Helen Gee

Comments on the Draft Climate Change Strategy for Tasmania
The Executive Officer
Climate Change Interdepartmental Committee
Strategic Policy Division

It is very pleasing to see the current biparisan recognition of the magnitude of the impact that climate change will have on our world and, specifically,our island of Tasmania. It is only when the direct impact kicks in – so many kids with asthma, so many cancer deaths, unprecedented drought and its implications for biodiversity – that people begin to pay attention. The move to greater sustainability, for all of us, is now of quite urgent necessity and I like the slogan “acting now…”. We need fundamental changes to our technologies, our social institutions and our values.

My comment in summary
1. National Leadership. Targets should be at least 30% below 1990 levels by 2020, and at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Through COAG, and all other avenues, the Tasmanian Government can influence the Federal government to; legislate strong National CO2 reduction targets, sign Kyoto, protect Australia’s old-growth & high conservation value forests, phase-out coal-fired power & coal exports, introduce a carbon tax and other greenhouse pollution levies.

2. The most important carbon sinks we have are our old-growth and high conservation value forests; we must end clearfell and burn logging operations, and legislate a rapid end to landclearing in Tasmania.

3. Tasmania’s public transport system is in urgent need of a more regular and affordable statewide bus service and bike lanes in Tasmania’s cities and major centres are an obvious necessity.

4. We should act to develop Tasmania as a centre of excellence in research and development of renewable energy & green technology.

Discussion

The National Context
There is within the Federal Liberal Government a deep and profound denial of climate change just as there is a seeming inabilty to understand that we are running down our natural capital at the expense of future generations. Big business and the media have stopped promoting doubt about the global warming crisis, in the face of irrefutable evidence from the world’s foremost climate scientists, not least of whom is our Australian of the Year, Dr Tim Flannery. The Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change recently called for a long-term aspirational target for cutting emissions (60 – 80% by 2050) as well as a short-term target of 20% reduction by 2020 and a clear financial signal to drive investment. However, each year the Australian population grows at a quarter of a million and each year we use more energy, travel further, consume more resources and create more waste. The Tasmanian Government must be more proactive in creating real awareness, and must deal with the unfortunate Federal stance on climate change in any influential way it can, bearing in mind:

Prime Minister John Howard’s approach is beset with contradictions; he has announced the composition of his emissions trading taskforce and its terms of reference; and the signs are not good (unless you are a major resources company).

The taskforce includes representatives of big polluters BHP Billiton, Xstrata, Alumina Ltd, the Australian Pipeline Trust and International Power (owner of the notorious Hazelwood power plant in Victoria).

It also includes the chair of Qantas, the managing director of the National Australia Bank and the secretaries of the departments of Environment & Heritage, Treasury, Foreign Affairs & Trade and Industry, Tourism & Resources.

The Prime Minister said the taskforce’s “sole remit will be to tell us what shape a global emissions trading system might take and it will be looked at against the background of preserving the natural advantages Australia has in areas like fossil fuels and uranium.” The 6.5 billion dollars which is given annually as subsidies to the Australian fossil fuels industry could be better spent on building a renewable energy industry and improving public transport systems.

Putting a price on carbon will provide the right price signal to invest in cleaner technologies and help our eonomy become more efficient, but the impact of climate change does not end there.

Tasmanian context; acting now

Acting now not only reduces the damage, it buys us time. Business leaders have recognised climate change is a serious business risk; a time bomb. The longer we delay, the more expensive for business, the economy and the environment. We must ramp up the sense of shared responsibility.

“The Government will take the lead…” ? A warning against terminological obfuscation becacuse I am a little cynical.

The Strategy and the Action Plan are, in my view, basically sound, with a few exceptions. However, there is hard work ahead for our politicians, senior bureaucrats and industry leaders who must lead by example. Otherwise the Strategy is just so much greenwash. You can’t expect ordinary Tasmanians to take the Greenhouse challenges and change their life quite radically if our leaders sit back behind volumes of greenspeak, and fail to recognise the inter-related issues surrounding climate change. That failure won’t win votes either. Climate change presents massive challenges for all sectors of the community and accordingly I believe the taskforce should include voices from a broad cross-section of the community.

Specific Comment
p10 Water Resources
Less secure water supplies are a reality. Logging of upper catchments is a definite no-no. Throughout the decade of Landcare people were workng hard in the lower catchments to overcome erosion problems often being exacerbated by landclearing in the upper catchment. It seemed like banging your head against a brick wall to speak out about this absurd reality. We have to quell the obsessive mind-set here in Tasmania that pervades politics and creates blind spots and blinkered vision. We have to bridge the divide. Oldgrowth forests play an important role in protecting and contributing to our water supply, beacause they contribute more and cleaner water (around 12 megalitres of water per hectare per year) than regrowth forests after logging. We could extract more water from catchments simply by ending logging in these areas. A few more years of subsidised access to the native forests in our upper catchements will see these values irretrievably damaged. Nothing has frustrated me more than this reality.

p11 vulnerability of the coast to inundation and erosion
People are still buying real estate virtually at sea level. In some areas such as river mouths, the natural erosion and deposition of sand is being impeded at great cost for only short term solutions. Longer term planning is required to prevent the waste of funds. (eg Prosser River mouth.)
p13
“Tasmania Together identified the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the mitigating of climate change impacts under Goal 24″
Our natural resources are not being managed in a sustainable way for future generations. ” By way of example I quote the Federal Court of Australia: Brown v Forestry Tasmania (N 4) [2006] FCA 1729 (Judgement Summary):
10 “…the Court has formed the view that the relevant forestry operations will be, and have been, carried out otherwise than in accordance with the RFA.”
AND
“I do not consider that the State has protected the eagle by applying relevant management prescriptions. Management prescriptions have helped to slow the eagle’s extinction but have not protected it in the sense of either maintaining existing numbers or restoring the species to pre-threatened levels.”
AND
283 An additional reason for finding the State has not protected the species through relevant management prescriptions is its failure to comply with cl 70 of the RFA. This, in turn, is a breach of cl 68 because the management prescriptions referred to in cl 68 are the same management prescriptions which cl 70 requires to be ‘identified in jointly prepared and agreed Recovery Plans’ and implemented ‘as a matter of priority’.
284 There has never been a Recovery Plan for the beetle. The previous Plans for the eagle and parrot expired in 2003 and 2005 respectively. When in existence, the Plans for the eagle and parrot were not fully or even substantially implemented.” [ Judge Shane Marshall]

Loss of faith
Because of the failure of the Tasmania Together process to implement the wishes of an overwhelming majority of Tasmanians to end oldgrowth logging (despite the late Premer Jim Bacon’s promise to do so by 1.1.01), there is considerable loss of faith and therefore a level of disprited interest in this draft strategy.
p15 Guiding Principles
Why reinvent the wheel? There are already numerous websites with information, guidance and incentives: take ACF’s internet based GreenHome challenge. Participants make changes to their own home and behaviour and continue to improve. Al Gore inspired ordinary people to take action. There is a snowball effect that is not only beneficial to the environment, it has the ability to strengthen communites. And if our politicians joined in and, for instance, cycled every day to Parliament House, or their electoral office, the snowball effect would get a real leg up.

Action areas
“The Tasmanian Government will lead.”
One wonders if the members of the Government are hiding behind that word ‘Government’. To me it is a group of real people making real lifestyle choices and my vote goes to them accordingly. Urgency is a key factor so words alone will not cut ice. I believe regulation of industry is necessary to bring about the urgent change required. Without it there will be some goodwill but an unlevel playing field.
p17 2.
Having ‘clean’ hydro power does not mean it comes without a cost. The cost is there; to the natural environment, and we should always remember this.
In addressing dam safety and water management issues, please be aware that small local dams, at the community level, are what the World Commission on Dams found to be the best water solutions. The Simpler Way is small local, community solutions to our energy and commodity requirements. That is, in part, why I opposed Basslink so vehemently. Tasmanians seem little concerned that they are now using power from dirty brown coal-fired power so that Melbourne folk can claim to be using clean hydro power. (my submission is available on request).
A specific point: the Edgar Fault is likely to be activated within 200 years of the last significant movement (1880s), according to the late Prof Sam Carey (Geology UTAS), who wrote to the HEC before his death. There is no way of knowing when it will be activated by the major fault-line to Tasmania’s south-west. (Pers Comm.) The impact on Huonville needs to be addressed now. (The significant increase in earth movements and severe weather events are related to climate change of course.)
p17 3.
Emissions trading. As in the US the Australian states are taking the lead with emission trading schemes and they are beset with complexities. I believe this trade will most likely be a way of shelving responsibilities: the carbon emitters will become the nouveau riche purchasing credits from the third world and those who are already living sustainably. Even though it is widely supported by business and economists, emissions trading is unacceptable. It must increase prices of electricity and petrol, perhaps that’s not a bad thing.
p17 6
I have travelled on public transport a good deal for the past decade, by choice, but the high cost is almost prohibitive for me; a one-way trip from Koonya or Triabunna into Hobart is over $20, about twice the cost of running my car in to the city, and I can take several others in my car. The Government must subsidise the initial phase, and promote the use of bus transport in tandem with a climate change awareness program. The MTT must similarly be subsidised to allow for cheaper fares. We could have people leaving their cars at home in droves if we wanted to get serious about bike-ways and boat transport (ferries and private craft).
p17 7
New research projects: avoid duplication of research please! So much is being done world-wide, its action we need.
p17 10
Excellent idea, a web-based portal for information (see www.acfonline.org.au/GreenHome for ideas)

Action plan

We must advance beyond planning and SOON. WE DO NOT NEED MORE RESEARCH TO ACT. WE NEED LEADERSHIP AND REGULATION.
OBJECTIVE 4
TOURISM
Water conservation is crucial. Tourists are not impressed with fountains, spas, swimmin pools when the countryside they travel through is drought ravaged. We must seriously question the viability of current operations such as the Federal Hotels project at Coles Bay.
Agriculture
* We are still losing key indicators of land health, like soil carbon and perennial vegetation.
*Many urban Tasmanians display spectacular ignorance of the rural situation. Consumers need to take more responsibility for where their food comes from
* We are seeing alienation of some of the best cropping land for housing and urban sprawl
* Fire mismanagement is destroying biodiversity. We need more ecologically focused education & more cool burns in autumn and winter.

Objective 6
Tasmania’s best carbon sinks are its old forests (see my comments below under Objective 8)
I question the morality of some of the overseas projects. HECEC has been removing carbon sinks in SE Asia, by logging catchments ahead of inundation. I believe the development that takes place in the Third World is a lot to do with maximising profits of corporations rather than producing the basic necessities, as perceaved by the local communities. Small and locally generated and operated power plants create local jobs, affordable power and what the people want (World Commission on Dams Report; International Rivers Network – more info available)
Potential for generating hydrogen Sodium hydroxide is not used here; it is a compact way of transporting energy, used in the USA.

Objective 7
Excellent.

Objective 8
Every day we read about another study revealing old-growth forests are carbon sinks.

Old-growth forest store far more carbon than previously thought, making their preservation a higher priority in carbon trading and other efforts to tackle global warming:

Until recently, it was presumed that old-growth forests were not able to absorb and store significant amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
However in a study published in recently in the American Journal, Science, scientists have discovered that a 400-year-old forest in southern China is soaking up carbon from the atmosphere considerably faster than expected.

Knowing this, developing countries with abundant old-growth forest cover could ask rich countries for compensation through the global carbon trade, and could help reduce deforestation in the developing world. (This is the idea generated by Guoyi Zhou, from the Guangdong Province-based Dinghushan Forest Station, Chinese Academy of Sciences.) Would Tasmania go for compensation?

In their study, Zhou and colleagues discovered that the top 20 centimetres of soil in old-growth forests can contain much more carbon that previously expected. We’d be mad to continue to log our old forests when we have a strategy for climate change in place. It simply won’t make sense!!

Until now, scientists believed that carbon taken up by old-growth forests from the atmosphere was balanced by the carbon they release, partly because of the large amounts of decomposing organic matter in their soils, ‘unlocking’ significant amounts of carbon.

The group of scientists measured carbon in the soil collected between 1979 and 2003. They found that organic carbon concentrations in the top 20 centimetres of the soil increased in that period from about 1.4 per cent to 2.35 per cent.

Carbon sinks “may be created through commercial forest plantings and environmental plantings” as Objectve 8 outlines, but the overwhelming omission here is the value of the old forests and the need to end oldgrowth logging in this state. Today. The young trees will take many years to store much carbon and often the land has been cleared and burnt ahead of the planting with a great loss of carbon to the atmosphere. The 40% of Tasmania reserved does include some forest but great tracts of commercial forests were left out of the TWWHA, to be available for logging. It is now not just the scientific experts who believe these forests must be protected, it is Federal law. These forests on the eastern and southern fringes of the TWWHA are our best carbon sinks.

It is irresponsible for people to buy electricity from suppliers who source power generated using wood from native forests.These are the best carbon sinks, particularly oldgrowth forests and there is an inherent contradiction in the Government’s forest policy and this Strategy which fails to grasp fact.

The “plantations for carbon sequestration” furphy – while we destroy oldgrowth is just plain stupidity. If mapping were accurate we would not see the continuation of the mantra “90% of our oldgrowth forests are protected”. The official RFA mapping was biased in favour of maximising resource security for the commercial forests and maximising the perceaved percentages in protected areas.. I could elaborate if requested.

Conclusion
Many small communities and individuals responded to the challenges foreshadowed in the Strategy many years ago and are exemplary in their personal daily lives. I live in such a community which has its own farmers markets, recycling depots and solutions and where people share transport and implements, food and time. This is what we call the Simpler Way, a way to reduce our ecological footprint. What is so disappointing is the relative immunity city dwellers feel towards the problem.

Population is an issue I would like to see addressed in the Strategy. Population and consumption are linked to climate change in a triangular causal relationship.
The fundamental cause of the big global problems threatening us is over-consumption.

Without community pressure, and pressure from the States, Australia could be stuck with a n economy which depends more on polluting our environment than on efficient, clean and safe energy.

The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), with whom I am a Tasmanian Councillor, maintains that it is essential that Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by at least 60% by 2050 and that the use of fossil fuels is phased out. ACF is campaigning for a 10% mandatory renewable energy target, and the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, including national legislation, tax reforms and a green cities program. Sir Nicholas Stern is Head of the Government Economics Service and Adviser to the Government on the economics of climate change and development. In his Report to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Economics of Climate Change he concludes that the scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change is a serious global threat, and it demands an urgent global response.

Working for a better future is our moral duty to the millions of other species we share the planet with as well as to the future generations for whom we hold the earth in trust. The Strategy needs to emphasise these values and the need to appeal to Tasmanians from this basis.

Helen Gee BA Dip Ed
(Tasmanian Writer)
Koonya 7187