Washing off the virus

Will we throw the environmental baby out with the bathwater?

By Peter Burnett

In canvassing our recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made bold statements about giving first priority to growing the economy through a business-led recovery. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has deployed equally strong language about an ‘aggressive’ deregulation agenda.

The strength of such language must give anyone concerned about the environment pause for thought. There’s no doubt the economy will need some heavy duty kick-starting as we recover from the COVID-19 disaster.

However, might this crisis be used to justify a political narrative about environmental regulation being ‘green tape’? Could we, in the name of curing the current big crisis, end up accelerating the next big crisis, brought on by environmental decline?

Wrapped in green tape

Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley already has a predilection for the green tape narrative. Announcing the current review of the Australia’s national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act) last October, she cast the review as an opportunity to cut ‘green tape’ and increase certainty for business.

The environment itself was only mentioned in the context of ‘maintaining high environmental standards’. Ley expressed no concern about the ongoing decline of the environment itself. And this was well before the COVID-19 crisis.

It is fair enough for the Government to look for increased efficiency, including in regulatory processes, as part of a plan for environmental recovery.

In federal environmental regulation, my first suggestion for efficiency would have been to fund the regulatory process properly. Successive governments have reduced efficiency by whittling departmental resources away through inflated ‘efficiency dividends’, code for general cuts. As a result, delays have gotten longer and longer, but of course they could have been reduced again by restoring the money.

But it seems that the Government is already on top of this one.

In November 2019 (ie, still before the crisis), it announced a $25m ‘congestion busting’ initiative to reduce delays in federal environmental assessments, including by establishing a major projects team ‘to ensure assessments can be completed efficiently and thoroughly in accordance with the Act.’

Recently, Ley announced that this initiative was delivering what appears to be significant progress. As of December, only 19% of ‘key assessment decision points’ were being met. But by March 2020 this had improved dramatically, to 87%. What’s more, the Minister says that figure should reach 100% by June 2020, all without relaxing any environmental safeguards under the EPBC Act.

In other words, the problem of slow environmental approvals will be solved in a couple of months.

I must admit to scepticism about this claim. I suspect that the assessments are much more superficial than they once were, more reliant now on accepting information provided by proponents and state regulators.

I also suspect that the introduction of user-charging for federal environmental assessments a few years ago, together with limited resources for compliance, mean that there are fewer projects under assessment. This is because proponents abandon a bias towards referring projects on a ‘just-in-case’ basis, in favour of a risk management approach, under which proponents weigh the costs of referral against knowledge that compliance action for failure to refer is unlikely.

However, let’s take the Government’s claims at face value for the moment and accept that regulatory delays, at least at the federal end, are on the way out. What else could they do to speed up environmental approvals?

More juice in the efficiency lemon

Even if individual statutory timelines are met, overall timelines can still be reduced, first by removing duplication between federal and state processes and also by removing delay at the proponent’s end. This latter kind doesn’t count as regulatory delay but is, of course, still delay.

Duplication is a complex issue and reform is a medium term task. But short-term gains could be achieved administratively, by forming federal-state task forces, ie by putting regulatory staff from both levels of government into a single team, tasked with shepherding the project through all processes as quickly as possible.

In the past I would have said the politics wouldn’t allow this, but I would also have said that a thing called ‘National Cabinet’ would never work. These are extraordinary times.

Proponents could also contribute to a task force model. I wouldn’t recommend direct secondment of proponent staff to task forces, as this is mixing the foxes in with the hens, but by increasing resources for their own project teams proponents could improve quality and responsiveness, both of which are essential to timely environmental assessment.

Avoiding the temptations of short-termism

So there are some gains to be had. Yet the temptation in a crisis is to grab onto anything and everything that might conceivably help deal with the problem at hand, taking a ‘tomorrow-can-look-after-itself’ attitude to any longer term consequences. And this is no ordinary crisis.

Beyond the marginal gains of efficiency, trading parts of the environment itself for a short term economic hit could look very tempting.

The OECD is alive to this issue and has come out with all guns blazing. In a recent statement, OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría argues, not just against weakening environmental standards, but in favour of stronger standards. In his view, governments should seize ‘a unique chance for a green and inclusive recovery … a recovery that not only provides income and jobs, but also has broader well-being goals at its core, integrates strong climate and biodiversity action, and builds resilience.’

In other words, kill two birds with one stone. Use your spending on post-virus economic recovery to advance longer term environmental recovery. Gurría has a three point plan for this:

First, align short-term emergency responses to long-term economic, social and environmental objectives and international obligations (ie, leverage your investment).

Second, prevent lock-in, not only of high-emissions activities, but also of impacts on vulnerable groups, who have been the worst affected by COVID-19. A key way to do this is through a fair transition to a low-carbon economy.

Third, policy integration. Integrate environmental and equity considerations into the economic recovery. This means that infrastructure investment, as well as government support to virus-affected sectors, should pass the test of contributing to a low carbon economy.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater

The OECD is often described as a club for rich nations. And rich nations, including Australia, could be expected to take a conservative view about maintaining wealth.

Yet this advice sounds rather left of centre. In fact, in an Australian context, it is redolent of the mostly unlamented Rudd/Gillard/Rudd Government, which aligned its short term emergency responses to long term environmental objectives (think Pink Batts, 2008) and also pursued a fair transition to a low-carbon economy by compensating low income earners for the impact of the carbon price (think Clean Energy Future, 2011).

In my view the OECD is right but, in Australia, its advice may be cruelled by our recent political history. If the Government were to take the OECD’s environmentally-responsible but mildly collectivist advice it would be accused of taking the Rudd/Gillard path to disaster.

On the other hand, if the Australian Government follows through on its current rhetoric of a growth-led recovery and aggressive deregulation, we may be headed for solutions that throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Which will it be?

Image by Pezibear from Pixabay

Three letters on the apocalypse

Conveying global impacts of climate change often requires a smaller human framing

By David Salt

The Great Barrier Reef is dying. It’s been hit by another mass bleaching, the most extensive to date. It’s the third mass bleaching in five years but this time it’s hardly caused a ripple in a world struggling to cope with a pandemic. We’ll get through this pandemic but the loss of the world’s largest coral ecosystem is a tragedy that will stay with us forever.

The progressive destruction of the Great Barrier Reef (and coral reefs in general) is the result of climate change and raised water temperatures. It’s a consequence of human activity. To address it we need to modify human activity but so far such changes have proved beyond the capacity of the societies in which we live.

Trying to engage people on the consequences of climate change can be very difficult. It’s big, its complex, and it’s happening all around us. There’s so much information to absorb (and disinformation to avoid), so many strongly held views, so many vested interests attempting to skew the debate in their own favour. It’s often hard to keep up, and so much easier to tune out. We need to explore stories that will keep people tuned in.

King hit

Do you remember when the first big episode of mass coral bleaching occurred early in 2016? I do.

Reef scientists knew something bad was coming their way and deployed a lot of cameras to capture the event. But the scale of death and destruction exceeded their worst fears. Ninety three percent of the vast northern section of the reef, the most pristine region of the GBR, was bleached leading to the death of almost a quarter of the coral.

If left alone, the reef would recover but all the modelling of our warming world suggested the bleaching events would increase in number and severity. Indeed, 2017 saw a return of the bleaching, this time focussed on the middle section. (And the 2020 event is hitting the southern regions.)

I felt sick in my stomach at the implications of what we witnessed in 2016 and was more than a little surprised when the Government glossed over the tragedy telling the world their 2050 Reef Plan was on top of the problem, even though this plan didn’t even deal with climate change.

Following those mass bleachings I remember attempting to communicate their significance to environmental science students I was teaching. I found that the actual numbers surrounding the event were so large and somewhat technical that they seemingly lacked impact, they were difficult to engage with.

Three letters

So, I searched around for commentaries by people and groups I trusted, and I attempted to convey the impact of this bleaching event using some of the words that I myself found moving.

The first message I used was in an email from a colleague, a marine ecologist. This colleague was a co-author on the Nature paper that categorically connected the bleaching with global warming and in this email she discussed the significance of the findings.

The paper showed that record temperatures had triggered massive coral bleaching across the tropics (it was way more than just the Great Barrier Reef). The study also showed that better water quality or reduced fishing pressure did not significantly reduce the severity of bleaching, something that the government had been hoping would save the Reef – indeed, this was the centre of their management strategy. What’s more, past exposure to bleaching in 1998 and 2002 did not lessen the severity of the bleaching in 2016, which debunked the hope that the reef might ‘adapt’ to warming.

This is all pretty important stuff but possibly it’s more technical than the broader community can easily absorb.

The reason I shared this email with my students was because my colleague finished with the statement: “This is the most depressing paper I have ever been involved in!”

Most researchers would be ecstatic to get their name on a Nature paper but the conclusions of this one signified the death of an ecosystem my colleague had devoted her life to.

Civil society

The second letter I shared with my class was a public letter from 90 eminent Australians to billionaire Gautam Adani to say Australians want clean energy, not a new coal mine. Australians who signed the open letter included senior business leaders, sporting legends, Australians of the Year, authors, farmers, musicians, scientists, economists, artists and community leaders. Names included Ian and Greg Chappell, Missy Higgins, Tim Winton, Peter Garrett and businessmen Mark Burrows, John Mullen and Mark Joiner.

Of course, the company Adani was (and still is) attempting to develop the Carmichael coal project in the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland. The project involves a 60 million tonne per annum coal mine, a 388km long rail line and the construction of a new coal export terminal at the Abbot Point coal port.

The scientists are adamant the extraction of coal from this mine would be the death knell of coral reefs everywhere. The fact that this mine is in the backyard of the GBR only adds salt to the wound.

I shared this letter because it conveyed the deep visceral antipathy held by many of our community leaders to the growing impact of fossil fuels on the ecosystems we hold dear.

It should be noted that at the same time this letter was being delivered to Adani, the Queensland Premier and six regional mayors visited India to promote the controversial Adani megamine because it promised regional jobs.

The scientific consensus

The third letter was on a similar theme. It was from the Climate Change Council, a science-based group advocating action on climate change, to the Federal Government. It pleaded with the government to not support Adani in developing its rail line from the Carmichael Mine to the coast. It provided a thoroughly researched and well-articulated argument on what the science says about the impact of a new mega coal mine: “Supporting this mine would fly in the face of advice from experts who have collectively devoted over 1,200 years studying climate change, marine ecosystems and coral reefs,” the Climate Change Council said.

Their letter finished with this succinct plea: “We urge you, on behalf of the 69,000 people to whom the Reef provides a job, the 500 million people worldwide who rely on coral reefs for their food and livelihoods, and the millions of Australians who are passionate about the protecting the Reef, that you make your decision based on the science.”

I thought it was a fairly compelling argument myself, but then I accept the science. But the argument was largely rejected and ignored by the Government. The Adani mine was approved and is now under development.

Apocalypse now

I titled this story ‘3 letters on the apocalypse’ because it sounds punchy, and the point I’m making here is it’s difficult to punch through on environmental decline when it’s bigger and more pervasive than our senses (and cognition) can readily absorb. One way we can try is by sharing other people’s responses, putting the events into a human frame.

Think about how popular media attempted to convey the impact of the Black Summer super-fires eastern Australia has just endured. The numbers (burnt hectares, lost houses, lives ended) are literally beyond our ability to assimilate but the horror of individual stories of loss cut through.

While the word ‘apocalypse’ is hyperbolic I think it’s appropriately used here for both the mass bleachings and the super-fires. Its religious connotation is of an ‘end of times’, and that is quite fitting when applied to what’s happening on the Reef. The frequency of these events means that coral reefs like the GBR now have a new identity. They are turning into something else, a system which will have a different composition and structure, a system that is unlikely to provide us a rich yield of ecosystem goods and services that it currently does.

But the word ‘apocalypse’ has another meaning as well. It’s derived from the Greek word meaning ‘revelation’. The changes taking place on the Great Barrier Reef and the forests of south eastern Australia are indeed a revelation on the true nature of climate change. It’s a revelation we dare not ignore.

Image: Bleaching coral off Lizard Island, a casualty of the most recent mass bleaching event. Photo by Kristen Brown, courtesy of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

Who’s the BOS?

The NSW Biodiversity Offset Scheme (BOS) will now apply to federal development approvals in NSW

By Peter Burnett

Federal environment minister Sussan Ley has announced new arrangements with NSW covering the application of biodiversity offsets under federal environmental impact assessment (EIA) laws. Under these arrangements the NSW Biodiversity Offsets Scheme (BOS) will cover both federal and state requirements and the federal policy on offsets will no longer apply.

Sounds complicated and technical, should we care? Absolutely we should. EIA is the cornerstone of our approach to environmental protection in Australia; offsetting has gone from being rare to common over the last 20 years; and the manner in which state and federal governments coordinate their approach to assessing development is key to effective environmental regulation. Everyone with an interest in protecting the environment should care about this new proposal.

Is this an improvement? Do the feds just want to get out of EIA? With offsets becoming the de facto bottom line in EIA, who’s the BOS now?

It is complicated

EIA is complicated, but doubly so under Australia’s federal system, where federal and state governments have overlapping EIA laws. Governments have been trying for decades to reach agreement on reducing the resulting duplication, but with limited success.

When the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act) was passed in 1999, one of its big selling points was that it would put an end to EIA duplication through a mechanism known as bilateral agreements, or ‘bilaterals’ for short.

There are two kinds of bilateral. An ‘assessment bilateral’ accredits a state to undertake a single EIA process to inform two approval decisions, one by the Federal environment minister and one by the state.

The more powerful ‘approvals bilateral’ accredits a state to assess and approve developments, without any federal involvement, on the basis that the state system has been accredited as meeting all federal environmental standards under the EPBC Act. The feds tried to go there twice, once under Julia Gillard and once under Tony Abbott, but these ‘one stop shop’ initiatives failed both times.

So we are only talking about assessment bilaterals here.

One of the problems with assessment bilaterals is that they combine two assessments into one but leave two separate approval decisions to be made, applying two sets of policy, including on offsets.

So this latest decision, under which the Commonwealth will apply the NSW BOS instead of its own offsets policy looks like it should streamline decision-making.

And that’s how Minister Ley and her NSW counterparts are selling it, of course. But what about substantive standards on environmental offsets? Does the BOS deliver environmental outcomes as good as, or better than, the federal offsets policy?

How do the two offsets policies compare?

The NSW BOS has some real strengths, especially that it is a statutory scheme administered by a government-controlled trust. This enhances governance by providing consistency, continuity and transparency. It leaves the non-statutory federal policy, which lacks even the basic transparency of a public offsets register, in the shade.

Nevertheless, some environment groups opposed federal endorsement of the BOS. A key concern was that the BOS is aimed at biodiversity generally, rather than at the threatened species and communities protected under the EPBC Act. As a result, it does not have a requirement that offsets address impacts on a ‘like-for-like’ basis, for example to offset an impact on the Eastern Quoll with something that benefits the Eastern Quoll.

NSW addressed this concern by amending its Biodiversity Regulation to impose a like-for-like requirement, but only for impacts on matters protected by the EPBC Act.

Another key concern raised by environment groups is that the BOS typically delivers smaller offsets than the federal policy, especially for species or ecological communities that have a higher threat status (eg, a species listed as critically endangered). The main reason for this difference is that the federal policy, unlike the NSW BOS, uses a discount factor, related to the likelihood of extinction. This discount factor increases the offset quantum as the threat status increases.

Presumably NSW objected to introducing a similar discount factor for federally protected species and communities. So the Commonwealth accepted the NSW position, justifying this with the argument the level of threat ‘would still be considered’ by the Commonwealth ‘as part of the broader regulatory process’.

Despite these soothing words, I think it’s unlikely that the Commonwealth will impose an additional offset in such cases, which arise regularly, because this would undermine the (streamlining) purpose of endorsing the NSW policy in the first place. At best, this caveat provides an escape clause to be invoked in egregious or highly controversial cases.

Different policies in different states?

One effect of Commonwealth endorsing a NSW-specific offsets policy is that this is likely to lead to different outcomes in different states. This is clearly undesirable from an environmental point of view, as ecosystems and bioregions straddle borders. I imagine Minister Ley might agree in principle but defend the difference in outcomes on pragmatic grounds.

The application of different policies also made my lawyer’s antennae twitch. Not only does the the Constitution prohibit the Commonwealth discriminating between states in certain cases, but the EPBC Act itself contains sections that translate these constitutional prohibitions into specific bans.

For example, sections 55 and 56 of the EPBC Act prohibit the environment minister from discriminating between states and parts of states through bilateral agreements in certain circumstances. However, it turns out that neither the Constitutional prohibitions nor the sections of the EPBC Act apply in this specific case, for reasons too complicated to explain here.

So, as undesirable as it might be to have two different policies on the same thing, there is no law against it in this case.

Streamlining or watering down?

In the short term, whether this is a good initiative, a streamlining or a watering down in the interests of putting the states in the driving seat, is a mixed question.

Clearly it will reduce the regulatory impact of overlapping the EIA schemes. And the NSW BOS does have some significant strengths, which the Commonwealth would do well to imitate when it responds to the current review of the EPBC Act.

But it is a worry that the Commonwealth has adopted a policy specifying what is an acceptable biodiversity offset, but then decided that a lower offset is acceptable if the impact occurs in NSW.

In the longer term, however, the more important policy question is not whether an offset is acceptable under a policy, but whether it is sufficient.

This highlights a fundamental weakness of the EPBC Act itself, which is that the Act doesn’t specify any objective standard of environmental sustainability, but leaves it to the environment minister to decide what is ‘acceptable’. Something that is clearly acceptable to a minister may nevertheless fall far short of sufficient.

Hopefully the current review of the EPBC Act led by Professor Graeme Samuel will recommend an approach that sets clear benchmarks for what is sufficient to maintain biodiversity and ecological integrity, and then requires that those benchmarks be met.

Image by Terri Sharp from Pixabay

Entering a no-analogue future

You’re seeing it happen around you right now

By David Salt

“We have reached a point where many biophysical indicators have clearly moved beyond the bounds of Holocene variability. We are now living in a no-analogue world.”

These are the words of Professor Will Steffen and colleagues from a paper published a few years ago on the trajectory of Planet Earth as it moves into the Anthropocene. These are truly chilling words yet their import is ignored by most people.

Well maybe that’s about to change. As we move deeper into the Covid-19 pandemic, their significance is surely taking on a sharper focus.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a proposal by many scientists of a new geological age in which humanity has become a ‘planetary-scale geological force’. It’s an idea that has been kicking around for the last two decades, and is finding increasing favour across the broad spectrum of academia, from the biophysical sciences to the humanities.

By ‘no-analogue world’, the scientists mean we can’t look at the past to guide our future. The Earth System is now behaving in ways that has no analogue in the past.

For the past 10,000 years, the Earth has behaved in a relatively predictable and stable way, in an age that geologists refer to as the Holocene. Scientists believe that if the Earth System was left alone (ie, if nothing interfered with the way it functioned), that Holocene conditions would continue for another 50,000 years.

However, in the last 10,000 years humans have become the dominant species on this planet and our activities have changed the very composition of the atmosphere, land and ocean – so much so that the Earth System is no longer behaving in the way that it did during the Holocene.

When it was originally proposed, most scientists suggested a good starting point for the Anthropocene was the invention of the steam engine in the late 18th Century as this was when the burning of fossil fuel (at this stage mainly coal) really ramped up powering the burgeoning Industrial Revolution.

More recently, most Earth Systems scientists have revised their idea of when the Anthropocene started. These days they nominate the 1950s and ‘the Great Acceleration’ as a more suitable start date. While the Industrial Revolution was an important antecedent to the forces that brought about the Anthropocene, it wasn’t till the great exponential increase in economic development (what is now referred to as the Great Acceleration) that the human signal began to change the way the Earth System behaves.

Trust in the future

This is a big concept with big consequences. Climate change, for example, is but one manifestation of the impact of the Anthropocene though it’s a lot more besides.

And this idea that we can no longer look at the past to guide our expectations of the future is terrifying if you think it through. Our whole quality of life is based on the belief that we have certainty in the future. It gives us confidence to plan, to invest, indeed to hope.

When disasters hit us, our leaders tell us to not worry, things will return to normal soon. But what does ‘normal’ mean in the Anthropocene?

In the Holocene, ‘normal’ means things will return to how we used to know them. The flood / bushfire / earthquake (whatever) will pass and good (normal) days will return. And then we can get back to business as usual because that’s how it has always happened in the past.

But in the Anthropocene, the past is no longer a good guide to what we can expect in the future.

Sleepers awake

Along with most people who believe in science, I am scared of what the future holds. As a species we are not living sustainably, but ‘business as usual’ trumps all other forms of business. Efforts at reform simply don’t seem to make any difference to accelerating economic growth and the impacts of that growth (be that impact in the form of rising carbon emissions or declining biodiversity).

There’s a profound cognitive dissonance here. The evidence tells us we are headed for trouble. But society keeps on with economic growth because it underpins our quality of life and expectations of an even richer future.

When the Great Barrier Reef underwent an unprecedented mass coral bleaching in 2016 I thought the scale of this disaster, and what it signified, would galvanise a nation-wide response, that it would serve as a wake-up call to our soporific negligence around climate change. But I was sorely disappointed. Many people expressed sadness at the stress the Reef was under, the Government threw a few more dollars at the problem, but life proceeded as normal.

Then there was another mass bleaching in 2017, but this event caused barely a ripple in the broader community – ‘mass bleachings; been there, done that…’

The climate wars continued unabated with claim and counter claim creating a dissonant chorus of fact, ideology and fake news. People switched off, and a party with no climate policy trumped a party with too much climate policy at our national elections in 2019 (less than a year ago, seems like an age ago).

And then came the historic drought and the unprecedented fires of our Black Summer – only just finished.

But before we could catch our breath the world has been plunged into a terrifying pandemic.

No certainty

Suddenly many of the certainties we believed in changed overnight. We lost our jobs, we were told not to travel, all sporting events and entertainment involving more than two people together were cancelled, and everyone is in quarantine.

The future is suddenly a very uncertain place. What we did yesterday is no guide to what we can do tomorrow, and we’re all quite scared.

This is what a no-analogue future looks like; except it’s not in the future, it’s here now.

Many industries (and regional communities) are on their knees because of the coral bleachings, the drought and the mass forest fires. Such disturbances stress society and depress regional economies. We turn a blind eye to these consequences however because we believe there will be recovery of some kind in the future. That’s what has happened in the past.

But the pandemic has shocked us to the core because the certainty of things being the same is no longer there.

Sleepers awake. This is the Anthropocene and we need to engage with what it means.

First indications with our pandemic wake-up call are that we’re still asleep.

There’s been another mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, the third one in five years and more extensive than the last two. The Conference of Parties meeting to discuss the Paris Agreement on carbon emissions has been cancelled suggesting climate change is still not a priority to world leaders. And the rhetoric coming from many industry groups is that governments need to dial back environmental regulations so the economy can get to double speed ASAP as soon as this pesky plague passes.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A pathway for the Coalition to improve its climate change act

Reviewing the 2020 Climate Policy Toolkit

by Peter Burnett

The Climate Change Authority (CCA) has released its latest advice to the Australian Government on how to respond to climate change. It’s contained in a report titled: Prospering in a low-emissions world: An updated climate policy toolkit for Australia.

For a body with three seats out of seven occupied by former Coalition politicians, it’s a bit of a surprise as it favours strong climate action.

Who or What is the CCA?

The CCA was set up by the Gillard Labour government in 2011. The Climate Change Authority Act was one of 18 bills forming the Clean Energy Future package, the centrepiece of which was a carbon price (also known as the ‘carbon tax’). The carbon tax didn’t survive of course, but thanks to Al Gore’s powers of persuasion with Clive Palmer, the CCA Act did. The CCA’s role includes research, and this latest report is released as a ‘research report’.

The CCA has seven members. The chair, Dr Wendy Craig, has headed a number of statutory authorities, including the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) and the Murray Darling Basin Authority. While not political, she is trusted by the Government, as seen in her conducting the recent review of the impact of the EPBC Act on agriculture, a review loaded with political sensitivities.

Also a member of the CCA is another former head of GBRMPA, Dr Russell Reichelt.

Most significantly, three members of the Authority are former conservative politicians. Kate Carnell is a former Liberal ACT Chief Minister; John Sharp is a former National Party transport minister and Mark Lewis is a former Liberal agriculture minister in WA.

Finally, Stuart Allinson has an industry background, while the Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, is a member ex officio.

A updated Climate Policy Toolkit

The CCA produced its original Policy Toolkit report in 2015, at the request of government. This update appears to be unsolicited.

The report presents 35 recommendations about transitioning Australia to a low emissions future. But it does so ‘building on the Government’s current climate change policy settings’.

The Government rejected the CCA’s earlier advice in the lead-up to the Paris Conference in 2015 that it should aim to reduce emissions (on a 2000 baseline) by 40-60% by 2030. It is not surprising then that this report takes the Government’s 26-28% by 2030 emissions-reduction target as a given.

Because governments don’t like taking the tough decisions needed to fix the environment, advisers often stress economic opportunity when serving up unpalatable recommendations. This report is no exception, with Dr Craik declaring in her media release that ‘we need to position our economy for the coming changes in global trade and investment markets and seize on the opportunities before us, or risk being left behind.’

The updated advice

Despite this, there is some good advice in the recommendations. I’ve listed what I think are the highlights below (with my ‘translation’ of what I think they mean):

Develop a long-term climate change strategy that secures Australia’s contribution to the achievement of the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
Translation: we should do our bit to stop temperatures rising, not just to meet (inadequate) national targets.

Governments should work together to support industries and communities facing an uncertain future to identify pathways for industries to evolve and remain competitive and to exploit new economic opportunities.
Translation: we don’t really like the Left-oriented phrase, the ‘just transition’, but we agree with the idea of managing the transition to a low carbon economy so that sections of the community are not disadvantaged.

Australia should aim to meet its 2030 Paris Agreement target using emissions reductions achieved between 2021 and 2030.
Translation: don’t claim Kyoto carryover credits.

Develop an international climate strategy to support a strong global response to climate change that minimises physical impacts on Australia and increases international demand for Australia’s emerging low-emissions export industries.
Translation: push other countries to up the ante as it’s in our national interest.

Review and update the 2015 National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy.
Translation: we need to do more in preparing to deal with the impacts of climate change.

In the electricity sector, advance electricity system security; fast-track reforms for integrating large amounts of low- and zero-emissions generation into the electricity market; align bilateral Commonwealth-State energy agreements with AEMOs Integrated System Plan; and increase certainty on the timing of the retirement of ageing coal generators to facilitate timely investment in replacement capacity and storage.
Translation: hurry up and fix energy policy.

Enhance the Safeguard Mechanism to deliver emission reductions from large emitters in industry, with declining baselines with clear trajectories and the ability to trade under- and over- achievement once baselines have commenced declining.
Translation: emissions trading, thou name shall not be spoken, though thy spirit be honoured.

For vehicles with internal combustion engines, reconsider implementing a greenhouse gas emissions standard for light vehicles and undertake a cost-benefit analysis of an emissions standard for heavy vehicles.
Translation: traditional transport can’t be left out of climate policy.

For electric vehicles, minimise barriers to electric vehicle uptake, including by: ensuring adequate infrastructure coverage on highways and in regional areas; considering implications for electricity network tariff reform and fuel excise revenue, and setting targets for electric vehicle adoption in government fleets.
Translation: Time to get serious about electric vehicles, including the tricky topic of new taxes to replace lost fuel excise.

Land use and agriculture activities should continue to be covered by the Emissions Reduction Fund, with credits continuing to be used as offsets for facilities covered by the Safeguard Mechanism.
Translation: Keep buying credits from agriculture until the Safeguard Mechanism above forces industry to buy them instead.

Introduce a Land and Environment Investment Fund (that is, a Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) for the land), to invest in low-emissions and climate-smart agriculture. Investigate and implement the most effective incentives to encourage the use of emissions-reducing inputs in agriculture.
Translation: Self-explanatory on the Fund. Farmers should be hit with carrots rather than sticks.

Recognise the benefits of a circular economy approach for emissions reductions, ensure the National Waste Policy Action Plan considers industry development, the waste hierarchy, research and development, training and barriers to adoption; and emphasises the creation of industries in regions undergoing transition.
Translation: governments need to drive us much further down the path of reuse and recycling.

Reinvigorate the National Energy Productivity Plan with enhanced ambition and additional resources, including by implementing a National Energy Savings Scheme that builds on existing state and territory energy efficiency schemes; strengthen and extend energy performance standards for appliances and commercial equipment (eg hot water products and pumps, boilers and air compressors); accelerate energy efficiency improvements for buildings.
Translation: energy efficiency has always offered cheap and low-pain options, so get on with it.

Continue to fund the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and consider expanding its remit into other sectors requiring R&D for low-emissions technology or practice. Expand the remit of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to allow it to invest in emissions reduction technologies in all sectors to help overcome barriers to finance. Restrictions on the scope of the CEFC’s activities, its portfolio mix and the financial instruments it can use should be lifted. The Government should consider making further capital injections in the CEFC to fund this expansion.
Translation: the investment mechanisms that the Abbott government wanted to get rid of have proven very successful and should be expanded.

Together with the major accounting bodies, examine the phasing-in and mandatory reporting of climate-related risks and mainstream climate-related disclosures in companies’ audited financial statements. Assist the finance and investment sector to develop standards and verification processes for green finance products and services.
Translation: the impacts of climate change on business are here. This means getting companies into mandatory reporting but also capitalising as companies are driven by risks and stakeholders to mitigate their climate impacts.

Not a bad package overall

All in all, this is not a bad package, containing some carefully couched hints from a body that includes the Government’s own colleagues, to up the ante on climate, even on ‘no go’ areas like the 2030 targets.

Image: Part of Figure 5 from the report Prospering in a low-emissions world: An updated climate policy toolkit for Australia