Page 4079 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011
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multidisciplinary, multiparty, community and business response which is timely and effective. The ACT Greens believe it is vital to pursue this issue collaboratively and are confident that other parties will also rise to the challenge. While we do need people nationally and internationally to come on board, the ACT can take the lead. We can make a start by setting a goal to go from the worst in Australia to the best.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (3.37): I thank Ms Bresnan for proposing this matter of public importance today. In December 2010 the ACT Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment published the results of the most recent assessment of the ecological footprint of the ACT. This work was carried out by the University of Sydney and it is the third assessment made using the same criteria.
An ecological footprint is the calculation of the amount of land and water required to support our use of resources and disposal of wastes. The ecological footprint is expressed in global hectares, where one hectare of biologically productive space with world average productivity is equal to one unit. The average world ecological footprint in 2003 was 2.2 global hectares per person. The ecological footprint is used by the Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment in the state of the environment reporting as a tool to communicate to the community about the impact of human activity. The footprint shows the impact of the decisions and lifestyles of the average Canberran on the environment.
The key findings of the commissioner’s most recent assessment, in December 2010, were that this footprint had increased by eight per cent in five years and by nearly 25 per cent in 10. The per capita average ecological footprint for ACT residents was 9.2 global hectares in 2008-09, and there has been a steady increase in the footprint in each assessment period; that is, in 1998-99, 2003-04 and 2008-09.
The major contributors to our footprint are food, goods and services and domestic and transport energy use. Looking at these contributors separately reveals a trend downwards in food, with steady rises in housing, mobility and goods with energy use. The ACT used 14 times the land area of the ACT to support our lifestyles. If everyone on the earth adopted a similar approach, we would need five earths to support our lifestyles. The increasing size of Canberra’s houses, coupled with the decrease in our average household size and the increasing numbers of single-person households, clearly has implications for our ecological footprint.
The environment provides us with clean air, water, food and other resources that support our ongoing survival and wellbeing. Environmental sustainability is important because we need to leave the environment in as good a condition as we have ourselves, or better.
As the natural environment has limits to its capacity to meet our increasing needs and wants, it is essential to manage our resources in a sustainable manner. We need to be conscious of how much we consume, how much waste we create and how we can be more self-sufficient.
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