Public Consultation on ACT Government Climate Change Action Plan

The ACT Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, Simon Corbell, has invited comment on the "Weathering the Change Action Plan II". There will be a public
consultation 12:30 to 3 pm, in the Legislative Assembly Reception Room, London Circuit, Canberra, Tuesday 14 February 2012. A light lunch will be served. RSVP: climatechange@act.gov.au

Adaptive management of natural resources

Greetings from the famous room N101 at the Australian National University, where Carol Boughton is presenting a progress report on her PHD research on Meta (models) as applied to managed environment. Essentially Carol is seeing if the analysis techniques used in the IT discipline can be applied to solving environmental problems. She cited the Australian Public Service report "Tackling Wicked Problems : A Public Policy Perspective" (25 October 2007) and discussed Adaptive management (AM).

Carol is looking in particular at the use of formal models for nature reserves. I did a quick search and found more than 22,000 web pages mentioning adaptive management for nature reserves (and more than 300 scholarly papers). However, most of these did not appear to be referring to formal models, as an IT person would understand them, but just a description in words.

Also I suspect that most of the "wicked problems" in natural resource use are due to a lack of recognition of the role of politics in decision making. This would require analysis of the special interest groups which decision makers have to take into account. An example of this, on a national scale, will be evident on Sunday, when the Australian Government releases details of their carbon pricing scheme.

A rational analysis of the problem would suggest pricing all carbon emissions and then compensating individuals for their loss of finds or jobs. However, the reality is likely to be that some special interest groups have so much political influence that the system will be distorted to accommodate them.

Environmental Sustainability Indicators for Local Government

The Leichhardt Council, in Sydney's inner west, has released a "Draft Environmental Sustainability Strategy 2010-14". The plan includes what appears to be an excessive number of not well targeted environmental performance indicators. From a quick search it appears there are many councils proposing their own sustainability measures. It would seem a good idea if the government or local government associations set some uniform standards.

As an example of a poor indicator, the Leichhardt Council proposes "Area of public open space available per resident within the local government area". This would allow the Council to provide one large park at a location inconvenient to most residents, but perform well on the indicator. In the case of Leichhardt Council, the large Callan Park would skew the results. A better measure would factor in how much green space there is within five minutes walk of each resident's home (easily measured using computerised mapping).

Unfortunately at 7.5 Mbytes, the Council's document is too large to easily download and about ten times larger than it need be. The size of the document is due to a number of excessively large images, which contribute little to the report, but which (ironically) greatly increase its carbon footprint. It is not clear why the staff of the council produced the report in this unwieldy format, however by doing so they have increased both the financial and environmental cost of the report and reduced access to the report for the citizens. If this was due to a lack of competence, that can be corrected with training, if deliberate it may require investigation by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) to establish why council staff are acting against the interest of the citizens.

Leichhardt’s ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY 2010-14 Exhibition Draft Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Environmental Sustainability
3. Strategy 2010-14
4. How to Use This Document
5. Land
6. Air and Climate Change
7. Sustainable Transport
8. Water
9. Biodiversity
10. Consumption and Waste
11. Noise
12. Heritage
13. Management of Sustainability

• Appendix 1: Council Environmental Policies
• Appendix 2: Environmental Legislation
• Appendix 3: Key Partners and Stakeholders

Environmental Accounts Information Paper

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released a useful information paper: "What are Environmental Accounts?". This discusses applying an accounting approach to integrate environmental data with economic and social data. I don't agree with the ABS assertion that an accounting approach necessarily brings greater discipline to the organisation of data. The recent global financial crisis, brought about by companies not knowing what liabilities they have, suggests accounting has a disastrous lack of rigour. However, the ABS provides a useful overview of environmental measurement for social planning, plus a List of economic Accounting reports.

Environmental science has detailed measures to try to assess the uncertainty of the data they collect. These do not always work. At Griffith University I studied global environmental models, such as the Club of Rome study "Limits to Growth" (1972); these suggested the world as we know it should have ended decades ago. The models were wrong and the world survived.

The difficulty is not with data from nature which can be measured with instruments, but the assumptions about human behaviour in response to that data. This is the most difficult part with environmental accounts, but the most important. As the ABS points out, government policy is shifting to an integrated approach considering the economy, society and the environment together.

In my own recent work, commissioned by the Australian Department of Environment, on how to reduce ICT energy use, I have pointed out the need for better measures of the energy use of the ICT sector in Australia (and therefore its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions). However, knowing how much energy is used will not necessarily reduce climate change. The actions I propose depend on the behaviour of people. At one extreme it depends on convincing individuals to turn off their computers when they are not using them, and at the other of convincing the Australian Government to buy energy efficient computers for the public service and schools. The resulting change in energy use can be measured, but there are is no perfect way to predict the behaviour of a person, or a government.

Some examples the ABS provides:

1. Accounting for Nature : A Model for Building the National Environmental Accounts of Australia, from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists
2. National Water Accounts, from the The Bureau of Meteorology
3. Australia's National Greenhouse Accounts, from the Department of Climate Change)
4. Water Account, Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics

... Environmental-Economic Accounts:

• enable the relationships between the environment and the economy to be analysed and understood, including understanding environmental and economic dependencies and outcomes;
• present environmental data using a framework that is consistent with broader economic data, such as those compiled in accordance with the widely used economic accounting framework, the System of National Accounts;
• show the distribution of environmental resources across different parts of the economy, which supports more targeted policy development;
• follow internationally accepted guidelines and facilitate international comparisons; and
• provide a system into which monetary valuations of environmental assets and environmental-related flows can be incorporated with physical data, so that monetary implications of environmental actions can be considered...
  

From: "What are Environmental Accounts?", ABS, Information Paper

4655.0.55.001 , 19 September 2008