Page 3183 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 20 August 2019
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In the near future the government will be ready to release our climate action plan through to 2025, designed to meet that target. The climate plan will also include a living infrastructure strategy. Again, it has been touched on in debate today that the infrastructure is a really important part not so much of mitigation but of adaptation as this city gets hotter and drier, which is what all the scenarios indicate will happen. A living infrastructure is a really important part of trying to keep cool, of making the city livable, comfortable and a visually pleasing place to be. That work will be released shortly.
This budget includes a commitment of $12 million for continuing development of our climate change response. We will be finalising the climate strategy, as I said, and that will require further budget agreements, but the work funded out of this year’s budget will enable the current programs to continue. There is a range of programs in the policy work being done—and of course the ACT is recognised as a policy leader—through to programs like Actsmart and our zero emission community grants, which set of grants I particularly welcome. It is an important set because it provides small grants for people to come forward with ideas. With this grants program we want to unleash the community enthusiasm that is out there to make a contribution. People have some great ideas on how to engage the community and we have provided this set of grants to particularly facilitate people to bring forward those ideas, amplifying government efforts but particularly to get the community involved.
Until now, the significant emissions reductions that the ACT has achieved have largely come through government action, the government purchasing our electricity supply from renewable sources. The community has been very supportive of that, but it has not required significant behavioural change. Whilst there have been energy efficiency programs and the like, most people have just carried on doing what they were doing. To achieve our emission reductions in the future it will require effort on the part of the community: individuals, corporations, community organisations and the like.
We need to think very carefully how we work with the community to make those significant changes that we will need to make. We know that post-2020 transport emissions will account for at least 60 per cent of the ACT’s greenhouse gas emissions. Gas emissions will account for at least 20 per cent—probably around 22 or 23 per cent—of the ACT’s emissions. I noted the comments in the earlier debate about the gas transition. What I can tell members is that natural gas is commonly used in the ACT, predominantly for space heating but also for cooking and some industrial applications.
That natural gas is, of course, a fossil fuel, so it remains part of our greenhouse gas emissions profile and we need to remove that from our emissions profile over time. It has been interesting to observe in the data that a large number of Canberrans have already started to make the move away from natural gas usage. They are doing this in many cases for economic reasons. Historically—there have been many education campaigns about this—natural gas was promoted as the cleaner and cheaper alternative. Of course, it was a cleaner alternative when most of our power came from coal-fired power. But as we go to having 100 per cent renewable electricity, clearly electricity becomes a cleaner option than gas.
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