Under Pressure From Oz Gov, UN Removes All References To Country From Climate Report

[hatrack]

Every reference to Australia was scrubbed from the final version of a major UN report on climate change after the Australian government intervened, objecting that the information could harm tourism.

Guardian Australia can reveal the report “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate”, which Unesco jointly published with the United Nations environment program and the Union of Concerned Scientists on Friday, initially had a key chapter on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as small sections on Kakadu and the Tasmanian forests.

But when the Australian Department of Environment saw a draft of the report, it objected, and every mention of Australia was removed by Unesco. Will Steffen, one of the scientific reviewers of the axed section on the reef, said Australia’s move was reminiscent of “the old Soviet Union”. No sections about any other country were removed from the report. The removals left Australia as the only inhabited continent on the planet with no mentions.

Explaining the decision to object to the report, a spokesperson for the environment department told Guardian Australia: “Recent experience in Australia had shown that negative commentary about the status of world heritage properties impacted on tourism.”

EDIT

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/27/australia-scrubbed-from-un-climate-change-report-after-government-intervention

[Eugene]

1. If we deny it strongly enough, maybe it will go away.

More from The Guardian:

Australia’s censorship of Unesco climate report is like a Shakespearean tragedy

Graham Readfearn
Monday 30 May 2016 06.31 BST

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All this, as the reef’s worst recorded case of mass coral bleaching makes headlines around the world

So why the whitewash?

In a statement to Guardian Australia, the Department of the Environment made two arguments to justify the request for censorship and neither of them makes any sense.

Firstly, the government argued the title of the report “had the potential to cause considerable confusion”.

The title Australia objected to was “Destinations at Risk: World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate”. The report was finally published as World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate.

The department said the UN world heritage committee had only last year agreed not to place the reef on its list of sites “in danger”.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2016/may/30/australias-censorship-of-unesco-climate-report-is-like-a-shakespearean-tragedy