It’s time: for a national conversation on the environment

And that conversation should include national goals and environmental measurement

By Peter Burnett

Soon after she became federal environment minister last year, Sussan Ley spoke of a collaborative approach to the environment.

Foreshadowing what is now Professor Graeme Samuel’s Independent Review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, Ley said the review was ‘the right time to have a conversation about the best ways we can ensure strong environmental and biodiversity protection measures that encourage people to work together in supporting the environment’.

Professor Samuel has handed his draft report to Ley, who is expected to release it soon.

So it’s about time to start that conversation.

Of course, it would have been better to have the conversation a long time ago, when the environment wasn’t in such dire straits, but as the Chinese proverb puts it, ‘The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.’

I’d like to suggest a couple of conversation-starters.

An agreed goal: what kind of environment do we want?

The first is to make sure the conversation leads to an agreed national statement of the kind of environment Australians want.

This is not an easy thing to do. For example, while most might support a goal of a ‘healthy’ environment, translating that vision into policy raises difficult questions like ‘how healthy?’ and ‘at what cost?’

Yet we need to commit to a clear goal. Otherwise we are left with our ongoing focus on the short term, something which has only delivered what Australia’s doyen of environmental policy, Professor Steve Dovers, has described as ‘policy ad hocery and amnesia’.

In colloquial terms this is a constant chopping and changing and it severely undermines our efforts to address environmental problems.

Earlier efforts at defining that national goal

So far, the closest we’ve come to adopting a clear national goal was through the ‘ESD [Ecologically Sustainable Development] process’, an intense dialogue between government, business, unions and environment groups in the early 1990s.

The ESD process produced a massive 12 volume consensus report containing hundreds of substantial recommendations. However, politics, especially Paul Keating’s ousting of Bob Hawke as Prime Minister, got in the way.

In the end, Australia’s governments gave us a vaguely-written and unfunded National Strategy on ESD.

As a conversation, the ESD process had at least two major flaws.

First, hardly anyone really knew what ESD meant. Unlike the ‘sustainability’ of political discourse, which means all things to all people, ESD is a real but complex and often misunderstood concept.

Second, the ESD process was a conversation between elites, which largely passed the rest of us by.

So we signed up to ESD through the National Strategy, without really ‘buying’ it. One consequence was that ESD was then written into many laws and policies, though usually in ways that allow lip service, which is what ESD usually gets.

But every now and again someone takes it seriously, as the Federal Court did recently in finding that VicForests had failed to apply the precautionary principle (one element of ESD) and were thus logging unlawfully.

This kind of outcome, where we set, but then ignore, environmental speed limits, while occasionally dabbing the brakes, is hardly good policy.

If we are going to have a national conversation, it needs to be widely publicised, well-informed, run at ‘town hall’ level and continued for as long as it takes to get a real sense of the aspirations of the Australian people for the future.

We especially need to grapple with the tension underlying ESD, which is how to reconcile our desires for ongoing economic growth with the capacity of the environment to support our ever-growing consumption of environmental goods and services.

If we squib this major challenge, we will likely continue as we have, nibbling away at various parts of the environment with a limited understanding of the cumulative impact of our daily decisions, large and small.

This nibbling away is what a famous American economist, Alfred Kahn, once described as ‘the tyranny of small decisions.’ And as the leading ecologist William Odum recognized, it is particularly pertinent to the environment.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure

My second suggestion concerns the dry but vital topic of environmental information.

One of the shibboleths of modern management is ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’. Managing the environment is doubly difficult because, even if we had unlimited data, we still wouldn’t fully understand nature in its complexity.

However a comprehensive information system, including environmental accounts to help arrange information for decision-making, would be a major advance.

Despite governments actively seeking to manage the environment for nearly 50 years, we still don’t have such a system. There have been many programs and promises over the years, but governments have tended to scale them back or drop them as they change focus.

Maybe that’s because environmental information isn’t politically ‘sexy’; most people neither know nor care.

A good example is the Rudd Government’s 2010 National Plan for Environmental Information (NPEI). This plan grew out of a recommendation from Prime Minister Rudd’s 2020 Summit (held in 2007) that Australia develop national environmental accounts.

But the NPEI was underfunded from the outset and then cut after a change of government.

We still have no national baseline biodiversity monitoring, first promised in 1996.

And although the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has been experimenting with national environmental-economic accounts for decades, these accounts remain experimental, partial or intermittent. They are certainly not developed to the point where they could support specific environmental management decisions.

If we were having a national conversation, I would argue for a national institution to gather and hold environmental information.

We do this for mineral resources, through Geoscience Australia; for health and welfare, through the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare; and for water resources, through the Bureau of Meteorology. An institution for environmental information is a logical next step.

And I would expand dramatically the environmental accounts prepared by the ABS, requiring them to be used in real environmental decisions.

The coming national conversation?

So we badly need a national conversation on protecting the environment, but will we get one?

Sussan Ley is hardly paving the way, having spoken of the Samuel Review only in the context of ‘cutting green tape’, a slogan.

Perhaps Ley will surprise us, by making some speeches about biodiversity or convening public forums to discuss the review.

Whether the conversation is led by government or not, we need to rise above slogans for a broad and respectful conversation about our environmental values.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Announcing ‘Australia’s Strategy for Nature’

The strategy you have when you have to have a strategy (without actually having one)

By Peter Burnett

In November 2019 Australia’s federal and state environment ministers signed off on a new national biodiversity strategy. Under the title Australia’s Strategy for Nature, it replaces the previous strategy, Australia’s Biodiversity Conservation Strategy 2010–2030 (the 2010 Strategy), even though the 2010 strategy had more than 10 years to run.

The new strategy comes with its own shiny new website, Australia’s Nature Hub, and it reads pretty well. But here’s the kicker: the new strategy doesn’t actually contain any strategies (ie means to achieving ends).

And there’s no new money or programs to support it, although the new website does serve as an aggregator for existing strategies and programs from various governments. As we’ll see below, the implication seems to be that if you think we need to do more to halt biodiversity decline, do it yourself!

It’s a ‘compliance model’

So what’s going on? If the new strategy were a car, it would be a ‘compliance model’, a car that manufacturers produce in limited numbers to comply with a regulatory requirement to sell ‘zero emission’ vehicles.

The best known example of a compliance car was the EV1, an electric car that General Motors produced in America in the late 1990s. Instead of selling the car to customers, GM leased it to them; once the leases expired it recalled the cars and sent them to the crusher.*

In this case, the requirement generating a compliance mentality is Article 6 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Australia joined the CBD, along with most other countries, soon after it was opened for signature in 1992. Article 6 requires each member country to ‘develop national strategies … for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity’.

Australia’s history with biodiversity strategies

Australia had started work on a national biodiversity strategy even before the CBD was signed. In fact, in his 1989 Environment Statement, Our Country, Our Future, Prime Minister Hawke made commitments, not just to develop a national biodiversity strategy, but for Australia to play a leading role in what would become the CBD. In marketing terms, we weren’t just ‘early adopters’ in biodiversity policy, we were ‘innovators’.

As they say in the classics, it’s been all downhill from there. The strategy was ready in 1993 but languished when it proved difficult to get the states on board. It was eventually adopted by all Australian governments in 1995, under the title National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia’s Biological Diversity. It’s most significant measures were a national commitment to undertake bioregional planning and a target of arresting and reversing the decline of native vegetation by 2000. The strategy also had major flaws, setting the unfortunate precedent of being adopted without new resourcing, on the basis that many of its measures fell within the scope of existing programs.

There was a change of government federally soon after the strategy was adopted and incoming environment minister Robert Hill worked hard, but with limited success, to give it life. He included provisions for bioregional planning in Australia’s new national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, but these have barely been used. Later, following a five year review of the strategy, he would develop ‘national objectives and targets’, including an objective of halting land clearing, and seek to incorporate these into bilateral agreements with states under the National Heritage Trust, a major funding program. Despite some success, state resistance was ultimately too great to deliver much of significance.

In 2009 another environment minister, Peter Garrett, succeeded in getting a new strategy (the 2010 strategy) endorsed, including 10 ambitious national targets for 2015. In their foreword to the 2010 strategy, ministers noted that despite much effort, biodiversity continued to decline and, as a result, ‘we need to take immediate and sustained action to conserve biodiversity.’

In fact, the problem was so serious that ‘business as usual is no longer an option’. Despite these strong words, most of the 2015 targets were not met (or could not be measured) and I suspect this was the real reason why environment ministers decided to replace the 2010 strategy early: to make the strong language and unmeasurable targets disappear.

A ‘zero emissions vehicle’ for the wrong reasons

Now governments are taking a new tack. Strong warnings and ambitious targets have been replaced by an exhortation that we all work together. The new strategy is sold as an ‘overarching framework’ and is said not only to ‘set the framework for local, state/territory and federal government actions’, but also to ‘help those outside government identify where they can contribute to support national areas of focus’.

I see this as code for ‘all care but no responsibility’: government will identify the problem and the point to both solutions and ways to measure progress, but without specifying any actual strategies in the document. As a result, if ‘those outside government’ (ie, you and me) want to halt the relentless decline of biodiversity it Australia, we will have to do it ourselves, as none of our governments have seen the need to announce any new measures to support this new ‘strategy’.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that Australia’s Nature Strategy has been produced only to comply with the CBD. It’s a ‘compliance model’ and if I were its owner I’d follow GM’s recipe by recalling it and sending it to the crusher. The difference is that I would be doing this, not because its success threatens business, but because its likely failure threatens business (and everything else that depends on biodiversity). This is a ‘zero emissions vehicle’, not because it is propelled by the latest technology, but because it only works if self-propelled. Fred Flintstone would feel right at home in it.

*Killing the electric car: if you’d like to know more about the EV1, it was the subject of a 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?

Image by David Zapata from Pixabay

How are we going?

What’s in Australia’s decadal Environmental Report Card?

By Peter Burnett

The OECD has just released its ten yearly environmental report card on Australia. It’s called OECD Environmental Performance Reviews: Australia 2019. This is the third review of Australia, following reviews in 1998 and 2007, so we can look at some trends as well as the current report card.

How did we do? Good and bad.

Being reviewed by our ‘peers’

Before reviewing its findings, some background. The OECD’s environmental review program was established in 1991. Since then around 85 reviews have been conducted. The review teams include members from other OECD countries. For the 2019 Australian review these reviewers came from Canada and New Zealand. So the report is not just ‘the view from Paris.’

These reviews aim to help countries assess their environmental progress while promoting domestic accountability and international peer review. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much sign of this has happened with past reviews. Perhaps Australian governments use the reviews behind the scenes, but publicly at least governments have not said much about them beyond the formal welcome when they hit the desk. And they haven’t generated much debate either. Nor is there much sign of international peer learning.

But these reviews offer a unique opportunity to governments seeking genuine environmental policy advance. Perhaps it’s time to try some encouragement from the sidelines.

Could do better

The report says some nice things about Australia. They acknowledge that we perform well in the OECD ‘Better Life Index’, showing that we rate better, often significantly better, than the OECD average on a range of things, including on environmental quality. That’s great, but our environmental quality rating was earned largely on the back of good scores on urban air quality and public satisfaction with water quality in an OECD index (see www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/australia).

These are both factors where we get a boost from being a small population in a large country and from the absence of the high-polluting neighbours that you can find elsewhere (South Korea, for example, chokes on China’s industrial emmissions).

The OECD also compliments us on being one of the few OECD countries that has a green investment bank (the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, CEFC) to help finance renewable energy, but they either don’t know, or diplomatically overlook, the fact that we only kept the CEFC because, in one of the stranger events in recent Australian political history, Al Gore dropped in and talked Clive Palmer into opposing its abolition.

So some of our success is more down to good luck than good management. But, of course, it’s the brickbats rather than the bouquets that are more important here. The headlines of the 2019 Review amount to saying ‘this student is not working to potential’, or the old-fashioned ‘could try harder’.

On climate policy and resource efficiency, the OECD recommends that we intensify our efforts to reach our Paris Agreement goal and produce an integrated energy and climate policy framework for 2030. Of course, we nearly did the latter with the National Energy Guarantee, but the politics got too hard.

On governance, which in Australia’s federal system is as much about federal-state cooperation as anything else, the OECD calls for more effort, but they add a new emphasis on state-to-state cooperation, to encourage best-practice and increase efficiency. For example, they recommend standardised approaches to cleaning up old mine sites and a nationally-consistent approach to landfill levies to remove incentives to truck waste interstate. While federal-state cooperation is less politically-sensitive than topics like climate policy, it’s profoundly and perennially challenging. In fact, there aren’t many examples of genuine success, except where there are large federal government carrots or sticks involved, as there were with the successful National Competition Policy of the 1990s. The trouble is that the carrots are expensive and the sticks take great political skill to wield effectively.

On economic efficiency, a key recommendation relates to environmental taxes: to tax fuels that are currently exempt (eg, coal) and increase rates on fuels that are too low (eg, petrol and diesel taxes don’t include an environmental component). In principle this is simple enough but fuel taxes can be political dynamite, not just here but elsewhere, as recent demonstrations in France and Zimbabwe show.

Our ‘special topics’

Finally, the report included two ‘in depth’ chapters on topics chosen by Australia, one on threatened species and biodiversity and the other on chemicals.

The OECD was blunt about species and biodiversity: things were poor and worsening. It found that pressures from humans, such as agriculture and urban development, were increasingly interacting to exacerbate challenges for threatened species. They recommended that Australia invest time and resources in regional plans and strategic assessments and that we get our act together on environmental information, including biodiversity baselines to measure progress. Sensible, but complicated, expensive and a political minefield.

In contrast, the recipe for success on chemicals seems easier: we already have reforms in the works and could achieve much just by getting a move on.

Recurring themes

Some of the themes that recur in the reports include the need for ongoing water reforms, full policy integration and enhanced Indigenous engagement in land management. Some of these themes are really tough because they affect vested interests or might constrain economic growth, but surely we can get Indigenous engagement right.

Other recommendations that I think are achievable without too much pain are the greening of government procurement and comprehensive and consistent approach to environmental information, especially baseline monitoring.

These are very useful reports and hopefully government will do more with the 2019 report than it did with the earlier ones. The ANU has given the reports some early attention by holding several events to mark the release of the report, and the report has already received some significant publicity, eg on the ABC: www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/pm/oecd-says-australia-not-on-track-to-meet-paris-agreement-targets/10764274.

Watch this space.