Rainforest's next generation of trees threatened 30 years after logging

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

 

IMAGE: 

AN UNLOGGED TROPICAL FOREST IN DANUM VALLEY, MALAYSIAN BORNEO.

view more 

CREDIT: DAVID BARTHOLOMEW

Rainforest seedlings are more likely to survive in natural forests than in places where logging has happened – even if tree restoration projects have taken place, new research shows.

Scientists monitored over 5,000 seedlings for a year and a half in North Borneo.

They studied a landscape containing both natural forest and areas logged 30 years ago – some of which were recovering naturally, while some had been restored by methods including tree planting.

A drought had triggered “mast fruiting” across the region, with trees simultaneously dropping fruit en masse and new seedlings emerging.

At first, both natural forest and restored forest had similarly high numbers of seedlings, compared to naturally recovering forest – suggesting restoration activities enhanced fruit production.

But these benefits did not last: low seedling survival in the restored forest meant that, by the end of the study, similarly low numbers of seedlings remained in restored and naturally recovering forest. Seedling populations remained higher in natural forest.

Together, these results show that regeneration may be challenged by different factors depending on the restoration approach – seed availability in naturally recovering sites and seedling survival in sites where planted trees have matured. These differences may have longer-term implications for how forests can deliver key ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration.

Dr Robin Hayward, who undertook this research during their PhD at the University of Stirling, said: “We were surprised to see restoration sites having lower seedling survival. After such a productive fruiting event in the restored forest, it’s disappointing that so few were able to survive – and to think what this might mean for the long-term recovery of different tree species.”

Whilst restoration has been shown to benefit biomass accumulation (the total amount of growth) in these forests, the research indicates this is not yet enabling full establishment of the next generation of seedlings.

Dr David Bartholomew, based at the University of Exeter during the study and now at Botanic Gardens Conservation International, said: “Our findings suggest that seedlings are experiencing stress in logged forests. This could be due to changes to the canopy structure, microclimate and soil, with current restoration treatments insufficient to eliminate this stress. In particular, highly specialised species seem to struggle to survive, leaving communities with reduced species diversity compared to intact forest.”

Daisy Dent of ETH Zürich, Switzerland and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama said: “Rainforests are complex systems and there are many possible explanations for our results. For example, animals that eat seeds – like bearded pigs – may be drawn into restored forest patches to eat the more abundant seeds and seedlings, rather than moving into adjacent poor-quality logged forest. In natural forests, animals potentially move more freely and so do not exhaust seed supplies in the same way.”

Selective logging of forests is prevalent throughout the tropics, and long-term recovery is crucial to maintaining carbon stocks and high biodiversity. Low rates of survival among seedlings three decades after logging therefore raise concerns about potential regeneration failure in future generations of trees.

Dr Lindsay F Banin of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said: “Together, these results reveal there may be bottlenecks in recovery of particular elements of the plant community. We are now progressing this research into the various stages of the regeneration process – fruiting, germination, establishment and causes of mortality – to help understand which mechanisms are driving the patterns we have observed and how we can better assist forest regeneration and support the long-term sustainability of degraded forests.”

The study highlights the importance of carefully designing, monitoring and adaptively managing restoration projects so that they can recover both biodiversity and carbon in biomass over the long-term. This is key to restoring degraded landscapes and achieving global targets such as those outlined in the UN Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

Local environmental conditions may differ between restored areas with higher biomass and canopy cover than in degraded areas with no restoration. Plant traits, or characteristics that determine how plants function, may be the key to understanding the low survival rates of seedlings – they can reveal which resources the plants are struggling to access.

The study observed differences in traits of the plants in logged areas compared to intact forest, showing that some species may be struggling to survive in disturbed areas, and some have to adapt how they grow to accommodate. This could lead to differences in biodiversity and ecological functioning in the long-term.

This study captures just 18 months after one fruiting event. Longer-term research is required to understand the full effects of historic disturbance, and how to enhance seedling survival.

The study was conducted in the Danum Valley Conservation Area and the surrounding Ulu Segama landscape of North Borneo.

Here, intact forests are dominated by a tree family, the Dipterocarpaceae, which along with many other tree families, fruits in large inter-annual episodes known as masting events.

These cyclical events have important cascading effects on food availability for animal species.

The study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, is entitled: “Bornean tropical forests recovering from logging at risk of regeneration failure Running Title: Seedling responses to logging and restoration.”

In this study, over 5,000 seedlings were individually tagged and monitored for 1.5 years

Logged forests have reduced seedling density, reducing the probability for the next generation to emerge

CREDIT

David Bartholomew

JOURNAL

Global Change Biology

ARTICLE TITLE

Bornean tropical forests recovering from logging at risk of regeneration failure Running Title: Seedling responses to logging and restoration.

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Mar-2024

 

Revolutionizing forest management: unveiling understory saplings with advanced airborne LiDAR technology

NANJING AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE

 

IMAGE: 

 FLOWCHART OF METHODS USED IN THIS STUDY.

view more 

CREDIT: PLANT PHENOMICS

The regeneration of forest saplings is pivotal for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem productivity, necessitating innovative management techniques for continuous forest coverage. Traditional 2-dimensional remote sensing struggles to accurately capture the complex, understory sapling dynamics. To address this, researchers are exploring the use of aerial laser scanning (ALS) for its potential in providing detailed 3-dimensional insights. However, despite progress in using ALS data to estimate tree metrics, accurately identifying and quantifying the phenotypic parameters of understory saplings remains a challenge. The current research gap lies in refining and applying algorithms that can effectively distinguish understory saplings within ALS datasets, a critical step towards enhancing forest management and understanding sapling regeneration processes.

In February 2024, Plant Phenomics published a research article entitled by “Identifying Regenerated Saplings by Stratifying Forest Overstory Using Airborne LiDAR Data”.

In this study, researchers developed a comprehensive methodology to extract phenotypic parameters of understory regeneration saplings using advanced high-density airborne LiDAR data. Initially, they fused data from multiple flights to generate a dense laser point cloud, which was then processed using a Nyström-based spectral clustering algorithm for segmenting upper mature trees. To address the common issues of oversegmentation and undersegmentation, a novel postprocessing method was introduced, prominently enhancing the positional accuracy of mature trees.

The results were impressive, showing a notable improvement in the detection and matching rates of tree segmentation after implementing the postprocessing steps; the detection rate for the Nyström-based spectral clustering postprocessing (NSCP) method reached 110.21%, with a matching rate of 96.69%. This optimization reduced trunk position errors, indirectly benefiting the accuracy of understory sapling detection. Utilizing the local adaptive mean shift algorithm, saplings under mature trees were successfully detected, achieving a matching rate of approximately 83% with an extraction rate between 102% to 105%, when the kernel bandwidth parameter was optimally set.

Further validation using multisource reference data confirmed the method's efficacy. Comparisons between airborne LiDAR (ALS) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data revealed a strong correlation (R2 = 0.79) for tree height, demonstrating a notable improvement in RMS error after accounting for the ALS's inability to detect terminal leader shoots. This adjustment led to a more accurate representation of sapling heights, with an overall R2 of 0.71 and RMSE of 0.26 m when comparing ALS-extracted sapling heights against field measurements. Additionally, sapling crown widths estimated from ALS data, when matched against TLS measurements, yielded an acceptable R2 of 0.64 and RMSE of 0.24 m, despite the challenges posed by upper canopy obstruction.

In conclusion, the study not only demonstrated a successful application of high-density ALS data for understory sapling characterization but also highlighted the potential of this technology to enhance forest management and sapling growth studies. The proposed method distinguishes itself by accurately segmenting and measuring understory saplings offering a significant step forward in the use of remote sensing technologies for detailed forest inventory and analysis.

###

References

Authors

Liming  Du1,2 and Yong  Pang1,2*

Affiliations

1Institute  of  Forest  Resource  Information  Techniques,  Chinese  Academy  of  Forestry,  Beijing  100091,  China.

2Key  Laboratory  of  Forestry  Remote  Sensing  and  Information  System,  National  Forestry  and  Grassland Administration, Beijing 100091, China.

About Yong  Pang

He is currently a Professor with the Research Institute of Forest Resource Information Techniques, Chinese Academy of Forestry. His research interests include surface height and vegetation spatial structure from InSAR and LiDAR, modeling of LiDAR waveforms from forest stands, and development of algorithms for forest parameter retrieval from remote sensing data.

---

JOURNAL

Plant Phenomics

DOI

10.34133/plantphenomics.0145 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Identifying Regenerated Saplings by Stratifying Forest Overstory Using Airborne LiDAR Data

Israel’s “Flour Massacre”: When A Crime Becomes A “Tragedy”

by Media Lens / March 13th, 2024

Corporate journalists are indeed ‘masters of self-adulation’, as Noam Chomsky has observed. In fact, they have to be; or at least they have to appear to be.

Consider BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson CBE, a long-term sparring partner and rare example of a BBC journalist who has bothered to reply to our challenges, often graciously. There have been times over the last two decades when Simpson genuinely seemed to get some of what we were saying. It’s no surprise, though, to read Simpson’s recent comment on X:

My colleagues at @itvnews, @SkyNews and @BBCNews jump through hoops to be balanced and impartial, and @Ofcom rightly holds us to the highest standard. Switch on @GBNews, and you watch unashamedly opinionated allegations being passed off as fact. What’s going on, Ofcom? (John Simpson, X, 25 February 2024)

Journalist Glenn Greenwald put this heroic claim in perspective:

The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.

But British media are the best of a bad bunch, right? Greenwald again, accurately:

The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.

I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.

Indicatively, in November 2002, as Bush and Blair were trying to scare their way to war on Iraq, Simpson produced a BBC documentary called: ‘Saddam – A Warning From History’ (BBC1, 3 November 2002). The title was an unsubtle and ‘unashamedly opinionated’ reference to an earlier BBC series, ‘The Nazis – A Warning From History’. This, of course, was a comparison that dovetailed with the sleaziest themes of US-UK state propaganda.

In 2013, Simpson opined:

The US is still the world’s biggest economic and military power, but it seems to have lost the sense of moral mission that caused it to intervene everywhere from Vietnam to Iraq…

Alas, the US continues to struggle to regain its ‘sense of moral mission,’ as it supplies the missiles, bombs and diplomatic immunity fuelling the genocide in Gaza.

Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:

World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked

Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:

Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy

Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:

Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…

The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.

Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.

The BBC headline reporting this story read:

Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO

Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting.

Over a picture of an emaciated, skeletal child victim of Israeli starvation in Gaza, Peter Oborne made a related point:

If Gaza was Ukraine this terrible picture would be on every front page tomorrow morning.

Needless to say, that was not to be.

On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:

Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children

Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:

Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.

On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:

As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals

Author Assal Rad responded:

Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.

The Al-Rashid Humanitarian Aid ‘Tragedy’

What has been termed the ‘Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident’ – also described as ‘the Flour Massacre’ because the food convoy involved was carrying sacks of flour – occurred in Gaza on 29 February. At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:

Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid

And:

Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks

USA Today’s headline was surreal:

112 killed in Gaza food line carnage: Israel blames Palestinian aid drivers

On 1 March, a Guardian front-page headline read:

More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy

The standfirst (sub-heading):

Israeli military rejects claims it fired on crowd and blames deadly crush

Imagine that second, high-profile comment in response to claims of a Russian atrocity in Ukraine, especially if Russia had inflicted comparable levels of near-total destruction on Ukraine.

It wasn’t that the truth was unavailable. One day before the Guardian headline appeared, the UK’s sole left-wing national newspaper, the Morning Star, published this online headline, which appeared in the print edition the following day:

ISRAELI ARMY FIRES INTO CROWD WAITING FOR FOOD, KILLING 104

Compare also its standfirst:

ATROCITY: Gaza death toll tops 30,000 after soldiers gunned down starving civilians as they unloaded aid lorries

On 1 March, Associated Press reported:

The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of the Palestinians wounded in the bloodshed surrounding an aid convoy said Friday that more than 80% had been struck by gunfire, suggesting there was heavy shooting by Israeli troops. (Our emphasis)

The following day, a BBC headline read:

Fergal Keane: Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza

A massacre is first and foremost a crime, not a tragedy. The BBC continued to muddle the picture:

After the events at al-Rashid Street in Gaza, in which more than 100 people were reported killed after a rush on an aid convoy, the international community is under pressure to tackle the growing crisis of hunger in the territory, as Fergal Keane reports from Jerusalem. (Our emphasis)

The focus on people reported killed in a ‘tragedy’ ‘after a rush on an aid convoy’ suggested death by trampling, or perhaps troops shooting in panic at a rampaging mob. It led away from the truth that Israeli main battle tanks fired on starving civilians with heavy machine guns. While the word ‘tragedy’ was used four times in the report, the words ‘massacre’, ‘crime’ and ‘atrocity’ were not mentioned. These were Keane’s opening sentences after the introduction specifically mentioning the mass death in al-Rashid Street:

They die in all kinds of places and ways. Broken under the rubble of their homes, blasted by explosives, punctured by high velocity bullets, cut open by flying shards of metal.

And now – as the war enters its fifth month – death from hunger has come to haunt Gaza.

It is essential to know the when, what and how of the tragedy at al-Rashid Street.

Again, this obscured the fact that ‘now’ – in the incident actually under discussion – death also came from high velocity bullets, not hunger.

On 1 March, the much-vaunted BBC Verify – ostensibly tasked to sift truth from allegation – described the massacre as ‘a tragic incident’. The words ‘massacre’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘crime’ were not used. 9/11 was also ‘a tragic incident’, but that’s not how it would ever be described. Paul Brown of BBC Verify reported:

The tragic incident has given rise to differing claims about what happened and who was responsible for the carnage.

Brown commented on video footage:

Volleys of gunfire can be heard and people are seen scrambling over lorries and ducking behind the vehicles. Red tracer rounds can be seen in the sky.

Mahmoud Awadeyah [a journalist at the scene] said the Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived.

“Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour,” he said. “They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.”

Brown added:

Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: “Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people… 142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts.”

Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?

As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:

The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).

The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from 7 October – 7 November 2023. The report found that Israeli perspectives were referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).

This is an exact reversal of performance on the Russia-Ukraine war by our supposedly independent and impartial ‘free press’.

A BBC report on 5 March stated:

Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed as crowds rushed to reach an aid convoy operated by private contractors that was being escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.

Palestinian health officials said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. Israel’s military said most died from either being trampled on or run over by the aid lorries. It said soldiers near the aid convoy had fired towards people who approached them and who they considered a threat.

Those are indeed the two competing versions of events. Was the BBC unable to find meaningful testimony from the hundreds of eyewitnesses to what happened, as they invariably manage to do in reporting alleged Russian crimes in Ukraine?

According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, an eyewitness at the scene, Israeli firing occurred in two bursts: the first as people seized food from the convoy, the second when the crowd returned to the trucks:

After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ he said.

Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.

Hossam Abu Shaar, a 29-year-old resident of Gaza City, who was injured in the attack, said of the gunfire:

“It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured. I was among the very few lucky ones,” he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by.

”I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.

”I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific. We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera.”

CBS reported eyewitness Anwar Helewa:

We ran towards the food aid. The soldiers then started firing at us, and so we left the food and ran.

On 5 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights commented:

UN experts condemned the violence unleashed by Israeli forces, which killed at least 112 people gathered to collect flour in Gaza last week, as a “massacre” amid conditions of inevitable starvation and destruction of the local food production system in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

“Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”

The UN added of its experts:

They noted that the 29 February massacre followed a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid, with over 14 recorded incidents of shooting, shelling and targeting groups gathered to receive urgently needed supplies from trucks or airdrops between mid-January and the end of February 2024.

“Israel has also opened fire on humanitarian aid convoys on several occasions, despite the fact that the convoys shared their coordinates with Israel,” the experts said.

None of this has been of much interest to the Western press. Media Matters reported that from February 29 to March 3, Fox News dedicated just 12 minutes of coverage to the massacre, noting:

During that period, Fox News aired only 1 interview about the carnage: a conversation with spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she blamed Hamas for Israeli military violence without evidence.

Conclusion

It is instructive to compare this latest apologetic performance with media responses to the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012 where words like ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocity’ – all instantly pinned on Syrian government forces – were the norm. This BBC headline was standard:

Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows

Note the very different, damning tone of the opening lines below:

Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.

The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.

On the BBC’s News at Ten, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins claimed:

The UN now says most victims, including many children, were murdered inside their homes by President Assad’s militias. (Robbins, BBC News at Ten, 29 May 2012)

See our 2-part media alert, ‘Massacres That Matter’, for detail and discussion on this long-term trend in reporting. See, also, our alert, ‘A Tale of Two “Massacres” – Jenin and Racak.’

Even more striking, of course, is the fact that in 2011 all major Western media propagandised heavily for the US-UK overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya, not for committing a massacre, but on the basis of fake claims that Gaddafi was planning a massacre in Benghazi.

We began with John Simpson’s lauding of the BBC, so let’s end with a couple of comments from the great and the good of BBC journalism. The BBC’s then Chief Political Correspondent, Norman Smith, declared that Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’ by the fall of Gaddafi. (Smith, BBC News online, 21 October 2011)

With Libya in ruins, the BBC’s John Humphrys asked sagely:

What, apart from a sort of moral glow… have we got out of it? (Humphrys, BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 21 October 2011)

The answer, of course, was oil.

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The most recent Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2018 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

Australia Development

Third Way Love for Public-Private Partnerships Turns Deadly

BYCHRIS DITE
03.06.2024

JACOBIN

Since Labor PM Paul Keating’s early ’90s privatization spree, Australian governments have been obsessed with public-private partnerships. It’s a model that spends public money to subsidize private profits — often with disastrous outcomes.

ALBERTA FOLLOWED AUSTRALIA'S P3 PLANS

An asbestos warning sign is seen along the foreshore at Bicentennial Park on February 29, 2024 in Sydney, Australia.

 (Jenny Evans / Getty Images)

When the Rozelle Interchange opened to traffic in November 2023, it cemented the status of Sydney’s WestConnex as one of the most extensive underground road networks on the planet. As cars poured into the tunnel, the general manager of one company involved in its construction predicted “a sustainable and joyful future for the people of Sydney.”

Instead, the good people of Sydney received two scandals: interminable daily gridlock, and one of the largest environmental pollution crises the state has ever seen.

City councils bore the brunt of residents’ anger at the new traffic congestion. Then, in January this year, parents noticed asbestos mixed in with the tanbark covering their children’s playgrounds in Rozelle Parklands. They reported it to the authorities and, after a week’s delay that the New South Wales (NSW) transport authority blamed on the Christmas holidays, an investigation began.

The investigation found that the parklands — built to mollify residents’ concerns about the environmental impact of WestConnex — contained more than ten tons of asbestos-contaminated mulch. And it wasn’t an isolated accident. Soon, it emerged that hundreds of other schools, playgrounds, and parks across the city were are also contaminated. These discoveries have prompted the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) to launch the biggest criminal investigation in its history. Although WestConnex developers John Holland CPB have some responsibility, given they constructed the Rozelle Parklands playgrounds, the investigation has not yet determined which waste management companies are directly responsible.

But the roots of the disaster run deeper than isolated criminal companies or “regulatory failure” associated with a single government agency. Rather, it should be understood as an outcome of a development model dominated by massive corporations that have molded infrastructure and planning to their interests. Working hand in hand with governments under the public-private partnership model, multibillion dollar developers have ensured that profits are systematically prioritized over the good of cities, public health, and the environment.

Star-Crossed Lucre

When Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National Coalition won government in 2013, Australia’s long mining boom had already peaked. Unemployment was growing, and excess capacity in the nonmining sector had led to a kind of capital strike. The prospects for economic growth were looking grim.

So, Tony Abbott — flanked by Liberal Party premiers Barry O’Farrell and Denis Napthine — decided to hitch his economic recovery wagon to two signature toll road projects: WestConnex in Sydney, and the East West Link in Melbourne, Victoria. At projected costs of $17 billion and $13 billion respectively, each ranked among the biggest infrastructure projects in the world.

Both projects were profoundly flawed from the outset. Abbott aimed to use public funds to subsidize construction of what were to be privately owned and operated toll roads. Both roads required the demolition of housing and parklands, both came at the expense of vitally needed public transport infrastructure, and both were sure to cause environmental destruction. And given the huge public expenditure, the financial case for both projects was dodgy, to say the least. Liberal Party state and federal governments addressed this weakness by keeping the business plans secret.

In both NSW and Victoria, local communities launched campaigns against the proposed toll roads. However, the outcome was markedly different in each state. In Victoria, socialists grouped around local councilor Stephen Jolly led the campaign. It involved daily pickets against drill sites as well as mass protests aimed at pressuring both the major parties. In the end, the campaign against the East West Link won when Labor’s Daniel Andrews came to power and scrapped the initiative.What was touted as a gridlock-busting gift to the suburbs has proven to be an environmentally disastrous money pit.

In NSW, however, the campaign mostly employed softer tactics. As a consequence, it failed to cajole the opposition Labor Party — historically well to the right of its interstate counterpart — into withdrawing support from WestConnex. Despite vehement community opposition, construction proceeded as planned.

Now, some ten years later, WestConnex is nearing completion, albeit with new extensions in the works. Already, the almost-finished product is vindicating predictions made by activists at the outset. In short, the road is a black hole for public funds that has worsened pollution while increasing congestion. What was touted as a gridlock-busting gift to the suburbs has proven to be an environmentally disastrous money pit.

“Big and Ugly Enough”

Both WestConnex and the East West Link were twenty-first-century incarnations of the 1950s dream of building Los Angeles–style freeway systems in Australia’s major cities. But while the idea was old, its twenty-first-century execution was neoliberal from top to bottom.

State and federal governments conceived of both projects as public-private partnerships (PPPs), a catchall term referring to infrastructure projects where governments offer tax concessions, lavish indemnities, and risk guarantees to attract private investment.

The PPP financing model kicked off in Australia in the early 1990s, when mania for deregulation swept the country under then Labor prime minister Paul Keating. The craze for marketization saw governments award generous contracts to transport companies like Mayne Nickless, essentially handing them public money to build, own, and operate core infrastructure like hospitals. To paraphrase the NSW auditor general at the time, under the PPP model, the public paid for infrastructure twice before giving it away.

The results have been predictably disastrous. Almost half of the hospitals built in the 1990s under NSW’s PPP model reverted to government ownership decades before the contracts were due to end.

These scandals were enough of an embarrassment that, by the early 2000s, governments began offering slightly less freewheeling PPP contracts. This, however, had a downside: it made PPPs less profitable for private investors.

Take the 2003 Sydney Lane Cove Tunnel contract. The group behind Lane Cove Tunnel Connector Motorways included Leighton Holdings (now CIMIC), Mirvac, and CK Infrastructure Holdings, some of the world’s biggest road and construction giants, as well as Transfield, which was to manage the tunnel’s day-to-day maintenance. These private companies sold the Lane Cove Tunnel project to the government and public using questionable traffic predictions. Unsurprisingly, it failed to make money and did not alleviate congestion. Then, in 2010, the consortium behind the Lane Cove Tunnel went into receivership with $1.14 billion in debt.At times, the public-private partnership infrastructure development paradigm has seen governments bankroll private profits to a farcical extent.

At the time, Transfield executive Tony Shepherd — who went on to become WestConnex delivery authority chairman — responded to the scandal by declaring that “the private sector is big and ugly enough to look after itself.” This might suggest that infrastructure giants would wean themselves off PPP money or simply absorb future losses, as free-market ideology would have it. Instead, the industry looked after itself — and used its weight to force governments to simply guarantee profitability, again, at public expense.

Privatized Profit, Socialized Risk

By 2010, the economic terrain had changed. Thanks to the 2008 global financial crisis, capital investment had slowed significantly, adding to industry pressure on governments to publicly subsidize profitability on major projects. So, despite increased public skepticism around PPPs, the Victorian and NSW governments moved to decrease risks to private investors in infrastructure projects by making state governments their financial guarantors.

At times, the resulting PPP infrastructure development paradigm has seen governments bankroll private profits to a farcical extent. The scrapped East West Link, for example, would have returned only 45 cents for every dollar invested. Despite this, it guaranteed private investors taxpayer-funded subsidies of $335 million per year for twenty-five years.

Governments have even turned to bribery to entice investors. Just weeks before the 2014 Victorian election, when public opposition to the East West Link was at a high point, most consortia had withdrawn their tenders. Although the project looked increasingly in doubt, the beleaguered Liberal state government lured developer Lendlease into bidding by promising as much as $1 billion dollars in compensation if the project did not go ahead. In part, it was a political maneuver aimed at forcing the incoming Labor government to go ahead with the project.

After coming to power, Labor premier Daniel Andrews made good on his campaign promise to cancel the East West Link. But he also partly honored his predecessor’s promise, “compensating” Lendlease hundreds of millions of dollars for absolutely nothing.

The situation in NSW is similar. In 2018, when construction of WestConnex was well underway, a NSW parliamentary inquiry found that the business case for the tunnel made no sense. Despite this, the inquiry recommended that the project should proceed — but only because the government had guaranteed inordinate taxpayer compensation, should the project halt.In practice, the New South Wales government is paying the private sector for failing at business.

WestConnex went ahead — and the tolls are so punitive that former Liberal premier Dominic Perrottet brought in subsidies compensating road users for costs surpassing $60 per week. In practice, the NSW government is paying the private sector for failing at business.

The new PPP paradigm encourages developers to gamble irresponsibly and win big regardless of how the cards fall. There are now seemingly no lengths to which governments won’t go to guarantee profits.

State-Sponsored Greenwash

Compounding the economic pain inflicted on the public by WestConnex is the environmental devastation. And unfortunately, asbestos contamination is just one part of a bigger picture.

To begin with, there is growing evidence that the project may be responsible for an increase in deadly air pollution in the state. Exhaust fumes are vented out of WestConnex through many huge, unfiltered exhaust stacks. As two recent reports suggest, the environmental, human, and economic cost of traffic pollution like this could be worse than previously thought.

The first report, published in February 2023 by University of Melbourne researchers, found that traffic pollution in Australia is causing around eleven thousand premature deaths each year. The second study, produced by the NSW state government in March 2023, found that across the state, premature deaths directly attributable to air pollution are costing the around US$3.4 billion a year. Thanks to campaigning by environmental groups in Sydney, the NSW minister for roads has now asked the NSW chief scientist to review his recent report on traffic-related air pollution that, somewhat dubiously, did not reflect any of these new findings.

But whether the environmental impacts of the WestConnex tunnel stacks were knowingly or unknowingly underestimated, there is little the current environmental authorities can or will do about it. To begin with, there is no national environmental protection agency in Australia. And beyond this, a cursory glance at recent developments shows that existing state agencies are largely ineffective, underfunded, or captured by business interests. As a result, the agencies tasked with protecting the environment often perform the opposite role.

For example, the former head of the West Australian (WA) Environmental Protection Authority, Tom Hatton, recently claimed that former WA premier Mark McGowan directly pressured the agency to withdraw policy proposals that the fossil fuel industry objected to. Or, on the other side of the continent, after conducting a three year review, Victoria’s EPA decided to not to impose any limits on greenhouse gas emissions under new coal power station licenses.

This reality is perhaps most glaring in NSW, where the EPA has found that 94 percent of industry players are not complying with environmental regulations. As the extent of asbestos contamination was revealed, it emerged that a staggering 43 percent of waste management companies have been ordering laboratories to repeatedly retest toxic waste samples until they meet acceptable contamination thresholds.In New South Wales, the Environment Protection Authority has found that 94 percent of industry players are not complying with environmental regulations.

There were also clear warning signs. In a 2019 review, the NSW EPA also found that 57 percent of facilities producing “recovered fines” — a soil substitute used in landscaping — were contaminated with asbestos. Despite this, the agency refused to tighten regulations, citing industry claims that it would cost too much. In this context, the NSW EPA’s leniency toward the big developers behind the current asbestos outbreak looks borderline complicit.

And although there is no nationwide agency tasked with protecting the environment, the federal government also shares responsibility. A 2020 inquiry into the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 found the act “is not fit to address current or future environmental challenges.” Since the act came into force, governments have approved 740 fossil fuel projects — and a staggering 75 percent of these did not require any environmental impact assessment.

As the Australia Institute’s 2022 State-Sponsored Greenwash report put it, “the fossil fuel industry and major emitters have set Australia’s policy agenda on climate.”

New Tactics Needed

The slow-motion WestConnex trainwreck has vindicated the concerns that campaigners raised way back in 2013 against Tony Abbott’s toll road projects. But given that the Victorian campaign won, while the NSW campaign failed to prevent the disaster it predicted, it’s worth considering the strengths of the former.

Firstly, when it comes to public relations, the fossil fuel lobby basically relies on a divide-and-rule strategy that smears environmental groups as representing spoiled inner-city elites. When protesters interrupted a speech by WestConnex Delivery Authority executive Dennis Cliche, he retorted that

it is a very, I would say, inequitable debate that’s being had. The people who are making the most noise . . . don’t have kids who are to some extent excluded socially from the opportunities that some people have. It’s not right for the people in an inner-city community to come in and enjoy their lifestyle and try and apply that to everybody else.

Cliche’s argument was obviously disingenuous. But it can’t be dismissed out of hand. The reality is that only a campaign that draws in broad, working-class support has any hope of being successful. The anti–East West Link campaign spent months drumming up opposition to the project in the outer suburbs and regional Victoria, signing up thousands of new people to the campaign. It predicted the developers and Liberal Party’s PR strategy and preempted it, denying them the chance to drive a wedge between inner-city and suburban residents.

Secondly, the failure of the WestConnex campaign shows that moderate tactics and well-researched appeals to authority are not enough. Both major parties receive copious amounts of money from the oil and roads lobby, and there is a revolving door between federal and state governments and the big polluting companies.

By contrast, the East West Link campaign employed a dual strategy. Activists built the campaign outward by engaging large numbers of residents, including in the suburbs, while simultaneously engaging in direct, tactical, collective confrontation with the government and big developers. As a result, it dominated the news cycle, won the battle of public opinion, applied tangible pressure — and it ultimately won.

CONTRIBUTOR
Chris Dite is a teacher and union member.