Should we include a climate-change trigger in national environmental law?

By Peter Burnett

In Australia this week, all eyes (well most of them) are on Canberra for the first sitting of Parliament since Labor came to power in May. The first order of business is the promised Climate Change Bill, to enshrine the government’s promised 43% target.

While public debate on the bill has focused on the target itself and the nature of a possible ‘ratcheting mechanism’ to raise the target over time, there’s also been quite a bit of attention given to something that definitely won’t be included: a ‘climate trigger’ for environmental approval of large projects such as mines and dams.

Let me explain.

Triggering the EPBC Act

For constitutional reasons, our main national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), is based on a set of ‘triggers’. These are formally known as ‘matters of national environmental significance’. The triggers cover various things you’d expect to be of national significance, such as impacts to World Heritage places and threatened species, but not the most obvious candidate of all, climate change.

The EPBC Act was drafted by the conservative Howard Coalition government in the late 1990s as part of an overhaul of national environmental law. This bold reform was an unlikely project for a conservative government, but came about for two reasons.

First, Howard had courted the environment movement quite successfully in the 1996 election campaign, largely by promising a large pot of money (the National Heritage Trust) in exchange for privatising the national phone company, Telstra. There was a sentiment at the time that perhaps conservatives could care for the environment as well as progressives, by investing in it.

Second, Howard’s environment minister, Senator Robert Hill, was not just a skilled political operator, but a genuine environmental reformer (though perhaps a flawed one — see below).

In particular, Hill demonstrated an ability to navigate obstacles in government where others would have foundered on the political rocks.

Kyoto and the climate trigger

Despite Hill’s commitment to reforming environmental law he also led the Howard Government’s negotiating team at Kyoto, securing the notorious ‘Australia clause’, under which Australia was allowed to increase its emissions to 108% of 1990 levels, despite other rich countries being locked-into cuts.

Beyond this, also notoriously, Howard refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, despite Australia’s easy ride through with the Australia clause.

Howard had a real thing about action on climate change. Despite Australia’s easy ride, early on his major concern seemed to be that Australia might be taken for a ride, by being required to do more than its fair share of the ‘heavy lifting’. Later on, he seemed determined to hold out on ratification as a way of supporting the USA under George W Bush.

You can see why, despite being the most obvious candidate, climate was never going to be a trigger in the EPBC Act. Unfortunately for the government though, it had to do a deal with a minor party, the Australian Democrats, to get the EPBC Bill through the Senate.

Howard agreed to more than 400 Democrat amendments to secure passage, but wouldn’t include a climate trigger.

A climate trigger discussion paper

The government did however agree to consult about including a climate trigger by later amendment, and released a discussion paper on the topic at the end of 1999.

An obvious issue was the emissions threshold for the trigger. The lowest number discussed was 500,000 tonnes CO₂-equivalent. This was said to capture 92% of emissions from new major facilities, such as power stations and aluminium smelters, then under construction.

Interestingly, today’s ‘safeguard mechanism’, enacted by the Abbott Government to support its Emissions Reduction Fund and requiring large emitters (currently 215 of them) to meet an individually-tailored emissions cap, has a threshold of 100,000 tonnes.

Even more interestingly, while the discussion paper canvassed some of the more technical issues associated with defining the trigger in some detail, such as whether emission estimates would be based on average or peak capacity, it completely avoided the significant issue of what kinds of requirements might be imposed on a new facility once the trigger was, well, triggered.

The discussion paper said this was because approval decisions had to be consistent with the principles of ecologically sustainable development and should take account of issues such as jobs and international competitiveness. (Had they addressed the issue, I think the most likely approach at the time would have been to require that the proponent use ‘best available low-emission technology at reasonable cost’.)

Then there was the issue of carbon emissions from land clearing. The discussion paper simply excluded this topic; the implication was that land clearing was not a ‘project’.

I think this explanation and exclusion are tendentious. I suspect that the government never intended to introduce a trigger, but simply to go through the motions. In that context, any content beyond the barest minimum could expose the government to enemy political fire, for no gain (to them).

Back to the future

So, there we have it. No climate trigger. But should we have one now?

Labor is promising to re-orient the safeguard mechanism, under which emissions from the major facilities are capped.

The previous government kept resetting the caps, giving emitters an easy ride in meeting them. Now, the government will lower the caps progressively, as the theory says such a scheme should, forcing facilities to lower emissions or buy emissions credits.

Under that scenario, it doesn’t make much sense to apply a climate trigger to major facilities — anyone building such a facility already knows that its emissions will be subject to a reducing cap.

Even if a climate trigger applied, what conditions could the environment minister impose that would achieve more than keeping emissions under a reducing cap? (In theory, a trigger would allow the minister to block a project entirely, this seems unlikely).

What about land-clearing?

Then there’s land clearing. Although the significance of land clearing is usually seen in terms of habitat loss, it is also significant for carbon emissions where the vegetation concerned is of high quality (low quality regrowth areas are marginal in terms of carbon emissions).

At present there is no land clearing trigger in the EPBC Act, even for biodiversity-related reasons. And, unlike industrial facilities, there are no climate-related laws applying to land clearing.

Thus, above a certain extent and quality, there is a case for a climate trigger relating to land clearing.

However, states and territories all regulate land clearing for other reasons. Due to the complexities of doubling-up on land regulation, it might be more effective to combine a trigger with a national standard for land clearing and to switch off the trigger in states where clearing laws meet the standard.

And in the end?

At the end of the day, given Labor’s plans for the safeguard mechanism, the case for a ‘climate trigger’ is particular rather than general. It would make sense for the clearing of significant areas of land containing old-growth and other high quality vegetation, but that’s about all.

In any event, a climate trigger is off the agenda as an amendment to the Climate Change Bill, given climate minister Chris Bowen’s statement that the government would rather pursue its climate target on a non-statutory basis, than have policy change forced on it by legislative amendment.

But there will be a second opportunity, when environment minister Tanya Plibersek delivers on her commitment to introduce major reforms to the EPBC Act in 2023.

Then, unlike now, the government won’t have the clean option of simply walking away, because so much of the non-climate environmental reform agenda hangs off that reform.

Banner image by Yazril Tri Mulyana from Pixabay

Thinking resilience – navigating a complex world

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By David Salt

Our world seems to be coming unstuck at the moment. Climate fuelled weather extremes – floods, droughts, heatwaves and fires – are crippling large parts of humanity. Many people are grappling for answers; What do we do? Why haven’t we already done something about this? It’s not like we haven’t been warned (repeatedly and with comprehensive detail by our climate scientists and others).

I believe many of your problems lie in our inability to deal with the complexity of the world around us (my last two blogs discussed this very thing – we can’t fix this because it’s complex and complicated vs complex). One way of better appreciating that complexity and navigating a way through lies in the area of resilience thinking.

The word ‘resilience’

The word ‘resilience’ is now common in many vision and mission statements. But ask the people who use these statements what they think it means and you get a range of different answers, most of which relate to how something or someone copes with a shock or a disturbance.

Concepts of resilience are used in all sorts of disciplines, but it has four main origins – psycho-social, ecological, disaster relief (and military), and engineering.

Psychologists have long recognised marked differences in the resilience of individuals confronted with traumatic and disastrous circumstances. Considerable research has gone into trying to understand how individuals and societies can gain and lose resilience.

Ecologists have tended to describe resilience in two ways; one focused on the speed of return following a disturbance, the other focused on whether or not the ‘system’ can recover. People engaging with resilience from the perspective of disaster relief or in a military arena incorporate both aspects (ie, speed and ability to recover). Indeed, there is a lot of commonality in the understanding of resilience in the three areas of psychology, ecology and disaster relief.

In engineering the take on resilience is somewhat different. Indeed, engineers more commonly use the term ‘robustness’ with a connotation of designed resilience. It differs from the other three uses in that it assumes that the kinds of disturbances and shocks are known and the system being built is designed to be robust in the face of these shocks.

Resilience thinking

The ‘resilience’ that is being invoked in vision and mission statements relating to Australia’s environment is largely based on the idea of ecological resilience, and it’s all about the ability to recover.

The science underpinning our understanding of ecological resilience is often referred to as resilience thinking. The definition of resilience here is: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks – to have the same identity. Put more simply, resilience is the ability to cope with shocks and keep functioning in much the same kind of way.

A key word in this definition is ‘identity’. It emerged independently in ecological and psycho-social studies, and it is both important and useful because it imparts the idea that a person, a society, an ecosystem or a social-ecological system can all exhibit quite a lot of variation, be subjected to disturbance and cope, without changing their ‘identity’ – without becoming something else.

The essence of resilience thinking is that the systems we are dealing with are complex adaptive systems. These systems have the capacity to self-organise around change but there are limits to a system’s self-organising capacity. Push a system too much and it changes its identity; it is said to have crossed a threshold.

The systems around us that we depend on (and are embedded in) are linked systems with social, economic and bio-physical domains, operating over multiple scales. To understand what enables these complex systems to retain their identity, what keeps them resilient, we need to appreciate the linkages between these domains and scales. We also need to understand how the system is behaving within each domain and scale, because over time these components go through their own cycles (known as adaptive cycles) in which the capacity for change (and the ability to hang on to their identity) shifts.

Many ideas, many insights

Resilience thinking involves all these ideas. It is the capacity to envisage your system as a self-organising system with thresholds, linked domains and cycles.

Each of these ideas take a bit of explaining, something I’ll attempt in upcoming blogs (for a good guide, see Resilience Practice*). However, when you begin engaging with ideas relating to a system’s resilience, you begin to appreciate the world in a different way.

Some of those insights have been for me that no-one is in control, and you can’t understand a system by understanding the components that make it up – complex systems have emergent properties (for example, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts).

We also need to appreciate that the narrower concept of ‘efficiency’ – ie, holding a part of our system in a state that delivers optimal returns (eg, food or fibre) without considering interactions with other domains or scales – leads to a loss of resilience, making it less likely that these systems will continue to deliver into the future. Efficiency is important but, by itself, it is not the solution to the challenge of sustainability.

We live in a complex world facing enormous challenges. Too much of our efforts so far have been directed to command-and-control approaches, techno solutions and improving efficiency. If the problems we were dealing with were simple and tractable, such approaches would work well. Unfortunately, our current approaches to sustainability are not working at all, and the problem is growing significantly.

Could it be we’re trying to solve the wrong problem? We’re managing a complex world as if it were a simple system.

*Walker B & D Salt (2012). Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function. Island Press. Washington.

Banner image: Forests begin their recovery after Australia’s Black Summer of 2019/2020. (Image by David Salt)

What can we expect in Australia’s new climate law?

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By Peter Burnett

Australian climate minister Chris Bowen has promised to introduce a Climate Change Bill when Australia’s newly-elected Parliament convenes in late July. The Bill won’t be available until then but we already have a fair idea of what it is likely to say.

The story so far

What used to be Australia’s main climate law, the Clean Energy Act 2011, imposed a price on carbon. It was repealed by the then-new Abbott government in 2014 as part of its ‘axe-the-tax’ platform.

As far as I know, this is the only reversal of a carbon price, anywhere, ever. Hopefully it will also be the last, because the abolition of such an effective policy instrument was a major loss.

Several other climate laws survived Prime Minister Abbott’s anti-climate change stance in amended form, including the Act establishing the independent Climate Change Authority (CCA). The CCA lost its power to advise on Australia’s overall emissions target but retained its power to review specific climate mitigation policies.

Some Australian states and territories have their own climate change laws that set targets, broadly similar to what Bowen is now proposing.

Shape of the new law

The Climate Change Bill will not seek to reimpose a carbon price — the government plans to use an existing law brought in by the Abbott Government known as the ‘safeguard mechanism’ to reduce allowable emissions for the largest polluters (over 100,000 tonnes C0₂-e) over time.

Rather, the new Climate Change Bill will deal with national targets. Minister Bowen outlined its content in a recent speech at the National Press Club.

The Bill will enshrine both Australia’s ‘net zero by 2050’ goal and its new Paris ‘nationally determined contribution’ of a 43% reduction in emissions by 2030.

It will also restore the CCA’s role of advising Government on future targets, starting with the 2035 target. In addition, the CCA will assess progress against existing targets, with these assessments made public.

Separately, the climate minister will be required to report annually to Parliament on progress in meeting targets.

Finally, the bill will paste the new climate targets across into the formal objectives and functions of several government agencies, including the Australian Renewable Energy Authority (ARENA, which makes grants for new but pre-commercial renewable energy technologies and businesses) and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC, which operates in a similar space but makes loans rather than grants).

Some interesting implications

Bowen says that the twin aims of requiring the minister to report to Parliament each year are to force government to be transparent and to focus the minds of parliamentarians on climate change as ‘our most pressing challenge’. Hopefully he is right on both counts and Parliament will focus increasingly on the substance of climate policy and progress in reducing emissions and less on the political posturing that has been so dominant to date.

More interesting than the pasting of targets across into the ARENA and CEFC legislation is the proposal to paste the targets into the objectives of bodies that are not dedicated climate agencies, including Infrastructure Australia and the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund.

Such a requirement is likely to force these infrastructure bodies to expand their horizons beyond conventional cost-benefit analysis and to evaluate in detail whether there are more climate-friendly alternatives to what is proposed. For example, climate considerations might force the ditching of a road upgrade in favour of rail or sea-carriage for long distance freight.

In a similar vein, legally-enshrined climate targets should have a ripple effect on all government deliberations. In particular, I would expect the government to amend the cabinet handbook to require that proposals evaluate climate implications against the target, including by considering low-emission alternatives, on a routine basis.

Under such a regime, a proposal to purchase new tanks for the army would be required to consider electric propulsion or, more realistically in the short term, a commitment to use biofuels or other synthetic fuels, despite the additional expense. Failure to consider such alternatives would open the government to criticism that it was not taking its own legally-enshrined commitment seriously.

Getting the law passed

While Bowen made it clear that the government regards legislated targets as best practice for the policy certainty that they provide, he also stressed that legislated targets are not strictly necessary.

In this light, he says that the government is open to ‘complementary’ amendments but will withdraw the bill if it cannot secure Senate support for the fundamentals of its agenda.

For example, if the Greens and climate-friendly cross-bench Senators were to oppose the bill on the basis that the targets were not ambitious enough, the government would probably withdraw it. Clearly the government regards itself as treading a fine line on climate ambition and does not wish to risk being held to ransom by forces on its Left, as it was in the Rudd years.

On the other hand, it is less clear whether the government would regard amendments based on Independent MP Zali Stegall’s Climate Change (National Framework for Adaptation and Mitigation) Bill 2021 as ‘complementary’.

Would the government accept amendments to enshrine, not just the 2030 target, but a rolling series of five yearly ‘emissions budgets’ and a full ‘national adaptation plan’? Or would it agree to legislate for a permanent Parliamentary Joint Committee on Climate Adaptation and Mitigation with a supervisory role over the CCA?

Watch this space for a report on the debate.

Banner image: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Solving sustainability – It’s complicated AND complex. Do you know the difference?

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What is it about the challenge of climate change that makes it so difficult to solve?

Clearly, it’s a complicated problem involving many interacting components. These interacting parts include the Earth system (and its billions of components), people (you and me), states and countries; organisations and institutions; unknowns; tradeoffs; winners and losers. We’ve spent decades of effort addressing this issue – including billions of dollars on research – and yet the problem of mounting levels of carbon emissions and accelerating environmental decline only seems to get worse. (Have you seen what’s happening in the northern hemisphere at the moment? And it’s only spring!)

Clearly, climate change is a big and complicated problem but it seems to me, having watched us deal with this challenge (and fail) over many years, what we’re not acknowledging is that it’s also a complex problem, and we’re not dealing with this complexity very well.

‘Complicated’ and ‘complex’ are words often used interchangeably but they are fundamentally different ideas. Do you know the difference? I’ll confess that for most of my life I didn’t.

So, what is complexity?

Complex systems scientists have been attempting to pin down what complexity is for decades. To me, most of their definitions are highly technical and only understandable by other complex systems scientists.

Here’s one commonly used definition set out by the famous evolutionary biologist Simon Levin in 1998 that encapsulates many of the ideas floating around complexity. It’s relatively short and sets out three criteria for defining a complex adaptive system. Complex adaptive systems have:

-components that are independent and interacting;

-there is some selection process at work on those components (and on the results of local interactions); and

-variation and novelty are constantly being added to the system (through components changing over time or new ones coming in).

Sounds straightforward but what does it mean and why is it important? Here’s how I attempted explain it in the book Resilience Thinking*.

Cogworld vs Bugworld

Consider these two situations: Cogworld and Bugworld.

Everything in Cogworld is made of interconnected cogs; big cogs are driven by smaller cogs that are in turn driven by tiny cogs. The size and behavior of the cogs doesn’t change over time, and if you were to change the speed of the cogs of any size there is a proportionate change in speed of other connected cogs.

Because this system consists of many connected parts some would describe it as being complicated. Indeed it is, but because the components never change and the manner in which the system responds to the external environment is linear and predictable, it is not complex. Really, it is just a more complicated version of a simple system, like a bicycle with multiple gears.

Bugworld is quite different. It’s populated by lots of bugs. The bugs interact with each other and the overall performance of Bugworld depends on these interactions. But some sub-groups of bugs are only loosely connected to other sub-groups of bugs. Bugs can make and break connections with other bugs, and unlike the cogs in Cogworld, the bugs reproduce and each generation of bugs come with subtle variations in size or differences in behavior. Because there is lots of variation, different bugs or subgroups of bugs respond in different ways as conditions change. As the world changes some of the subgroups of bugs ‘perform’ better than other subgroups, and the whole system is modified over time. This system is self-organizing.

Unlike Cogworld, Bugworld is not a simple system but a complex adaptive system in which it’s impossible to predict the emergent behavior of the system by understanding separately its component subgroups. It meets the three criteria outlined by Levin: it has components that are independent and interacting; there is some selection process at work on those components; and variation and novelty are constantly being added to the system.

Complicated vs Complex

In Cogworld there is a direct effect of a change in one cog, but it doesn’t lead to secondary feedbacks. The cogs that make up Cogworld interact but they are not independent, and the system can’t adapt to a changing world. Cogworld might function very ‘efficiently’ over one or even a range of ‘settings’ but it can only respond to change in one way – that is working all together. If the external conditions change so that Cogworld no longer works very well – the relative speeds of the big and little cogs don’t suit its new environment – there’s nothing Cogworld can do.

In Bugworld the system adapts as the world changes. There are secondary feedbacks – secondary effects of an initial direct change. The bugs of Bugworld are independent of each other though they do interact (strongly – though not all bugs interact with all other bugs).

In our Bugworld, if we attempted to manage a few of the subgroups – eg, hold them in some constant state to ‘optimise’ their performance – we need to be mindful that this will cause the surrounding subgroups to adapt around this intervention, possibly changing the performance of the whole system.

Ecosystems, economies, organisms and even our brains are all complex adaptive systems. We often manage parts of them as if they were simple systems (as if they were component cogs from Cogworld) when in fact the greater system will change in response to our management, often producing a raft of secondary feedback effects that sometimes bring with them unwelcome surprises.

The real world is a complex adaptive system. It is more like Bugworld than Cogworld and yet it seems most of our management, policy and leadership is based on a Cogworld metaphor.

The consequences of complexity

Complex adaptative systems are self-organizing systems with emergent properties. No-one is in control and there is no optimal sustainable state that it can be held in. These are just two of the consequences that fall out when you begin to appreciate what complexity is all about, and they are pretty important consequences if you reflect on it.

Our political leaders will tell you they are in control, and that they have a plan, a simple solution that solves the problem of climate change without anyone having to change the way they do things. This is the message that Australians have been hearing for the past decade from our (recently defeated) conservative government. But we grew skeptical of these claims as we saw our coral reefs bleach and our forest biomes burn.

Why is climate change so difficult to solve? Yes, it’s complicated with many interacting components. However, more importantly, it’s complex and complexity is something humans don’t deal with well (let alone understand).

As one piece of evidence on this, consider how we think about thinking. What’s the image that immediately comes to your mind? For most people it’s a set of mechanistic cogs encased in a head (like in our banner image this week). If you thought my ‘Cogworld’ was fanciful, how many times have you seen this representation of human thinking as mechanistic clockwork without questioning it. Because what you’re seeing is a representation of a complex system (you thinking) as a non-complex simple system (a set of cogs). The ‘cogmind’ is a fundamentally disabling metaphor.

And if you scale this up to the systems around us, how many times have you accepted that someone is in control, and that the answer is in just making the world a bit more efficient, a bit more optimal? How is that going for us at the moment?

Different priorities

If, however, we are living in a complex world, then maybe we should stop looking for the illusory optimal solution and start dealing the complexity in which we are all embedded. How is that done?

One set of ideas I have found helpful lies in resilience thinking. Rather than prioritising efficiency, command-and-control, reductionism and optimisation, resilience thinking encourages reflection, humility and co-operation, aspects on which I’ll expand in my next blog on complexity.

*Two decades ago I was asked by a group called the Resilience Alliance to write a book on resilience science. That book, co-authored with Brian Walker, one of the world’s leading authorities on resilience science, became the text Resilience Thinking. As I learnt about resilience science I discovered that it was all about dealing with complexity, an insight that transformed the way I understood the world.

Banner image: If you thought my ‘Cogworld’ was fanciful, how many times have you seen this representation of human thinking as mechanistic clockwork without questioning it. (Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay)