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The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
An eco-friendly renovation doesn't need to be all about appliances and it needn't cost the Earth
When people think of undertaking an environmentally friendly renovation on their homes, the first thing they might think of is replacing old inefficient appliances or going electric. But for an increasing number of ecologically minded homeowners, reducing construction waste and recycling or repurposing existing infrastructure is just as important and even more affordable. Andrew Sweatman and his wife are empty-nesters approaching retirement who live in a century-old Edwardian house in Melbourne's inner north. The couple's renovation should ultimately lift their home's energy rating from 0.9 to 7.7 stars. But rather than following the trend of ripping the guts out of the house, they have elected to keep as much of the original building as possible intact and recycle the good parts, including elements of the back yard. 'This was a key philosophy of our architects too – we kept the same footprint with no massive rebuilds,' says Sweatman. 'We realised it was time to freshen things up for our retirement and fix some key problems to improve the environmental performance of the house so this would be our forever home.' The couple started by identifying the features they wanted to keep including the flooring, framing materials and some plasterworks and renovate around them, minimising costs and recycling where possible. They also maintained some original features like the front door and stained-glass windows. 'We wanted to maintain heritage aspects of the house instead of simply demolishing the whole home and keeping just a facade. We also decided we didn't want to destroy the back yard to extend the home to be a mega house.' The Sweatmans are improving the homes energy efficiency by installing solar, batteries, and more efficient electric appliances. They are also installing insulation under the floor, in the walls and the roof, triple glazed windows and designing upgrades to maximising passive solar exposure. In this way they share architect Brave New Eco's operating mantra of 'minimum change for maximum benefit' in their approach to the project. 'If you can minimise waste in this process it's an extra benefit, you can do lots of amazing things with an existing building, you don't need to demolish to get beauty just because home shows or designers tell you that it's not possible,' Sweatman says. Linden Thorley, a Sydney-based architect and chair of the Australian Passivhaus Association Retrofit Committee, says one of his top considerations is determining how much of a building can be kept intact in order to minimise construction waste, a principle called 'circularity'. He says in some cases the costs and risks associated with taking buildings apart, storing the materials and finding new uses for them can be costly, but there are huge benefits in reusing parts of the existing building. 'Many existing homes can be significantly improved to make them more comfortable and healthier to live in without completely demolishing them.' Thorley says he often renovates houses through incremental improvements rather than a complete rebuild, staggering work to target low-hanging fruit in a home and focusing on the potential for passive solar are key elements to consider. 'There's no point adding heaps of insulation if there is a draft blowing through it. We can test for improvements in air tightness before spending money on additional insulation that is harder or more expensive to install.' Maximising the use of available sunlight to warm the home in winter and exclude heat via well-placed shading is also a key consideration. 'To support this we need a really well insulated, and relatively airtight building envelope that allows us to maintain our preferred inside temperature. This includes really well sealed windows when they are closed and excellent ventilation.' 'Learning to reuse materials instead of always using new ones is something we have to learn to do in a finite world,' he says.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Bateteba left what once felt like ‘the safest place in the world' to build a life in Australia. Thousands hope to follow
Bateteba Aselu describes her former life in Tuvalu as like living in the 'safest place in the world' where the community looked out for each other, there was no homelessness and you rarely heard the sirens of police or ambulances. But rising sea levels and extreme weather have created such an immediate existential threat to the tiny South Pacific island nation that when a new visa lottery to migrate to Australia closed last Friday, 8,750 people in 2,474 family groups – more than 80% of Tuvalu's population of 11,000 residents – had applied for the world's first 'climate visas'. 'The impact of climate change about two decades ago has become such a significant challenge to people's livelihoods,' says Aselu, who is doing a PhD in climate change at the University of Melbourne, focusing on small island states. She is one of those who has applied for the visa. The new visa allows 280 Tuvaluans to move to Australia annually, part of the Falepili Union treaty signed in November 2023, which also included a security pact and $150m in new commitments to improve livelihoods in Tuvalu. Aselu moved to Australia four years ago on a student visa. With her husband and two children, she lives in Melton South in Melbourne's northern suburbs, part of a small Tuvaluan community of just a few hundred – a figure set to grow dramatically as the new climate visa arrivals flow into Australia. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Although the Australian High Commission in Tuvalu has been sharing promotional videos on social media to prepare people for the realities of life in Australia, Aselu says the transition is not easy. Four years in, adjusting to Australian life has been 'quite a challenging journey' for Aselu and her family, she says. 'It is a lot to take in and a process that requires time ... having the social network from families, colleagues from school and supervisors as well as spiritual space are crucial for us.' Despite the challenges, Asulu is confident Tuvaluan culture will 'persist no matter where we land or where we go'. 'We are collective and communal and we adapt as we go through this life. Already we have young people who are making waves in working to maintain and preserve our culture from technology to revival of Indigenous knowledge learning in school and community. That is hope for me and for my children and those after them,' she says. Frayzel Uale and his family are also part of the Tuvaluan community in Melton and among those who applied for the visa. Uale moved to Australia four years ago with his parents and is studying a certificate III in information technology. Uale says he doesn't want to move back to Tuvalu to live as he has memories of the extreme weather there frightening him as a child. 'Before they started the programs informing us about climate change, I remember waking up with water on the roads and [in] community buildings when the king tides would come on to the land – it was shocking.' Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion He now sees his future in Australia, where he has the opportunity to get a job, earn money and access everything he needs. But he says the small Tuvaluan community he is part of is actively working to protect and preserve his culture with 'regular community events and gatherings'. 'The older generation is keeping cultural life alive and the younger generation is willing to learn. We practise our culture of traditional dancing and singing to ensure the culture will survive here. We will 100% protect our culture here in Australia.' For Leni Malua-Mataka, a Tuvaluan mother living with her husband and children in Mount Isa in north-west Queensland, the new climate visa offers an opportunity to get ahead. 'Coming from such a small country with very limited employment opportunities and few ways to grow wealth or even provide for your family, this opportunity to work, live and raise your family in Australia is a dream,' she says. 'We already have well-established small Tuvaluan communities here in Australia that are more than willing to help, as is our custom.' A spokesperson for Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said a range of support services would be made available to help new visa holders, including briefings on life in Australia, financial and digital literacy training and connecting visa holders with potential employment. Jane McAdam, professor of law at the University of New South Wales, says although the majority of the population applied, that shouldn't be read as everyone on Tuvalu wanting to leave due to the climate crisis. 'I think it's more that this visa opens up all sorts of possibilities for schooling and for work – and provides a safety net even if people do want to stay in Tuvalu,' she says. While recognising the merit of the Falepili Union treaty to allow people from Tuvalu the chance to migrate with dignity, Mahealani Delaney, Pacific community engagement coordinator at Greenpeace Australia, says the climate visa needs to be considered in context. 'Australia continues to produce and export coal, oil and gas, fuelling the climate crisis that is causing people to leave their homelands. It simply is not enough to offer up a solution while ignoring the issue. The most meaningful action that Australia can take is to address the root problem: rapidly and fairly phase out fossil fuels, including no new coalmines and no new dirty gas.' Malua-Mataka says on her recent visits to Tuvalu she noticed areas around the capital Funafuti where the sea has risen on the lagoon side, which was never the case when she was growing up. 'The impact can be very emotional to talk about especially when I think of my family still living in Tuvalu who face these issues on a daily basis. The impacts far exceed the physical environmental issues. It impacts our government, our global status and most alarmingly, it impacts our future as a nation.'
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘We're watching it get worse all the time': as fish vanish in SA's algal bloom, livelihoods are also at stake
Nathan Eatts can remember the last day he caught a squid. It was 18 April, a few weeks after a brown foam and dead marine life began appearing on beaches on South Australia's Fleurieu peninsula. 'That's over three months now,' says the third generation squid fisher, whose business, Cape Calamari, is based on the southern Fleurieu peninsula. 'Everyone just sort of says 'go fish for something else', but it's not that simple, because we're under a quota system and 95% of what I fish for is calamari.' Since March, Eatts has seen dead stingrays, fish and a dolphin – and that's just at his local beach in Normanville. It is both emotionally and financially devastating. 'Last time I fished, I caught four whiting,' he says. 'That doesn't pay any bills, it puts eight fillets on my table.' The toxic algal bloom that has killed thousands of marine animals around the state has put fishers like him under pressure in areas including Kangaroo Island and the St Vincent and Spencer gulfs. Squid fishers like Eatts were among the first to feel the impact of the disaster on their business. 'We're trying to be optimistic about squid as it's one thing we haven't seen wash up dead,' Eatts says. 'We're hoping they're in deeper water waiting for this to clear but until this clears we just have to sit back and wait, and we're watching it get worse all the time. It's heartbreaking.' This week, under pressure from community advocates, scientists and South Australian politicians such as Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, the federal and state governments announced a $28m assistance package for affected communities and parliamentary inquiry into the crisis. However the federal government has stopped short of declaring the crisis a natural disaster, which would trigger more resources, saying it did not meet relevant definitions. The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, warned politicians against getting caught up in technicalities and said it should be described as a natural disaster. Senator Hanson-Young also called on the government to 'declare this the emergency it is'. For fishing businesses that have bills piling up, the pledged assistance package money is welcome help in the short term. However, it is not known when the algal bloom will clear and the industry expects there will be communities in need of more long-term support. 'There is extreme regional impact,' says Kyri Toumazos, executive officer at Seafood Industry South Australia. But some parts of the state have been hit harder than others. Toumazos says wild catch and aquaculture businesses in Kangaroo Island have been affected since 'day dot' of the disaster, as had communities south of Adelaide. In Port Lincoln on the Spencer Gulf, where thousands of people are employed either directly or indirectly by the seafood industry, he says some aquaculture businesses were limiting their harvests due to the algal bloom. Some wild catch businesses in the area were feeling the effects too. 'The biggest concern for us is the longer the algal bloom persists, then the greater the chance of longer term impact for our fisheries,' he says. Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton's Clear Air column as a free newsletter Work to better understand the economic costs to fishing communities and the effects of the bloom on fishing stocks will take place over coming months, says Toumazos, but it could be up to a year before a detailed picture emerges. He said the state and federal governments had been receptive to the need to undertake this work. The chair of Oysters South Australia, Peter Treloar, said the oyster industry had seen the closure of harvest zones in and around Gulf St Vincent including at Stansbury and Port Vincent and at American River on Kangaroo Island. 'The bulk of our oyster growers are located around the coastline of Eyre peninsula and they remain open for sale,' Treloar says. 'It's worth saying that the algal bloom first appeared in Gulf St Vincent some three months ago now and the oyster growers in and around Gulf St Vincent have been closed for sales for two and a half months.' He said these oyster growers had not been able to sell any product and have had effectively no cashflow for that entire period. RecFish South Australia's executive officer, Asher Dezsery, says recreational fishing tourism has also slowed. Regional areas that rely on income from short term accommodation and bait and tackle sales are suffering. 'People are cancelling their trips and not travelling around South Australia whilst this algal bloom is happening,' Dezsery says. A persistent marine heatwave affects the waters off South Australia, kicked off with sea surface temperatures reaching 2.5C above average. A mysterious sea foam appears at beaches on the Fleurieu Peninsula, with reports of more than 100 surfers becoming ill, and deaths of leafy sea dragons, fish and octopi. Marine biologists from the University of Technology Sydney find high numbers of a tiny harmful algal species called Karenia mikimotoi in water samples collected from affected beaches. Prof Shauna Murray – who identified the algae under the microscope and by analysing its DNA – says while still not well understood, K mikimotoi is thought to produce a reactive oxygen that caused gill cell damage in fish – which means they can not breathe. By this point, more than 200 marine species have been killed by the bloom, which stretches along more than 150 kilometres worth of coastline. A powerful storm and high tides washes the algae into the Coorong, staining the water like strong tea before turning it into a slurry. Water testing confirms the presence of the algae in the Coorong. Abnormally high tides, strong winds and large waves lashes the South Australian coastline, with multiple reports of fish deaths along the Adelaide metropolitan coastline reported in the aftermath. Testing confirms the toxic algae had entered West Lakes. While the algae has been detected at the inlet, it had not yet been detected at three other testing sites. 'What this does is highlight just how important recreational fishing is to regional towns and areas such as Yorke peninsula, southern Fleurieu and the west coast.' Scientists from the Biodiversity Council warned this week that the wildlife impacts of the marine heatwave that has driven the catastrophic algal bloom were likely to be equivalent to those from the black summer bushfires and would need a similar response from governments. They've called for tens of millions in additional funding for immediate environmental measures – including at least $10m to fund urgent research into the impact and possible mitigation of the bloom – and for governments to commit to seven actions to respond to the 'foreseeable and even predicted' event. That includes rapid acceleration of decarbonisation efforts because minimising ocean warming was 'the most important step in preventing harmful algal blooms' along all Australian coastlines. Darcie Carruthers, the South Australia-based nature campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, spent the week travelling the coast talking to people in affected communities. She says family-run businesses like Eatts's squid company relied on nature being healthy and were carrying the weight of the crisis. 'In this part of Australia, healthy nature and successful business are one and the same,' she says. 'Communities and industries, including tourism, hospitality and small fishing businesses, that rely directly on a healthy marine ecosystem to survive are desperate for help and for this algal bloom to end.' Bart Butson, a commercial fisher in Port Wakefield at the head of Gulf St Vincent, says the crisis had taken an emotional toll. 'I'm really sad to see that the Gulf is sick, it's terrible,' he says. 'Emotionally that's been the hardest thing for me, is to go out there and see funny coloured water and some iconic fish species dying and floating on the surface. 'I never realised how much I loved the ecosystem until it had become unwell and then it really hit me.' While so far he has been able to get by, there is great uncertainty for his future. Many fishers he knows have been caught off-guard by the bloom, he says, and are now feeling unsure about the future of their businesses. 'They just don't have any fish, they don't catch fish, they don't go fishing any more.'
