Climate change will threaten the viability of grassroots sport in Australia, and elite tournaments will have to adapt to rising temperatures, extreme rainfall and shrinking snow cover, a report has warned.
The extreme heat policies of sports such as tennis, Australian Football and cricket will have to “dramatically improve” to protect the health of competitors at all levels, the Climate Institute report, Sport and Climate Impacts: How much heat can sport handle, concluded.
The Climate Institute compiled the report in the wake of the heat that affected the Australian Open tennis tournament last year. Players and court staff fainted, water bottles melted and a participant even warned someone might die after temperatures hit 43°C.
The Open has since introduced protocols that require the match referee to consider suspending play if the ambient temperature reaches 40°C.
But the Climate Institute warned that the heat policies of other sports were patchy, with a recent AFL match taking place in 38°C heat and last year’s Tour Down Under having no heat stipulations, even though cycling races in certain states are normally halted in extremely high temperatures.
EARTH CROSSES FOUR PLANETARY BOUNDARIES
An international team of 18 researchers say that four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a result of human activity.
The study, reported in the January 16 issue of the journal Science, says the four are: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change and altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).
Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call “core boundaries”. Significantly altering either of these “core boundaries” would “drive the Earth System into a new state”.
“Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human well being in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries,” says Lead author, Professor Will Steffen, researcher at the Australian National University, Canberra. “In this new analysis we have improved our quantification of where these risks lie.”
The research builds on a large number of scientific publications critically assessing and improving the planetary boundaries research since its original publication. It confirms the original set of boundaries and provides updated analysis and quantification for several of them, including phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, land-system change, freshwater use and biosphere integrity.
OIL SETTLED ON SEA FLOOR AFTER BP OIL SPILL
A new study has found that much of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 wasn’t cleaned up, and instead settled in the sediment of the Gulf of Mexico’s floor.
The study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, found that 22 to 37 million litres of oil from the spill are buried in the seafloor. The researchers measured the amount of carbon 14 — a radioactive carbon isotope that’s found in organic material but not found in oil — in an approximately 24,000 km² area of sediment near the spill site, a process which allowed them to see what parts of the sediment were low in carbon 14 and thus contained oil.
The researchers found that the oil was buried in the top layers of the Gulf’s sediment, meaning that if the sediment is stirred up in the future, the oil could once again enter the water. The oil’s position on the sediment’s surface also means that it is a part of the food chain: worms and other organisms that live on the seafloor and feed on sediments will ingest the oil, and the contaminants associated with the oil will be passed on to the creatures that eat the worms. That could be a long-term problem for the health of these deepwater Gulf fish.
CHARGES DROPPED AGAINST PROTESTING POCOCKS
Charges against rugby union player David Pocock and his wife Emma Pocock were dropped in a Gunnedah court on February 4. The two were arrested last year after locking on to bulldozing machinery in protest against the Maules Creek coal mine in northern NSW. Emma said they joined the protest because of the contribution the mine would make to climate change.
STUDENTS HOLD MOCK RACE
Students from several Victorian universities held a mock race on February 3 in Melbourne’s CBD to highlight how Australian universities are falling behind in the Global Universities Climate Index. “These results show Australian universities are actively contributing to the onset of climate disasters by investing in fossil fuels,” said group spokesperson Catherine Nadel. The students called on universities to divest from fossil fuels.
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