Greenhouse emissions linked to a gas field being developed by Australian fossil fuel company Woodside could lead to the death of at least 480 people and expose more than half a million to unprecedented heat, new research suggests.
Scientists from six universities have examined the climate impact of the $16.5bn Scarborough project, which is expected to start production off the northern Western Australian coast next year and could result in 876m tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere over three decades.
Emissions from the project would contribute 0.00039C to global heating, they estimate. Using recently developed techniques known as climate attribution, they suggest that fraction of warming would expose an additional 516,000 people globally to unprecedented heat, and result in the loss of an extra 16m coral colonies in the Great Barrier Reef in every future bleaching event.
It would also push 356,000 people outside the “human climate niche” – the reasonable zone for human survival, with an upper limit for average annual temperature of 29C.
The study, published in the journal Climate Action, forms part of a new focus in climate science that aims to quantify the impacts of individual fossil fuel projects and emitters.
A Woodside spokesperson said the company would reduce the Scarborough project’s “direct greenhouse gas emissions to as low as reasonably practicable by incorporating energy efficiency measures in design and operations”.
“Climate change is caused by the net global concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” they added. “It cannot be attributed to any one event, country, industry or activity.”
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But study co-author Andrew King, an associate professor in climate science at the University of Melbourne, said the research illustrated that individual projects had tangible climate impacts.
“Often the argument made for individual projects that would involve greenhouse gas emissions is that they are quite small [in the global context],” he said. “But really, especially with larger fossil fuel projects, we can very clearly say that the impacts are not negligible.”
Study co-author Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a professor of climate science at the Australian National University, said that given Australia’s emission reductions requirements, in the coming decades Scarborough would also constitute a greater proportion of the country’s CO2 emissions budget.
“By 2049, assuming that the Scarborough project emits the same amount year on year, it’s going to be chewing up half of our emissions budget,” Perkins-Kirkpatrick said. “That’s the stuff that we burn here, let alone what we export overseas.”
Beyond 2050, emissions from Scarborough would require CO2 removal from the atmosphere – “technologies that either don’t exist yet, or that we can’t scale up”, she said.
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Under a middle-of-the-road emissions scenario, warming contributed by Scarborough would cause an additional 484 heat-related deaths in Europe alone by the end of the century, the researchers calculated. Taking into account a reduction in cold-related deaths in Europe, they estimate a net contribution of 118 additional deaths.
The researchers calculated the project’s climate impacts with a tool used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called the Transient Climate Response to CO2 Emissions (TCRE). The TCRE estimates that every 1,000 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions causes 0.45C of additional global heating.
Scarborough’s contribution to global heating had a likely range between 0.00024C and 0.00055C, the study’s authors estimated, but they noted “direct measurement of global mean temperature changes is not possible with this level of precision”.
The approach could be used by governments and companies to assess whether future “projects fall within acceptable levels of environmental and societal risk”, the researchers suggest. The tool “could be part of the process for determining whether a project should be approved”, King said.
Yuming Guo, a professor of global environmental health and biostatistics at Monash University, who was not involved in the study, said the study provided “a valuable tool for conducting environmental risk assessments”.
“Considering the vast number of fossil fuel projects operating globally, the cumulative contribution of these emissions to climate change is substantial and should not be overlooked,” he said.
Dr Kat O’Mara, a senior lecturer in environmental management and sustainability at Edith Cowan University, who was not part of the study, said: “With the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion a few months ago that countries need to take action to protect the climate, this new research reinforces the need to consider climate impacts beyond just how much carbon is being produced.”
