Saving the environment via human rights

Is it possible? Is it likely? Appealing a coal mine using the HR Act

By Peter Burnett

A group of young people in Queensland are challenging the approval of Clive Palmer’s giant Waratah coal mine. The challenge is based on human rights – a legal first in Australia – and it just might rewrite the law books.

The Waratah mine, which is near Adani’s Carmichael mine but a separate project, is huge. If my back of the envelope calculations are correct, coal from the Waratah mine represents about 3% of the world’s remaining carbon budget if warming is to be limited to 2 degrees.

Challenging the mine’s approval on the basis of human rights is a novel approach. It’s based on Queensland’s new Human Rights Act (‘HR Act’), passed in 2019. Only the ACT has a comparable Act, though Victoria has a Charter of Rights and there’s a federal Human Rights Commission.

Where does a human rights approach take us?

The HR Act protects a series of rights, including the right to life, right to own property and right of children to protection. It makes no mention of the environment. Rather, the argument will be that the mine breaches human rights by contributing to climate change, which in turn will impair these rights.

The HR Act directs Queensland decision-makers, including those responsible for environmental approvals, to consider human rights and makes it unlawful for them to take decisions that are not compatible with human rights.

No doubt the case against the Waratah mine will involve arguments about the meaning of rights such as the right to life. However, that’s not the interesting part from our environmental perspective.

To prove that the mine would breach their human rights, the applicants will have to establish that it would contribute significantly to climate change. This will involve showing that emissions resulting from the mine would make a significant contribution to global emissions.

So, despite the novel human rights basis for the challenge, we find ourselves back on the familiar but troublesome environmental terrain, traversed in earlier challenges based on environmental laws, of demonstrating the contribution of individual developments to climate change.

The substitution argument

The mine is probably big enough to rate as a significant potential contributor to emissions. The problem is causation: if the coal is mined and exported, will this actually increase emissions by the amount of carbon in the coal? Is there additionality of impact?

Additionality is not a simple physical cause and effect issue. Before it is burnt, the coal is sold into a market, in which human actors take independent and unpredictable transactional decisions.

This then raises the ‘substitution argument’, an economic argument that the coal from this mine may substitute for another energy source, such as lower quality coal, in which case the Waratah coal might even reduce emissions if the low quality coal is thereby pushed out of the market and left in the ground.

But there are variations and elaborations on the substitution argument. In one case the federal environment minister, considering whether to approve the Adani coal mine in 2016, argued in effect that it was not possible to tell who would buy the coal, what it would replace, or how other suppliers might respond, which meant that it was not possible to tell whether there would be any additional impact.

The minister instead declared himself satisfied that emissions associated with the project would be managed through the Paris Agreement. The Federal Court accepted this as a legally valid approach.

In the more-recent Rocky Hill case, Chief Judge Preston of the NSW Land and Environment Court rejected another version of the argument, which amounted to ‘if we don’t mine this coal, someone else will supply something worse’. Justice Preston rejected this ‘lesser of two evils’ framing in favour of what amounted to a presumption of additionality, which could only be displaced by evidence of substitution.

Will the courts reject the substitution argument?

On the face of it, this latest challenge might lead to an appeal court ruling, possibly from the High Court, on the substitution argument. If favourable to the young appellants, this might lead to an outcome where, subject to the specifics of the laws concerned, environmental assessments must consider downstream (Scope 3) carbon emissions on the basis that their potential emissions were their actual emissions.

However, the courts will not necessarily accept or reject the substitution argument. When reviewing the use of such arguments by decision makers, most courts, and certainly appeal courts, are not deciding which substitution argument is the best approach to analysing downstream impacts, but whether the approach chosen is legitimate.

The problem is that most versions of the substitution argument have some legitimacy – they just vary in their assumptions or predictions about whether and how markets might respond to the sale of the coal.

The underlying problem

The challenge brought by this group of young people is innovative and bold, but I think the new path they have taken will lead eventually to the same swamp of substitution that has caused problems before.

The underlying problem is that we don’t have a comprehensive climate policy including a carbon budget. If we did, the question might be whether we should allocate a significant share of our budget to a coal mine (and, if the system allocates Scope 3 budgets to importing countries: do they want to allocate their carbon budget to importing more coal)?

At the end of the day, this challenge is another attempt to force our bottom-up project approval system to address what is really a top-down issue: what is our carbon budget and how should we allocate it?

You never know, this challenge just might rewrite the law books, and you can certainly understand why people keep trying, against the odds.

But it would be so much simpler if we just adopted a comprehensive climate policy.

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

The man who shamed the PM

and thereby saved Australia

By David Salt

How did we do it? How did Australia beat COVID 19 when most other countries failed; failure being their inability to prevent the overloading of their health systems and the consequent death of tens of thousands of lives that should have been saved.

Is it because Australia has better leaders? Better health officials? Better people? Better geographical positioning?

Maybe our island continent’s physical isolation helped a little but I don’t think the other human factors had much to do with it, not directly anyway. Our health officials delivered similar advice to those health officials overseas but leaders in other nations often ignored this advice and shut the gate only after the horse had bolted (then searched for a scapegoat when their citizens started dying needlessly).

But our leaders followed the scientific advice pretty much to the letter. However, this is not in keeping with their behaviour in recent years in which they felt free to ignore, discount, denigrate or deny scientific advice that ran counter to their politics and ideology – think death of rivers, collapse of coral reefs and skyrocketing extinction rates.

And yet this time they did listen. What’s more, they showed how effective our federal system of governance could be when federal and state governments pulled together. How did we do it? Why did we do it differently this time?

The answer, I believe, is that our nation was primed for an unprecedented national response to an unprecedented national emergency by an earlier unprecedented national emergency. And I’ll make my case on this using what happened when our Prime Minister mis-read this earlier unprecedented national emergency.

Our PM’s Black Summer

Remember our Black Summer? The fires were extinguished only a couple of months ago but COVID 19 has relegated that disastrous time to a different age. But I reckon it was our experience of Black Summer that made the difference on how Australia responded to the ensuing COVID 19 pandemic.

And maybe the defining moment during this horror season on wildfire was when our Prime Minister Scott Morrison was rebuffed after making a unilateral announcement to bring in the army reserve on Saturday 4 January.

It was already clear by that stage that the Federal Government’s standard command-and-control approach wasn’t cutting the mustard. But, true to form, our leaders pushed on hoping to push through. And they played down the connection with climate change: ‘let’s not talk about that now, we must focus on the emergency’.

But the fire emergency was still escalating so the Government called out the army reserve without telling the states and simultaneously put out a political ad telling Australia what a great job it was doing. And they did it on the very day the wildfires were at their unstoppable worst.

The real heroes of the moment were the firies and emergency workers. When the NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons was told of the army reserve call out (by the media, not by the Federal Government) he was flabbergasted describing the manner of the announcement as “atrocious”.

And the whole country sat back and wondered what an earth the national government was playing at. Can they not see that in a time of national emergency that politics and ideology has to take a back seat to reasoned, evidence-based, co-operative action?

Well maybe that reality became apparent because after that incident they went decidedly quiet, letting the states, who have primary responsibility for fire management, take the running.

Not a panacea

A little bit later during this unfolding catastrophe, Conservative political leaders including our Prime Minister started looking around for a scapegoat for the wildfires and, predictably, targeted environmental groups and the Green Party as responsible for preventing hazard reduction burning in the lead up to the Black Summer.

Again, Commissioner Fitzsimmons spoke truth to power saying that hazard reduction is important but not a panacea for bushfire risk and has “very little effect at all” on the spread of fire in severe or extreme weather.

Fitzsimmons also pointed out that hazard reduction burning itself is extremely challenging and hazardous. What I didn’t know at that time but subsequently discovered on ABC’s Australian Story is that Fitzsimmons knows the perils of hazard reduction personally – his father burnt to death in a hazard reduction burn in Sydney’s north in the year 2000.

So one of our true national heroes of the Black Summer, Shane Fitzsimmons, called out our national government on at least two occasions while simultaneously showing what calm dedicated leadership looked like. Many hold him up as the type of leader we need in a national emergency.

It takes a disturbance to be prepared for a disturbance

If there is a silver lining on our Black Summer it’s that it knocked the hubris and arrogance out of our national government’s approach to dealing with mass disturbance. Had it have been a ‘normal’ summer I believe we would have taken our lead from the UK or the USA on how to deal with Covid 19. And, in prioritizing the economy over the environment and discounting the science (our normal modus operandi), we would likely have led to the same death rates those countries are now experiencing (an outcome many are putting down to failed leadership).

Much has been written about how different countries have coped. It’s been suggested that South Korea and Taiwan have both fared well because they both previously experienced SARS and MERS, two respiratory pandemics very similar to Covid 19. They didn’t take it for granted and didn’t treat it like a flu, they responded appropriately.

I think our biggest risk now is believing the myth that Australia has done well because Australian’s (and Australian leaders) are a cut above the rest, that we are superior. We aren’t. We were lucky. Above all else, our decision makers approached the task of keeping Australia safe through the pandemic with a degree of humility, acceptance of the evidence and collegiality that has been missing from Australian politics for many years.

The smirk is back

And now, as Australia looks to be ahead of the (flattened) curve, I fear the smugness and arrogance is creeping back in. The idealogues are seizing back the pulpits, and tribal politics is beginning to strangle our winning formulation.

The months ahead look uncertain and strange. We’ve beaten the first wave but how will we go with the second and third?

The biggest national disturbance prior to this was the Global Financial Crisis in 2007. Once again, as a nation, we reacted strongly and well. But there was collateral damage. In the following year the GFC helped knock the wheels off our Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and our politics has been a shameless dog fight ever since.

There are two lessons here for our national leaders. The first is that circumstances (history and path dependency) play a large part in our triumphs and failures. The second, contained in the first, is that pride goeth before a fall.

Image by David Salt

Is a positive environmental narrative possible?

Maybe we should be turning to hope rather than fear

By Peter Burnett

One of the challenges of working in the environmental field is that both the news and the prospects are almost relentlessly negative. Bad things have happened and there’s much worse to come.

The public don’t like it either. There is research suggesting that trying to promote policy and behavioural change through fear, by warning people of likely environmental disaster, does not work and can even be counterproductive.

This made me wonder whether our environmental situation can be compared to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief, experienced by people diagnosed with a terminal illness. The first two stages are denial and anger, words which seem to describe climate change denialism quite well.

If this is right, the obvious solution for those trying to build public support for stronger environment policy is to identify positive narratives that are based on hope rather than fear. I thought I’d look at some positive narratives to see whether they might provide support for better policy in Australia. I’m hoping this is more than just wishful thinking.

Imports down, national security up

The first narrative concerns import substitution. Although we produce a reasonable amount of oil, we export three quarters of it and import more than 80% of what we consume. This is because ‘oils aint oils’; different grades of oil are used for different purposes.

If we could replace imported oil with renewable energy, mostly by switching to electric vehicles, there’d be a double benefit, not including environmental gains.

Replacing an imported energy with renewable energy from local sources would improve our balance of payments, which is good for the economy. We could spend our import dollar on other things.

It would also benefit our national security by reducing our dependence on other countries, and thus our foreign policy concern with the Middle East, long an area of instability.

In particular, it would largely remove the need for us to hold a three month supply of oil in reserve, just in case international supply chains were disrupted. This is a policy that members of the International Energy Agency adopted in the 1970s after the first global oil crisis, brought on by OPEC countries imposing an oil embargo in response to the Yom Kippur war.

Australia has not been complying with this obligation in recent years and is taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to play catchup by buying cheap oil and storing it in America until we can build enough storage here.

Post-carbon superpower

The second narrative is based on reshaping the domestic economy. In his 2019 book Superpower, Ross Garnaut argued that Australia’s wealth of renewable resources offered it an unparalleled opportunity to become an energy superpower in a decarbonising world.

His most powerful argument was that because green hydrogen (hydrogen produced from renewable energy) was best used at source rather than exported (because liquefying hydrogen for transport is energy-intensive and costly), we could shift from exporting mineral ores such as iron and aluminium, to refining those ores into metals domestically.

Recently, the Grattan Institute has buttressed this argument. In its report Start with Steel Grattan argues that, instead of exporting green hydrogen, we should use it to make ‘green steel’. Green steel is made by using hydrogen, rather than coal, to strip the oxygen out of iron ore, leaving water as the by-product rather than carbon dioxide. The metal is then refined into steel.

This is only the most prominent example. Australia’s wealth of mineral and renewable resources would allow us to move up the supply chain in a range of high tech, low carbon, industries, such as producing batteries for electric cars.

Yes we can!

I have called the third and most recent positive narrative to emerge ‘yes we can’, after President Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan.

Although the COVID-19 crisis has been both a health and economic disaster, it has produced some unexpected positives.

One is national cooperation, led by a new body, the national cabinet. Another is public cooperation, manifested through high levels of compliance with the draconian restrictions associated with lockdown.

While it is too early to tell, it seems that the political ground may have shifted because of the virus. Commentators are talking about proceeding with reforms that, until recently, were gridlocked politically, like tax reform, all in the interests of helping economic recovery.

Beyond reforms related directly to economic recovery, I detect at least some sentiment that if we can cope with corona we can cope with other things too, so let’s make the most of the opportunity and deal with other threats as well.

This is the most tenuous of the three narratives.

Where to from here?

All three narratives are real and, for added effect, they could all be developed at once, as they are complementary.

This does not mean any of them will gain traction. They are only part of the recipe.

The missing ingredient is political will, which will emerge only with political leadership (a ‘pull’ factor) or a groundswell of public opinion (a ‘push’ factor).

Moreover, it seems equally likely that negative environmental narratives could gain traction, for example that economic recovery requires ‘sacrifices’, including the by-passing of any environmental concern that would delay a development approval.

However, I think you can see just from the examples I have provided here, positive environmental narratives are not only possible, they are viable.

Maybe we should be asking ourselves what we need to do to make them real.

Image by Colin Behrens from Pixabay

Joining the dots (again) on Sustainability Bites

66 bites / 5 sustainability themes / the story continues

By David Salt

In a world staggering from one crisis to the next, stricken with plague and quarreling over solutions, where lies the true path to sustainability? Have we got a story for you, and we present it in 66 compelling chapters.

But can we sustain it

When we began Sustainability Bites I’m not sure how long Peter or I thought we could sustain it. It was a nice idea to write up our reflections on sustainability but how many blogs did we have in us? What would run out first: ideas, enthusiasm or available time?

Well, as it has turned out, we’re still putting them out a year and a half later. Indeed, we’re two thirds of the way to cracking a century!

I attempted to reflect on possible emerging themes arising from our musings back when we had completed 33 blogs (a third of a century; see Have we bitten off more than we can chew?), and I thought I’d repeat the exercise now at 66.

Back at blog #33 I suggested I could see five themes constantly emerging in our commentaries:
1. The challenge of change (and the importance of crisis);
2. The culture of science (and its failure to influence policy);
3. The burden of politics and ideology (frustrating the development of good policy);
4. The value of good policy; and
5. The importance of history.

Well I think these five overarching themes still apply to our musings but I’m happy to say I don’t think we’re simply rehashing the same words over and over again.

History in the making

Our first 33 blogs set out what we believed sustainability involved, with commentaries on how governments here and overseas (though mainly Australian) were tackling the goal of sustainability. We reflected a little on the history of sustainability, called out inconsistencies between government rhetoric and action, and delved in to the ideology and culture of science and politics.

I’ve listed those first 33 stories at the end of this blog in the order they appeared (Appendix 1) with links to each piece if you see something that catches your interest that you may have missed first time round (or maybe you only started following us recently).

Our second tranche of 33 essays covered the same basic ground but were developed in a time when sustainability policy seemed to go through enormous upheaval and contention as our nation endured disaster after disaster.

The big stories we commented on in several ways in our second 33 blogs included:
-the review of Australia’s premier environmental law, the EPBC Act
-the growing societal rejection of government inaction (and denialism) on climate change
-a season of unprecedented wildfires (and the politics it provoked)
-the collapse of the Great Barrier Reef
-the consequences of the pandemic on business as usual; and
-the use and abuse of crisis, hyper partisanship and ideology
I’ve listed those second 33 stories at the end of this blog as well (see Appendix 2) if you’d like to jump into any of these pieces.

Here are a few comments on the five themes I see overarching our individual stories:

1. The challenge of change (and the importance of crisis)

In our first 33 blogs we came to the repeated conclusion that achieving enduring change is hard. Often it’s politically impossible. Vested interests, competing ideologies and weak governance frequently conspire to defeat our best intentions. We concluded on several occasions that enduring change is probably only achieved through crisis. The status quo needs some form of disturbance to weaken its hold to enable a change in rules to occur.

Well, be careful what you wish for. This recent ‘summer of our discontent’ has brought more crisis than anyone thought possible (though all of it is well within predictions made by the scientific community).

Will change result? Almost certainly. Will it be change for a more sustainable future? Maybe. Or maybe it will see a massive decline in environmental protection as the economy ‘snaps back’ to full speed (double speed?) and crushes everything in its path.

2. The culture of science (and its failure to influence policy)

This theme continued to develop in our second set of 33 blogs. Scientists cried apocalypse, wrote massive public letters, and called governments out time and again on climate denialism. Meanwhile forests burned, coral reefs fried and landscapes withered.

Everything the scientists were warning us about seemed to be coming true and yet our government held fast to its line that everything is okay and Australia should be proud of its performance. While grudgingly acknowledging that there might be a connection between the fires and climate change, it wasn’t something they could deal with till the crisis was passed. Having got passed it, now we only talk about the plague.

So what do I expect scientists to do? I really don’t know. If they become advocates or start manning the barricades then they’re no longer practicing science. And yet the science by itself seems so impotent.

3. The burden of politics and ideology

Surely something has got to give? The neo-liberal conservative ideology that sits behind climate denialism cannot be sustained given what our country (and the world) is enduring – surely? And yet it does. Could it be that when everything else has been burnt, withered and wasted, our ideology will still be standing, still declaring its intrinsic rightness – that would be the ideology of whoever is left standing. (It’s been pointed out to me that ‘denialism’ is driven by more than neo-liberal ideology. That might be so but it paves the way by promoting the view that the market will solve all problems and that non-market things do not count. Of course it’s much more complex than I present here, and there’s a strong thread of libertarianism interwoven through this tapestry of deceit. The net effect is continuing poor outcomes in the face of overwhelming evidence that we should be doing something different.)

4. The value of good policy

Whereas I tend to despair and begin to rant (as in point 3) when I consider the rampant environmental decline all around me (largely discounted by government), Peter looks for constructive policy solutions that may or may not be applied but at the very least deserve serious consideration. For example, Peter devoted several blogs to exploring environmental accounts and environmental impact studies and how they relate to effective environmental protection (in both sets of 33 blogs).

It will be interesting to see if good policy takes the fore as we move deeper into this crisis riven year.

5. The importance of history

To understand why a good policy is not implemented in an appropriate way, or why ideology so often trumps rationality, it’s important to understand the historical context and development of an idea or process. Many of the stories we have examined have long histories, and to understand why something works as it does it’s necessary to see from where it came and how it has changed.

The historical antecedents of sustainability policy was a much greater talking point in our first 33 blogs though it still featured in many of the second tranche. Possibly the reason for this is that it seems that history was being made even as we wrote the second set, and it was all we could do to reflect on what was unfolding around us.

Last year’s drought seemed to be a game changer but it was dwarfed by the scale of ensuing fires which in turn has been swallowed by the enormity of the Covid 19 pandemic (and somehow, while all this was happening, no-one seemed to notice that the Great Barrier Reef had been king hit by another mass bleaching event, the most extensive to date).

What will come out the other end of this run of crises is anyone’s guess but it’s a sure bet that what we think is happening now will likely be revised and reinterpreted many times as we move away from these tumultuous times – though possibly towards even more tumult.

Maybe I’ll have the answer by blog #100.

Image by Flo K from Pixabay

Appendix 1: Our first 33 Bites [in order of appearance with themes in brackets]

1. Environmental Sustainability: a thoroughly Conservative notion – [Ideology; history]
2. Sustainability, ‘big government’ and climate denialism [Ideology, science]
3. Why Can’t We Agree on Fixing the Environment? Tribalism & short termism[Politics, crisis]
4. Wishing for a ‘Goldilocks’ crisis’A crack in the Greenland Ice Sheet [Change, crisis, history]
5. How are we going Australia’s OECD decadal Environmental Report Card [Good policy]

6. Throwing pebbles to make change:is it aim or timing?[Crisis and change]
7. The BIG fixWhy is it so hard [Crisis, politics]
8. Duelling scientists: Science, politics and fish kills [science culture, politics]
9. Making a difference without rocking the boat The FDR Gambit [Crisis, good policy, politics]
10. Throwing pebbles and making waves: Lake Pedder and the Franklin Dam[Crisis, history]

11. Ending duplication in Environmental Impact Assessments [Policy, history]
12. Is science the answer? Technology is not the solution[Science, ideology]
13. Environmental Impact Assessment and info bureacracy [Policy, politics]
14. Confessions of a cheerleader for science: delaying action because science will save us[Science, ideology]
15. Caldwell and NEPA: the birth of Environmental Impact Assessment[History, policy]

16. This febrile environment: elections, cynicism and crisis[Politics, crisis]
17. 20 Year review of the EPBC – Australia’s national environment law [Policy, politics, history]
18. Saving the world’s biodiversity: the failure of the CBD and the need for transformative change[Policy, history, politics]
19. The value of Environmental Impact Assessment [Policy, history]
20. Retreat from reason – nihilism fundamentalism and activism [Ideology, crisis, politics]

21. Too late for no regrets pathway: a pathway to real sustainability[Politics, policy, history]
22. A short history of sustainability: how sustainable development developed[History, policy, crisis]
23. Kenneth Boulding and the spaceman economy: view from Spaceship Earth[History, policy]
24. A real climate change debate: science vs denialism[Science, politics, ideology]
25. Craik Review on green tape: environmental regulation impact on farmers[Policy, politics]

26. Trinity and the dawn of the Anthropocene [History, science]
27. An environmental accounting primer [Policy, history]
28. Displacement activity – it’s what you do when you don’t have a real environmental policy [Politics, policy]
29. The Productivity Commission and environmental regulation [Policy, politics]
30. Framing climate change: is it a moral or an economic issue [Politics, ideology]

31. The Sustainable Development Goals: game changer or rehash [Policy, history]
32. The Great Barrier Reef: best managed reef in the world down the drain [Science, policy, politics]
33. Doing the Tesla Stretch electric cars to our economic rescue [Policy, politics]

Appendix 2: Our second 33 bites [in order of appearance with main themes in brackets]

34. Joining the dots on Sustainability Bites – looking back on 33 blogs[reflection, history]
35. What’s in the EPBC Box? – Unpacking Australia’s primary environmental law [policy, EPBC Act]
36. I’ll match your crisis and raise you one Armageddon – playing the crisis game [crisis, politics]
37. Federal environmental planning – planning should be strengthened in the EPBC Act [policy, EIA]
38. Shame Greta Shame – the use of ‘shame’ to affect change [politics, shame, denialism]

39. Is Corporate Social Responsibility an environmental ‘Dodge’? – [business, social responsibility]
40. On the taboo of triage – why politicians don’t talk about triage [politics, policy, denialism]
41. 2019 Senate Environment Estimates – [politics, policy, news]
42. I’m so angry I’m going to write a letter!! – the value of the ‘letter’ from experts [politics, science culture, denialism]
43. Supplementary Environmental Estimates – [politics, policy, news]

44. The script that burns us – predicatable responses to wildfire [politics, ideology, denialism]
45. Announcing ‘Australia’s Strategy for Nature’ – what’s in this new policy [politics, policy]
46. But we’re only a tiny part of the problem! – unpacking denialist cant [politics, policy, denialism]
47. Will next year be a big one for biodiversity? – the importance of 2020 [policy, environmental accounts]
48. Positioning ‘The Environment’ – rearranging government departments [policy, politics]

49. Insights on government thinking from 20 years ago – release of parliamentary papers[policy, history]
50. Five lies that stain the nation’s soul – the government’s worst lies [politics, denialism]
51. Now is the summer of our discontent – reflecting on an awful summer [politics, disturbance]
52. On ‘resilience’ as a panacea for disaster – hiding behind notions of resilience [politics, disturbance, resilience]
53. By all accounts, can we manage to save biodiversity? – environmental accounts to the rescue [policy, environmental accounts]

54. Conversations with the devil – false news is amplified by tribalism [polarization, tribalism]
55. A tale of two climate bills – laws proposed by an independent and the Greens [policy, politics]
56. Dawn of the new normal (?) – when will we acknowledge climate change [policy, politics, disturbance]
57. Insensible on coal – why is coal the elephant in the room[policy, politics, disturbance]
58. The zero sum game – from biodiversity to emissions – ‘net’ zero carbon emissions[policy, politics, offsets]

59. ‘Practical Environmental Restoration’– the Government always talks about ‘practical’ [policy, politics, offsets]
60. A good decision in a time of plague – the process is more important than the decision itself [policy, governance]
61. A pathway for the Coalition to improve its climate change act – the 2020 climate policy toolkit [policy, politics, climate change]
62. Entering a no-analogue future – Covid 19 is giving us the world to come [Anthropocene, Covid 19]
63. Who’s the BOS? – Biodiversity offsets – state vs commonwealth [policy, politics, offsets]

64. Three letters on the apocalypse – putting a human frame on disaster [climate change, communication]
65. Washing off the virus – what happens to environmental regulation after the plague [policy, politics]