Page 1743 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 7 June 2016
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Leave granted.
MR CORBELL: I am pleased to table the government’s response to the latest Australian Capital Territory state of the environment report. It is a requirement of the Commissioner for the Environment Act 1993 that the commissioner present to the government at regular intervals a report on the condition of our environment. The government is required to formally respond to such a report.
The Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment presented a 2015 report to the government on 21 December last year. The government tabled the report on 18 February this year. The report assesses the ACT’s performance in relation to climate change, human needs, air, land, water, biodiversity and heritage.
The report highlights that overall the ACT fares well on the state of the environment and its effective management. The report acknowledges that the community and government are showing strong leadership on action on climate change and that the government has been responsive to the concerns and issues previously raised by the commissioner.
The report points out that a key challenge for the ACT and our community will be to reduce the environmental impact of our consumption of goods. We continue to have an unsustainably high ecological footprint, at 8.9 global hectares per person. The findings of the report reinforce the need to continue to take strong action on climate change and to reduce our ecological footprint.
In the report, the commissioner makes 10 formal recommendations. The government is proposing to agree to eight of these recommendations. These eight recommendations reflect the government’s existing policies and approaches and require that the government continues to implement them. The government is also agreeing in principle to the remaining two recommendations. The first of these relates to recommendation 3, “Human needs”:
That the ACT Government considers integrated monitoring, reporting and evaluation of all the key strategies to guide achievement of improved sustainability outcomes for the ACT, including the ACT Planning Strategy, AP2, Transport for Canberra, the ACT Water Strategy, the ACT Nature Conservation Strategy and the ACT Waste Management Strategy.
It is the government’s view that there is already a high level of integration in developing, monitoring and reviewing all of the strategies referred to in this recommendation, with the Environment and Planning Directorate having lead responsibility for all of these strategies or other policy documents. The government agrees to consider how it can complement this work by developing a suite of indicators to better assess the effectiveness of environmental management and sustainable development in the ACT.
The second recommendation which the government is agreeing to in principle relates to recommendation 6:
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