Page 2385 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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The government performed particularly poorly in pursuing their commitment to protect areas of high conservation value. It was found that recommendations from a series of key reports, including the Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment’s grasslands investigation and the lowland woodland conservation strategy, were often ignored and that no new areas have been protected since weathering the change was released, other than for offsetting. Further complicating the situation is that neither the Assembly nor the public have been made privy to or consulted in the development of the ACT’s offsets policy which, we are told, is currently under development.
Similarly troubling was the action to plant one million new trees. The latest count, as of 2011, was 741,000. However, 17 per cent of these were found to be shrubs whose sequestration potential is much lower than that of trees. The target includes planting programs that were underway prior to action plan 1. It is also unclear whether the arboretum plantings are included in this target. Repeated requests by the Greens for information from the minister has yielded little clarity on this point.
Finally, category 4, improving our understanding of climate change, rated the most favourably of all and included two actions which we felt worthy of full marks. One of these was the commitment to implement sustainability in schools. Through the Australian sustainable schools initiative, sustainability curriculum packages were introduced to all ACT schools in 2007. An independent evaluation conducted in 2010 revealed glowing results from this initiative including a 94 per cent satisfaction rate amongst teachers, multiple benefits reported by students and staff and many practical resource management achievements. Given these positive results, the Greens strongly hope that the federal government will commit ongoing funding to the AuSSI program.
Another successful action was the government’s undertaking to partner with institutions to encourage climate change research. The government has commissioned a series of ANU research projects, awarded grants to the ANU Climate Change Institute and provided a bursary to the ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society. Unfortunately, this category also included some poor outcomes, in particular the commitment to undertake a carbon sequestration audit.
Whilst it was completed in 2009, the audit’s recommendations appear not to have been followed. We could find no evidence that the recommended research plots were established and the chipping of removed trees is still common TAMS practice, despite the ANU warning that this releases carbon at a much greater rate than in non-chipped wood. An analysis of the remaining weathering the change actions can be found in our full report which is available on the ACT Greens website.
In conclusion, it is hoped that this assessment will provide the government with food for thought as it finalises weathering the change 2. Far from this being an exercise in unnecessarily dredging up the past, it is intended to ensure that the way forward will be more ambitious and deliver stronger action on climate change in the ACT. Our evaluation reveals that action plan 1 delivered only quite timid first steps. We now need action plan 2 to deliver giant leaps to take us towards a sustainable and prosperous future.
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