will continue for another year.

The Government will provide $0.6 million in 2017‑18 to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. This measure supports existing online platforms that inform decision makers seeking to adapt to changes in climate.

And then? Well down on page 57 of the Environment Portfolio Budget Statements, the funding looks like it dries up after the end of the 2017/18 financial year. No more NCCARF. It may merge with the CSIRO, or it may just be lost.

“I think it’s got another year to find a funding mechanism that is stable, that’s my reading of the situation,” NCARFF Director Professor Jean Palutikof told HuffPost Australia…….

Australian Conservation Foundation CEO Kelly O’Shanassy told HuffPost Australia that NCCARF was now “a research facility without funding for research”.

“The budget commitment is for $600,000 next year with CSIRO to maintain an online database of specific parts of its research. It has no funding after that.”………

More broadly, this was a budget in which the term “climate change” barely rated a mention.

“There’s nothing on climate change and very little on the environment. It’s like someone’s gone ‘Control Alt Delete’ and the whole thing’s disappeared from the budget papers,” Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young told HuffPost Australia politics editor Karen Barlow.

Gemma Borgo-Caratti, the National Director of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, said “the Budget ignores climate change which in turn handballs Australia’s biggest problem to the next generation to deal with”.

Greenpeace Asia Pacific said “the Turnbull government has continued to ignore climate change and the need to fund renewable energy at a time when the country is demanding leadership on the most serious threat of our age”……http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/05/10/nobody-mentioned-it-but-we-stand-to-lose-our-best-defense-again_a_22078630/

May 12, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, climate change - global warming