Climate crisis will lengthen Australia’s extreme fire seasons: report
Sydney, Australia, Nov 13 (efe-epa).- The climate crisis will lengthen the fire seasons in the south and east of Australia in the coming decades, which last year suffered the most serious forest fires in recent decades, according to a Friday report.
The biannual report “The State of the Climate,” by the Meteorology office and the government scientific agency, said the climate crisis will also acidify ocean waters, destroy coastal areas due to rising sea levels and increase drought, among other problems.
The agency said temperature increases in Australia of between 0.24 and 1.44 degrees since 1910, the year climatic variations records began, has seriously worsened climatic conditions that aggravate fires in the country since the second half of the last century.
Jaci Brown, director of the agency’s Climate Center, told local network ABC that this decade has been very hot, but those to come in the next hundred years will be even hotter.
The report was published a year after the so-called “Black Summer” fires, one of the longest and most serious in recent decades in the country, which killed 33 people and 3 billion animals.
Between September last year and March, forest fires also burned more than 24 million hectares of land and some 3,000 homes.
The “State of the Climate” report also warns that Australia’s oceans “are acidifying and warming by one degree since 1910, contributing to longer-lasting and more frequent marine heatwaves.”
This year, corals in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have again undergone bleaching, following similar consecutive bleaching events in 2016 and 2017.
The scientific body recommends establishing adaptation plans to climate change in Australia and said a reduction in polluting emissions around the world would reduce risks to the planet.
Australia, whose government is committed to coal and gas as engines for economic recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic, has committed to reducing its polluting emissions by at least 26 percent by 2030, compared to 2005, according to the Paris Agreement. It is believed it will only reach this goal if it adds the carbon credits it carries from previous commitments.
The conservative government of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is criticized by the opposition and environmentalists for not committing to zero emissions by 2050, despite several regions having already taken steps towards this goal by promoting sources of clean energy. EFE-EPA
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