Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
Following a “disappointing” inaugural Nature Positive Summit in Sydney, a team of researchers say that current laws are not sufficient to achieve the summit’s lofty goal.
In a perspective in Science, Australian researchers argue that “net gain” legislation – that is, legislation that doesn’t allow for any loss – is required to make the world, and Australia, truly nature positive.
“Nature Positive means holding or stopping and reversing nature loss by 2030, with a full recovery by 2050, using 2020 baseline,” co-author Yi Fei Chung, a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, tells Cosmos.
“Absolute net gain could be a powerful lever in legislation because it would ensure that nature is in a measurably better state than before a development takes place,” says co-author Dr Michelle Ward, a lecturer at Griffith University.
Ward says the current reforms proposed for the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act “leave the door open for continued decline of our environment”.
This is because they operate on the assumption of “relative net gain”.
“We know that a business-as-usual scenario often involves a declining biodiversity trend,” explains Chung.
“Any slight improvement is good enough to satisfy this relative net gain policy, but this very slight improvement can still mean overall decline,” Chung adds.
“For example, under an ‘absolute net gain’ scenario, if there were 200 quolls before a project, there must be more than 200 quolls afterwards. In contrast, a ‘relative’ net gain allows some decline,” says Ward.
“If the quoll population was expected to drop from 200 to 150 without the project, reducing the decline to 170 would count as a gain. However, this still leads to an overall loss. A truly ‘nature positive’ approach wouldn’t allow nature to keep declining.”
“If you’re speeding at 130km/h on a 90km/h road, and you reduce the speed to 115km/h, you’re still exceeding the speed limit, right?” says Chung.
Chung says that only a few net gain laws have been introduced worldwide, citing the UK’s biodiversity net gain legislation, which requires developments to deliver a 10% increase in biodiversity, as an example.
But early research on this law suggests that some local councils are struggling to judge biodiversity loss and gain.
“Effective implementation and resourcing is crucial for good policy,” says Chung.
Ward says that, as well as an absolute net gain approach, Australian environmental laws need legally binding national environmental standards that embrace genuine nature positivity.
She also wants to see a national Environment Protection Agency, which the federal government committed to establishing in its 2023-24 Budget.
“We need a strong, truly independent EPA to ensure compliance and enforcement of environmental laws and standards,” says Ward.
“Any biodiversity loss from development should be fully compensated, and any irreplaceable biodiversity loss must not be permitted,” says Chung.
Irreplaceable biodiversity loss includes things like old-growth forests, which take decades or centuries to develop and which provide habitats that newer forests cannot, like hollowed trees.
“The current compensation schemes are woefully inadequate at covering the true cost of an offset site,” says Ward.
In their paper, the researchers point out that 90% of proponents in Queensland have chosen to pay into a fund rather than secure their own biodiversity offsets.
“The current compensation scheme in NSW are performing so badly that an independent review has recommended they are completely phased out,” says Ward, adding that an independent EPA should be able to enforce the quality and size of ecological compensations.
“We need strong monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to ensure the policy is effectively implemented,” says Chung,
“There is no point of having a good policy without people complying.”
Biodiversity policy is on the minds of many governments this week, as the 2024 United Nations Biodiversity Conference of Parties (COP16) has kicked off in Colombia.
The researchers say that Australia has an opportunity to steer global conversations about environment laws.
“We can lead by example, to show to other countries that this is, this is a potential method that they can adopt,” says Chung.
But for now, the researchers are dissatisfied.
“We have an opportunity to leave a lasting legacy of environmental reform,” says Ward. “But unfortunately the current proposals fall far short of what is needed.”
