The Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water has been running a series of consultations on Australia’s new Nature Positive laws.

As an organisation, Climateworks Centre believes that protecting and restoring nature is critical to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets because climate change and creating resilient ecosystems are deeply intertwined.

Nature is being increasingly recognised not only for its environmental, social and cultural value but also for its contribution to the sustainability of human society.

Currently, over half of the world’s economy is moderately or highly dependent on nature (World Economic Forum 2020).

Despite this dependency, the state of nature is rapidly declining due to impacts of human activity (IPCC report, Australian State of the Environment report).

Over the last couple of years, we have focused on embedding the concept of natural capital in decision-making, specifically the measurement and valuation of environmental ‘assets’ as an important enabler of sustainable land use.

This work is being conducted through our Natural Capital Investment Initiative, a key part of which is the development of the Natural Capital Measurement Catalogue (NCMC).

Through the development of the NCMC, Climateworks has engaged the services of Dr. Francisco Ascui, an Independent Consultant and Professor of Environmental Accounting at Federation University.

Francisco is an internationally recognised expert in environmental accounting and finance, with over 20 years of experience across business, government, and academia.

In addition to ensuring that the Catalogue aligns with the evolving Nature Positive regulatory framework, Francisco supported Climateworks’ review of and feedback on the Consultation on National Environmental Laws.

Additionally, this submission draws on:

  • Insights from our Natural Capital Investment Initiative and NCMC
  • Climateworks’ engagement with agriculture, conservation, finance, corporate and government sectors to drive consistency in natural capital measurement and embed the value of nature in decision-making.

Submission summary

With increasing attention on impacts from businesses and governments on nature, credible, reliable, and verifiable measurement is critical to determine whether the decline and loss of species and ecosystems is being halted and whether nature is being repaired and regenerating.

We need to equip land managers, investors, governments and businesses with scientifically credible data that can inform decision-making at all levels.

Climateworks recommends that DCCEEW account for the following when developing proposals for Environment Information Australia (EIA) and the National Environmental Standard for Data and Information.

Further detail for each of these recommendations are included in the submission.

Climateworks recommends:

  • EIA curates a set of nationally consistent environmental metrics and measurement methods. EIA should collect and provide high quality and accessible natural capital datasets in readily available formats (at site and sub-national levels) to support robust decision-making.
  • National Environmental Standard for Data and Information reliability tiers should be presented in ascending numerical order, such that Tier 1 is the lowest and Tier 3 is the highest reliability. This follows the example set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Climateworks seeks to work with the Australian Government and interested parties to help build sufficiently granular and extensive measurement systems and datasets in support of public and private sector action.