The game changers – Australia aims for nature positive as well as net zero

The inaugural Global Nature Positive Summit is being hosted in Sydney this week and Murray Hogarth has been covering the emerging stories for The Fifth Estate. Here’s some of what happened on Wednesday, day 2.

The Australian Carbon Credit Unit scheme and the Nature Repair Market are game changers for nature and climate outcomes.

These programs are designed to unlock opportunities for landholders, businesses and communities to contribute to both nature and climate solutions, while driving economic benefits.

Today (Wednesday) David Fredericks, Secretary of the Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water delivered a plenary session titled Integrated Strategies: Nature Positive and Net Zero.

His inclusive address was an opportunity to put aside daily politicking and get an insight into what the work of responsible government looks like on the most important threats to people in Australia and the world in the 21st century, the climate crisis and destruction of nature.

As Fredericks said: “We want to explicitly reject the notion that action on nature, on climate, on water, on biodiversity, on sustainability comes at the cost of our future prosperity.”

He spoke to reform agenda for the politically challenged Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act), Australia’s cornerstone environmental legislation, which is in serious need of a 21st century overhaul and update.

If anyone is in any doubt, this speech showed that DCCEEW (DEC-Q) is deeply focused on addressing Nature positive and net zero in tandem, which has major implications for business and industry, government at all levels, communities and civil society, and consumers.

Following is a lightly edited version of the full speech

Good morning everyone, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of lands on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. I extend that acknowledgement to their elders, past and present, and to First Nations people attending here today from Australia and indeed from across the globe, as others have done from the opening session of this summit.

I too, want to acknowledge strongly the deep connections between First Nations peoples and the natural environment, and therefore, on behalf of my department. I commit fully to working in partnership with First Nations peoples across Australia to embrace their stewardship, to learn from their science and to close the gap.

I also want to thank each of you for being here and for making time in your busy schedules to contribute your insights and your expertise to the first Global Nature Positive Summit. Some of you have travelled a long way to be here, and I’m personally very grateful for your commitment to making progress on these important issues.

Finally, I cannot leave this stage without personally thanking all of the people who have done such a wonderful job over an extended period of time to make this summit happen. I’m grateful for that.

As a senior public servant, it makes me very proud to see the Australian public service and Commonwealth public services come together and work collegiately and conscientiously to pull off such a significant and successful summit.

I hope that it gives all of you confidence that the same innate professionalism will similarly be applied as we work together to achieve a nature positive and net zero future.

Now to be clear, we all know there are a range of challenges we must meet in achieving these objectives. Many of them have been discussed over the last two days, but a particular challenge is how we achieve these two objectives concurrently.

That, of course, is the subject of this plenary, and it comes at a critical time as governments, NGOs, industry and business community, groups, academia and many others wrestle in different ways with this challenge.

For my department, the issues are very real. Some preeminent examples [include]:

• facilitating the roll-out of large scale renewable energy infrastructure, so crucial to the energy transition to net zero emissions, in a way which considers the impacts of nature and the ambition that we be nature positive
• regulating environmental impacts under the existing EPBC Act, and ultimately amending that law to secure nature positive outcomes in ways that also consider the impacts of climate change and the need to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions to mitigate those impacts
• overseeing, and indeed creating markets to crowd in private sector investment, to reduce emissions and to drive nature positivity, while ensuring these markets reinforce each other rather than create duplication or worse contradiction.

Now as a department, we are taking very real steps to tackle these challenges and to seize the opportunities which they present. We start from a strong institutional basis.

The creation of the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water in 2022 was a deliberate decision by the Australian government to bring together in the one department, indeed in the one portfolio, the people and resources and the policy program and regulatory levers required to address these issues and to find and leverage the opportunities from this collective.

We have also adopted a vision which unites our work by proudly committing to an Australia that is prosperous because it is sustainable, with community and country at the heart of our actions, I say proudly because we want to explicitly reject the notion that action on nature, on climate, on water, on biodiversity, on sustainability comes at the cost of our future prosperity.

We have spent two years now driving a culture within the department which honestly and transparently recognises that we will encounter legitimate, competing perspectives and genuine, contestable problems in our culture, requiring staff to empathetically consider all perspectives, their own and others.

To consult deeply within the department and across a broad range of external stakeholders, to ensure those perspectives are fully informed.

To thoughtfully consider nuances, changes and trade-offs that could assist in addressing the problem in a balanced way.

To engage collegiately, to seek to achieve a whole-of-department position on the best advice or the appropriate outcome, and where this is not possible, the right thing to do then is to be frank about that and expose objectively the very proper differences.

Now I can tell you that this institutional and cultural commitment is already driving integrated strategies and actions which better balance our nature positive and net zero goals in our existing regulatory work under the EPBC Act.

Some of those are very practical. We have instituted a program of early engagement with renewable project proponents and sectoral representatives to help them understand how to design and site projects to have lower impacts on nature so they can be efficiently considered through the regulatory process.

And we are investing in science and research to help the sector with a renewables research program underway to address known gaps in environmental information that unaddressed could affect the consideration of projects.

Our reform agenda for the EPBC Act has also been heavily influenced by our dual goals.

For example, regulators will need to consider climate adaptation and resilience measures in planning and landscape-scale approaches to their decision making, including in regional plans, strategic assessments and conservation planning processes. And these reforms will be supported by improved information and guidance, including climate impact modelling of exposed habitats, species and places.

The markets and nature

Finally, a word about markets.

Australia’s economy is deeply connected to the natural environment. Almost half of our GDP is tied to industries with moderate to high dependence on nature.

And so as we incentivise carbon decarbonisation, we must look for opportunities to incentivise positive biodiversity and nature outcomes. Now, nature-based solutions such as carbon sequestration are vital tools in our climate strategy, but they also present an opportunity to maximize efforts for biodiversity and for nature.

The Australian Carbon Credit Unit scheme and the Nature Repair Market are game changers for nature and climate outcomes.

These programs are designed to unlock opportunities for landholders, businesses and communities to contribute to both nature and climate solutions, while driving economic benefits. With our Nature Repair Market, we will have, for the first time anywhere, a national, voluntary, regulated system that incentivises the protection and regeneration of Australia’s unique biodiversity.

An innovative market which will bring nature into the economic equation in ways that has never been done before, providing land holders with new income streams while ensuring that we address biodiversity loss in a meaningful way. To this end, the Nature Repair Committee has recently released the first method for public consultation under the Nature Repair Act.

This method allows landholders to deliver biodiversity benefits by planting diverse native trees and vegetation that is specific to their local region, which in turn increases habitat to benefit wildlife. Land holders are then eligible for a tradable biodiversity certificate, and in an important acknowledgement of our dual goals of nature positive and zero. This method can be combined with carbon projects to generate carbon credits as well on the same parcel of land.

And so to conclude, I well and truly know that we can only meet the challenge and seize the opportunities of our Nature positive and net zero future with the collective input of thoughtful, considered, committed people like you all gathered here today, and in that spirit, I now look forward to hearing the valuable insights of my fellow panel members.

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