Regreening Australia

Australia21 will host a roundtable in February 2013 on the benefits and feasibility of a large national program to ‘regreen Australia’ through massive reforestation and revegetation.

The project will re-examine the issues raised in a 1989 CSIRO report - Regreening Australia: The environmental, economic and social benefits of reforestation  by Australia21 director Richard Eckersley - in the light of advances in knowledge about both the problems and the solutions. Key among these is the growing understanding of the impacts of climate change on Australian environments and the importance of land use and land cover in addressing climate change.

Initial feedback on the proposal from a range of scientific and policy experts has been positive. There was general agreement that, while there has been a substantial increase in funding for relevant environmental activities since 1989, these efforts still lack the necessary scale, integration and prioritisation to address the environmental challenges Australia faces. Participants in the roundtable will examine the following central question: ‘What are the benefits of large-scale reforestation and revegetation, and how can they best be achieved?’ 

Subsidiary questions include:

-   What is already being done, and is it enough?

-   What have we learned from past reforestation/revegetation programs?

-   What remains to be learned?

-   What are the best processes and mechanisms for assessing risks and achieving benefits?

-   Who are the key partners/stakeholders and what are their roles?

-   Are priorities at local, regional and national scales agreed and compatible?

-   What are the next steps?

A two-page summary of the 1989 report which provides background is available here.

Enough funding to kick start the project has been provided by Richard Eckersley, through a bequest from the estate of the late Jan Lee Martin, and the Natural Resources Conservation League of Victoria. Australia21 is seeking more funding to ensure the best possible outcome. If you would like to comment on this project or you would like to know more please contact us at office@australia21.org.au. Donations to support Regreening Australia can be made on line http://www.givenow.com.au/australia21.

Climate change forum report issued

In Joint forum on climate change on the Australia21 blog I gave my extemporised summary of a high level group meeting on climate change and Australia’s response to it which was held at the Australian National University on 12 July.

The meeting, hosted by Australia21, Universities Australia and the National Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable Development, included some of the nation’s leading climatologists, economists, climate policy experts and representatives of Australian business.

The question under discussion was “What are the best available policy options for reducing greenhouse emissions in Australia in the context of the Copenhagen result and the delay of an Australian CPRS [the government’s proposed emissions trading scheme]?”   

The formal report of the forum has now been issued, and copies have been forwarded to the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the Australian Greens .  The executive summary appears below. The full report may be downloaded from the Australia21 website here, and the covering media release may be accessed here.

Executive Summary

Australia21, Universities Australia, and the National Business Leaders Forum on Sustainable

Development combined to host a high-level forum of twenty-seven experts in Canberra on 12 July

2010. The meeting was held in the context of a forthcoming national election. This Australia21 report provides an overview of the forum discussion and outcomes.

The purpose of the meeting was to define how Australia could most effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in the aftermath of the Copenhagen discussions and the deferral of the Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). The participants included climatologists, economists, social scientists and policy experts from a range of national institutions and businesses.

A brief review of the scientific consensus about climate change and Australia’s response to date reaffirmed that climate change is a public policy issue requiring urgent attention. Furthermore, far from being a world leader on this matter, Australia is now lagging behind many other developed and developing nations in producing mechanisms to mitigate and adapt to global warming. Yet the Australian electorate seemingly remains impatient for effective action.

The science clearly indicates that there is likely to be increased danger with increased warming and that in the face of grave risks and uncertainties associated with rising emissions Australia must move towards becoming a resilient society. There is the likelihood that feedback effects that are relatively unpredictable in their timing of onset could lead to ‘tipping points’ that would produce irreversible changes to our landscape and ecosystems, and place additional stresses on Australia’s regional and urban infrastructure and its food production systems.

It was concluded that plans for adaptation, mitigation and transformation must be developed in our national response to these changes, recognising that the climate of the future will hold the likelihood of ‘high impact-low probability’ events, of which the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill is a striking example.

Much of the discussion centred on the potential role of carbon pricing in constraining greenhouse emissions and the practicability of various pricing approaches, including different ways of moving from where we are now, to a situation where a carbon price would result in trading of emissions entitlements as well as real reductions in the nation’s emissions - which are still continuing to rise.

A known and predictable price will offer business a clear understanding of the future costs they face, and will also facilitate investment in innovation in non-polluting energy production. Pricing could be introduced without disturbing the budget bottom line and made appealing to the public and industry, if the property rights on emissions are distributed effectively.

There was firm agreement that a new national narrative on emissions reduction should be developed, and on the importance of depoliticising the debate so as to reflect the magnitude of the environmental, economic and social aspects of changes to our climate.

While regulation for energy efficiency and strategic roadmaps for alternative energy technologies are vital elements of climate policy development, the meeting concluded that Australia should develop a pricing and market mechanism to win the support of the vast majority of Australians. A pricing and marketing mechanism will reduce business uncertainty and increase incentives for investment, at the same time as it contributes to rapid and essential reduction in emissions. There are a number of ways this could happen, and it should commence now.

An independent institution to manage a carbon price could assist in informing a carbon market and in educating the community. Any such institutional structure should be at arm’s length from the political process in much the same way as the Reserve Bank manages monetary policy.

The group is concerned at the way this policy is currently being handled and urges all political parties to work together to produce an effective carbon pricing policy. All political parties should engage in the scale and management required to create Australia as a low carbon society – and to bring it into the centre ground of national public policy.

The forum has offered its support to all parties to assist them to build an attractive and common pricing mechanism into their policy platforms.

Australia’s population

Today’s edition of The Age advises us on the front cover that the Prime Minister has done a backflip on the question of the size of Australia’s population (see Rudd flips on ‘big Australia’ here):

The federal government will consider slashing Australia's annual migration intake to help tackle concerns about traffic congestion, housing, hospitals, water and the environment.

Just months after declaring himself in favour of a ''big Australia'', Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday warned of ''legitimate concerns'' with population growth and appointed Agriculture Minister Tony Burke as Australia's first Population Minister.

There is a debate to be had about the size of Australia’s population, to be sure: we live on an ancient and fragile landmass, with thin soils, limited (and over-allocated) water, man-made salinity problems, species extinction, loss of biodiversity and other problems. If Tony Burke is to find a way of addressing those problems, then all to the good.

But “slashing Australia’s annual migration intake” is a remarkably blunt instrument with which to tackle traffic congestion or concern about houses or hospitals or water and the environment.  We would be quite capable of making a mess of all of those without a single extra migrant.

Unfortunately the lack of political imagination is such that whenever there is talk of doubling the size of Australia’s population our political “elites” assume that this automatically means passively accepting a doubling of the size of Sydney, Melbourne and the other state capitals, crowding more and more people into taller and taller buildings spread along ever more congested transport corridors and dragging water from further and further away to provide for their needs.

Dear old Tom Uren had an alternative back in the 1970s, with his policies for Land Commissions to undertake orderly development (and provide for “affordable housing”) on the urban fringe, and designated growth centres to take the pressure off the capital cities.  This would be complemented by improvements to urban public transport.  Tom’s colleague Transport Minister Charlie Jones thought that action should be taken to develop fast rail to Canberra in order to avoid the need for a second Sydney airport.

Of course Tom Uren was not only from the Labor Party, but from the old guard Labor Left, so he was a crank by definition and no-one had to take his ideas seriously. The Land Commissions have gone, Albury-Wodonga was allowed to wither on the vine, the reserved public transport corridors were sold off, the urban sprawl continues, and housing affordability is one of the issues du jour.

Yesterday on her Radio National program Saturday Extra Geraldine Doogue rounded off an interview with Louis Armstrong’s latest biographer by playing Velma Middleton and Louis himself singing the classic Loveless Love. There is a line about “dreamless dreams and schemeless schemes”. That just about sums up Australian politics today.

Or as another Labor Old Guard gentleman, The Hon. RFX Connor, was fond of saying, quoting Proverbs 29:18:

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

We do not need a plan to determine how large a population we can manage on the basis of the current lack of investment in vital infrastructure and the current scandalous incapacity of our state governments to develop and implement any coherent plan about anything. We do however need a plan to ensure that the needs of our precious environment and its embodied ecosystems are fully taken into account in providing for our future, so that whatever growth in the population takes place, and whatever the policy settings about population growth might be, it can be managed sustainably.