Where’s nature positive? Australia must ensure environment reforms work to restore what’s been lost

For decades, conservation efforts have focused on stopping the loss of nature. But a new era nature positive Environmental policies are spreading around the world, moving from preventing further damage to restoring what has been lost.

In 2022, almost 200 countries subscribed towards the 30 by 30 goal of restoring 30% of land and seas by 2030. Globally, the goal is to restore an area almost the size of India. Australia is working on it international goal strengthening the protection and restoration of the highest priority areas under its control. Strategy for nature. Over the past two centuries, Australia has already lost lots of biodiversity.

Laws must play a key role in protecting and restoring nature. But Australia's national environment and biodiversity law is currently falling short of its purpose. 2020 Samuel Review concluded that existing laws “do not contribute to the maintenance or restoration of the environment.”

In 2022, the Australian government has pledged to reverse environmental decline with new nature positive laws that will restore ecosystems and help species recover. Soon after this, parliament created a national Nature's Repair Market provide incentives for land users to restore degraded ecosystems.

After a failed reform attempt last year, the federal government last week announced its long-awaited broader reform package. Introducing the bill, Environment Minister Murray Watt said the laws will allow “Stronger environmental protection and restoration.” Will these reforms be a game-changer for the recovery? It's not so clear.

What will the proposed laws do for recovery?

Labour's reform bills run to more than 550 pages. This level of complexity means it is difficult to give a clear answer about how the reforms will affect the recovery.

At this stage, it appears that while the package contains welcome reforms, it does not deliver on ecosystem restoration.

The cornerstone of the reforms will be giving the Environment Secretary new powers to set national environmental standards, as set out in the Samuel Review. Once implemented, they will require environmental approval to ensure they do not contravene any standards.

These standards have been relaxed somewhat. The Samuel Review recommended mandatory national standards that would set out clear requirements for the protection of endangered species and other issues of national importance. Under the current reforms, the minister is not required to set any standards and environmental permits only need to be “consistent with” them.

The reform package continues to rely on environmental offsets, a practice that allows developers to destroy habitat in one place while “compensating” for it by restoring habitat elsewhere.

The text of the bills suggests that the developer must compensate for any long-term significant impact through compensation or payment of a restoration fee. The goal is to provide a net benefit to nature.

This sounds promising, but the concept of “net gain” is unclear, and the emphasis on compensation still assumes a loss of nature somewhere.

A better option would be if developers were required by law to first explore ways to avoid or mitigate environmental damage before relying on compensation. Although ministers must “consider” this hierarchy of options when making decisions, they are not actually obliged to apply it.

Overall this is disappointing. Instead of creating new incentives for landscape-scale restoration, restoration work will instead be associated with traditional legal approval model for specific, environmentally degrading projects through the use of offsets and restoration elsewhere.

The new “recovery contribution” scheme is even more worrying. This will allow developers to contribute to a compensation fund rather than having to do the work themselves. This would be a shortcut to allowing developers to pay for environmental destruction.

Compensations should only be used where habitat can actually be replaced. But in their current form, these reforms do not require an assessment of whether offsets are feasible for a particular project. Biodiversity compensation has also been thoroughly criticized for their failure to prevent the loss of nature, let alone the creation nature, positive results.

The reforms will also allow biodiversity certificates issued under the Nature Restoration Market to serve as offsets, even though the government excluding this in 2023. Tying the nature restoration market to offsets may divert investment away from some types of restoration projects. This reduces the net benefit of voluntary restoration when the results simply offset losses elsewhere.

Landscape planning

To speed up environmental recovery, the Samuel Review recommended better planning nationally and regionally. Downscaling will help environmental planners link habitat, protect climate refugia, and protect critical habitat at the landscape scale.

These new reforms appear to be a step forward on this front. However, the Minister will retain the discretion to draw up bioregional plans. If plans are drawn up in accordance with environmental laws, they must indicate development zones and areas where remediation will take place.

It's good to see restoration included in these plans. The problem is that recovery is still about land degrading activity for example, mining or land clearing. That is, it is being done in response to new environmental damage, rather than to restore already degraded landscapes.

Time for a new model

What is missing from the proposed reforms is a positive program of action to address Australia's deep historical losses to nature.

As bills are debated in Parliament, the best outcome would be to take clear action to actually restore nature at a landscape scale, and to do so proactively rather than as a response to the damage caused by development.

An excellent example that Australia could follow is the situation with the European Union. Nature Recovery Act adopted last year. It sets ambitious targets for restoring severely degraded EU ecosystems: 30% by 2030, 90% by 2050.

These goals will help restore biodiversity while combating climate change and accelerating natural resource-based adaptation. By law, EU states must prepare their own national recovery plans. Prototype laws on ecosystem restoration are also being developed by international organizations. Society for Ecological Restoration.

After decades of species decline and extinction, Australians deserve environmental laws that truly protect and restore our unique wildlife and ecosystems. The reforms proposed by the government are promising. But they are not yet making recovery the national priority it should be.

This article has been republished from Talk under Creative Commons license. Read original article.