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Ecological decline

By Robert Ellison - posted Tuesday, 29 August 2006


The 2000 Repairing the Country: a National Scenario for Strategic Investment report estimated the cost of repairing the Australian landscape would be $65 billion over a 10-year period and that a public investment of $37 billion was needed, matched by private investment of $28 billion. The total expenditure on environmental services in 1996-97 from all public sources was $2 billion for programs that are manifestly failing to reverse the decline in biodiversity.

In Queensland, the central organising environmental legislation is the Integrated Planning Act. It specifies a number of activities that trigger assessment under other environmental legislation. The associated environmental legislation is the Environmental Protection Act, the Fisheries Act, the Vegetation Management Act, the Coastal Protection and Management Act and the Water Act.

The Integrated Planning Act is possibly a perfectly adequate vehicle for town planning, roads, water, building and structural certification, sewerage, storage of flammable materials and a host of other traditional activities.

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The Environmental Protection Act applies to industry and development. Its main concern is emissions of noise and air and water pollutants. The main outcome is a host of “end of the pipe” limits on emissions.

The Fisheries Act protects marine vegetation and approves structures in marine waters. The Vegetation Management Act rules on clearing of native vegetation. The Coastal Protection and Management Act at least theoretically addresses sustainable development of the coastline. In practice, it approves development in the coastal zone. It applies to very limited areas of the coastline with the bulk left to weeds, 4WD’s, goats, pigs and cats. The Water Act applies to diversion of water resources.

Laudable as the goals of any single piece of environmental legislation may be, the larger picture is not addressed in a manner that integrates science, society and the economy and at the same time provides for conservation and restoration of our landscapes. The legislation applies to part of the problem but leaves huge gaps where the decline of ecological systems continues unabated.

Next generation environmental approvals are needed to save money and to redirect those resources into achieving better environmental outcomes.

In Queensland, the way forward must be to exclude the environmental legislation from the Integrated Planning Act and reassign staff from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Primary Industries, the Department of Natural Resources and Mines and Parks and Wildlife into interacting teams of environmental scientists working at a local scale.

Environmental science is a new type of team-based science drawing on a range of skills - ecology, archaeology, sociology, engineering, economics, accountants, environmental law and ethics, town planning and others. Use these powerful teams to drive solutions to local problems on a broad front.

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Keep the environmental triggers in the Integrated Planning Act by all means by making them notifiable activities. Subject activities to integrated assessment but make compliance voluntary and enforced by contract. This would streamline processes tremendously and allow people to get on with higher priority and broader environmental conservation goals. If agreement can’t be reached, refer it to the political sphere where decisions should always have been. Provide for statutory timeframes. Keep criminal sanctions for proved environmental harm.

There are three elements to sustainability, the welfare of current and future generations and the conservation of biodiversity on which all life ultimately depends. For one objective measure of sustainability, the unfortunate truth is that the trend to declining biological diversity has not been reversed over the past 20 or more years. The urgency of now doing so should be apparent to everyone.

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First published in the Journal of the Environmental Engineering Society, Engineers Australia.



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About the Author

Robert Ellison has a Bachelor Degree in Civil Engineering and a Masters in Environmental Science from the University of Wollongong. He has been an environmental activist for many years.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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