Page 3900 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 25 September 2019
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Acting on climate change has been a passion of mine for a long time. In my capacity as the president of the Australia India Business Council’s Canberra chapter, at a 2009 annual Australia India address I made the focus of the night combating climate change and the shift to clean energy and renewables. This was during a time when India was starting to make serious efforts to conserve energy, harness renewable energy, protect forests and enhance understanding about climate change through government. I was delighted to initiate a conversation about addressing climate change and the benefits of renewable energy then, and I am happy to talk about it now.
Mr Assistant Speaker, in conclusion, I am pleased to move this motion to highlight how our government is taking substantive, pragmatic and compassionate action to address climate change. It is important that, as we make this transition, we bring the community along with us and ensure that they benefit from our actions to tackle climate change. I believe a comprehensive awareness program that actively promotes the measures outlined in the ACT climate strategy 2019-25 will greatly benefit our local community so that individuals and households can take full advantage of its cost saving and energy efficiency measures.
Our government is consulting and listening to our community. We are the only ones who have a plan to tackle this challenge in the ACT, while supporting the individuals in our community. I congratulate all those who have worked on developing the climate strategy. I commend this motion to the Assembly.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (5.21): I was anticipating that there would be quite a lot of speakers on this motion—and I am still hopeful that there will be, because climate change is, after all, the biggest issue facing the world as a whole. I am planning, however, to focus on only one aspect of Mr Gupta’s motion rather than the full breadth of it. What I am focusing on is the living infrastructure plan. This plan covers living urban infrastructure such as trees and other vegetation, soils, lakes and wetlands.
Trees are a very important climate change adaptation measure for cities like Canberra. It does not matter what we do; we now know that climate change has started and that our climate will get hotter, regardless of what sort of mitigation we do. There is a substantial degree of warming already built into the system, so we are already feeling the impacts. We felt this last January, which was our hottest on record. The mean temperature was 34.5 degrees Celsius, which was 6.3 degrees above average. January 2019 was the first time we have ever had more than four consecutive days over 40 degrees.
Hopefully, members have had a chance to look at the CSIRO heat map of the ACT, because it is really stunning. You can see the suburbs—the older suburbs have lots of trees, and they are nice and cool. There is 12 degrees difference between different parts of Canberra. It was done at 10.54 am on a summer’s day in 2017. In the shady areas around Lake Burley Griffin it was 28.8 degrees, while at the same time in parts of Gungahlin it was almost 41 degrees.
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