South Wind

When a highly reputable international science journal publishes a claim that the Australian public is paying huge sums for carbon capture that isn’t happening, the government has a choice: it can address the issue head-on, or double down. 

With potentially billions of dollars of public money and a big chunk of Australia’s emissions reduction target hanging on the viability of human-induced tree regeneration, or HIR, the government has chosen to double down. 

Andrew Macintosh, an ANU law professor with specialist inside knowledge of the nation’s Emissions Reduction Fund, known also as the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) scheme, is lead author of a peer-reviewed paper published last week by the London-based science journal Nature.

Macintosh resigned in 2020 after four years chairing the former government’s Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee. He has since become a leading critic of misuse by successive governments of tree carbon offsets to support ambitious carbon emission reduction targets. 

In their Nature paper last week, Macintosh and 10 other specialists in ecology, tree biology and carbon accounting described what appear to be fatal flaws in administration of the “Safeguard Mechanism”, by which big fossil fuel polluters can pay for ACCU accreditation to offset their carbon emissions.

Offsetting by means of tree-planting – the vast bulk of ACCU accreditation projects – is supposed to deliver real, additional and permanent abatement. The main regenerative trigger for projects Macintosh’s team investigated was supposed to be ending grazing by farm animals on low-rainfall lands. 

The team found that the very limited amount of regeneration that had occurred over four years in 182 tree regeneration projects in inland Queensland, NSW and Western Australia, compared with adjacent areas, delivered an average increase of just 0.8 per cent, almost all of that a result of identifiable rain events. 

Macintosh launched a public broadside at Australian carbon offsetting in March 2022, sensationally declaring the market “a rort”. He claimed that graziers had been paid millions of dollars “to not chop down forests that were never going to be chopped down, to grow forests that are already there [and] to grow forests in places that will never sustain permanent forests”.

Confronting evidence that carbon farming under previous governments was so suspect that it should be excluded from our national carbon accounts, the incoming Albanese government was in something of a pickle. Its prized target of 43 per cent emissions reduction by 2030 looked very vulnerable indeed.

In 2022 new climate change minister Chris Bowen named former chief scientist Ian Chubb to investigate the ACCU scheme, including Macintosh’s allegations. Drawing on a 2021 study commissioned by the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee – the same body Macintosh had left in 2020 – Chubb concluded that the scheme was basically sound and critics were letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

The debate picked up. In March last year a team of ANU legal and scientific specialists, including Macintosh, responded that Chubb had ignored the clear failings of the 2021 study, misrepresented a critical report by the Australian Academy of Science and skated over awkward questions about the HIR projects.

Coinciding with this month’s publication of the critical Nature paper, the Clean Energy Regulator, which manages the ACCU scheme, publicly declared faith in the HIR method and the integrity of the scheme’s carbon credits.

The CER declared its scheme to be robust, with “a high degree of integrity” and “a raft of compliance tools at its disposal”, adding that ACCUs were underpinned by “rigorous assessment processes” and “a comprehensive set of audit requirements.”

On ABC breakfast radio Chris Bowen added to the pile-on. He referred to a 2023 study by an ANU forest scientist, Cris Brack, as evidence that the HIR projects were delivering regeneration “and proponents are implementing the project activities”.

Bristling at a suggestion that Macintosh’s claims called for a “rethink” of the scheme, the minister said: “Professor Chubb and Associate Professor Brack are the people who have been commissioned, and there is a different result from their work.” In other words, the fact of their being commissioned should end the debate.

Macintosh is being represented as a man with a grudge against the system which he left in 2020. But he served and led that system for years, and the claims he makes are getting independent scientific support. Those simple facts alone should be enough to sound alarms.

Australia has always been a leading global advocate for carbon offsetting schemes and this large land-based scheme has been held up as an example for others. But its ultimate value is in its ability to draw down atmospheric carbon, and that will not be served by its keepers closing ranks and dodging uncomfortable questions.

Five days before Tasmanians went to the polls on Saturday, the World Meteorological Organisation identified what ought to be the runaway top issue of every election campaign in every jurisdiction the world over – Earth’s surface is now above the “safe” global warming limit of 1.5C.

Every indicator is sounding alarms, said the WMO in its yearly report released last Wednesday. A day earlier, its monthly update noted that in February the global average surface temperature was 1.77C above the pre-industrial reference period of 1850 to 1900. If the March figure is in similar territory, we will have experienced a 12-month period averaging above 1.5C of warming. This is a shocking turn of events.

The end of El Niño might deliver a reprieve, but current record-high ocean temperatures indicate this will only be temporary. Our historically stable global climate is now in an indefinite period of instability, and we’re perilously close to the point where no political party, even in a sophisticated economy like ours, will be able to ignore the impact of climate change. 

But we’re not there yet. On the day the WMO report came out, in their leaders’ debate Premier Jeremy Rockliff and Opposition Leader Rebecca White discussed housing, health, education and training, recreational fishing, and above all, an AFL stadium, with the environment getting a cursory mention. Climate change was nowhere to be seen.

The Greens aside, no party or individual candidate across the spectrum took on climate change as a major issue of concern. Perhaps they think it’s something for bigger fish to attend to, too big and all-encompassing for a state election. Some may even think it’s all just hot air.

However, some people and communities in Tasmania hear the urgency in the international climate reports and see climate change looming ominously above their children’s future – and also above their own lives now. They see that established political processes and institutions are struggling with this enormous challenge and that waiting for authorities to act will leave us far short of what’s needed.

One notable example is the community scattered along the D’Entrecasteaux Channel coast and hinterland, loosely based in Kettering. Guided by a well-established group of climate watchers chaired by semi-retired businessman Phil Tomney, people of the Channel have set up their own sustainability and resilience support group, called Net Zero Channel (NZC), formed in May 2022 and incorporated three months later. 

These are people who see the limitations of our political institutions and processes and are determined not to leave the future entirely in the hands of those we elect to office or the bureaucrats who do their bidding. In a nutshell, they’re activists – not a word beloved of many in authority, but one that’s becoming increasingly relevant.

Their activism is on two levels. There’s the individual or household level, where they do things to their homes and lifestyles to make both more climate-friendly. They are solid supporters of a big national push for a federal universal finance scheme to help Australians electrify their home – the Electrify Everything Loans Scheme (EELS) developed by Rewiring Australia, an independent non-profit organisation led by entrepreneur-physicist Saul Griffith. We’ll be able to gauge the success of the EELS push when Treasurer Jim Chalmers hands down the federal budget next month.

NZC’s second focus is setting up its Channel community to lead the state in cutting emissions by coordinating households’ electrification efforts, preferably but not necessarily using EELS finance.

Rewiring Australia has already recognised the group’s work to date by selecting it as the sole Tasmanian volunteer organisation among 10 such groups Australia-wide to receive a small grant ($1000) and online help to spread the word around the Channel – and by extension more broadly – about electrifying to cut community emissions.

One of NZC’s first projects is an online survey exploring strategies to help the Channel region (read, all of Tasmania) to transition rapidly into renewable technologies, seeking information on your home energy circumstances, current and aspirational. The survey is easily accessed on the Net Zero Channel website (www.netzerochannel.org.au).

Initiatives like NZC’s have been supported for years by groups like Sustainable Living Tasmania, Climate Tasmania  and the University of Tasmania’s Tasmanian Policy Exchange under Richard Eccleston, but their ideas keep getting lost in the swirl of power politics.

Yet the Greens and progressive independents were solidly supported in an election that saw the government vote plummet. On Saturday evening Greens leader Rosalie Woodruff spoke with conviction of the conservation movement’s continued success against big commercial and political interests. There is still hope.

Tasmanian voters can be forgiven for thinking that a Hobart sports stadium is the only issue that counts in Election 2024. From the start of the campaign, the stadium (it needs no further identifier) has been front and centre in public debate.

You could sense the relief in Jeremy Rockliff’s government in late 2022 when he named Macquarie Point as the stadium site. After a decade of hope and disappointment as ideas aplenty appeared in the public spotlight and then vanished, the centrepiece for this priceless nine hectares of real estate was finally decided.  

If we’re to believe the official “plan”, Macquarie Point will essentially comprise a stadium and a working port, with small bits of land set aside for “residential and public foreshore” and “Antarctic facilities” respectively. The latter is all that’s left of an earlier idea for a “science and Antarctic precinct”, bringing together Hobart’s various Antarctic and Southern Ocean functions in a single location.

Back then the science precinct idea didn’t appeal to me. I saw little merit in spending millions just to move the Australian Antarctic Division from its established Kingston base, or CSIRO and the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies from their current Princes Wharf and Castray Esplanade locations. 

But that was before I learned of a proposal by Glenys Jones, who trained as a natural scientist before a career in heritage evaluation and science policy, and marine scientist Keith Sainsbury, an IMAS associate professor and former CSIRO senior research scientist.

Jones and Sainsbury raised their idea for a “Science Centre for Sustainability” in these pages in September 2020. They elaborated on it in October last year, around the time premier Rockliff and former premier Paul Lennon were arguing over competing stadium proposals. 

Needless to say, any public airing of their idea was drowned out by all the stadium noise, but their proposal is far too valuable to allow a sports stadium – whatever its own merits – to elbow it out of the way. 

It’s no accident that Tasmania is already home to more scientists per capita than any other Australian state, and their work is overwhelmingly focused on the natural resources from which we inhabitants of this island – and of the rest of the nation and the world – draw all our sustenance. 

As Jones and Sainsbury point out, besides CSIRO’s marine, atmospheric, agricultural and ecological research, Tasmania hosts complementary University of Tasmania research hubs covering marine ecology, fire research, agricultural and forest science. 

We’re also home to the national headquarters for Antarctic science, policy and administration,  the National Environmental Science Program’s Marine Biodiversity Hub, and the international Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), as well as the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. 

A Tasmanian Science Centre for Sustainability would serve all these functions, but it would be far more besides. In the inspired vision of Jones and Sainsbury, it “would communicate, inspire and advance innovation and excellence in science for sustainability [and] actively support informed policy, planning and decision-making for our collective community and planetary wellbeing, now and for future generations.”

The centre would “communicate, inspire and advance innovation and excellence in science for sustainability,… engage and connect experts with policy and decision-makers and community stakeholders across multiple sectors.”

Such a centre “would establish an active link between what the science tells us and what we are trying to achieve,” delivering robust science to support a growing role for Tasmania “as a global leader and exemplar of sustainability.”

At the weekend Jeremy Rockliff himself put the case for science supporting sustainability, in an election promise to boost flathead stocks through relocation and captive breeding. He pledged to “work with the best of science within … IMAS to ensure that we can do both”. All without imposing any additional taxes or fees.

This is almost believable – until you factor in the government’s record of chronic disregard of any sort of objective science in managing resource activities affecting the natural environment – most tellingly the failure to regulate Tasmania’s clearly unsustainable salmon farming industry, but also in mining, forestry and water use. 

How we fund science while ensuring that it remains objective is a perennial problem. In aquaculture, forestry, mining and agriculture, in Tasmania as elsewhere, it’s too easy to use commercial-in-confidence contracts and other means to hide bias in research outcomes to favour those providing the money.

We need science to be – and to be seen to be – a public asset. Jones and Sainsbury offer an opportunity to give long-neglected environmental research the public spotlight it deserves. There can be no better use for Macquarie Point.