Page 246 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 7 March 2007
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The ACT government produced a greenhouse gas inventory in 2003 and then promised to produce one every year. This motion calls on it to keep its promise. Even the greenhouse discussion strategy lacks emission numbers, although chapter 5 has a breakdown of sources of emissions. You have to go to the draft energy discussion paper to find them—in 2003-04 at 2.185 million tones of CO2 equivalent, which was an increase of 11 per cent over the previous year, attributed to a decline in people’s take-up of green power. Last week I heard that people’s take-up of green power has increased by a major amount as they are doing their personal thing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
So what steps do we need to take now? Prior to 2004 we had a greenhouse strategy which tied itself to the Kyoto targets—a strategy moved by the first Greens in the Assembly. My motion suggests that the government must ensure that we do not go backwards with our 21st century climate crisis strategy but we must at least recommit to those targets. Mr Stanhope talked about the cost of implementing the strategy, and I ask him to calculate the financial cost of not implementing it. In other words, I suggest that the government reveal its cost-benefit analysis of the impact of climate change in the ACT and, if it has not done so already, to undertake such a study as a matter of urgency. Perhaps it can be done under the auspices of emergency services, as they are the people who will be at the coalface of its impacts.
There has been no study of the impacts of the climate crisis on the ACT. We rely on work done for south-east New South Wales. I suggest that the government ask the commissioner for the environment, if we still have such a person, to undertake a study of the climate change’s environmental, social and economic impacts on the ACT, in collaboration with relevant government agencies. This study needs to model the impact of various intensities of climate change on our water and our agriculture, on our housing, our workplaces and other built environments, and then we can get a better picture of how to act to safeguard our region’s future.
This knowledge can become the basis of conversations occurring at the level of neighbourhoods in the style of the agenda 21 local government consultations which followed the 1992 UNCED conference in Rio. Because the impacts of the climate crisis will be felt in every area of our lives there must be a whole of government approach to dealing with it. We need a climate crisis strategy, not just a greenhouse emissions reduction strategy. This strategy should incorporate: planning on the likely health effects from climate change; improvements to building codes to prepare for extreme weather events; building and retrofitting to make them energy efficient, including climate change education in school curricular at various levels; preparing emergency services for unusual and sudden extreme weather; as well as looking at the impacts on habitat for rare and endangered species and what we must do to reduce extinctions.
The greenhouse discussion paper invites ACT people on a journey, and that is a good and a positive image. I believe that if we factor the climate change story, both current and likely future, into all our policy making and planning, governments’ responsibilities to people and land become very stark indeed. This matter is not one to shirk or postpone, or belittle or laugh at, or just say, “It is one of those Greens’ things that we can ignore.” The Greens have been talking about this for over a decade and
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