Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This summer we've had a very strong focus on some of the climate extremes our country is facing. Also over the last couple of weeks, due to family circumstances, I've been giving a lot of thought to the future of our planet and the future of this country. The extremes that we've been facing this summer bring into stark reality the impacts of climate change. Over the summer we've had heat extremes. We've broken record after record. At one stage, we had the 15 hottest places on the planet. We've had those tragic floods and we've had fires in Tasmania, where we've lost not only properties but also irreplaceable ecosystems.

We continue to see, of course, the devastation that mismanagement and climate change are having on the Murray-Darling Basin. We've seen the impacts of climate change and coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. We've seen the reports of species being driven to extinction in the Wet Tropics, the reports of the impact of climate change on species in the Northern Territory, and, over the last couple of days, the reports of the impact of climate change on the Shark Bay region in Western Australia. That is an absolute tragedy.

Shark Bay is a World Heritage area in Western Australia. It was created in 1991, and I'm proud to say that I was a key part of the campaign to get Shark Bay listed on the World Heritage List. I was also a member of the Shark Bay World Heritage Advisory Committee for many years. It's about 830 kilometres north of Perth, and, for those who don't know it, I would highly recommend that you visit Shark Bay. Unfortunately, the news is not good, so I'd suggest you do it fairly quickly unless we see dramatic action on climate change. It is an absolute tragedy that nearly 30 years later we have not seen the action on climate change that we need. We continue to see this government in denial. We continue to see the hands out taking big donations from the miners and from the big developers that refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having an impact.

For those who don't know Shark Bay, it is one of a handful of World Heritage properties around the world that meet all four natural criteria for listing. It has spectacular natural landscapes—it's described as 'superlative'. It is an example of exceptional beauty, which is one of the criteria for natural listing. It is an example representing the major stages of the earth's history, and I will come back to that in a minute. And it has significant ongoing ecological and biological processes and important and significant natural habitats for conservation of biodiversity.

World Heritage listing was absolutely deserved for Shark Bay. But the impacts of climate change, which is predominantly affecting the marine environment in Shark Bay, saw a marine heatwave in 2011 which wiped out 36 per cent of the seagrasses. The seagrasses are an absolutely key part of the World Heritage listing and an absolutely key part of the ecosystems. Those seagrasses were irreplaceable. Because Shark Bay is at the boundary of the southern and northern extreme of the ecosystems, it has systems that are found nowhere else—that are irreplaceable. It also means that the seagrasses are living at the edge of their extremes. So any increase in temperature is going to start wiping those out, which is what we've seen.

The problem here is that enough research money is not being put in to look at these impacts. There are about 115 projects funded for the Great Barrier Reef, which is great, but only nine for Shark Bay. Not only do we need to act absolutely urgently on greenhouse emissions and on climate change but we need to invest very heavily in saving the Shark Bay World Heritage area. It is a tragedy that that area is under such threat.