Positioning ‘The Environment’

A new year sees a new department for The Environment – What’s in a name?

By David Salt

As we grind to the end of a difficult year in terms of environmental decline and crisis, it’s worth noting the Prime Minister’s recent announcement of a shake-up of the public service. Eighteen departments are to be reorganised into 14 mega departments on the grounds of improving efficiency and service delivery (though the details have not been made public and there is considerable skepticism on the value of these changes). Given our ongoing fire crisis, endless heatwave, mass fish kills and growing extinction list, a more responsive and effective Department of the Environment is to be hoped for. But rather than making The Environment a higher priority, this latest reorganisation appears to be signalling the exact opposite.

From DSEWPaC to DoE

Government departments are always changing names as governments reorganise the public service’s structure, roles and responsibilities to suit their agenda. Each change is a good reflection of the priorities of the group in charge.

Prior to the current conservative group (the Liberal National Coalition) coming to power, The Environment fell under the umbrella of the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities or DSEWPaC.

It was a bit of a grab bag of issues but it signalled that ‘sustainability’ was a high priority for the Labor Government of the time, and that sustainability had strong connections across multiple sectors such as water and population. This reflected the growing consensus that has emerged in recent decades that sustainability needed to be integrated across sectors if it was to make a difference.

‘Climate Change’, the key sustainability issue of our times, had its own department, reflecting the political priority the Labor party had placed on climate change (and some believe this structure placed climate change closer to the central economic ministers/agencies). Prime Minister Rudd had, after all, declared climate change the great moral issue of our times (but then reneged on his pledge to do something about it).

On the outer

And then the conservatives stormed to power in 2013 under Tony Abbott and ‘sustainability’ was an orphan in search of a patron. SEWPaC became simply the Department of the Environment, and the Department of Climate Change was subsumed into it. Environmental budgets were cut and ‘The Environment’ was clearly on the outer.

Where possible, the government avoided talking about climate change or biodiversity, and the idea of sustainability was simply code for how do we get more efficient (and fuel even greater economic growth).

A few years into the conservative rule, the Department of the Environment also took on responsibility for ‘Energy’ And, even though Malcolm Turnbull put the Environment first in the department title (it was now the Department of the Environment and Energy), no-one was under any illusion as to which sector called the shots.

The Environment part of the department laboured on with ever decreasing resources while the government undertook several reviews on how environmental checks could be streamlined in order to enable economic development to grow unimpeded.

The Department of AWE

And now we have the latest reorganisation – The Environment Department is now being subsumed into the Department of Agriculture along with water to become The Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment (or DAWE).

I think it would be safe to say, given the Coalition Government’s track record, that this new mega Department of AWE will place the protection of environmental values a distant third behind ramping up agricultural productivity and maximising the economic return on our troubled water resources.

As one example of that track record, earlier this year the Government ran a review on green tape and how environmental constraints (in the form of our national environmental law, the EPBC Act) might be lifted from farmers. Ninety percent of all land clearing in Australia is for agriculture and yet this review found that only 2.7% of the 6000 referrals considered under the EPBC Act have been for agriculture. In other words, the overwhelming majority of federal environmental regulation doesn’t even touch our farmers and still they complain and want even less constraint placed on them.

Well, now The Environment is truly back in its box and the new Department of AWE will likely ensure that’s where it remains (while this government is in charge, anyway).

Priorities and mental models

And this reveals a tragic reversal of the central tenet of ecological economics, that our society and economy are a subset of The Environment. Rather, this latest reorganisation suggests that The Environment is a subset of the economy and reflects the conservative catch cry that we’ll look after The Environment once we’ve fixed the economy.

As our farms, houses, suburbs, businesses, national parks and endangered species are all going up in flames, the lunacy of this ideology has never been so apparent. Our environment is failing and, as it does, it is bringing down the economy with it.

This is not the time to turn our backs on The Environment or see it as a marginal add on to our economy. And yet this is exactly what our Government seems intent on doing.

Will next year be a big one for biodiversity?

The Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework: From Aichi 2010 to Kunming 2020

By Peter Burnett

Next year might be a big year for biodiversity. At least, I would like to think so. In February, almost every nation on the planet is meeting in Kunming, China, to discuss how well they are doing at conserving biodiversity. Which is just as well as earlier this year the UN issued its latest report suggesting we are witnessing an biodiversity catastrophe with a million species threatened with extinction.

The upcoming event in Kunming is a meeting of the nations (parties) which signed up to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). That’s 196 nations, almost everyone except the USA*. The February meeting is in preparation for the 15^th Conference of the Parties (or COP 15) to be held in October.

‘COP’ is an arcane diplomatic acronym that is, unfortunately, entering the mainstream as the annual climate COPs held under the Climate Change Convention become increasingly desperate for real progress as time runs out.

COP this for biodiversity

But I digress. For the CBD, the main task of COP 15 is to adopt a new ten-year strategic plan for biodiversity. The current ten year plan, known as the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and which includes a set of ‘Aichi Biodiversity Targets’, is about to expire. With 2020 looming it’s time for a new plan and targets. These have the working title of the ‘Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework’.

But let’s not be too hasty to move on. What were the Aichi Targets and will Australia meet them?

I’ve had a quick look at key targets and Australia’s progress. These are discussed below. Progress can be hard to gauge though. The usual scarcity of information is made even worse by the fact that Australia’s Sixth CBD National Report is nearly 12 months overdue, which in itself suggests this task is a low priority for the Australian Government.

Each of the 20 Aichi Targets falls under one of five strategic goals:

Goal A: Mainstreaming

Strategic goal A deals with the ‘mainstreaming’ of biodiversity. This term may sound contemporary, but it’s pretty much a rehash of the concept of ‘policy integration’ from the 1987 Brundtland report, which gave birth to the concept of sustainable development and to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the meeting at which the CBD was born also.

Targets for mainstreaming include the insertion of biodiversity into national plans of various kinds. This includes Target 2, which talks of extending national accounting and reporting systems to address biodiversity.

Superficially, Australia’s environment ministers look to be on the ball in regards to this target. They have agreed on a national plan in 2018 to develop environmental-economic accounts. In reality, this is a small drop in the bucket and it comes more than 25 years after Australian government first agreed on the potential of ‘proper resource accounting’, and nearly 50 years after Barry Commoner proposed as the first law of ecology, that ‘everything is connected to everything else’.**

Accounting aside, we haven’t even attempted national baseline monitoring of biodiversity, decades after governments first committed to it, so even if we designed a good set of accounts we’d be short of data with which to populate them.

Goal B: Reducing pressures and promoting sustainable use

Goal B deals with reducing direct pressures and promoting sustainable use. Key targets under this goal include halving the rate of habitat loss; making farming and fishing sustainable; and minimising the pressures on coral reefs, to maintain their integrity and functioning.

In Australia we haven’t even reduced habitat loss, let alone halved it. And while fishing is one area where we score reasonably well, we haven’t done nearly so well with farming and our attempts to reduce pressures on the Great Barrier Reef have made no discernible impact. On the contrary, the authority responsible for the Reef has downgraded its outlook from ‘poor’ to ‘very poor’.

Goal C: Safeguarding biodiversity

This goal deals with safeguarding ecosystems, species and genetic diversity; traditionally, these three components are used to measure biodiversity. The targets contained in this goal include having 17% of terrestrial areas and 10% of marine areas in ecologically representative and well-connected protected areas (ie, 17% of Australia’s land within a protected area and 10% of our sea).

This goal also includes the highly ambitious aim of improving the conservation status of our threatened species (as well as halting their extinction).

When Australia gets around to submitting its Sixth National Report, we’ll no doubt blow our trumpet about meeting the percentage targets for protected areas, but we won’t have gone close to the ensuring that they are representative and well-connected, at least on land.

And we can’t even measure a turnaround in the conservation status of threatened species, except at the very coarse level of counting new and changed listings. Even at this coarse level, things have declined rather than improved.

Goal D: Enhancing benefits to people

The aim of Goal D is to enhance the benefits to people from biodiversity and ecosystem services, including by restoring and safeguarding ecosystems that provide essential services such as water.

A recent positive example from Australia is the Victorian Government’s decision to phase out logging of native forests. This decision was influenced in part by a 2017 study led by ANU academic Heather Keith and based on a specially-prepared set of environmental-economic accounts.

The study revealed that native forests would provide greater benefits through the ecosystem services of carbon sequestration, water yield, habitat provisioning and recreational amenity if harvesting for timber production ceased and forests were allowed to grow to older ages.

Goal E: Better planning, knowledge

Finally, Goal E is concerned with enhancing implementation through planning, knowledge management and capacity-building. The Aichi targets under this goal include showing respect for traditional knowledge and encouraging the full participation of Indigenous communities in biodiversity conservation and use.

I’m not aware of much progress in Australia in this area, but the emphasis given to Indigenous knowledge and participation in a recent discussion paper on the review of Australia’s national environmental law [link: https://epbcactreview.environment.gov.au ]did make me wonder whether the Government might have some appetite for improvement in this area.

A colleague in Indigenous studies commented that with the Government having appointed Australia’s first Indigenous minister for Indigenous Affairs, but not keen on implementing proposals to recognise Indigenous Australians in the nation’s Constitution (see the Uluru ‘Statement from the Heart’, they might be keen to deliver some reforms here to avoid leaving their minister with a thin record of achievement. I think he might be right.

Beyond Aichi: what can we expect from the ‘Yunnan Targets’?

So for Australia at least, the limited evidence suggests a weak record of achievement under the Aichi targets.

Chances are that many other countries will find themselves in a similar position. Yet experience also suggests that countries will also be too embarrassed to simply sideline biodiversity targets as too hard.

The path of least resistance would be to say ‘we’ll do better next time’ and adopt a set of ‘Yunnan Targets’*** for 2030. There is likely to also be some discussion on aligning the Yunnan Targets with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. In diplomacy, if you can’t win the war, the next best option is to simply declare victory and charge on …

* The USA isn’t a member because President George Bush (senior) wouldn’t sign and his successor, Bill Clinton, couldn’t get ratification through the US Senate.

** Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (Random House, 1971).

*** Targets are normally named after the region in which they were drawn up. The Aichi Targets were drawn up in the Japanese city of Nagoya, which is in the province of Aichi. The Yunnan Targets will be drawn up in the city of Kunming, which lies in the Chinese province of Yunnan.

But we’re only a tiny part of the problem!

The bankrupt philosophy underpinning the Morrison Doctrine

By David Salt

Seven suited powerbrokers sit in an air-conditioned board room discussing the morality of their business. Unfortunately, for them, their bank has been caught putting profits before people in manner which breaks the law and deemed morally repugnant. What are they to do?

David Pope, one of Australia’s leading political cartoonists, imagined what might have gone on in that boardroom. He suggested in his daily cartoon (in The Canberra Times, 24 November 2019) that maybe they could hide behind the argument of relativity: that their bank’s illegal money transactions were just a tiny fraction of the global total and that doing something different wouldn’t change the “child exploitation climate in the Philippines one jot”.

Of course, Pope was using the Westpac debacle to throw a light on the Australian Government’s hypocrisy in relation to our nation’s carbon emissions, something that is quite unmissable because he labelled this cartoon ‘the Morrison Doctrine’. That’s because Prime Minister Morrison used pretty much the same argument in defending his party’s approach to climate change. He said:

“Climate change is a global phenomenon and we’re doing our bit as part of the response to climate change – we’re taking action on climate change. But I think to suggest that at just 1.3% of emissions, that Australia doing something more or less would change the fire outcome this season – I don’t think that stands up to any credible scientific evidence at all.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison*, in The Guardian

To paraphrase, the Morrison Doctrine says that our ‘sin’ is but a small part of the overall ‘sin’ and doing something about our sin wouldn’t make much difference to the global total. The unstated part of this train of logic is: therefore, we needn’t bother because doing something will cost us.

*The Morrison Doctrine: Image by David Pope, courtesy of The Canberra Times*

The Doctrine fails for some sins

Pope’s cartoon is a fabulous parody of our Prime Minister’s defence and it’s worthy of reflection on several levels.

First, the Morrison Doctrine didn’t work for Westpac. The bank’s CEO at the time, was reported to have told staff that mainstream Australians were not overly concerned about what had happened.

“This is not a major issue,” he said. “So, we don’t need to overcook this.”

But, as it turned out, he was dead wrong. Mainstream Australia was appalled at the behaviour of Westpac and within days our political leaders had sensed this and joined in with the mob calling for heads to roll.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said “these are some very disturbing transactions involving despicable behaviour”. Attorney-General Christian Porter said “this is as serious as it ever gets”, while Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton accused Westpac of giving “a free pass to paedophiles!”

Westpac’s share price plummeted, its CEO resigned and its Chairman brought forward his retirement.

So, in the case or Westpac and the Morrison Doctrine, ‘our little sin’ did count. Not doing anything (or much) was simply unacceptable and believing otherwise was a hanging offence.

But the Doctrine works for the Government

I think the reason the Pope cartoon stuck with me is because of the many questions raised by Westpac’s corporate failure compared to our government’s failure on climate change. The big question is: Why is the Westpac sin seen as an unacceptable moral failure (for which the board must be held accountable) when no-one is held accountable for the policy failure on limiting carbon emissions?

There are many answers to this: the Westpac failure was well documented and the lines of accountability crystal clear; whereas the climate failure is global in scale, complex and it’s very challenging to hold individual people, institutions or governments directly accountable.

The Westpac failure followed on shortly after the Banking Royal Commission which exposed the corrupt heart beating behind so many bank practices so the broader community was already sensitised (and outraged) by corporate malpractice. The Westpac malpractice gave us a target to vent our sense of injustice on.

And the Westpac failure indirectly involved possible sex trafficking and exploitation of children, a moral crime deemed unacceptable by society; whereas conservative governments everywhere are framing climate change as an economic issue and doing their best to discount the moral consequences of inaction. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, for example, summed it up best at the Liberal’s recent electoral victory when he said “Where climate change is a moral issue we Liberals do it tough. Where climate change is an economic issue, as tonight shows, we do very, very well.”

A tiny part of the problem (?)

But maybe the reason Pope’s cartoon got me thinking so much was because it played on one of the central articles of the climate denialist’s cant: that humans have only added a little to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which in themselves are only trace gases. A little on a little surely can’t be the problem the scientists are saying, can it (and definitely not something worth sacrificing economic growth for)?

Well, it depends. The science says it matters enormously. The science says little changes to the atmosphere fundamentally shifts the Earth system. However, setting aside the scientific consensus, a little sin might be completely unacceptable when it involves transgressing community norms like the sex trafficking of children.

But this ‘little sin’ of economic growth heedless of the consequences is drowning the little children of low lying Pacific islands? It’s also destroying the livelihoods of all those families that depend on the ongoing health of the Great Barrier Reef? This little sin is pushing the climate to the point where it undermines our food security.

“There has to be some understanding of accountability for when these things happen.” These aren’t my words, they are Scott Morrison’s but he was referring to the Westpac failure, not his own on climate change.

*Australia’s little bit: whenever anyone says to you Australia is pulling its weight in producing only 1.3% of global emissions (as our PM constantly does) politely point out at only 0.3% of the global population we are the highest per capita emitters in the developed world.

Main image: Image by cinelina from Pixabay

Announcing ‘Australia’s Strategy for Nature’

The strategy you have when you have to have a strategy (without actually having one)

By Peter Burnett

In November 2019 Australia’s federal and state environment ministers signed off on a new national biodiversity strategy. Under the title Australia’s Strategy for Nature, it replaces the previous strategy, Australia’s Biodiversity Conservation Strategy 2010–2030 (the 2010 Strategy), even though the 2010 strategy had more than 10 years to run.

The new strategy comes with its own shiny new website, Australia’s Nature Hub, and it reads pretty well. But here’s the kicker: the new strategy doesn’t actually contain any strategies (ie means to achieving ends).

And there’s no new money or programs to support it, although the new website does serve as an aggregator for existing strategies and programs from various governments. As we’ll see below, the implication seems to be that if you think we need to do more to halt biodiversity decline, do it yourself!

It’s a ‘compliance model’

So what’s going on? If the new strategy were a car, it would be a ‘compliance model’, a car that manufacturers produce in limited numbers to comply with a regulatory requirement to sell ‘zero emission’ vehicles.

The best known example of a compliance car was the EV1, an electric car that General Motors produced in America in the late 1990s. Instead of selling the car to customers, GM leased it to them; once the leases expired it recalled the cars and sent them to the crusher.*

In this case, the requirement generating a compliance mentality is Article 6 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Australia joined the CBD, along with most other countries, soon after it was opened for signature in 1992. Article 6 requires each member country to ‘develop national strategies … for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity’.

Australia’s history with biodiversity strategies

Australia had started work on a national biodiversity strategy even before the CBD was signed. In fact, in his 1989 Environment Statement, Our Country, Our Future, Prime Minister Hawke made commitments, not just to develop a national biodiversity strategy, but for Australia to play a leading role in what would become the CBD. In marketing terms, we weren’t just ‘early adopters’ in biodiversity policy, we were ‘innovators’.

As they say in the classics, it’s been all downhill from there. The strategy was ready in 1993 but languished when it proved difficult to get the states on board. It was eventually adopted by all Australian governments in 1995, under the title National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia’s Biological Diversity. It’s most significant measures were a national commitment to undertake bioregional planning and a target of arresting and reversing the decline of native vegetation by 2000. The strategy also had major flaws, setting the unfortunate precedent of being adopted without new resourcing, on the basis that many of its measures fell within the scope of existing programs.

There was a change of government federally soon after the strategy was adopted and incoming environment minister Robert Hill worked hard, but with limited success, to give it life. He included provisions for bioregional planning in Australia’s new national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, but these have barely been used. Later, following a five year review of the strategy, he would develop ‘national objectives and targets’, including an objective of halting land clearing, and seek to incorporate these into bilateral agreements with states under the National Heritage Trust, a major funding program. Despite some success, state resistance was ultimately too great to deliver much of significance.

In 2009 another environment minister, Peter Garrett, succeeded in getting a new strategy (the 2010 strategy) endorsed, including 10 ambitious national targets for 2015. In their foreword to the 2010 strategy, ministers noted that despite much effort, biodiversity continued to decline and, as a result, ‘we need to take immediate and sustained action to conserve biodiversity.’

In fact, the problem was so serious that ‘business as usual is no longer an option’. Despite these strong words, most of the 2015 targets were not met (or could not be measured) and I suspect this was the real reason why environment ministers decided to replace the 2010 strategy early: to make the strong language and unmeasurable targets disappear.

A ‘zero emissions vehicle’ for the wrong reasons

Now governments are taking a new tack. Strong warnings and ambitious targets have been replaced by an exhortation that we all work together. The new strategy is sold as an ‘overarching framework’ and is said not only to ‘set the framework for local, state/territory and federal government actions’, but also to ‘help those outside government identify where they can contribute to support national areas of focus’.

I see this as code for ‘all care but no responsibility’: government will identify the problem and the point to both solutions and ways to measure progress, but without specifying any actual strategies in the document. As a result, if ‘those outside government’ (ie, you and me) want to halt the relentless decline of biodiversity it Australia, we will have to do it ourselves, as none of our governments have seen the need to announce any new measures to support this new ‘strategy’.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that Australia’s Nature Strategy has been produced only to comply with the CBD. It’s a ‘compliance model’ and if I were its owner I’d follow GM’s recipe by recalling it and sending it to the crusher. The difference is that I would be doing this, not because its success threatens business, but because its likely failure threatens business (and everything else that depends on biodiversity). This is a ‘zero emissions vehicle’, not because it is propelled by the latest technology, but because it only works if self-propelled. Fred Flintstone would feel right at home in it.

*Killing the electric car: if you’d like to know more about the EV1, it was the subject of a 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?

Image by David Zapata from Pixabay