Campaigning For A Greener Australia

Upon arrival to Australia, permanent visa holders often imagine themselves as living in a lush village with a nice garden beside their homes and breathing clean fresh air. While this one is indeed a great picture of life in the country, this would actually be a little off from the reality that will greet immigrants here. And there are a lot of issues that will make this ideal picture even harder to achieve.

One of these major concerns that have dogged Australia in recent years is that of climate change. While the country is traditionally considered to be a warm place, the rapid changes in the world's climate have made it even hotter than usual. Thus, Australia has actually become one of the forefronts in the fight to stop climate change.

And in order to promote awareness and response against climate change, Australia become host to the 2010 Climate Action Summit that was held in Canberra last March 13 to 15. Aside from providing and disseminating information about climate change, the summit also served as a venue for devising solutions that will be able to help in lessening the impact of climate change, not only in Australia, but also in other regions of the world. More than three hundred climate change activists and experts participated in the said summit.

One of the major topics that was touched in the said conference was the impact of humans on the accelerating change. According to many studies, it is indeed human activities that contributed greatly to the speeding up of global warming. Thus, some of the solutions that came out of the summit were the reduction of activities that are deemed harmful to the environment.

Another solution that was presented in the summit is that of pursuing alternatives to these. One such proposal is a complete shift of the Australian energy infrastructure into one hundred percent renewable sources. As of current, much of the continent's electrical output comes from coal fired power plants, which is not only non-renewable but is also one of the major sources of greenhouse gases that cause global warming. The summit also encouraged industries to move into greener means of operations, not only for their businesses but also for the sake of their workers as well.

One notable talk in the summit was given by climatology professor David Karoly. Here, he focused on the attempts of certain groups with vested interests to stop the movement to prevent climate change. He said that these groups try to control the dissemination of information about climate change and prevent these from reaching the wider public. According to him, all of these are in order to protect their businesses. He then encouraged the Australian people to seek out these information by any means and never be discouraged by these groups in their quest for a greener Australia.