Poor compliance and broad exemptions mean land clearing continues apace in northern Australia – despite our laws and pledges

by bpckle | Aug 21, 2024 | Media

In 2021, Australia was one of 141 nations pledging to end deforestation by 2030 – just over five years from now.

On paper, Australia should be well placed. It is wealthy, politically stable and has modern environmental laws. But the trees keep falling. Australia is the only deforestation hotspot among developed nations. Forests are still being cleared for farming, mining and expansion of urban areas. More and more species are becoming threatened, and populations of threatened species keep declining.

So what’s going wrong? We investigated land clearing across northern Australia, including longtime hotspot Queensland and the Northern Territory, where land clearing is accelerating at worrying rates.

Forests and woodlands across Australia’s south were deforested many decades ago. But our northern reaches have stayed far more intact – until recently.

In research out today, we found key reasons why the trees are falling faster in the north. Most clearing took place without being assessed under Australia’s national environmental laws, which covers damage to threatened species and ecological communities. And state laws have many exemptions, especially in Queensland.

What did we do?

To assess how effective Australia’s suite of laws are, we used Queensland land clearing data, and forest extent data in the NT and Western Australia to find examples of forest (denser canopy) and woodland (sparser canopy) being cleared between 2014–15 and 2021.

We focused only on land clearing above the 28th parallel south – the latitude line running from near Kalbarri in Western Australia to the Gold Coast in Queensland.

To avoid including small-scale clearing for firebreaks and access tracks in our data, we set a minimum clearing size of 20 hectares. This gave us a large sample of more than 18,000 clearing events done by humans.

National laws are ineffective

Australia’s main environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, does not explicitly regulate land clearing. But it does regulate Matters of National Environmental Significance, including loss of threatened species habitat and threatened ecological communities.

In our sample, around 80% of clearing events appeared likely to require assessment under these laws, as they involved the loss of at least 20 hectares of likely threatened species habitat or threatened ecological communities. We found no application for approval of clearing in the public database for 78% of these.

Following the blistering critique by the independent Samuel Review, the Australian government pledged to reform and strengthen the laws. But this year, the government indefinitely delayed the most important components of the reforms.

If our national laws are to properly conserve – let alone recover – our threatened species, any reforms must protect their habitat. This would mean clearer communication of when these laws apply and stronger enforcement.

Broad exemptions under Queensland law

For decades, Queensland has been the top state or territory for deforestation.

Most Queensland clearing complied with state laws. But the vast majority (75%) was done under legal exemptions, meaning no assessment was required.

Queensland’s Vegetation Management Act contains many broad and sometimes subjective exemptions such as “clearing for an urban purpose in an urban area”.

One specific exemption stood out: clearing regrowing forests and woodlands. Most exempt clearing was done under this exemption. But most cleared regrowth was over 15 years old, meaning it could have been habitat for threatened species.

Read more: Why Queensland is still ground zero for Australian deforestation

Many poorly protected species are found largely on private land – not in national parks. In fact, private landowners manage around 60% of Australia’s continent, including many forests and woodlands.

A 2023 expert panel assessment of clearing in Queensland suggested far better support and incentive schemes for private owners to manage trees on their land. Why would this help reduce clearing rates?

Protecting vegetation can come with direct costs such as weed management, as well as opportunity costs (for example, denser forests are less suitable for grazing). But forests and woodlands on farms bring benefits such as boosting farm production through natural pest control by birds and bats, as well as shade and shelter for livestock.

Routine NT clearing approvals

In the Northern Territory, clearing approvals are relatively easy to get – especially if you own a farm. Almost half (45%) of the entire NT is pastoral land – public land leased for use as cattle stations.

The Northern Territory is the only jurisdiction lacking specific vegetation management laws. While the Northern Territory has previously cleared land at slower rates than other states and territories, clearing rates are now on the rise.

The NT government has ambitious plans to develop both its agricultural and resource sectors. This will likely mean much more land clearing, and there are growing concerns over what that will do to landscapes, waterways and wildlife.

Effective laws are essential if we are to protect vegetation and wider biodiversity in the Northern Territory, home to the largest intact tropical savannah we have left on the planet.

What’s next?

In recent decades, huge swathes of native forest and woodland have been cleared across Australia’s north. The loss of this vital habitat has contributed to the worsening plight of our threatened species, ecosystems and human health.

Australia has promised to end deforestation. The problem is, our environmental laws and enforcement are failing to do so. Reforming our national laws will be essential, alongside better support for landowners managing trees on their land.

After all, ending widespread clearing is the most cost-effective and least risky way to protect our wealth of species.

Read more: Land clearing and fracking in Australia’s Northern Territory threatens the world’s largest intact tropical savanna

Hannah Thomas has received funding from WWF-Australia and an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. She is an early-career leader with the Biodiversity Council.

Martine Maron has received funding from various sources including the Australian Research Council, the Queensland Department of Environment and Science, and the federal government's National Environmental Science Program, and has advised both state and federal government on conservation policy including as a member of Queensland's Native Vegetation Scientific Expert Panel. She is a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, a councillor with the Biodiversity Council, a governor of WWF-Australia, and leads the IUCN's thematic group on Impact Mitigation and Ecological Compensation under the Commission on Ecosystem Management.

Martin Taylor was conservation scientist with WWF-Australia from 2006 to 2020. He has worked as a consultant since then producing reports for various environmental NGOs including WWF-Australia. He also has taught International and National Conservation Policy at the University of Queensland and is an adjunct Senior Lecturer in the School of the Environment there.
He received no funding for participating in or contributing to this research.

Michelle Ward has received funding from The Australian Research Council and the Commonwealth National Environmental Science Program. She was Science and Research Lead at WWF-Australia and is currently on a Technical Advisory Panel for a vegetation change project run by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.

Yes, it’s difficult for governments to pick green industry winners – but it’s essential Australia tries

by bpckle | Aug 21, 2024 | Media

Since the 1990s, the economic agenda of governments across much of the world has been dominated by the Washington Consensus. This is a series of policy recommendations centred on privatisation of state businesses, deregulation of industries, liberalisation of trade, and opening economies to foreign direct investment.

As a result, industrial policies – where governments actively shaped the structure of economic activities towards a public purpose – fell into disuse in many parts of the world.

Now, after decades in the doldrums, industrial policy is back – with a green twist. The United States, European Union and Australia are spending hugely in a bid to respond to climate change, while trying to make domestic industries more competitive. There’s also a clear geopolitical aspect – Western nations are trying to reduce their reliance on China in the name of economic security.

Australia’s new industrial policy, Future Made in Australia is being debated in parliament. Amongst other things, it will use public funding to help homegrown industries benefit from the global low-carbon energy transition. The plan supports the creation of new industries such as green hydrogen and the expansion of existing ones, such as the manufacture of solar panel components and mining of critical minerals important to the green transition.

Returning to industry policy has not gone unquestioned. The Productivity Commission, an independent federal advisory body, recently argued we should be cautious about this approach to stimulating the economy because it’s hard for governments to identify where Australian companies and industries can compete – and failed public investment could make us less well off.

Green stimulus, as far as the eye can see

Australia did not move first. Green industrial policies are surging around the world. The International Monetary Fund has counted more than 2,500 worldwide as of 2023, largely in developed countries.

Across the Asia Pacific, governments never really gave up using industry policies. In particular, China’s government has supported its industry heavily and over a long period. This is one reason why China’s producers are now so dominant in green tech sectors such as solar photovoltaics.

What is genuinely new is how the US, Germany and other Western nations are embracing green industrial policies. The US Inflation Reduction Act announced by President Joe Biden in 2022 contained around A$560 billion in green stimulus, following the European Union’s 2020 Green Deal.

But can governments pick winners?

The Productivity Commission is worried the government will struggle to use subsidies and tax incentives to successfully support selected industries. Can we really pick winners? What if we fail?

These are important questions to answer. But we should remember we have been picking winners for decades in one sense, even during the era of untrammelled globalisation.

Australia has benefited from decades of international trade and investment in carbon-intensive bulk commodities such as coal and gas. But the picture of our true competitiveness is distorted by the lack of an effective carbon price. Would Australia have exported $65 billion of thermal coal last year if global policies fully accounted for the environmental damage done by burning coal?

Regardless, as our major trading partners go green, demand for these carbon-intensive products will fall. The key question is not if, but how fast?

In the absence of an international price on greenhouse gas emissions, green policies are necessarily going to be a patchwork of subsidies and other kinds of incentives.

So the question is not really whether to get into the industry policy game, but how to do it right.

Read more: Climate holdout Japan drove Australia’s LNG boom. Could the partnership go green?

What do best practice policies look like?

Picking winners is hard. That doesn’t mean green industrial policies will fail.

We need to look at this as an information problem. Let’s say you want to identify how Australia could best compete and contribute to global value chains for emerging products, such as low-carbon steel or offshore wind turbines. Neither governments nor industry have all the information needed to make the best choices. That means collaboration is key.

The first and best response focuses on enabling governments, industries, and communities to better work together in identifying our strengths, and collaborate on an ongoing basis. It’s also useful to do detailed analysis of industrial processes and capabilities, as we did recently for the solar industry.

Research also indicates we are more likely to succeed in areas related to our existing strengths. But Australia is weakly diversified, meaning we have a lot riding on the success of a few industries such as iron ore, coal and gas.

This suggests there is real benefit to building new capabilities and industries by spending on research and innovation. The amount we spend on public research and development in the energy sector is low by international standards.

Importantly, this approach to industry policy relies on having governments with greater ability to do things rather than outsourcing. Reinvesting in government capacity to act is going to be essential.

But green industrial policy doesn’t mean retreating into protectionism. Throughout the transition to low-carbon energy, we will remain highly interdependent with our trading partners.

In low-carbon steel, for example, our ability to carve out a niche in emerging supply chains will rely in large part on collaborating with trade partners regionally and globally.

Try, fail, iterate, succeed

For many years now, scholars have forecast the retreat of globalisation. The new era of global competition centred on green industrial policies is unlikely to be reversed soon.

The Productivity Commission has contributed to the debate by noting that designing and implementing good policy is hard.

Caution is important. But so is seizing the moment, as governments and industry scramble to benefit from the transition to low carbon economies.

Llewelyn Hughes has received funding from a variety of different government and non-government sources, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Australia Japan Innovation Fund, and the Clean Energy Transition Advisory Committee of the Australia Japan Business Cooperation Committee.