Losing it – the consequences of stepping over the threshold

By David Salt

In Australia, we called the horrible summer of 2019/20 the Black Summer. Unprecedented heat waves and drought led to the biggest, most ferocious, most extensive wildfires this nation had ever known.

I wonder what the world will call 2022? Once again that word ‘unprecedented’ gets rolled out to describe a series of heatwaves, extreme storms, massive floods and record-breaking droughts. This year these events were happening all over the world (and especially across Europe, Asia and America during the northern hemisphere summer). Will it be the ‘Angry Summer’ or the ‘Season of our Great Discontent’ or maybe just the year of ‘Climate Breakdown’. (At what point do we know it’s broken?)

Or maybe the climate disruption will just continue and even grow worse, as many climate scientists are predicting, and 2022 will be wilfully forgotten as we struggle to deal with each new emerging weather crisis.

The idea of normal

When describing abnormal events, unprecedented episodes or historic happenings, you need to have some idea about what ‘normal’ actually means. In some cases this is relatively straightforward.

We have temperature records, for example, that go back for at least a century so it’s easy to define ‘normal’ with statistical precision. Our temperature has ranged between X and Y, and there is a different average max and minimum value for each month of the year. This August was particularly hot for many regions in the northern hemisphere, so when you hear on the news that temperatures broke records, or were above average, you can appreciate just what is meant.

The more variables you bring in (precipitation, wind speed, humidity, wild storms etc), the harder it is to characterise what is normal. Of course, these variables are what add up to weather, and long-term average weather is what we call climate.

If the weather gets ugly, we normally console ourselves that we just need to survive this rough patch and at some point the weather will ‘return to normal’ – the rains will replenish the dams after the drought or calm will follow the big storm.

‘Return to normal’ is a form of equilibrium thinking. Your world gets rocked by some disturbance, your equilibrium is thrown out, but you do everything you can to bounce back, to return to normal.

Of course, I’m talking about the notion of resilience – the capacity to cope with disturbance and bounce back (the word ‘resilience’ derives from the Latin ‘resilire’, meaning ‘to jump back’ or ‘to recoil’).

What’s normal for a complex system

‘Resilience thinking’ is all about how this idea of ‘recovery’ applies to complex adaptive systems. Complex systems have the capacity to self-organise. Resilience is the amount of disturbance a system can absorb and still retain its identity, still continue to function in much the same kind of way.

In recent blogs I’ve attempted explain what complexity means, and how complex systems change over time, how they go through a pattern known as an adaptive cycle. The concept of adaptive cycles is one important building block of resilience thinking, the other is the idea of ‘thresholds’.

There are limits to how much a complex system can be changed and still recover. Beyond those limits the system functions differently because some critical feedback process has changed. These limits are known as thresholds.

When a complex system crosses a threshold it is said to have crossed into another ‘regime’ of the system (also called a ‘stability domain’ or ‘basin of attraction’). It now behaves in a different way – it has a different identity (or you might say it has lost its original identity).

In coral reefs there’s a threshold on the variable of the level of nutrients in the surrounding water. If nutrients become too high, the coral will be displaced by algae. The coral reef identity is lost, replaced by the identity of an algal reef.

On many rangelands there is a threshold on the amount of grass present. If the grass level falls below a certain level (because of too many grazing animals or a prolonged drought), shrubs begin to take over. The grassy rangeland identity is lost, replaced by a shrubland.

Sometimes it’s easy to cross back over to the identity you want, sometimes it’s difficult and sometimes it’s impossible.

Tipping points

In a recent blog I discussed how fossil fuel corporations are complex systems. The identity of this system is heavily influenced by quarterly profit statements; more so than any concern they might hold for longer term climate disruption. The levels of the profits in those quarterly statements likely has a threshold point, below which the fossil fuel corporation will likely change its business (eg, take on the identity of a renewables company, maybe) or shut down. Either way, crossing this threshold leads to a change of identity in this system. (Of course, what might put downward pressure on their profits is stronger government regulation or broader community rejection of the cost being imposed on society by the fossil fuel company.)

In my last blog I also said you could view the British Monarchy as being a complex system. Its identity hinges on public acceptance and support over time, something the late Queen Elizabeth II understood and worked with like a pro. Again, its likely a threshold point exists on this variable of public support, below which the Monarchy becomes vulnerable. QEII represented integrity, authenticity, stability and certainty. She had very high levels of social approval (social capital) that has ensured that the system of the Monarchy had resilience, even to the disturbance of her own death, and the Crown passed seamlessly to her son, now King Charles III. But imagine what might have happened if the Queen didn’t have that level of social capital. Or what happens if King Charles squanders that social capital? Smooth successions aren’t always the rule in the UK (or elsewhere), and many countries don’t need Queens (or Kings) to function.

Thresholds occur in many complex systems however they are often described as ‘tipping points’ where they occur in the social domain. In addition to the two examples I just discussed (profit levels and levels of public approval), tipping points might manifest as changes in fashion, voting patterns, riot behaviour, or markets.

Defining a safe operating space

So here is useful way of defining a system. Every system can be described in a variety of ways using a number of variables. The identity of the system can be characterised by an average range of those values. While kept in that range, the system will behave as you expect, be it a business, a monarchy, a coral reef or a rangeland. However, when the system passes a certain level on one of a number of key variables (eg, profit, popularity, nutrients, grass cover) – a threshold or tipping point – the system changes its identity and begins to behave differently (often in strange or undesirable ways).

Or, in other words, you can understand a system’s identity by knowing how much change it can take before that identity is lost, replaced by a different identity.

Not only are thresholds critical to understanding the behaviour of complex systems, they are the basic limits to whatever enterprise you’re responsible for or have an interest in. To use the phrase in a prominent analysis of global-scale thresholds (Rockstrom et al 2009), thresholds define the safe operating space of your system.

And how are we going in keeping our society in a safe operating space? Well, considering our experiences with the Black Summer of 2019 or the Angry Summer of 2022, not so well.

Climate and weather systems are complex systems too. Their current behaviour suggests they have been pushed over critical thresholds and their emerging identity is something quite new, quite destructive and terrible. Allowing the Earth system to cross these thresholds comes with an enormous cost to society, and will sorely test our own resilience as we cruise into an increasingly uncertain future.

Banner image: How much disturbance can your ‘system’ take before it loses its identity? It’s not just the intensity of a specific event (a single hurricane for example) that’s important, it’s also the frequency of such disturbances. The Great Barrier Reef can survive mass bleaching events if they only occur once every 20 years but it loses its ‘identity’ if they occur every few years (which is now what’s happening). (Image by David Mark from Pixabay)

Five transformations: Breathing life into Australia’s national environmental law

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By Peter Burnett

I often write in these blogs about Australia’s national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). My excuse is that the EPBC Act is the most important environmental law in the country, but it doesn’t work. This is something we all should be worried about, and, as you’ve heard before, this is a piece of legislation that badly needs reform. Australia’s new federal government is making hopeful sounds here but, again as you’ve heard before, talk is cheap.

The job of reform is big, complex and challenging. However, if you reflect on the basic aims of what the EPBC Act was established to achieve, I think it’s possible to envisage a simple pathway forward. And that pathway involves five basic transformations on how the Act currently performs.

The story so far …

The new Australian government has promised to overhaul the EPBC Act and to establish a independent federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In pursuit of this reform, environment minister Tanya Plibersek has promised to respond to Professor Graeme Samuel’s 2020 review of the Act by the end of this year and to table proposed new laws in 2023.

Plibersek has hinted strongly that the government will follow Samuel’s recommendations, so that provides a clear starting point for discussion while we wait for the detail of the government’s plan.

From great green hope to great green flop

Looking back over the history of the EPBC Act — three years in development and 22 years in operation — it is clear that few of the high hopes held for the Act have been realised. While it expanded federal government involvement in environmental regulation significantly, the evidence suggests that the benefits of this have been marginal. Worse, when we look at the whole picture, the limited benefits achieved are partly offset by the resulting regulatory duplication.

The fundamental reason for this failure to deliver is not poor regulatory design, but gross under-implementation, mostly the result of under-resourcing and a lack of political will.

The EPBC Act can be seen as a three-legged stool on which most of one leg, dealing with environmental planning, is largely missing. (The other two legs protect the so-called ‘matters of national environmental significance’ and provide for environmental impact assessment.)

Most of the plans envisaged by the Act, and essential to its operational, are either vague in content, sitting unimplemented on the shelf, or simply not done.

Meanwhile, as Professor Samuel put it in his review, ‘Australia’s natural environment and iconic places are in an overall state of decline and are under increasing threat.’

What should we do about it?

The EPBC Act is highly complex. It is over 1,000 pages long and there are hundreds of pages of supporting regulations and determinations.

And the Act in turn sits within a complex set of roles, responsibilities, laws and agreements that govern the environment in Australia’s federal system.

Understanding the system is no mean thing, let alone fixing it. So, where to start?

When I went through Professor Samuel’s 38 recommendations, it struck me that he was calling for a complete transformation, in fact five of them. These are:

First, to change from prescriptive regulatory processes to setting and pursuing national environmental outcomes

the EPBC Act (and its state counterparts) focus on following due process, a ‘box ticking’ exercise that requires consideration of various factors such as biodiversity loss and the precautionary principle but, at the end of the day, allows governments to decide pretty much anything they like

Second, to shift from Indigenous tokenism to full use of Indigenous knowledge and a full recognition of Indigenous values

Samuel was highly critical of the tokenism of current arrangements, while recent events, especially the Juukan Gorge disaster in 2020, have generated considerable impetus for change

Third, to simplify regulatory processes and harmonise environmental processes and outcomes between federal and state jurisdictions

this isn’t just about ‘streamlining’ which has become almost a cliché, but a call for harmonisation of processes and outcomes across the nation

Fourth, to lay new foundations for quality decision-making

many of the foundations of the current system are either significantly under-done (eg environmental information, compliance and enforcement) or not done at all (eg bioregional planning across the continent)

Fifth, to restore trust in decision-making

damningly, Samuel found that none of the key stakeholder groups — business, environment groups and the wider community — trusted the current arrangements.

The reform process going forward

I’ll take a closer look at each transformation in a series of blogs over the next two months, in the lead up to Tanya Plibersek’s response to Samuel.

The reform debate will last right through 2023 and into 2024, as, once the response is on the table, there’s a large reform Bill to draft and an extended Parliamentary process to navigate as Plibersek seeks to shepherd her reforms through a Senate in which the balance of power, for the first time, lies with a cross-bench that is tinged a fairly dark shade of green.

Among other things, she will have to deal with very strong pressure to extend the EPBC Act by including a ‘climate trigger’.

My aim in the lead-up to that debate is to offer some points of focus in a discussion that always risks getting lost in its own complexity. (If you prefer to watch rather than read, I presented these transformations in a Parliamentary Library Seminar on 30 August.)

The problem is enormous and policy ambition needs to be high — bring on the reform!

Banner image: The job of reform is big, complex and challenging. However, it’s possible to envisage a simple pathway forward involving five basic transformations. (Image by David Salt)

Death of the Queen, identity and a sustainable world

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By David Salt

The Queen is dead, long live the King. Okay, we’ve said it, can we now please return to normal transmission*!

On the announcement of the death of Queen Elizabeth the 2^nd, Australia sunk into a blackhole of mourning (described by some in the twitterverse as ‘mourn porn’). All news bulletins and national programming seemed only to talk about her passing, how good she’d been, and the 1,000 tiny (tedious) steps of what happens now as her son becomes King. We suspended parliamentary business for a staggering 15 days and declared a public holiday that, because of its suddenness, some believe may cost our economy over a billion dollars. All of this in a country on the other side of the planet from where she had lived, with a population whose majority want us to ditch the monarchy completely, and whose government for all intents and purposes is independently elected and run. What gives?

Of course, there are hundreds of stories currently doing the rounds at the moment on how wonderful and enduring Queen Elizabeth had been. However, for my money, the furore over her passing is more about what it means for our own identity – what and who we are.

The Queen has been our monarch for over 70 years. She’s always been there performing her many public duties through thick and thin; with a polished reserve, constancy and perseverance that is almost superhuman. She is universally lauded as a trusted and hard-working soul, a role model of public service, temperance and restraint. Her very existence gave us confidence in the stability and validity of the system of which we are a part, a confidence that this system would endure and be around to sustain ourselves and our children.

So, even though the Queen was growing old, her death still hit us like an existential slap. Yes, she was a good person, but suddenly her constant presence had vanished, and we all needed reassurance that the validity and dependability of our system was still there, that we still had good reason to believe in the certainty of tomorrow.

The Queen and the Great Acceleration

So much has happened during the 70 years of her queenship. If you think about it, her reign began in 1952, just as the ‘Great Acceleration’ of humanity was taking off; a time of unprecedented technological change, economic growth, exploding population and accelerating consumption. Beginning in the 1950s, humanity built more dams, converted more land to agriculture, eliminated more species and released more greenhouse gases than at any other time in history.

By the 1970s scientists were beginning to point out how unsustainable this development was, but the warnings did little to change our course over the next half century.

With the new millennium, the warnings started proving true. The ‘spotfires’ of deep droughts, floods and mass coral bleachings are becoming more intense and frequent. 2022 seems to have seen most of the northern hemisphere engulfed in one climate-ramped natural disaster after another. The US is burning, Pakistan is drowning while all our great rivers are withering. A climate crisis is emerging.

And, during this time, our trust in the institutional pillars of society have been eroded by neoliberal drivers and market forces. A recent Australian Prime Minister** observed: “We face the spectre of a transactional world, devoid of principle, accountability and transparency.”

‘False news’ and misinformation cloud all our reflection, as tribal partisanship displaces reasoned debate and good governance.

Throughout all this tumultuous, transformational change, the Queen was always there, always constant. The monarchy no longer had the power and influence of earlier centuries, but the Queen still represented all the symbols (flag, crown and anthem) that lay under everything we have built (and fought for, and in some cases died for).

For King, country and the higher cause

Part of that is what the empire built lies here on the other side of the planet. Almost 250 years ago, Britain deported felons to a remote settlement in New South Wales, and that convict colony grew and flowered to become a vibrant multi-cultural, economic powerhouse that we now call Australia.

For King/Queen, God and flag, we displaced (and oppressed) a pre-existing First Nations culture as if it had never existed (a process codified as Terra nullius). Indeed, Indigenous people were not given recognition in the Australian Constitution till the 1960s, and (against a backdrop of multiple appalling legacies in the areas of health, education and welfare) we’re still fighting over how their voice might be heard in our national parliament.

Australia leads the world when it comes to extinction rates, land degradation and per capita emissions of greenhouse gases. Until very recently, we have been seen as the climate change laggards of the developed world.

The belief in ‘Queen and country’ have been central to our society and how we have justified so much of our development trajectory; ‘yes there have been costs, people and cultures have suffered, but it’s all been done for a higher cause’.

The loss of ‘our Queen’

So, with the sad loss of ‘our Queen’, our very identity has been under siege as we reflect upon what it is we have built, and how much certainty is there that it will be there in the future.

The fact that the Queen was undeniably an honest, hardworking servant of the public only clouds our reflections. She was a ‘good’ person but what is the value of the institution she represents, and is this belief in the Crown really an appropriate justification for how we are developing this world?

I quipped at the beginning: ‘can we please get beyond this and let normal transmission return’. But on reflection, humanity can’t afford ‘normal transmission’. We’re driving off a cliff at the moment and the powers that be are only concerned with the condition of the car they’re driving, not where it’s going.

Actually, what we should be saying is: The Queen is dead, long live the King, and may we use this moment of fragility and uncertainty to honestly reflect on the world we have built in their names.

*Speaking of ‘normal transmission’, my recent blogs on Sustainability Bites have been reflections on resilience thinking. This blog on the Queen has been a bit of a divergence. And yet, thinking of the Monarchy as a complex adaptive system might reveal some interesting insights. For example, how much disturbance (and of what form) can the Monarchy absorb before it loses its identity, and begins to operate as a different system (ie, how resilient is this system)? And does the Monarchy have its own adaptive cycle? And during what periods might reform actually take root?

** Which recent Australian Prime Minister observed: “We face the spectre of a transactional world, devoid of principle, accountability and transparency?” I think this is a smart and incisive observation, so I am totally gobsmacked that it was uttered by PM Scott Morrison, the most unprincipled, unaccountable and secretive Australian Prime Minister in living memory.

Banner image: It’s only common cents – the Queen symbolizes certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. (Image by Alexander Lesnitsky from Pixabay)

Down into the weeds again – the new government announces a return to bioregional planning

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By Peter Burnett

In a recent speech at the National Landcare Conference, still-honeymooning federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek announced what she called the ‘third arm’ of the government’s environmental agenda, regional planning.

(The first two arms, by the way, are an overhaul of national environmental law following the Samuel Review (2020) and setting up a federal Environment Protection Agency.)

A little history

More correctly, Plibersek was announcing a return to regional planning. Federal and state governments first signed up to bioregional planning in 1996 as a key action under the National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia’s Biological Diversity.

This National Strategy was our first attempt to meet our commitment under the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992 that each country should have such a strategy.

In 1995, in the run-up to adopting the strategy, then-environment minister Senator John Faulkner convened a national conference on bioregional planning.

But with the conference done and the National Strategy signed-off, momentum dissipated. This was no doubt due to the change of government that followed.

Although the new Howard government remained committed to bioregional planning, and in fact legislated for it as part of its big and shiny new national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, there was a problem.

The EPBC Act was seriously under-funded. With available funds sucked up by the day-to-day business of project-based environmental assessment and approvals, there was simply no money left for bioregional planning.

Eventually, in 2012, a later government found enough money to prepare bioregional plans for four of Australia’s marine bioregions. But there have never been plans for Australia’s 89 terrestrial bioregions.

What’s on the table this time?

Fast-forward to the present.

Following a recommendation for regional planning in the Samuel Review (NB. no longer bioregional planning, although the name change is not that significant) the Morrison government put its toe in the water by announcing $2.7m in the 2021 federal Budget for a pilot terrestrial bioregional plan.

By the time Morrison lost government in May 2022, this pilot program had not translated into on-ground action. Instead, Morrison had put more money on the table in the 2022 Budget (tabled in the lead up to the May election).

This time the government announced some $63 million for up to ten regional plans. However, this Budget didn’t pass the Parliament before the election of the Albanese government and so we must wait until next month (October) to see whether Treasurer Jim Chalmers keeps this measure in his replacement 2022 Budget.

In the meantime, Plibersek has announced the government’s commitment to regional planning and laid down some markers. She acknowledges that the idea is not new and says she will build on good work already done.

She says regional plans will improve federal environment protection by providing insight into cumulative impacts and enabling threats to threatened species to be addressed more effectively.

Plibersek wants to cooperate with states and territories and she wants the plans to be integrated across land uses, programs and tenures. She also wants the plans to improve resilience to climate change.

And, significantly, she wants to start now, so that ‘regional planning will be well underway by the time we pass our improved environmental laws next year’.

It’s complicated

This is an ambitious agenda, particularly from the low base of a fragmented environmental information base and a depleted environment department.

What challenges will Plibersek face? To borrow the title of one of my favourite Meryl Streep movies, ‘It’s Complicated’.

Plibersek needs to partner with state governments, who traditionally resist federal government involvement in land management, which they see as both their backyard and their bread and butter (excuse the mixed metaphors).

She will need to offer incentives, and in this context ‘better environmental outcomes’ doesn’t cut it. If I were a state I’d be after money for environmental restoration, by the truckload.

Assuming one or more partner governments step forward, regional planning would need to integrate with a myriad of other plans which, depending on location, could include metropolitan plans and strategies, state environmental plans and policies, catchment management plans, town plans, local environment plans and so on.

Then there are other federal plans to fit in with, including the Murray Darling Basin Plan and Regional Forest Agreements.

Once the government gets into the planning itself, it will need a full suite of supporting policies. What are the planning objectives? Do they include creating reserves for areas of high environmental value, such as critical habitat? Should zoning for development be done on the basis of maintaining ecological function? Would development be allowed in areas containing significant environmental values and if so, would an environmental-offset policies such as ‘no net loss’ apply?

Then there’s the need for appropriate governance. There’s no point in doing these plans on a one-off basis. They would need to be revised regularly, say every five years. Climate adaptation will make this even more complex.

Finally, how would public consultation be undertaken and who would undertake it?

Climb lower mountains

I could go on but I’m running out of space. I think there’s a real risk here of taking up mountain climbing and choosing Mt Everest as one’s first summit.

Given the minister’s determination to move on this front ahead of her major reform package next year, the risks of this could be avoided by treating the early regional plans as experiments — by confining the exercise to two or three regions and focusing on skill acquisition and capacity-building rather than aiming to take a full suite of plans through to legal adoption and operational use.

I know it’s hard in a political context, but with something this ambitious I think it’s important to allow for failure.

Rather than tackle Mt Everest straight up, a little practice in the foothills could be just the thing. That way, injuries from the inevitable falls will be minimal; and the whole process won’t be discarded when the going gets rough.

Banner image: Image by Joshua_Willson from Pixabay