Ground Up & Top Down - A Call For Stronger Action

Being a voice and advocate for our wildlife and fellow species involves ground up and top down actions.

PlantingSeeds is working hard to ‘plant seeds’ through projects such as the B & B Highway which creates pollinator gardens in public schools and other community centres. However, legislative and governmental actions to protect our biodiversity are also vitally important for those species without a voice. And in advocating for wildlife conservation, plant conservation is equally important. Over 1,000 plant and animal species in NSW alone are threatened. The destruction of habitat and climate change work to compromise our biodiversity.

We present a critique and focus on the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act) which is currently being reviewed with the federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley tabling draft legislation to devolve the Commonwealth’s approval powers under the Act to state and territory governments.

This follows a review from Professor Graeme Samuel who recommended handling states and territories the power to reduce duplication.

However, Australian National University environmental law expert Dr Peter Burnett has stated that the bill includes no provisions to create legally enforceable national environmental standards - something Professor Samuel called for to be a ‘centrepiece’.

Let's first look into what the EPBC Act is designed to do:

As the name entails, the EPBC Act was implemented to protect the Environment and Biodiversity within Australia. Predominantly; the Act identifies a need for ecologically sustainable development - mitigating government development to ensure it is done in an environmentally conscious way. The Act also identifies the potential input of Indigenous Australians when making decisions on environmental conservation.

Recent analysis of the EPBC Act suggests that this model could do with some improvements.

In his Independent Report, Professor Graeme Samuel indicates a disastrous decline of Australia's natural environment - with it the gradual extinction of species. With three native Australian mammals going extinct within the last decade, Professor Samuel argues there is a strong need for change - specifically within the policies meant to protect these animals.

Some important points made in the independent review of the EPBC Act include:

  • Environmental decisions are done on a project by project basis - rather than looking at the bigger picture. This means individual development opportunities can go ahead on the basis of their individual environmental impacts, rather than the potential larger impacts on broader aspects of biodiversity.
  • The EPBC Act does not have a standard mechanism that can be used to measure improvements of environmental protection.This means that even if endangered species are recognised; they are not protected. Furthermore; the provisions do not allow for accurate ways to measure effectiveness of protective actions.
  • There has been limited activity to enforce the Act in the last 20 years.

Prof. Samuel recommends that there should be standards developed in consultation with Indigenous Australians, science and environmental and business stakeholders.

He recommends an independent overseer to police governmental action on the environment, ensuring compliance and transparency. However, while Professor Samuel has only released the interim report with initial recommendations, the Environment Minister Susan Ley has already ruled out the implementation of such an independent compliance officer.

A slow Act…

Lesley Hughes, a professor of biology at Sydney’s Macquarie University, describes this new legislation as “death by a thousand cuts”. He says the Act tends to assess threats to a species in a vacuum: "It's the classic death by a thousand cuts. You could lose the species because each of those threats have been assessed independently rather than at the same time."

Sean Dooley, from conservation group BirdLife Australia, said recently on ABC Radio National: "The way [the Act] currently works is they don't really take into consideration cumulative impacts.”

Citing the example of the swift parrot, he states: "You see a bit of bush being cleared here, it doesn't meet the criteria of having a significant impact, and a housing development there, or some logging in another site, and the lights go out for that bird across the landscape," he says.

"Each incident isn't deemed serious enough, and so the swift parrot has been declining throughout the period of the EPBC Act."

The proposed changes to the Act emerge in response to the societal values that span across Australia. Looking closer to home - at the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 - reliance on the market to mitigate environmental issues is at the forefront of this issue. Biodiversity Stewardship Agreements agreements act as a credit scheme - paying individuals to manage their land to offset species loss on new development sites. This scheme determines a species value in relation to their worth to humans - failing to consider the implications for biodiversity in the future.

Speaking to ABC National recently, Rachel Walmsley from the NGO the Environmental Defenders Office said the review — which is required every decade under the law — actually recommended the EPBC be repealed and rewritten: "The 71 recommendations that the Hawke review came up with, unfortunately, never really saw the light of day. They have languished on a dusty departmental shelf." She says the law is fundamentally flawed.

"We have an Act that doesn't prevent extinction, even though that is the primary national Act to conserve our unique biodiversity," Ms Walmsley says.

"There have been about 6,500 projects referred under the Act in 20 years, but there has only ever been a handful of refusals, and the Act has been really ineffective in actually delivering environmental outcomes.”

Next steps

The full Interim report by Professor Graeme Samuel is linked here to give you a more in-depth idea of the extent of these issues and their ramifications within Australia. If you would like to learn more about Australia’s threatened species and the organisations currently working to help them they are linked below.

Australian Conservation Fund

Voiceless

Save our Species

Australian Wildlife conservancy

The PS Team will continue to update and add to this article as more information becomes available so be sure to bookmark this and check back to keep up to date on this important issue.

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