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Climate change is absolutely will mean that many jobs will be changing into the future. We have already seen big changes in the jobs available due to climate change. Some of these changes offer new opportunities. For example, there are more jobs in renewable energy - the renewable energy sector currently employs about 26,000 people in Australia. Tasmania has jobs in hydro and wind electricity generation, and potentially in a new green hydrogen production industry. The future of jobs in this sector however depends on policy decisions made at the moment.
Some existing jobs have also changed due to climate change. This includes jobs in agriculture, manufacturing, and construction. Many of these jobs will still be a part of our society going forward, but they will probably look different than they have previously. We’ve also seen a shifts in law, with environmental law becoming a specialty area, and changes in social work as greater focus is being placed on disaster response. There are also opportunities for jobs as climate change educators and science communicators. As well as jobs in creating resilient communities, and disaster preparedness.
Climate change will also present some challenges to jobs in the future. Extreme weather events are likely to have impacts on working conditions and safety.
At the moment in particular we want to be encouraging decision makers to be considering the future of climate change as they make policy decisions. You may also like to think about what you’re passionate about, what your talents and skills are and how you could contribute to climate change as you think about what job you’d like to do in the future. What brings you joy and how can you use that to help respond to climate change.
How hot it will get by 2033 depends on mitigation actions taken today. If greenhouse gas emissions are reduced quickly and net-zero CO2 emissions achieved, there will not be as much warming as there will be if these actions are not taken.
In Tasmania it is predicted to average between 1.05 and 1.27 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels in the year 2033. Now this isn’t as high as the predictions for global temperature increase, but that’s because there are significant local variations in temperature increases. Tasmania is an island – so the ocean helps keep us a bit cooler than other places.
There will be more days that are unbearably hot – because the increasing average temperature means that extreme temperatures will increase too, creating more hot and extremely hot weather.
While by 2033 it will not be unbearably hot in Tasmania very often, there will still places in the world where this temperature change has a really big impact. Climate scientists predict that extreme weather are heatwaves are going to increase and get more extreme. Urban air temperature is also often higher than in rural environments, due to heat generated by traffic and industrial activity, as well as the spread of heat-trapping concrete buildings that have steadily replaced plant life. Heat waves impact vulnerable people the greatest – children, the elderly, those with existing health conditions, people who are experiencing homelessness and people in financial difficulties. It is important that we are looking after the most vulnerable in our communities and in the global community.
There are things we can do. For example, urban greening! More information about urban greening can be found here: https://theconversation.com/urban-greening-can-save-species-cool-warming-cities-and-make-us-happy-116000
Your generation already are and will continue to live with the impacts of climate change as you get older. And this can feel frustrating and scary as you look towards your and our planet’s futures. Lifestyles may change, but that doesn’t mean you can’t live a full life. If you’re needing some help with what to do with these feelings have a look at our page on the Curious Climate website.
You can have a look at an interactive map that shows predicted warming here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-every-part-of-the-world-has-warmed-and-could-continue-to-warm
It’s important firstly to distinguish between mitigation and adaptation when we are talking about climate change. Mitigation means all those actions intended to lessen climate change, mainly by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing nature’s ability to absorb emissions. Mitigation includes things like transforming our energy, transport and manufacturing systems so that we can move away from fossil fuels. It also includes helping nature to recover with tree planting and habitat restoration so that natural environments can help us do the work of reaching net zero emissions by absorbing carbon dioxide. However, even if we can cut global emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050 – the key goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement – impacts of climate change will continue to be felt for some time. We will therefore need to work on adaptation: that is, changing our societies to better cope with the impacts of climate change already being felt and the impacts projected into the future.
One of the key things we need to think about is adapting to sea level rise. Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tell us even if we succeed in strongly reducing emissions, greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and heating already in the climate system will mean that sea levels continue to rise for centuries. Sea levels could rise by 30-60cms by 2100, even if global warming is kept below 2°. Seas could rise as much as 60-110cm by 2100 if we don’t curb emissions strongly. In any future emissions scenario, therefore, coastal areas and low lying land areas will have to adapt to saltwater flooding from sea level rise. In some cases this may mean building extensive sea walls: such adaptation infrastructure is now being considered by low-lying cities, for example Miami in Florida, USA. In other places, like low-lying Pacific Islands, this may be less feasible and moving away from such islands may be a necessary adaptation action. For example, people living on the Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea are already having to decide to leave their islands, as sea levels rise.
Increasing heat will also call for adaptions. Heatwaves are Australia’s most dangerous extreme weather risk for humans. Heatwaves are becoming hotter, lasting longer and occurring more often. By mid-century in Australia, we expect to see an increasing number of days on which there is severe heat danger for people working outside. Outdoor work normally done in the daytime may need to be undertaken at night (eg: agricultural work). Architecture of homes to allow more natural cooling and of cities to reduce the urban heat island effect with planting of more trees are possible adaptations.
In a heating world, we will also need to be better prepared for bushfires – particularly in Australia. This may mean further upgrading of building codes to make every house in bushfire-prone areas more bushfire ready. Though we can better protect houses by clearing vegetation around them, houses in some areas may not be able to be adequately protected from fire. This could mean that one climate change adaptation we may see in the future is whole communities needing to move out of particularly bushfire-prone areas.
Some impacts of climate change may allow for potentially positive adaptations. For example, in Tasmania, overall warming may allow for a change of land use choices in agriculture, with potentially higher economic returns. Climate modelling for Tasmania shows that by 2085, pasture production of ryegrass for livestock could increase in some areas by 10-100% due to an earlier start to spring and therefore a longer growing season. Wheat cropping in some parts of Tasmania could see a 10-15% increase in yields. However, agricultural pests (eg: fruit fly) could become a problem for agriculture in a warmer Tasmania. Farmers will therefore need to adapt on several levels.
How will Tasmania stop the waters rising? You might not like to read this, but sea level rise will continue for hundreds maybe thousands of years, even if the world stops climate heating emissions in their tracks today. This is because the ocean mass is so big, and it changes slowly. BUT, what the world does now to limit global warming will have a great impact on how fast sea level rises and by how much.
Since Tasmania produces electricity by renewable fossil fuel-free hydropower, it won’t be difficult for us as a state to achieve net zero by 2030. So how can Tasmania further help with limiting global climate change and the impacts of sea level rise? In our own backyard, Tasmania can be more prepared in understanding the risks and helping our communities be resilient to coastal flooding and erosion. Tasmania can also work towards being carbon positive so that we capture carbon already in the atmosphere.
Beyond our island, Tasmania can keep improving agriculture and aquaculture practices to feed the world more sustainably. Tasmania can be a leader in adapting to sea level rise - some of our scientists are developing coastal protection methods that also boost marine biodiversity. Tasmania can support our Pacific nations friends who are losing their island homes to sea level rise, by sharing knowledge and resources and welcoming those who must leave. We all need to keep talking about climate change and looking for opportunities to make whatever positive difference we can.
Thanks to the students in the Action Pact and Socrates Café extension program for your great question.
The short answer to your question is called ‘just transition.’ It is the idea that we can transform our societies to stop relying on fossil fuels responsible for climate change (coal and oil, for example) and create alternatives that are fair, so that no one is left out.
There is a common idea that polluting industries are necessary for our economy to work. Well, this is not true, quite the contrary! Transforming our societies, so that they are more sustainable (or environmentally friendly), could create jobs and improve our quality of life. Investing in renewable energy (like wind and solar energy) and sustainable industries (like public transportation or eco-friendly housing), can help to create new jobs, while fighting against climate change.
Here is an example. When a coal power plant closes, many workers lose their jobs, and this can have a serious impact on the local community and economy. Therefore, it is important to make sure that these people are given new job opportunities (through training, etc) in clean energy sectors, for instance. A key for a successful ‘just transition’ is to ensure that all the people concerned work together to decide what they want the new society to look like.
First, I would like to say that it is normal to feel distress when you see footage of extreme weather events and think about the effects of climate change. Watching such footage can be genuinely terrifying, and reacting to this with distress and worry is a completely appropriate reaction and nothing to feel ashamed about. There are a number of simple things you can do to start off with which I will outline below. However, if you find these feelings of distress are continuing, please do tell a safe adult that you trust about what you are going through, or find help through the resources available through our page on feelings about climate change.
There are a lot of glaciers in the world and they can be found on every continent, except Australia. The largest glaciers are called ice sheets and they cover vast areas of Greenland and Antarctica.
The Antarctic Ice Sheet is the largest of all and if that were to fully melt the sea level would rise by nearly 60 m! By comparison, melting the Greenland Ice Sheet would only raise the sea level by 7 m. The rest of the glaciers are all much smaller and if they all melted the sea level would only rise by 0.3 m.
If every single glacier were to melt, the ocean would rise by nearly 70 m. But, it would take a very long time to melt all that ice. At the moment melting glaciers and ice are causing the sea level to rise by about 2 mm every year.
So, there are a few pieces to this:
Climate change can impact human health in many ways. In fact, many doctors think that climate change is a health emergency, more than an environmental emergency. Climate change will lead to more extreme weather events, like heatwaves, bushfires, floods and severe storms, and these all have the potential to take lives. Smoke from bushfires is also a problem as it can travel a long way and cause people to be sick when they are nowhere near the fire.
Climate change can also cause problems for farming, where it might be too hot or too dry for crops to grow. That places pressure on farmers to produce enough healthy food, like fruits and vegetables. This can cause prices of these foods to increase, meaning people that have less money are unable to buy healthy food, which can increase their chances of getting sick. If food is scarce because of repeated drought, then this can lead to mass migration and economic or political instability. Climate change is also causing some insects, like mosquitoes, to move to places where they previously didn’t live. This is causing diseases like malaria, dengue and Ross River virus to spread. These sorts of impacts will be felt by some people more than others. People that are poor, live further away from health care, or people who make a living from agriculture will feel the effects first. But these people aren’t usually the ones that make decisions about society.
Humans are very clever and will make lots of changes to adapt to these new conditions. However, it is always better (and cheaper) to prevent these conditions from happening in the first place. This is called mitigation. We still have time to mitigate climate change by switching to renewable energy, consuming less and using our cars less, but we need to be doing a lot more than we are, a lot quicker than we are. The video below from the World Health Organisation talks about some of the ways human health is affected by climate change.
The shape of the Earth does influence the Earth’s climate. The curved surface of the Earth creates different climates across the globe.
The Earth has its shape because of gravity. As you might know, the Earth isn’t quite shaped like a perfect ball or sphere – it bulges out a bit around the middle, and the reason for the bulge is because the Earth is spinning.
Because of the Earth’s round shape, the equator is the closest point to the sun. It receives most of the sun’s energy and the polar regions receive less. This creates the warm tropical regions and cold polar regions. The extra heat at the equator also drives the movement of air up and away from the equator which creates the circulation patterns that form weather systems.
Gravity is also the reason why the Earth has an atmosphere – and as I’m sure you know, it’s actually the atmosphere that is responsible for climate change, because it contains greenhouse gases that trap heat.
Given our current laws of physics, no other shaped planet can naturally exist. If in another universe these laws are different, a planet would still need an atmosphere and still be susceptible to climate change.
This is a great question, it shows that you are thinking about your impact on the environment and how we might change our habits to help support nature.
Becoming self sufficient is a powerful way that we can have a direct impact on climate change. But first, let’s consider what self sufficiency looks like in a home.
Energy
Creating our own energy through solar panels is a great way to be self sufficient. Just one house using solar panels is equal to taking away the greenhouse gas emissions of three cars in one year. The more of us that have solar panels, the greater the emissions savings over time.
Creating your own energy is also a good idea so that big energy companies do not control the price of electricity and have less money to pollute the planet. We can hold the power, literally!
Water
Rainwater tanks are an awesome way to rely on yourself and reduce your water needs. Most households can reduce their water use by around 21% by having a water tank. These savings are super important particularly in Australia, as we are often faced with drought which will worsen as the climate keeps changing.
Food
Growing your own food is not only fun (and delicious), but has a great impact on the environment. Growing crops like vegetables and herbs at home means that we are supporting healthy soils that can store more carbon. Plants are also brilliant carbon sinks, as they breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen.
Another great impact of growing your own food is keeping our food local. A lot of the foods we buy at the supermarket travels a long way to get to our homes, which means that we are using a lot of energy, fuel and resources carting food around. Local and fresh is always best!
Waste
Here we get to my favourite part, talking rubbish! Managing our waste at home is a very impactful way to be more self sufficient and help the environment. We can help by using a compost bin or worm farm for our food waste.
The food we throw in the rubbish bin is sent to a landfill, where it releases a greenhouse gas called methane as it breaks down in an unhealthy way. Methane is much more powerful than carbon dioxide, and so has a strong negative impact on climate change. When we compost our food scraps at home, it breaks down in a natural ecosystem and does not produce methane. Once our food scraps are composted, we are left with fantastic living compost to put back into our soils.
Stuff
An important way to become more self sufficient is learning to manage all of our stuff! This could be clothes, shoes, toys, games, electronics, just about anything you can think of in your home. Many of the things that we buy not only cost us money, but cost the environment, as it takes a lot of energy and natural resources to make products. For example, it takes around 2,700 litres of water to make just one cotton t-shirt!
You can become more self sufficient with your stuff by using some of the ‘R’ strategies: Reducing the amount of things we buy, Reusing our things as much as we can, Repairing broken things, and Recycling what we can no longer use.
So, going back to your question, if everyone became self sufficient, this would lead to a large collective impact on reducing our carbon emissions. Self sufficiency can also help us to save money, learn from and help those in our community, and get creative about how we live our lives.
Although we need government and big businesses doing their job to significantly reduce their impact on the climate, making changes at home and at school is something that we can and should all be doing, to learn to live more sustainably and take care of our amazing planet Earth.
This is a great question as it highlights the important role of thinking about our food choices in responding to climate change. But if everyone in the world was vegan, that wouldn’t necessarily be the best way to help slow climate change because we would need a very large land area to grow enough crops. Cutting down trees to clear land for crops is not helpful for climate change because we need trees to help take carbon out of the air.
So instead of everyone in the world being vegan it would be better if everyone in the world reduced how much beef and lamb they ate to maybe once or twice a week or even less and for the rest of the time ate more chicken, fish or vegetarian meals. It is healthier for us to eat less red meat anyway and in Australia we already eat far more red meat than dieticians recommend. That is because we farm a lot of cattle here and our access to high quality and affordable meat is good.
Being vegan can be a much more environmentally sustainable way of eating if you are eating local (or home grown) produce, but it can have health implications for some people, especially children, so it is important to make the decision considering health as well. So the answer is yes, being vegan can really help to reduce emissions but the key part is being aware of what you are eating.
There are also other options to eat more sustainably. Eating food that you grow yourself is great. Do you have chickens at home? As well as eating more locally produced food, including meat. Trying to reduce waste from the food that you eat is also helpful. Eating kangaroo and wallaby is another great option for red meat! Have you tried wallaby? It is great on the BBQ or in a curry. So it is helpful for climate change and our health to reduce the amount of meat we eat, particularly red meat, but meat is still ok in small amounts. Thinking about what we are eating, how it was produced and where it is coming from and making choices that have less emissions is a really great way to help combat climate change.
This is a fascinating question! There are many aspects that need to be considered in thinking about, and responding to this question. Firstly, there is the issue of consumption, or over-consumption. With consumption, firstly, we need to recognise the distinction between ‘needs’ and ‘wants’. Needs such as shelter, clothing, food are essential for human survival and wellbeing, i.e., they are ‘necessary’ for survival. Many of these essential needs are even recognised under global agreements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Then there are the wants. These relate to our desires, and can change over time and external influences such as advertising. Wants are also necessary when they help improve our quality of life, over and beyond survival. But wants can also be endless, just as human creativity and imagination to imagine wants is endless. This is the territory we are in when we talk about ‘unnecessary items’.
Now to the second aspect of this question – with both needs and wants, and especially with wants, the issue with them is when they have a material footprint that then negatively impacts our climate. Let us pause here to note that there are also other negative impacts such as to biodiversity and social justice. So in other words, we can still enjoy an unlimited amount of seemingly ‘unnecessary items’ if they do not have a material footprint, e.g. playing Uno all day! However, it is quite another matter if the things that we do in order to enhance our perceived quality of life have a material footprint, e.g. buying a new sofa because it looks a little nicer than the older one. In this case, the harvesting, processing, manufacturing, packaging and transport of the new sofa all have contributed to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that add to our historic global GHG concentrations in the atmosphere to the extent that it now threatens our quality of life, and survival for some. The irony of it all!
Finally, on to interest rates, there is a broader question whether raising the interest rates is an effective way to address inflation, especially when the inflation might be caused more by supply-side issues rather than demand-side factors. Leaving that aside, what rising interest rates are expected to do is to reduce our purchasing power as we now are paying more on our loans and mortgages, and have lesser money to spend on other things, especially on satisfying wants (e.g. not buying a new sofa, as opposed to paying for needs, such as housing, food etc.). Therefore, as we tend to buy fewer sofas (and other such wants/desires), we are requiring fewer sofas to be made, and in effect, reducing the carbon pollution from the sofa industry. However, there are several considerations here that would mean that: a) the net effect on climate change is not going to be significant enough (as happened with COVID19, where despite fewer people flying overseas for holidays, emissions still did not reduce to sustainable levels); b) the regressive nature of interest rate rises and associated ‘austerity’ in the tightening of budgets for households might have poor social outcomes, and in turn, poor outcomes for social, democratic and climate welfare in the long run (see what happens to countries around the world where people are unable to pay for essentials).
In conclusion, the answer to the question is: No, as it is neither sufficient in terms of reducing GHG emissions nor is it a socially progressive approach.
