Category: biodiversity

Don’t look up! Don’t talk up! Don’t rock the status quo. Attenborough’s message upsets vested interests.

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By David Salt

David Attenborough is experiencing what happens when society is caught in the late ‘K’ phase of the adaptive cycle. It’s an insight from complex systems science that we are all seeing play out around us every day. The insight is this: over time, vested interests and elites distort the system to maximise their wealth while simultaneously playing the system to protect their perceived entitlement. They do this through denial, obfuscation, denigration and applying the levers of power to prevent change and stop any talk about the redistribution of power.

How is David Attenborough an example of this?

Apparently the BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of his flagship new series on British wildlife, Wild Isles, because of fears its messages on the destruction of nature and the decline of biodiversity would risk a backlash from conservative politicians and the right-wing press.

The episode in question takes a stark look at the losses of nature in the UK and what has caused the declines (loss and degradation of habitat and climate disruption). The BBC claims this episode was only intended for the network’s iPlayer stream, a claim hotly contested, but even on iPlayer the episode is being attacked in the Daily Telegraph for being partly funded by WWF UK and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The Daily Telegraph says these two establishment wildlife groups have a “campaigning agenda”.

When the message being put out by the world’s leading wildlife presenter is being constrained by one of the world’s leading information organisations (an organisation that proudly claims to be independent) for fear of a conservative backlash, then we have a classic ‘don’t look up’ moment.

Don’t look up

‘Don’t look up’ was the title and central idea of an American apocalyptic political satire film that came out in 2021 in which scientists tried to warn the world of in impending asteroid strike. When there was an opportunity to do something about it, the world ignored the warning as ‘doing something’ would shift the status quo. When it became apparent the threat was real, because the asteroid was growing larger in the night sky, the elites still thought they could escape (together with their privilege) by rocketing to another planet. To keep the masses from realising what was going on, they promoted the slogan ‘Don’t look up’.

The movie was a parable on climate change, and the unwillingness of society to respond to the warnings being put out by scientists because changing the status quo comes with short terms costs that the rich and the powerful don’t want to take on (costs of giving up some of that wealth and losing some of the power).

‘Don’t look up’ became a catch cry for climate denialism, and it had some resonance when it first aired.

But how quickly we forget. The movie came out in the dark days of the covid pandemic, a time before vaccines became available and lockdowns were rigorously enforced (and in some quarters vehemently rejected). Now, with the lifting of restrictions, everyone wants their cake and they want to eat it double fast. There’s even a term for it – revenge tourism – in which everyone is traveling as a way of making up for lost time during the pandemic. Though it might be asked, who are we taking revenge on? Planet Earth? Transport-related greenhouse gas emissions from tourism have been estimated at 5% of all human originated emissions.

So maybe none of us want to ‘look up’ for fear of upsetting our own plans of ever greater consumption and economic growth.

Don’t speak up

David Attenborough has been doing nature docos since Moses was a boy. He’s does a great job, but while he often points out issues of environmental decline, for most of his series he tries to stay as neutral and apolitical as possible. It’s something he’s often criticised for in environmental circles.

In recent years, however, as he has grown older and climate change and environmental disruption has ramped up, his neutral stance has markedly shifted to one of pleas for action. In 2020 he even suggested the coming decade was a make-or-break time for humanity.

And, as with all scientists who get proactive on climate change, he’s finding you face a backlash when you raise your head above the parapet.

Stand up and tell society it needs to change and those that have benefitted from the societal status quo will draw a target on you. Corporate and political interests will apply leverage to groups they can influence, spread misinformation, foment anger. In Attenborough’s case, that means a showcase on environmental decline is closed down by the very organisation that prides itself on its independence (but at the cost of becoming overly sensitive to government sensitivities and attacks by other media organisations).

Attenborough is big enough and strong enough to stand his ground and weather such attacks, but early career researchers pay a heavy price for standing up and being counted.

When a system becomes moribund

So what’s this ‘K’ phase business I opened with, and how does it apply here?

Society is complex system. Over time societies change following a variety of pathways; they develop and grow, weather change (or sometimes are overwhelmed by it), split into sub groups, collapse, reorganize and start again. Resilience scientists have described these patterns of change as adaptive cycles in which systems go through four phases of rapid growth, conservation (also known as the K phase), release and reorganisation. The rapid growth and conservation phases are times of relatively predictable dynamics and in which there is a slow accumulation of capital and potential through stability and conservation.

But this growth cannot continue indefinitely. As the system moves into the late conservation phase the system begins to become locked up as vested interests begin to dominate what can happen. Here are some things you might expect to see in the late K phase:
-Subsidies which were once designed to help set up new industries now prop up old industries (which are good at lobbying and influencing political power).
-More effort is put into protecting existing (sunk) investments rather than exploring new ones (think fossil fuels v renewals).
-Increased command-and-control (less and less flexibility).
-A pre-occupation with process (more and more rules, more time and effort devoted to sticking to procedures).
-Novelty being suppressed, with less support for experimentation (think of the government’s approach to research).
-Rising transaction costs in getting things done.
-Increases in ‘efficiency’ being achieved through the removal of apparent redundancies
(and ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions are increasingly the order of the day).

Or, if you want another take on this, consider political economist Mancur Olson’s pathbreaking book, The Rise and Decline of Nations, published in 1982. He argued that a country’s economic stability ultimately leads to decline as it becomes increasingly dominated by organised interest groups, each seeking to advance their interests at the expense of others. It’s a very similar perspective to the complex systems framing.

So, next time you see something that appears to be a ‘don’t look up’ situation, ask yourself if this isn’t just another example of a complex system (eg, society) locking up because vested interests are seeking to perpetuate a status quo in which they benefit.

Maybe David Attenborough could do a doco on it.

Banner image: Don’t look up, don’t speak up, you might upset the status quo.
(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

Get the basics right for National Environmental Standards to ensure truly sustainable development

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Peter Burnett, Australian National University

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers has attracted controversy by proposing to update 30-year-old superannuation laws with a definition of the purpose of superannuation as being to fund a dignified retirement. There is a clear lesson here for other reforms to make policy objectives clear, even when they seem obvious. One important example is Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s Nature Positive Plan.

Plibersek’s department began consulting last week on new National Environmental Standards. She will table these later in the year, along with a bill to replace Australia’s most significant environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

The standards will be the “beating heart” of the reforms. They will set out in some detail just what has to be protected and the circumstances in which development can be approved. It is essential these standards rest on solid foundations, including a clear statement of purpose.

You may be surprised to hear mandatory standards are new territory for environmental laws regulating development. Existing federal and state laws are mostly built around regulatory process and ministerial discretion. Typically, they tell ministers to consider ill-defined principles like “ecologically sustainable development”, but lack any real “bottom line”.

This leads to “black box” decision-making, in which decisions are unpredictable beforehand and opaque afterwards. This lack of transparency does little for the environment, which continues to deteriorate due to increasing pressures from climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and resource extraction.

Tough calls ahead

Plibersek faces some tough calls in developing the standards. If strong and clear, they will protect nature and make it harder to get developments approved. But if the standards lack a clear statement of purpose and carry over rubbery phrases and weak offset requirements, then it will be business as usual, freshly wrapped.

For these new standards, we must get the basics right. One basic is to gather enough environmental information to make properly informed decisions.

The government is acting on this need with its plan to set up an independent environment protection agency (EPA), including a dedicated data division. However, it has yet to put serious money on the table. Making up for lost decades of patchy data gathering will be expensive and time-consuming.

Lack of clarity makes for ineffective law

Another one of the basics is to properly define ecologically sustainable development (ESD) as the foundation of environmental policy. The existing words on ESD in the EPBC Act are hard to divine. They trace their roots to the early 1990s and reflect the state of knowledge, and the compromises, of that era.

In fact, the EPBC Act does not even attempt to define “ecologically sustainable development”. Instead, it requires the environment minister to take into account five “principles of ecologically sustainable development”.

This disaggregation is part of the problem. Among other things, it forces the minister, in deciding whether to approve the clearing of koala habitat, for example, to consider an obscure principle that “improved valuation, pricing and incentive mechanisms should be promoted”.

This is a high-level policy principle advocating “market-based instruments”, such as a carbon price. It does not belong in a decision about clearing native vegetation.

I am now a researcher but in a former life (2007-12) was responsible for the administration of the EPBC Act. I have gone back over several hundred statutory EPBC Act “recommendation reports”. In these reports, environment officials provide formal advice to the minister about whether to approve a development.

I found very few instances where ESD principles made a substantive difference to the advice. It’s not surprising, given the obtuse approach of the legislation to ecologically sustainable development.

How to breathe new life into ESD

That is not to say we should abandon ecologically sustainable development. Properly defined, it can provide an overarching statement as to what environmental laws are designed to achieve and what development can be approved.

In the broad, ecologically sustainable development should mean keeping the environment healthy, so future generations can enjoy the same quality of life as we do. It would follow that development should not harm anything essential to a healthy environment.

It is important that we not simply roll the current principles into the National Environmental Standards without reflection.

One of the principles, the precautionary principle, can stand alone. It’s about risk management, to be applied when environmental knowledge is limited, which is often. It means, in context, that if a development risks serious or irreversible environmental damage, don’t approve it.

With that done, the central intent of ecologically sustainable development can be met by having the standards require that each decision maintain the diversity of life and the integrity of ecosystems affected by development. Ecological advice would be needed on how to do this in each case.

The gist of such a rule is to keep nature in good working order. That means maintaining viable populations of species and the essentials of ecosystems – their composition, structure and function.

The other three ESD principles deal with policy integration, intergenerational equity and market-based instruments. These principles are important but do not belong in the standards. They should be rehoused in a major policy statement, such as an environmental white paper.

It is often said with regulatory reforms such as the Nature Positive Plan that the devil is in the detail. That can be true, but in this case the devil is more in the basics. Get the basics right, and the rest is just detail.

Peter Burnett, Honorary Associate Professor, ANU College of Law, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Banner image: Image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay

Whatever it takes, or just “whatever”? Biodiversity targets post Montreal

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By Peter Burnett

With some ambitious biodiversity targets negotiated in Montreal last December, now it’s time to translate these into action on the domestic front. The good news is that Australia was a leader in setting those ambitious targets. The bad news is the ambition may just be more hollow rhetoric.

Ambition at the 15th CoP

The 15th Conference of the Parties (CoP 15) to the global Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) wound up its long deliberations in Montreal at the end of last year. It adopted a bold set of targets that needed to be met by 2030. While it didn’t receive enormous media attention back here, by all accounts one of the heroes of the hour was Australia’s environment minister Tanya Plibersek, who pushed hard for decisions with plenty of ambition.

After many years of bringing up the rear, it’s heartening indeed to see Australia returning to the leadership role first articulated by Prime Minister Bob Hawke in 1989.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the CBD has form for adopting ambitious targets that nobody feels obliged to meet. Most countries, including Australia, have been long on aspiration and short on perspiration.

Will Tanya Plibersek also prove to be a biodiversity hero back home? I thought I’d go through the four goals and 23 targets adopted in Montreal to see what she’d have to do if she means business.

After all, 2030 is only seven years away and our current national biodiversity strategy is the most vacuous environmental policy I’ve ever seen, so there’s a lot of ground to cover.

Lofty goals and targets aplenty

The official CBD vision is that by 2050 we will be living in harmony with nature. The four goals adopted in Montreal in pursuit of this vision revolve around enhancing and restoring natural ecosystems and halting human-induced extinction. With this done, biodiversity should be used sustainably and the benefits of genetic resources shared equitably with Indigenous peoples. Finally, recognising the lack of effort to date, the fourth goal calls for adequate resources and increased capacity for implementation.

The four goals are in turn supported by 23 targets, grouped under three headings: reducing threats; sustainable use and benefit sharing; and tools for implementation. There’s too much to cover everything here, so I’ll cover what I think are the highlights.

The headlines are a ‘30-by-30’ target for land, freshwater and marine protected areas, and urgent action to reduce extinction risk, on a path to halting human-induced extinction by 2050. These are said to involve bringing biodiversity into spatial planning; preventing over-exploitation of wildlife; reducing new invasive species by 50%; eliminating risks from pollution; and minimising the impact of climate change and disasters.

Sustainable use and benefit sharing is said to require, not just management of wild species and ‘biodiversity friendly’ farming practices, but maintenance of ecosystem services such as ‘regulation of air, water and climate, soil health, [and] pollination’. For good measure, sustainable use is also said to require a significant increase in green and blue urban spaces.

When it comes to implementation, the specifics include getting large and transnational companies to disclose their impacts on biodiversity; halving global food waste; phasing out subsidies harmful to biodiversity; substantially increasing both government spending on national biodiversity strategies and private investment in Nature; payment for ecosystem services and ensuring ‘best-available data’.

What does all this mean domestically (and will Plibersek act)?

Even allowing for the usual mix of flowery language and weasel words, that’s a pretty hefty agenda.

Apart from core biodiversity actions such as increasing protected areas and increasing investment in restoration, pursuing the 2030 targets vigorously would bring biodiversity into a number of non-traditional’ areas for biodiversity policy — urban planning and development, pollution control, waste management, and corporate affairs, to name a few.

Plibersek has already made strong public statements about the 30-by-30 and no more extinctions targets. But can she deliver? And I mean in substance, not just in the fudging or ‘box-ticking’ sense.

For example, one fudge involves creating large reserves in places where there are few vested interests and voters. In that regard, Plibersek has just announced a tripling of the size of the marine reserve around Macquarie Island, creating a marine reserve the size of Germany.

As nice as that is, it makes me a little uneasy.

On the other hand, Plibersek has also shown signs of being a strong environment minister. In the same week she made good on her promise to use water ‘buy-backs’ if necessary, to meet the water savings targets of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. That’s a move that will burn significant political capital.

Real world hurdles

If the minister is serious about the domestic delivery of the Kunming-Montreal 2030 targets, she’ll need to burn a lot more political capital, not just with various stakeholders, but with her own Cabinet colleagues.

Here’s three reasons, for starters.

First, biodiversity restoration is very expensive. The federal environment portfolio was run down by the previous government and competition for new funds will be cut-throat, given major demands in big-spending areas like aged care and defence.

Plibersek is attempting to overcome this with a Nature Repair Markets bill, designed to facilitate private investment in biodiversity. I’m just one of many who can’t see a business case for such investments, beyond the small amounts available from philanthropists and companies seeking to build their social licence. If business doesn’t come to the party, she’ll be back knocking on the Treasurer’s door.

Second, the states control most of the levers for on-ground action. They manage the lion’s share of Australia’s parks and reserves; they also make the planning laws and control most of the on-ground staff.

Traditionally the states oppose Commonwealth involvement in what they see as their backyards; they may be prepared to relent on this, but only at a significant price. That’s another path leading to the Treasurer’s door.

As for bioregional planning, while Plibersek has committed the Commonwealth and even has a ‘launch partner’ in Queensland, the going is likely to get very rough once people realise the constraints that need to be placed on development just to protect the Koala, let alone several thousand other threatened species.

The third reason is that halting threatened species extinctions is probably impossible, given we don’t fully understand the processes involved — the Red Goshawk for example is in serious decline, even though its main population is found in tropical savannah that is subject to relatively few pressures. If it went extinct tomorrow, the major causes might eventually turn out to be impacts that occurred decades ago.

“Whatever it takes” or just “whatever”?

The answer of some previous ministers to CBD targets has, in effect, been “whatever”. Plibersek seems to come more from the “whatever-it-takes” school, in which case she will need to pull some seriously large rabbits out of her political hat.

The alternative, down the track somewhere, will be that she (or her successor) will have to admit that the targets were just too ambitious, just like what occurred internationally with the 2010 CBD targets and the 2020 targets.

Apart from my uneasiness over Macquarie Island, I reckon the minister is showing real signs that she means business. Stay tuned.

Banner image: The official CBD vision is that by 2050 we will be living in harmony with Nature. Unfortunately, when it comes to the cut and thrust of realpolitik, Nature is rarely given a high priority. (Image by Ronny Overhate from Pixabay)

Offsetting lost species is easy – simply find a few new ones!

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By David Salt

Sad about the extinction crisis rolling out around the world? Don’t be, the Australian Government has figured out an excellent way for you to wash away your woes. Simply go out and discover a few new species to fill the void. It’s a well proven technique to grab a few headlines, give the impression the government cares and, best of all, hardly costs a thing.

And here’s the latest proof. This month, an 11-day expedition to discover new species in Australia’s Alpine region has uncovered three new species of spider previously unknown to science! How great is that!

But it gets even better, one of the new spiders is a “ferocious nocturnal mini-hunter that impersonates a tree branch during the day to hide from predators.”

Now, forget the fact that Australia’s alpine region is reeling under multiple assaults of catastrophic wildfires, outbreaks of bark beetles decimating the iconic snow gum and a raft of other disturbances connected to climate change (and we’re not going to even mention the self-inflicted disaster of exploding numbers of wild feral horses destroying our alpine water catchments); the thing to keep in mind here is that we have discovered three new species of spider.

The blitz on biodiversity

The program in which these new species were found is called Bush Blitz. It’s a partnership between the Australian Government through Parks Australia, BHP and Earthwatch Australia. It involves scientists, teachers and citizen scientists heading out into the ‘bush’ to discover new species and spread the word on nature.

Our environment minister was full of praise for the outcomes of this latest adventure.

“The discovery of three new spiders in the Australian alps is fantastic,” she told the media. “Around three-quarters of Australia’s biodiversity is still waiting to be discovered by science. Programs like Bush Blitz are giving us a deeper understanding of Australian habitats so that we can make nature positive decisions for the future.”

Forgive my cynicism, but crowing about the discovery of three new spiders from a region where habitats are in steep (and likely mortal) decline without even acknowledging the massive challenges facing this area is disingenuous if not outright hypocritical.

Please minister, spell out how this deeper understanding you’ve acquired is helping you make ‘nature positive’ decisions? Because, so far, as demonstrated by our collapsing biodiversity, Australian governments of all stripes are only making ‘nature negative’ decisions when it comes to balancing economic development against biodiversity conservation.

Nature negative

Of course, it’s not only Australia letting down Mother Nature here. It’s a global problem.

Most nations around the world eagerly signed up to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) way back in 1992 (at the Rio Earth Summit), pledging to slow down and reverse rates of biodiversity decline. Ten years later (at the next Earth Summit in Johannesburg), these same nations (of which Australia is one) confirmed their commitment and even signed up to a target of seeing measurable improvement at a national and regional level by the year 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity.

2010 comes around and all signatories to the CBD were found to have comprehensively failed at meeting any of the targets they had signed up to. What’s more, the Global Biodiversity Outlook released in 2010 revealed rates of biodiversity loss were accelerating.

Consequently, a new list of more nuanced targets (the Aichi Targets) were drawn up for 2020 and (no surprises here) these too were comprehensively missed by all signatory nations.

A new list of CBD targets was released a few days before Xmas. Maybe you missed the announcement. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, as it’s called, includes four goals and 23 targets to be achieved by 2030. To tell you the truth, I don’t know anyone who holds out hope that these targets mean anything anymore. Default on them once is bad enough, twice is chronic and who cares what happens after that.

The line in the sand

I remember writing about 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, back in 2007. Everyone was calling it a line in the sand in the fight for biodiversity. I thought Australia was taking it seriously. I thought there would at the very least be some successful stories where some nations managed to demonstrate it was possible to protect biodiversity while sustaining economic prosperity.

But I was wrong; comprehensively wrong. Everyone failed everywhere.

But what really stuck in my craw when the score cards came in for the Global Biodiversity Outlook in 2010, was Australia’s response? Did we acknowledge our failure and promise to redouble our efforts (and resource allocation) to do better in future? No, we set up a new national program to find new undescribed species. Can you guess what it was called? That’s right, Bush Blitz!

It was only supposed to run for three years but the political imperative of having something positive to announce in the face of unremitting failure (and given the ongoing decimation of resources for biodiversity conservation), there was strong reasons to keep in going.

And so it is, in the midst of an unravelling biodiversity catastrophe, we’re still seeing announcements from the minister on how wonderful it is that, thanks to Bush Blitz (and its wonderful partner, BHP) we’re still able to discover fascinating and quirky new species. The fact that these new species probably haven’t got much time left on this planet is by the by.

Cheap as chips

And discovering new species is so much cheaper than stopping the development of new fossil fuel projects or passing effective regulation on land clearing. Paying the expenses of a few taxonomists and a group of teachers for a week’s camping out in the bush to find new species is as cheap as chips by comparison.

Indeed, as a colleague pointed out to me when I shared this story with him, it could be even cheaper. He’s just identified 22 new species of mite just by going back through the collection at the Australian National Insect Collection and uncovering evidence there’s a greater diversity in existing records than previously appreciated. How much is his work costing the tax payer? Nothing, he’s retired and the work is voluntary!

So, next time you feel a planet-sized hole opening up in your soul as you hear the latest extinction reports; think of Bush Blitz*, they’ve just discovered three new spiders in the alps.

*I really need to underline that there’s nothing wrong with Bush Blitz itself or the quest to discover new species. This is important and worthy work. It just shouldn’t be a cloak for turning your back on the growing plight faced by so many species and ecosystems.

Banner image: Extinction crisis? What extinction crisis. Nothing to see here.
(Image by Ronny Overhate from Pixabay)

From moonlight jewels to common browns: what do butterfly accounts say about biodiversity conservation?

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By Suzi Bond and Michael Vardon*

Biodiversity is important and butterflies are beautiful. But Australia’s biodiversity is in steep decline. Maybe environmental accounts can help here, and butterflies are a great example demonstrating how.

We have around 450 butterfly species in Australia, almost all of them native. Seven butterflies are listed as under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act), although 19 more are thought to be eligible for listing. While some species are commonly observed and adaptable – such as the common brown – others, such as the moonlight jewel, are not. Accounting for these differences begins with understanding.

Moonlight jewels are ‘specialist’ butterflies. Specialists are more likely to be found intermittently, in few places, have particular habitat requirements, a limited number of food plants and are sometimes reliant on attendant ants. Specialists are not necessarily endangered but they are less common, more vulnerable to extinction and more likely to be an indicator of biodiversity conservation success and the state of the environment than ‘generalists’ like the common brown.

How do we know this? Through painstaking research, expert knowledge and long-term monitoring by trained volunteers, all summarised in biodiversity accounts for butterflies for the Australian Capital Territory. For other types of animals, for example birds and mammals, we have much research and knowledge but very little monitoring and no accounts, just a five-yearly State of the Environment Report with a story of woe.

To have any chance of successfully implementing the “Nature Positive Plan” announced by the Commonwealth Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last December, then we are going to need more monitoring and reporting. This will be especially important for the planned “Nature Repair Markets”.

Biodiversity accounting

Biodiversity accounting provides a framework for integrating environmental and economic information. This accounting is part of the United Nation’s System of Environmental Economic Accounting, which has in theory been adopted by Australia’s governments, but has so far been under-resourced and provided underwhelming results.

Few countries have produced biodiversity accounts, partly a function of the newness of the accounts (the UN only adopted the SEEA Ecosystem Accounting in 2021) but also because of a lack of data. Without data you cannot make accounts. Because of this, the biodiversity accounts to date have used what data are available, which is on endangered species, rather than what is needed. Which means tallying the number of endangered species and putting this into a table. This does not tell you anything that you don’t already know. What we need to know is how, why, when and where things are changing. This requires monitoring and expert knowledge.

You would think that endangered species would be regularly monitored, and conservation actions recorded to figure out which conservation measures were giving the biggest conservation bang for the very limited conservation bucks. Sadly, this has not happened, as found in the Samuel Review.

Professor Graeme Samuel saw the potential for accounting, recommending accounts be produced and now the government has committed to their preparation in the Nature Positive Plan to “help us value nature”. The plan also commits to the “Better Use of Environment Data”. But it doesn’t commit to gathering more data: the focus is on artificial intelligence and remote sensing. Unfortunately, we cannot spot and identify butterflies from outer space, so we will have to keep the boots on the ground.

Butterfly values

Common browns, moonlight jewels, scarlet jezebels and golden ant-blues all conjure notions of value. They are of course all beautiful. Beyond this, they each occupy a different ecological niche and have different traits that make them more or less vulnerable to extinction.

As for value, we have already introduced the common brown and moonlight jewel.

The scarlet jezebel occasionally flies to the Australia Capital Territory and when it does it can be found in different places, but it does not breed. A heart breaker, but occurrence of this species probably tells us little about the state of the environment. This contrasts starkly with the golden ant-blue which is resident and breeds in the region, found only in a few places and is suspected to eat ant larvae. Like the moonlight jewel, a real treasure.

These butterflies and other breeding specialists can tell you a lot about the health of the ecosystems. This is because butterflies are excellent indicators of ecological condition as they respond quickly to change, are short lived, and many are specialists. They are also relatively easy to identify.

What about the economics?

If we follow Economics 101, the scarcer the commodity, the more valuable they become. Bad news for common browns. Worse, it would be possible for a specialist species like the moonlight jewel to increase in economic value due to declining abundance and listing as endangered. Not quite the outcome we want from biodiversity markets.

And how would we value the Bogong moth? This species is of great cultural significant to First Nations peoples. Once vast numbers flew by Canberra and the lights of Parliament House had to be switched off so as not to interfere with their migration to the Snowy Mountains. Their numbers crashed, but are beginning to recover, although no-one is sure why. They are culturally important and are internationally listed as endangered by the IUCN Red List, but not under Australian law. 

Accounting and accountability

For the Nature Positive Plan to work and for us to build a capacity to keep our precious species, we need to have information and hold governments accountable. Ecosystem accounting provides the numbers, but for accounting to be possible it needs biodiversity monitoring. At present we do not have this for most species, and the endangered species lists highlight our failure to protect biodiversity and are a poor reflection of value.

If we are to be ‘nature positive’ then we need accounts to reflect the different values and needs of common browns, moonlight jewels, scarlet jezebels and golden ant-blues and all of the other species that are not on the endangered species list, so that they stay off the list, and the success of any conservation policy or plan can be judged.

Banner image: The narcissus jewel (Hypochrysops narcissus), a thing of beauty currently sitting outside our economic values system. (Image by Suzi Bond.)

*Dr Suzi Bond works at the Australian Bureau of Statistics where she is a specialist in biodiversity accounting, and is also an honorary member of the Australian National Insect Collection at CSIRO, an honorary senior lecturer at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU, and a butterfly moderator for citizen science platforms Canberra Nature Map and Butterflies Australia. Suzi published the first field guide to the butterflies of the ACT in 2016, was a co-author on the first book published on ACT moths in 2022 and leads an ongoing butterfly monitoring project in collaboration with citizen scientists.

*Michael Vardon is the Associate Professor of Environmental Accounting at the Fenner School of Environment and Society (Australian National University). He has assisted more than 30 countries with development and implementation of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting and is the former Director of the Centre of Environment and Energy Statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics. He has been an advisor to the World Bank and United Nations on accounting https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/vardon-mj

The golden ant-blue butterfly (Acrodipsas aurata) is resident and breeds in the Canberra region, found only in a few places and is suspected to eat ant larvae. (Image by Suzi Bond.)

Nature Repair Market bill may repair the environment, but is it the Budget that will need repair?

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By Peter Burnett

Environment minister Tanya Plibersek’s draft Nature Repair Market bill, currently out for public comment, appears to form part of a ‘build it and they will come’ strategy on nature repair.

Right from her first domestic speech as Minister last July, Plibersek has said consistently that the environment is in a bad way and getting worse. And — citing an estimate of more than $1 billion a year to restore landscapes and prevent further degradation— that the cost of repair is beyond the capacity of governments alone.

Plibersek believes the answer lies in finding industry and philanthropic partners. She says that markets can put a value on improvements in biodiversity, enabling landholders to be paid for their services to nature and allowing businesses, among others, to invest in the biodiversity credits that landholders would produce.

The Nature Repair Market bill certainly aligns with this framing, but I don’t think the investors will come, at least not without inducements.

Let me explain.

Nature Repair Market Bill

The bill itself is very similar to the Agricultural Biodiversity Stewardship Bill introduced by then-Agriculture minister David Littleproud before last year’s election. It addresses what can be regarded as the five foundations of efficient and effective markets in nature:

  • standards, to guarantee that any credit given for repairing nature delivers genuine ‘additionality’ — ie, that nature really is enhanced by the action concerned and that the ‘benefit’ produced wouldn’t have happened without the action
  • methodologies, to allow experts on a Nature Repair Market Committee, including conservation biologists and ecologists, to spell out exactly what must be done to enhance nature in particular cases, whether by preparing the soil in a certain way, planting native species in a particular mix, or controlling for particular pests
  • certification by a Regulator, to ensure that repair projects are following the methodologies
  • implementation and compliance, to ensure the repair projects deliver the intended additionality in a measurable way
  • good governance, to ensure that all aspects of the scheme comply with the standards and are seen to be doing so; this requires strict role separation between minister the methodology experts and the regulator, as well as full transparency, so that market participants can see that the elements that give the credits their value are present at all times.

But the bill needs strengthening if it is to lay these five foundations in full. In particular, it comes with some ‘mutant DNA’ inherited from one of its forbears, the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011. This DNA was injected by the Abbott government in 2014 and blurs some of the boundaries between the policy role of the minister and the independent expert role of the Nature Repair Market Committee.

The bill also needs more transparency. The underlying principle should be that everything the Committee does should be publicly available, with a few narrow exceptions such as confidentiality while methods are under deliberation.

No doubt the government will make some changes itself to reflect its recent in-principle acceptance of the recommendations of the recent Chubb Review into the integrity of carbon credits, but the underlying principle is that integrity must not only be achieved but seen to be achieved. Anything less rests on a slippery slope towards greenwashing and impaired value.

Then there is the task, once the bill becomes law, of getting a swag of methods approved. This will be much harder for biodiversity than for carbon: a tonne of carbon is a tonne of carbon, but a unit of biodiversity has dimensions in structure, composition, geography and even history, and so may need to be defined in ways specific to a bioregion, ecosystem or area.

Take for example a site that has undergone pasture improvement with the application of fertiliser over time. This site will be more difficult to restore to its original condition than a similar unfertilised site, and sowing seeds and planting native trees on both sites will lead to different biodiversity outcomes.

Come hither, philanthropists, investors, one and all …

At the end of the day though, the biggest challenge is not building the scheme, but getting investors to come.

Philanthropy in Australia is limited, while the business case for companies to invest in biodiversity to build social licence is also very limited. And companies that invest in biodiversity certificates to deliver offsets are compensating for losses they are causing elsewhere — so overall, they deliver no additionality.

I think the government is wedged. If the investors do not come, it could look at some form of compulsion, such as a development levy with an exemption for companies that purchase biodiversity certificates. Any measure of this sort would be political poison without an election mandate.

Alternatively, the government could do what other governments have done over the years — fudge their way through by failing to collect comprehensive data and funding small tree planting programs to apply a veneer of greenwash. Apart from the policy failure this represents, I think Plibersek has already nailed her ‘no fudging’ colours to the mast.

The final option is for the government to stump up a billion or so each year to buy certificates itself. A billion against the Budget as a whole is not much, but a billion from the much smaller pile of ‘new money’ that the government puts on the table each year is a big slice.

Any large biodiversity certificate purchasing program the government did consider would likely come at the expense of either another portfolio or the Budget bottom line, because the environment portfolio was so run down by successive Coalition governments. It would represent an embarrassing, though survivable, retreat from ‘build it and they will come’.

Keep an eye on the coming May Budget for a response to the wedge. Or a cupped hand to the ear for the sound of raised voices emanating from a certain room deep in a well- known Hill in Canberra.

Banner image: Tree plantings and shelterbelts on agricultural land near Canberra. Defining what a biodiversity unit consists of is only part of the challenge in establishing a market for nature repair. (Image by David Salt)

New ‘Big Agenda’ for Nature faces many hurdles

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By Peter Burnett

This is a version of an article published on 12 December 2022 in The Conversation; it contains some additional material.

The Albanese Government’s ‘Nature Positive Plan’ reform package last week, announced by Environment minister Tanya Plibersek last week, is a much-anticipated response to Professor Graeme Samuel’s 2020 Review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. It will be a major plank in the Albanese government’s 2023 agenda.

The plan is packed with policy announcements, most of which stick close to Samuel’s recommendations. Major stakeholders have welcomed the package, none more so than Samuel himself, who expressed ‘complete elation and unqualified admiration and respect’ for Plibersek.

The heart of the plan is a bold decision to drop the current ‘box-ticking’ approach to development approval. Instead, decisions must deliver environmental outcomes that reflect new national environmental standards.

As Plibersek puts it, the government now has a ‘big agenda’ supporting a vision of ‘net zero and nature positive by 2050’.

Dauntingly for her, the path of this big agenda stretches far over the political horizon and is littered with hurdles.

Here are ten hurdles the minister will have to jump, just for starters.

1. Climate trigger

The Greens and several cross-benchers have already criticised the absence of a ‘climate trigger’ in the reforms. This would expose large developments to having their carbon emissions limited as a condition of approval. Developments might even be refused for excessive emissions.

The government argues that regulation should not duplicate other measures, especially the safeguard mechanism, which already limits emissions from major facilities. Fair point, but so is the concern that Australia’s primary environmental law, designed to protect matters of national environmental significance, does not deal with the most significant environmental threat of all.

There is scope for a limited climate trigger, to fill gaps in climate regulation, so perhaps a deal will be done. Large-scale land clearing is climate-significant, but not regulated for carbon impacts. Similarly, Australia does not regulate large developments for their ‘scope 3’ downstream domestic emissions (eg, domestic gas production). Now that we have a Climate Change Act and an emissions budget, there is a case for a reserve power not to approve projects on the ground that there is no room left in this budget to accommodate these omissions.

2. Weasel words in the standards

Setting standards for nature-based decisions is cutting edge; the idea is to spell out exactly what a healthy environment looks like, and how much environment we need.

Samuel worked with stakeholders to include some draft standards in his report; in doing so he rightly counseled against ‘weasel words’ — words that rob the standards of their punch, like ‘as far as possible’.

But one person’s weasel words are ‘flexibility’ to another. It won’t be easy keeping the devil out of the detail.

3. Sell standards to states

To eliminate duplication, a major bugbear for business, the reforms provide for states to be accredited to take decisions that are otherwise for federal government, provided they meet the standards. If the states agree to meet the standards for federal decisions, environment groups may push to apply the standards to state-only decisions. States will resist being driven by federal policy.

4. Get into bed with states on regional planning

Regional environmental plans sit alongside national standards at the heart of the reforms. Standards will define what needs to be protected, while plans will say where protected values lie and how much protection is needed, on a traffic light system: red for irreplaceable, orange for values that can be offset, and green for minimal restrictions.

Federation makes it almost essential that the federal government partner with states in preparing regional plans. Plans could be based on Australia’s 56 Natural Resource Management regions or 89 bioregions.

Plibersek has moved early, signing an MOU with Queensland to work together on regional plans on the day she announced the reforms. Even so, this is a long and winding road — time-consuming, expensive and politically challenging.

5. Forest deal

Regional forestry agreements (RFAs) are exempt from the EPBC Act, though both have been criticised for similar failings: inadequate conditions on development, inadequately enforced.

The Rudd government dismissed a similar recommendation pre-emptively. Labor still remembers the 1995 ‘siege of Canberra’, in which logging trucks encircled Parliament House.

One can almost feel the rumble of logging trucks in the cautious language of the plan to ‘begin a process of applying’ the new national standards to RFAs, in consultation with stakeholders.

6. Respect Indigenous views and values

Professor Samuel was rightly passionate about bringing true respect for Indigenous views and values into the EPBC Act. The challenges however do not stop with respectful engagement.

The Rudd Government endorsed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) and a Parliamentary Committee is considering its domestic application. A key UNDRIP principle is free, prior and informed consent. If we listen respectfully to Traditional Owners, but are told ‘no’, will this translate this into a veto?

7. Kick-start nature repair markets

The Albanese government has placed significant emphasis on the environmental role of the private sector, through ‘nature repair markets’. The plan promises to establish the functional components of these markets.

The government says it cannot foot the repair bill alone. That may be so, but the private sector is motivated by profit, supplemented at the margins by social licence and philanthropy. The government may build a market but with these motivations only a few will come. Often, there just is no business case for voluntary action.

It would be different if we put a price on biodiversity, as we briefly put a price on carbon but, thanks to Tony Abbott, that idea is ‘dead, buried and cremated’.

8. Offsets

Offsets seek to compensate Nature for approved loss, eg clearing habitat for construction. The compensation should be ‘like for like’, eg growing new koala habitat to substitute for cleared habitat. The bottom line is that if offsetting is not possible, nor is the development.

The plan will replace this last restriction with a rule that if offsetting is not possible, pay cash and proceed. Government will spend it on something else, applying a ‘better off overall test’ (BOOT).

If we run out of koala offsets, would feral cat reduction, which benefits quolls but not koalas, leave nature better off? Does the offset need to save two quolls for every koala lost, or is one for one enough? Tricky.

This policy would fit better with a policy goal of conserving whole ecosystems rather than individual species.

9. Build not just trust but support

Samuel found that all sides had lost trust in the EPBC Act. Some things are easily fixed. Full transparency, clear policies, reasons for decision given routinely.

Ironically, things that restore trust will tend to box decision-makers in, just as magicians would find it much harder to perform their tricks if we could see into the magic box.

10. Buckets of money

Of the many hurdles confronting Plibersek in the near term, the highest sits in her own Cabinet room, where she will seek funding in the 2023 Budget. One recent study found that federal and state spending, on threatened species alone, was 15% of what was needed.

Whatever funding is announced, history suggests it will fall several zeros short of what Nature needs.

Endurance race

The biggest problem with the EPBC Act has not been what sits within it, but what does not sit behind it. It has been chronically under-resourced and under-implemented. EPBC is a story of unrealised vision.

We cannot afford a repeat of the EBPC story — better to dig deep and make the Nature Positive Plan work.

Banner image: Image by Christel SAGNIEZ from Pixabay

The fifth and final transformation: Restoring trust in decision-making

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By Peter Burnett

This is the last of my series of blogs arguing there are five transformations implicit in Professor Graeme Samuel’s review of national environmental law,* to which the Albanese government will respond in early December.

The first four transformations were to:

The fifth and final transformation is to restore trust in environmental decision-making.

Trust makes the world go round

It’s true, trust makes the world go round.

Democracies in particular depend upon it. Just look at the polarisation, indeed tribalisation, that has occurred in the United States, culminating in the insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington on 6 January 2021.

Trust in government has declined in Australia as well. According to the respected Scanlan Research Institute, trust in the federal government (measured as people saying that they trusted the government at least most of the time) reached a low of 27% in 2013.

This recovered dramatically with the pandemic — trust in the federal government had more than doubled by 2020, to 55% — but it started to drop back again last year (48%). Even if trust were to stabilise around 50%, which seems unlikely, that’s not a great result.

There is no trust in our nation’s most important environmental law

Against that backdrop, it is not surprising that one of the main findings of the Samuel Review of the EPBC Act was that it was not trusted, either by business, who are regulated by the Act, nor by the wider community, who rely on it to protect the environment.

Business views the EPBC Act as cumbersome, involving duplication between federal and state systems; slow decision-making; and as facilitating legal challenges intended to delay projects and drive up costs for business (sometimes called ‘lawfare’).

Businesses are concerned in particular by long delays — for business, time is money.

A major project, such as a mine, can take nearly 3 years to assess and approve. For a business, this is far too long. Most people would acknowledge this.

The community on the other hand, are frustrated by the Act, viewing their participation as limited and process-oriented.

Often, people cannot see how the various environmental, economic and social considerations are weighed by the environment minister and are left with a general perception that outcomes are unclear, if not unsatisfactory. Compliance and enforcement are seen (rightly) as weak and environmental monitoring ineffective (also, clearly correct).

According to Professor Samuel, environmental groups often bring legal challenges because of these frustrations. They have the sense that decisions are out of step with community values, but do not have sufficient ready access to information to know exactly why.

Samuel’s recipe for restoring trust

Happily, Samuel had a recipe for restoring trust in the EPBC Act (or its successor).

His most important recommendation supporting trust is the fundamental shift from process-based decision-making to outcome-based decisions, applying the new national environmental standards (which I discussed as the first transformation). Standards would be supported by regional plans and stronger institutions, including information systems and compliance regimes.

If we had a set of environmental standards spelling out just what we need to protect and conserve, and knew that the environment minister was a) required by law to take decisions reflecting these standards and b) properly supported in taking those decisions by well-designed and well-funded systems, we could all sleep more easily.

But it’s not just the results that matter, but how we get there as well.

Professor Samuel’s other recommendations for restoring trust relate to efficiency, transparency and accountability in decision-making processes. He proposed:

  • Giving the community much more access to information, including Plain English guidance; opportunities to participate; access to information being considered; and routinely-given reasons for decisions.
  • A new and more influential set of statutory advisory committees, including an new and overarching Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) Committee to provide transparent policy advice to the minister on overall progress towards the outcomes set out in the standards
  • Adding ‘limited merits review’ (explained below) of development approvals to the existing broad standing of community groups to seek ‘judicial review’ in the courts (also explained below).

Judicial review, which is currently available for EPBC decisions, is the right to ask a court to overturn a decision, but only on the legalities — eg, that the minister failed to follow due process by not consulting everyone affected — and not on the merits, which concern the pros and cons of the final decision itself.

Merits review, often sought through a tribunal rather than a court, but not currently available for the most significant EPBC decisions, would get down to the pros and cons of the decision. Samuel’s ‘limits’ to this kind of review include confining merits review to decisions that have material environmental impacts and good prospects of success.

This is designed minimise review of minor decisions, or those that lack merit and promote delay.

For constitutional reasons Samuel could not simply recommend that the Parliament block all delaying actions by prohibiting access to the courts.

Will the cooks follow the recipe?

You have no doubt guessed from my description of Professor Samuel’s recommendations as involving ‘five transformations’ that I think his approach is ground-breaking.

As he himself hinted, the switch to a standards-based decision-making alone is transformative.

In this context, his further recommendations for increased transparency and accountability are icing on the reform cake. That’s not to say they are not important or long overdue.

But will the government go down this track? We’ll know very soon.

I think they will go for the general approach. However, the devil will be in the detail, especially in the detail of the standards.

The Morrison government pretended to start down the Samuel track by proposing an initial set of draft standards that simply repeated various process-based requirements from the existing EPBC Act. These ‘standards’ added nothing to existing rules and so would not have changed decisions. It was an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes.

If the standards-based approach is to work, it is essential that they spell out, in unqualified detail, exactly how much of the ‘matters of national environmental significance’ we must protect and conserve, if we are to maintain quality of life for ourselves and for future generations.

This will not be easy to do — hopefully our ecologists are up for the job!

We’ll also need some good lawyers — it is essential that the standards contain no ‘weasel words’, as Professor Samuel likes to say.

At the end of the day, people will only trust environmental laws that truly protect and conserve the environment. Transparency and accountability are important, but cannot carry the day by themselves.

Banner image: Trust makes the world go round. If the government wants trust restored in its national environmental law it’ll need to ensure it is efficient, transparent, accountable, but most importantly, that it delivers real outcomes. (Image by Tahlia Stanton from Pixabay)

Laying new foundations for environmental decisions: the fourth transformation

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By Peter Burnett

My recent blogs have argued that there are five transformations implicit in Professor Graeme Samuel’s review of national environmental law*, to which the Albanese government will respond in early December.

The first three transformations were to:

  • pursue pre-defined environmental outcomes rather than simply following legal process
  • take Indigenous knowledge and values seriously
  • simplify the processes of environmental regulation and harmonise regulatory outcomes between federal and state systems.

This blog concerns the fourth transformation, which is to lay new foundations for quality environmental decisions.

Money is the root of all … problems

One of the biggest problems with the EPBC Act is that it is a ‘jumbo jet’ of an Act run on a budget fit for a propeller-driven plane.

It has been like that during most of the 20+ years in which the Act has operated.

The original problem was that the environment minister behind the Act, Senator Robert Hill, pulled off something of a coup in getting the EPBC reforms through Cabinet and the Parliament. Many of Hill’s colleagues would likely have opposed the Bill if they had fully understood its scope and power.

As good as he was, Hill was not a magician and scoring a bucket of ‘new’ money to operate a new law with a much wider scope than the laws it replaced was a bridge too far.

The EPBC Act has had some particular financial ups and downs.

In 2007, after the Auditor-General criticised the poor implementation of provisions for protecting and conserving threatened species, the Act received a healthy injection of funds.

On the other hand, over the period 2013-2022, and especially following the notorious Abbott/Hockey ‘horror budget’ of 2014, resources for the environment portfolio, including the EPBC Act, were cut by around 40%.

The new Albanese government has just put some money back in, but it has started from a very low base. The Act remains significantly under-resourced.

Every Act has its consequences (or not) …

The consequences of this long-term underfunding, compounded in some cases by lack of political vision or will, are that many of the foundations of the current system of protection and conservation provided for by the EPBC Act are either significantly under-done, or not done at all.

Three of the most important identified by Professor Samuel were environmental information, compliance and enforcement, and environmental planning.

He described the collection of data and information as ‘fragmented and disparate’, while compliance and enforcement had been ‘limited’ and lacked transparency.

As for planning, while the Act includes a full suite of planning provisions, Samuel found that these provisions had yielded only piecemeal approaches and ad hoc efforts at coordinated national action.

For example, ‘bioregional plans’ prepared for four of Australia’s marine bioregions have never been updated, while no bioregional plans had been prepared for any of Australia’s 89 terrestrial bioregions.

In many respects such ‘under-institutionalisation’ is a perennial problem in Australian environmental policy. So perennial in fact that (ANU) environmental policy expert Professor Steve Dovers even had a name for it: ‘policy ad-hocery and amnesia’.

Of course, this doesn’t excuse such failures.

Samuel’s fix

As we’ve seen, Professor Samuel’s proposed fix is built around the new concept of national environmental standards.

If we are to avoid the ‘on paper, but not in practice’ problem of the current law, the standards will need to be complemented by a range of supporting institutions. Samuel made a number of recommendations in that vein, including:

  • Extending the concept of national standards beyond on-ground environmental outcomes, to deal with requirements for transparent processes and robust decision-making, including environmental data and information; and compliance and enforcement
  • A national data supply chain, managed by a supply chain ‘Custodian’, guided by a strategic plan and supported by adequate investment in new information systems
  • Independent compliance powers for the environment department, with increased transparency and accountability; and adequate resources
  • A new set of planning tools which emphasise strategic approaches at national and regional levels

To go beyond regulation and encourage investment in restoration, Samuel also recommended establishing a central Trust to coordinate public and private investment. While he didn’t mention money every time he made a recommendation, there is a clear sense in his report that none of this will work unless properly funded.

Over to you Tanya

Although environment minister, Tanya Plibersek has spoken positively about implementing the Samuel reforms, there remains a significant risk that this government will repeat the mistake of the Howard government by enacting laws that are strong on paper but weak in practice.

Putting a stop to the long-term decline of Australia’s environment will take a political courage, persistence and (last but not least) major investment.

It is notoriously difficult to obtain ‘new’ money in a government Budget. The lion’s share of expenditure is already baked-in and there are many competing commands for any remaining Budget ‘headroom’.

Plibersek is about to announce the government’s design for the next generation of environmental regulation. Even if it looks very different to the EPBC Jumbo, I’m guessing the design will still be in same ‘heavy lift’ Jumbo Jet class.

But will there be provision to fill the fuel-tanks and a hire a full complement of crew?

* Independent Review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, 2020.

Banner image: Australia’s national environmental law was sold to us as a ‘jumbo jet’ set of protections… but then they only provided enough funds to run a propellor driven plane.
(Image by Anja from Pixabay)

It’s ‘business as usual’, but at least there actually is plenty of business

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Senate Budget Estimates on the environment, November 2022

By Peter Burnett

Australia’s environment department has been run down over the past decade. I’m pleased to see from this month’s Estimate hearings that it’s getting extra resources. What does that mean? Let’s consider two areas, biodiversity and Indigenous heritage.

2022 is unusual in that the new Labor government has handed down a Budget, even though the previous government had already tabled the ‘normal’ Budget in March. The main objective for this extra October Budget was to fund election commitments and to de-fund programs from the former government that Labor did not support. Larger reforms have been held off until the next (normal) Budget, due in May 2023.

Some funding was redirected from old to new programs. For example, most of the money from the old ‘single touch approvals’ program, under which the former government wanted to accredit States to take environmental approval decisions under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, was redirected into reforming the Act itself, in response to the Samuel Review of 2020.

The environment department has been run down over the last ten years. It has lost core capabilities as well as programs. The budget put $275 million over four years into strengthening corporate areas of the department.

This sounds like dull stuff, but it bodes well for building capacity to get things done. However, it’s impossible to tell how close this amount goes to enabling the department to do things it needs to be doing, like putting boots on the ground to deliver programs.

Environment is such a big agency now — covering climate and energy as well as biodiversity, water and heritage, that it’s impossible to cover everything here. So, I’ve picked just two topics of interest for a closer look, biodiversity and Indigenous heritage.

Endangered possum ‘on notice’

To illustrate just how low is the base from which the government is starting in this area, take Senator Rice’s attempts over 9 successive years to pin the government down on a credible recovery plan for the critically endangered Leadbeater’s Possum, the faunal emblem of Victoria.

Senator Rice pointed out that a 1997 recovery plan for the possum had expired in 2002 — 20 years ago. A draft replacement plan had not been sent to the Victorian government for comment until 2019; moreover, it remains a draft.

Officials assured Senator Rice that things had changed under the new government and that ‘we’ve really been asked to give this priority’. Unfortunately, however, the Threatened Species Scientific Committee had identified the need for further research as to exclusion zones for possums in forestry areas.

Apparently, funding had been identified and ‘we’d expect that the research would start quickly’. How long would it take? ‘We will be able to take on notice the exact timeframe’ said the official. ‘I’m not sure how long it needs to …’

Aargh! Leadbeater’s possum may be a particularly bad example, but it is by no means unique. Things are crook.

Modelling pathways to goals?

David Pocock is a new Independent Senator for the ACT. He displayed both a strong interest in environment and a good policy brain by asking about two government commitments, ‘no more species extinctions’ and its ‘30-by-30’ commitment (to have 30% of land and sea in reserve by 2030).

Had the government done its homework? Specifically, could the government deliver on these commitments with the $56 million p.a. it had allocated to threatened species, and the zero new funding it had allocated to the National Reserve System?

Senator Pocock pointed out that a recent academic study suggested that it would cost $1.7 billion p.a. just to save threatened species.

And another senator asked, had the government modelled the path to these goals?

‘Have you modelled this?’ has become something of an easy (but often valid) question in Estimates, asked mostly in relation to economic policies, but now it is being asked of environment policy.

For the record, no, the department had not modelled these outcomes.

The threatened species money was an election commitment — ie, the Labor Party came up with the amount while in Opposition, though we don’t know how, and Senators did not ask. So we remain in the dark about why $56 million p.a. is the right number.

On the 30 by 30, officials told the Committee that existing proposed reserves, including Indigenous Protected Areas, would get the government to 27%, leaving a 3% gap, unfunded but possibly met through no-cost additions, including Defence land (which, counter-intuitively, is often of high biodiversity quality) and State-owned land that they might be persuaded to place in reserve (presumably at their own cost of maintaining).

While modelling may not always be useful, we do need to move away from this kind of ‘a-wing-and-a-prayer’ approach.

Both major parties tend to announce modest yet very specific amounts for environment programs. The specificity implies that budgets have been carefully costed, while the modesty of the amounts involved often points to the opposite — that the calculations involved were probably based on a political calculus (‘this sounds credible’) rather than technical assessment of the costs of reaching the policy objective.

To be fair to the government, a target such as preventing threatened species loss can be delivered through multi-pronged approaches, including tighter regulation of development. Direct on-ground spending may be only one string to their bow.

The point remains however, that serious environmental policy needs to be taken more seriously than it is, and grounded in detailed strategy, fully and transparently costed.

Indigenous heritage

In 2020 Rio Tinto demolished, with state heritage approval, a 46,000-year-old Indigenous site at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara. The site was probably of global cultural and archaeological significance. The outrage at this destruction was global; it was made worse by the fact that national safety net mechanisms to protect Indigenous heritage failed to trigger.

As part of its response to the resulting crisis, the previous government began a process of co-designing a new national First Nations’ cultural heritage regime.

The new government has allocated $14.7 million over the next four years to continue this process. Officials described an ongoing process of detailed consultation:

“It’s very much our intent to talk not only with bodies and representative bodies but actually with communities and community members in order to get feedback about, if we are going to have a structure or approach which potentially gives First Nations people and traditional owners a much greater role in decision-making about heritage protection, understanding their concerns and approaches around all of that.”

All of this is welcome, though decades overdue and prompted by an unmitigated and avoidable disaster.

As an indication of the long-term neglect of this area, one of the national safety net laws, enacted in 1984, was intended to be interim, and included that word in its title to make this clear. The Act was amended several years later — not to insert a permanent mechanism but to remove the word ‘interim’!

Also welcome is the attention the government is giving to include sites with significant Indigenous heritage values in its World Heritage program, with nominations under development for sites in Cape York, the West Kimberley, and Murujuga (also known as the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara, the site of over a million ancient petroglyphs of unknown origin.)

A small down payment

The Indigenous heritage processes in train are a rare example of good news in the environment portfolio.

On biodiversity, I think we could say that the new government has made a small down payment, but on a veritable mountain of environmental debt. The repayment schedule will be taxing and stretches out into the far distant future …

As to the rest, it’s a case of ‘watch this space’. Officials told Senators that the government was on track to announce its promised overhaul of national environmental law by Christmas and to legislate next year.

Here’s hoping the reforms are bold and innovative, because as Prince (now King) Charles has pointed out, we’ve been drinking in the Last Chance Saloon.

Banner image: “So, I see the Australian Government is back in the business of resourcing environmental management. I’ll believe it when I see the outcomes.” (Image by David Salt)