Wouldn’t live anywhere else, said the survivor of Cyclone Tracy to a television reporter in Darwin last week. Having lived through the terror of the storm that shredded the frontier city half a century ago, she’s going nowhere.
Darwin has endured many cyclones and its people are prepared to live with that risk. That’s despite its chequered history of frontier politics, stark social and racial divisions and heavy dependence on federal spending, raising questions about the city’s viability.
Fiercely defending its reputation, Darwin’s civic leaders are putting heart and soul into keeping it viable long into the future. In 2019, after Cyclone Marcus destroyed an estimated 10,000 trees that had been planted for shade, the city declared a climate emergency and embarked on an action plan.
Marcus wasn’t the only driver of that emergency declaration. As a tropical city Darwin is used to warm winters and hot summers, but the heat is starting to bite. In 2019 the city endured a record heatwave, and its council instigated an action plan to address the city’s rising temperatures.
Research by the Northern Territory-based Charles Darwin University has found that heat has joined remoteness and a high cost of living as a key factor driving people from the tropics to cooler southern states, with older people rating it as the main reason to leave the Territory. By 2030, average temperatures for the Top End along with Western Australia’s Kimberley and Pilbara regions are predicted to be between 1.5C and 2.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Projections are especially confronting for Darwin. Today the city gets on average around 12 days a year above the critical heat mark of 35C; by 2030 it can expect those days to number 43. Without drastic cuts in emissions globally, that figure is projected to rise to over 300 days a year by 2090. At which point Darwin will have become uninhabitable.
Darwin’s built-up commercial centre is a classic “heat island”, with the air next to hard, reflective surfaces warming to temperatures near 60C on hot days. The city has been warned that it will face a double economic and public health crisis if it is unable to mitigate the impact of extreme heat.
The city’s council is not sitting on its hands. It has had a shade structure built and nearly 20,000 trees planted in the city centre, double the number destroyed by Cyclone Marcus. Other mitigatory measures include pavements that don’t absorb heat, green roofs that make a measurable difference to buildings’ temperatures, and water fountains in the city mall.
Like many northern cities – and centres around Australia including Tasmania – Darwin has a climate action plan for net-zero council-controlled emissions by 2030 and net-zero emissions across the whole community by 2040. But with the impact of global warming now starting to bite, it’s obvious that local action will not be enough.
The focus of local action tends to be on midday heat, but hardest to deal with will be night-time temperatures which normally allow bodies to recover from hot days. Darwin is now facing the prospect of minimum temperatures in the high 20s or even above 30C for long periods each summer. Eventually, that becomes deadly.
This is the bleak context of support by federal and state governments, along with respective Oppositions, for the massive corporate effort to extract from under our lands and seas every last skerrick of methane, a leading global warming agent, and sell it here and abroad. Ironically, most of this is happening in the tropics, mainly in waters off the Top End and northern WA.
Among those currently standing in the way of this government-supported smash-and-grab are a dozen marine scientists, artists and campaigners who are spending their New Year on a boat 300 km north of Broome. At Scott Reef, believed by marine scientists to be Australia’s last undamaged clear-water coral reef, they will investigate its exceptional biodiversity and Woodside’s gas activities there.
One of their number is acclaimed writer Tim Winton, whose most recent novel, Juice, imagines a future on a continent where “living” – if that’s the word for it – involves spending summers tending food plants underground and bringing them out in winter for some natural light. Increasingly Winton and visionaries like him, in close concert with scientists documenting climate, will be our guides in this very uncertain future.
It’s a New Year tradition to think hard about past, present and future. Maybe tonight, maybe just in the last minutes or seconds of this disappearing year, we’ll find it in us to abandon pretence, seize the moment and resolve to focus on what’s really important. Hold that thought.