Michael Vardon on why urban forests keep losing the argument — and how a bit of accounting could change the odds. And he begins by looking at the loss of a much loved 80-year-old raintree in Cairns.
governance
Australia quietly released the national ecosystem account last week. Now we need to use them
Nature in Australia stored almost $60 billion worth of carbon in 2021–22! How do we know? Because this value was recorded in the country’s second set of ecosystem accounts just put out by the ABS. And they are open for everyone to see. You can look up your favourite ecosystem to see how it is doing in terms of its extent and condition, and the ecosystem services it provides. Here, Michael Vardon explains why these accounts are important and how we should be using them, and laments at how little attention they given.
A long time between drinks!
This is just a quick note to say that Sustainability Bites has been quiet now for several months. But that will change soon.
Too big to fail? Who cares if there’s no accountability
Building big on big promises of endless clean energy ignores the limits of our institutions. It’s something rarely considered in the febrile, volatile environment of contemporary politics. We pull our leaders up on the smallest of inconsistencies but let them get away with the biggest of lies. When you next cast your vote, keep in mind that extraordinary promises require extraordinary accountability.
The Blue Mountains – towards nature positive with natural capital accounting
The Blue Mountains rise to the west of Sydney, NSW. In the year 2000 it was included on UNESCO’s World Heritage register for its representation of the evolutionary adaptation and diversification of eucalypts in post-Gondwanan Australia. Those eucalypts are rich in oil, filling the air with a distinctive blue haze that gives the region its name. Earlier this month, the many environmental organisations and community groups with connections to the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area came together for the Inaugural Blue Mountains World Heritage Conference. The meeting aimed to chart a way forward to ensure the protection and environmental stewardship of the globally significant landscape of the Blue Mountains. Michael Vardon was invited to speak at the conference on environmental accounting. Here he shares his personal perspectives on how the goodwill and enthusiasm generated at this meeting might translate into enduring environmental outcomes. Our governments chant a mantra of ‘nature positive’ but without a framework like natural capital accounting, it’s little more than empty rhetoric.
Nature-positive information: devilish detail and a head with two hats and no teeth
Will the new Environment Information Australia (EIA) be up to the job? Can it equip us, for example, with the necessary data to discern if the government’s new “nature positive” policies and nature repair markets are delivering real gains, or just biodiversity conservation doublespeak? As the saying goes, the Devil is in the detail. Or in this case, in the lack of it.
Does ‘Nature Positive’ ‘strike the right balance’? The shifting dial is scaring some players.
The unwritten rule of environmental policy is that economy trumps environment. ‘Nature positive’ reforms threaten to put it the other way round, or at least to shift the dial in that direction. And the states (beginning with Western Australia) are not happy about it. Crunch time is approaching.
The cognitive dissonance in dealing with mass coral bleaching
The Great Barrier Reef is facing an existential threat of our own making. We know what the solution is but our current governance around the Reef is inadequate to meet the challenge.
We can’t speak truth to power; science does not guide our decision making; and we can’t acknowledge that current economic priorities (and vested interests) mean that “the best managed reef ecosystems in the world” is being hung out to bleach.
Trump and the crazy ants – focus on the system, not the symptom
‘Trumpism’ is a bit like crazy ants? Both require certain system conditions for them to become super pests. Throwing Trump in jail won’t remove the threat. The conditions for Trump’s ascendency are still present and will enable the next ‘crazy man’ to do just as much damage. We need to remediate the craziness and address the gaps in society that let so many people believe the system isn’t working for them.
Plugging the holes in the Nature-Positive-Plan bucket
Fully implemented, the ‘Nature Positive’ model on which the reforms are built could completely reframe decisions to approve (or not) development projects following environmental impact assessment (EIA). However, it all comes down to ‘who pays’?
Revelations 2 and 3 – justice and truth (Now all we need is the slogan)
If you accept that humans are not in control, that you can’t hold nature in some mythical ‘optimal state’, that good resilience thinking is all about understanding the variability of the natural systems around us and living within those constraints – if you do all these things then you are acknowledging complexity and demonstrating ‘humility’. So, do you want to save the world? Justice, truth and humility is the path you need to tread.
Has time been called on the native forest logging deals of the 1990s? Here’s what the Albanese government can do
It seems time is being called on the forest settlement of the 1990s. These developments are already destabilising the federal government’s environmental law reform agenda, and could even derail it. The government could use the time between now and next year’s Senate debate on its reform package to work up a new approach. It could be built around forest restoration, conservation and Indigenous empowerment, as experts are proposing. If it doesn’t, we are headed for quite a stoush.
Have we learnt nothing? Don’t put all your (biodiversity) ‘eggs’ into a single (market) ‘basket’!
Before we commit all our ‘biodiversity eggs’ to the ‘market basket’ and leave saving Nature to the market traders, could we quickly reflect on what’s been done in the past to save biodiversity? How did we attempt to protect Nature before markets were put forward as our road to salvation? What are the lessons? Those lessons would include attention to governance, resourcing, inclusion and justice. Ignore these dimensions and there’s little prospect that a market-driven approach is going to achieve anything better.
Nature Repair Market bill may repair the environment, but is it the Budget that will need repair?
Can markets 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 new Nature Repair Market bill certainly aligns with this framing, but investors are unlikely to sign up, at least not without inducements.
The fifth and final transformation: Restoring trust in decision-making
One of the main findings of the Samuel Review of the EPBC Act was that it was not trusted, either by business nor by the wider community. Restoring trust requires a fundamental shift from process-based decision-making to outcome-based decisions. This requires standards supported by regional plans and stronger institutions, including information systems and compliance regimes. At the end of the day, people will only trust environmental laws that truly protect and conserve the environment.
Laying new foundations for environmental decisions: the fourth transformation
The consequences of Australia’s long-term underfunding of our national environmental law, compounded in some cases by lack of political vision or will, are that many of the foundations of the current system of environmental protection and conservation provided for by the EPBC Act are either significantly under-done, or not done at all.