Tag: Convention on Biological Diversity

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

By all accounts, can we manage to save biodiversity?

Environmental accounting could be the key to saving nature

By Peter Burnett

It’s 2020, and the world is again discussing targets to save biodiversity. The approach hasn’t been very successful in the past and many are throwing up their hands in despair in the face of a rapidly unfolding biodiversity catastrophe. Could environmental accounting be the missing link in our thinking?

In an earlier blog I described the short history of environmental accounting and highlighted its potential. This was more than just extending the traditional (economic) national accounts to cover the environment, which was the original idea (especially to make GDP a much more accurate measure of economic performance by subtracting losses of ‘natural capital’). Governments could also use environmental accounting to manage the environment.

In another blog I wrote about key meetings to be held this year in Kunming, China, under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CoP 15, CBD, and preparatory meetings). The aim is to develop a new 10-year international plan to replace the Aichi targets that have operated for the last decade.

Given the significance of 2020 internationally (and our extreme bushfires in Australia putting nature at the top of the agenda domestically) it seemed to me like a good time to come back to what role environmental accounting might play in saving biodiversity.

Aim for net positive outcomes

Conservation scientists have been questioning the value of biodiversity targets and the way they are applied for some time. Most recently, this call was made in Nature Ecology & Evolution by Joseph Bull and colleagues. They argue that policy must shift away from conservation targets that are based just on avoiding biodiversity losses, towards considering net outcomes for biodiversity.

This would involve tracking the cumulative net impact of both development and conservation, while aiming for an overarching objective such as ‘a positive outcome for nature’. It would be bringing things like restoration and offsets into the equation.

In effect, the argument is to take the mitigation hierarchy, the ‘avoid, mitigate, offset’ approach most often associated with individual development approvals, and apply it at a global level. Yet Bull et al go even further, arguing that this language of net outcomes raises an even wider aspiration for tackling biodiversity loss, climate change and human development together.

This latter argument is similar to the one made by Malgorzata Blicharska and colleagues, that biodiversity supports sustainable development and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in many ways (‘Biodiversity’s contributions to sustainable development‘).

Also in a similar vein, Charlie Gardner and colleagues have argued that attention to biodiversity loss has been eclipsed by the climate crisis, and that conservationists must capitalise on the opportunities presented by the climate crisis to establish the idea that keeping ecosystems intact is one of the most cost-effective defences against climate impacts (‘conservation must capitalise on climates moment‘).

These recent articles suggest to me that there’s a growing realisation that the coming decade is not just the last chance to halt climate change, but also the last chance to address the ‘sixth great extinction’, before they get away from us completely. Hitching the two together might increase the chances of at least some success.

Biodiversity and sustainability: the accounting connection

If we were to turn ‘avoid, mitigate, offset’ into an overarching approach, one of the challenges identified by Bull et al was that the resulting need to measure net outcomes would require a plurality of metrics for measuring losses and gains to biodiversity.

With several colleagues, I responded by pointing out that environmental accounting, standardised globally in the System of Environmental-Economic Accounts (SEEA), already does this well (our Nature Ecology & Evolution paper is titled ‘Measuring net-positive outcomes for nature using accounting’). All that is needed is for governments to make it happen.

A key but often misunderstood point is that although environmental accounts are often, like conventional accounts, kept in monetary terms, it is just as valid to keep them in physical terms such as population numbers and measures of condition. Environmental accounts could, for example, measure a variety of biodiversity-relevant attributes such as species occurrence, distribution, abundance and age-sex structure of populations.

In contrast to financial accounting, there is no need to consolidate these different accounts into a single ‘bottom line’ unless this would be both feasible and meaningful.

In other words, if you are counting echidnas and platypii, there is no need to aggregate these into a single ‘monotreme account’ unless this is a useful thing to do. While a single bottom line is always ideal (which prompts economists to push hard for it) it is by no means the only solution.

In an ecological context, it could be just as useful to take all the accounts relevant to a particular ecosystem, which might include our echidna and platypus accounts, and ask whether the bottom line of each and every account exceeds a predetermined measure of ecosystem health. If they do, then the collective ‘bottom line’ for the ecosystem is ‘in the black’. If only some do, the ones below the measure point to the management intervention needed.

Why accounts?

Why bother using accounts? Why not just do a census or a stocktake, or ongoing monitoring? The answer lies in the problem being solved. Environmental accounts are not kept by scientists for research, but by a new and specialised form of accountant for management purposes.

Importantly for governance, environmental accounts that comply with the SEEA are consistent and auditable. This facilitates transparency and, where appropriate, comparisons.

Further, because accounts don’t just contain entries but record transactions, they reveal something about when and why something occurred, and who it was connected with. For example, a reduction in a species population due to approved land clearing would reveal not only the quantum but the date and party undertaking the clearing.

In a comprehensive set of accounts this action would be reveal not only the loss of natural capital, but the corresponding loss of ecosystem services.

All of these attributes contribute to good decision-making. Environmental accounting may not have been invented as a management tool, but serendipity has delivered this as a bonus.

The capacity of environmental accounts to be used in environmental management has been demonstrated in some case studies but not in a general and ongoing manner. Ideally it would be nice to scale up slowly but we don’t have the luxury of time.

If we are to manage, by all accounts, to save biodiversity, it might be because environmental accounting was a key part of the decisions taken at Kunming.

Image by Terri Sharp from Pixabay