As a business, is it worth checking out how your business can get climate ready? Getting climate ready includes reducing your energy use, energy costs and training staff to build resilience to climate change.
It is worth checking out what the Government has on offer to help you adapt. This includes free, easy-to-use resources, tools and ideas. It includes access to technical experts who will visit your business on site and assess ways you can become more sustainable, with many changes potentially no or low-cost. Free workshops are also available.
Our local government is a leader with climate change. Not only a leader locally and nationally, but internationally. Its climate change work is bold because climate change requires ambitious and innovative solutions. Right now.
But is climate change the sole responsibility of government? The reality is that businesses have an important role to play in helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is everyone’s responsibility-at work, at home and in the community.
Despite progress towards its ambitious and legislated targets, the ACT Government needs to ramp up efforts to reduce long-term greenhouse gas emissions, in part because of the high level of historic greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. And we need to work together to build resilience to the increasing warming trend that will continue for decades, causing even more extreme weather and variability in our climate.
The facts are indisputable.
A recent World Meteorological Organization report suggests, for example, that 2015 was the hottest year globally on record, with temperatures 1 C above pre-industrial levels and 0.76 C above the 1960-1990 average.
Our own experience in Canberra is further direct evidence that our weather patterns are increasingly variable and unpredictable:
1. January 2016 was our wettest in 20 years, with almost double our average rainfall
2. While we had our coolest January day since 1995, temperatures were still above average, with six days reaching at least 35 C.
3. Above-average temperatures extended into February, March and April.
4. In June the Bureau of Meteorology reported that we had just recorded our warmest autumn on record.
To enable the Canberra community to adapt to these unavoidable changes, the ACT Government is preparing the ACT Climate Change Adaptation Strategy: Living with a Warming Climate. It has 22 actions to help us adapt to current and future climate change challenges. It identifies priorities and coordinates our work so we build resilience.
While Canberra is kicking big goals with climate change, this does not mean we can be complacent. We need to keep moving forward, together.
We live in a beautiful city-a city that has been ranked more than once as the best place in the world to live. Let’s keep it that way.
For more information on the draft ACT Climate Change Adaptation Strategy and to find out what you can do to take action, visit www.environment.act.gov.au or www.actsmart.act.gov.au
For more tips, information and resources visit the Actsmart Sustainability
Hub (actsmart.act.gov.au) and follow us on: Facebook: Actsmart – Canberra
Twitter: @SustainableCBR Contact number: 13 22 81 Email: [email protected]
Actsmart – helping your business make changes for a sustainable future.