As the election hangover fades and a new government packs itself into Parliament House, we have a chance to remake the nation for a new century. In a special post-election series, Crikey asked leading Australian thinkers to sketch a blueprint for a future Australia. Their brief: to spell out how Australia might fully realise its potential.

Yesterday, renowned social commentator Eva Cox wrote on social justice. Today, author David Lindenmayer from the Fenner School of the Environment & Society at The Australian National University points out opportunities for the new Rudd government on the environment.

Professor Lindenmayer writes:

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment

The Australian political mantra for the past few decades has been that we must “fix” the economy before we can sort out the environment. This is patently wrong. The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. Even if it were true, as the economy has strengthened, the nation’s environment has continued to unravel. The incoming government must therefore have a full agenda to seriously tackle Australia’s major environmental problems – and there is no shortage of them. There are many things that can be done to turn these problems around to see Australia make good on its natural abundance and realise its potential.

Biodiversity and the environment generally

Every five years Australia is delivered a report card on its environment. It’s called the State of the Environment Report. And every five years the report card delivers an “E” or an “F” – confirming that our record on environmental management and biodiversity loss is simply atrocious. We lead the world in land degradation. We have cleared millions of hectares of native vegetation in the last decade – and rates are still far too high. We lead the world in recent mammal extinctions. We lead the world in the overall number of threatened species. We lead the world in the number of per capita threatened species. Biodiversity loss is a symptom of poor environmental management. By all accounts we lead the world in poor environmental management.

We have to do better. Environmental management needs greater and better targeted investment. For a start we need to be able to gauge progress on our billions of dollars of investments in environmental management. To do that, we need good monitoring. But in fact we also have an absolutely atrocious record on environmental monitoring. More than half the 100+ indicators for the State of the Environment Report have poor data or no data! It’s clear to me that we need a network of long-term ecological research sites to help us understand how effective our management actions really are. It is a program that would cost around $50 million annually, but it would help us make far better strategic decisions on the billions of dollars spent every year. The Australian Academy of Science called for this over three decades ago. It’s needed now more than ever, especially if we are going to make informed decisions about how to manage natural resources in the face of rapid climate change.

Climate change

Only paid-up members of the flat earth society and the deniers of continental drift are still arguing about whether climate change is real. That wasteful debate over the last decade needs to be left behind and the real focus of attention now must be on what to do about it. I believe that action is required at three levels.

First, there is a global imperative. Australia’s intention to sign to Kyoto Protocol is a good first step. Although Australia is a small-time polluter in terms of overall emissions, we are the highest per capita emitters on the planet. Therefore, we need to take a leadership role, rather than a spoiling one (that we have had over the past decade) to tackle the problem. We did this in tackling problems with CFCs and we were successful. The imperative to do this with carbon and other emissions is now greater than ever.

Second, we need to take national-level steps to reduce our emissions on a per capita basis. There are wonderful opportunities to do this. There can be no better country in the world for subsidies to support solar panels on roof tops (that can then sell electricity back to the power grid), to provide subsidies to purchase hybrid vehicles, to upgrade to the rail freight system to reduce emissions from truck transport – this list goes on. As important, land clearing is still a major problem in Australia. More than 500,000 hectares are still cleared in Australia every year and it makes an important negative contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. There is already far more than enough cleared land in Australia – in fact we need to do significant re-vegetation. So let’s implement the environmental and economic instruments to halt the land clearing madness.

Third, we need to think deeply about climate change adaptation. This is actually a very substantial issue because rapid changes in climate will be overlaid on landscapes that have already been extensively altered, with potentially serious environmental, social and economic consequences.

Addressing these environmental challenges will require fundamentally new approaches to make landscapes more robust in the face of rapid climate change. This is a significant scientific challenge – how can we do our farming, our forestry, our fire management, our nature conservation management in ways that will counter climate change? This is a substantial challenge for the incoming government.

The combined effect of existing landscape change and climate change is considered to be the single biggest issue facing modern society. To date, human-induced landscape change has been the major driver of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and many other problems. Current landscape conditions set the background against which future climate change will occur. To give some examples, rapid climate change in already modified landscapes may:

  • Further accelerate habitat loss and extinctions;
  • Undermine the effectiveness of reserve systems;
  • Make pest and exotic species more invasive and/or magnify their effects on landscapes. And;
  • Increase the destructiveness of major disturbance events (e.g. though promoting the spread of wildfires.

Forests and Forestry

There is no doubt that forests are the most socially divisive environmental issue in Australia. The Tasmanian pulp mill is emblematic of this. The process of assessment was deeply flawed and clearly needs to be re-visited. The assessment should not be rushed – pulp mills are around for a long time once they are built, so it is critical to get their location, forest impacts and other effects assessed correctly.

It is truly nonsensical not to fully assess the availability of timber to feed a mill. This is essential because worldwide there has been a tendency to over-commit wood supplies to feed woodchip and pulp mill industries. This results in intensified forestry and, in turn, undermines other key forest values such as biodiversity conservation, water production, and eco-tourism. These and many other questions go beyond simply the problems with the location of the presently proposed pulp mill and the waste that will be produced only from that single point location.

I strongly believe that a re-thinking of the pulp mill project is warranted. Where will the wood come from to feed it? (It should not use old growth forest for example). How will the forest be logged to feed it? Can the forests be logged in ways to avoid threats to biodiversity and other key forest values? What is a reasonable mill size relative to the availability of forest resources to feed it? What is the carbon account for the mill – not only at the mill level but at the entire timber catchment level? What are the true employment trajectories for the mill and how will they impinge on other sectors – such as the sawmilling sector as well as tourism and other natural resource-based industries? These questions take time to answer properly. It should not be rushed.

The elephant in the room – Australia’s population

The elephant in the room is Australia’s human population. Australia’s true population size in terms of impacts on the environment is around 400 million. That is, we grow food, supply energy and provide other products for about 400 million people. The impacts on the continent’s environment in 220 years have been unequivocally substantial. We need a broadly based debate about our future population size, its standard of living and levels of resource consumption. That is the real issue of the vision for the future of the nation, especially with the impacts that rapid changes in future climate will have. Given the demands of an increasing population, it is essential to work out how many people Australia is truly capable of supporting and take on board the simple fact that ecological criteria are central to those calculations.

This article is broadly based on David Lindenmayer’s recently published book On Borrowed Time. It is published by Penguin and CSIRO Publishing and explores many of the issues touched on here in greater detail.