Is Australia willing to protect nature from destruction?
What is the nature positive plan?

"The biggest threats in Australia are forest and habitat destruction – sometimes described as land clearing – and invasive species...The government released what it described as a “nature positive plan” in 2022, saying it would be “better for the environment, better for business.""

"Megan Evans, a senior lecturer in environmental policy at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, says it is “absolutely greenwashing” to say there must be an improvement without specifying how it would be measured."

"If the government is serious about achieving this it will need more than an EPA that is a “tough cop on the beat...They will need to ensure that every decision made under national environmental law improves outcomes for threatened species, ecological communities and protected places."
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/05/labor-national-environment-laws-policy-endangered-animals
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What are ‘biodiversity offsets’?
Australia’s “nature repair market” is using market-based mechanisms to solve environmental problems instead of state regulation. Market place accounting of nature is the attempt to value and quantify complex ecological systems

"For example, biodiversity offsets are included in Target 19 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which covers finance for reversing biodiversity loss in this decade."

“In Australia, our government has gone as far as to say it can’t afford to do the job alone, because biodiversity conservation will cost around $1bn a year. To be clear, we spend close to $11bn a year on fossil-fuel subsidies and we want to spend $368bn on nuclear submarines…The idea that we can’t fund the environment is just false. Everything is affordable, if it’s a priority.”

“Australia is like a petri dish for some of the worst schemes that are then adopted globally."

"In its current form, the nature-repair market bill is a framework law with no methods, metrics, baselines or even definitions for biodiversity."

"All eight Australian states and territories have compliance-based biodiversity-offsetting schemes and an existing federal biodiversity-offset scheme.
Some of the better-defined units of trade include threatened species credits, “large old trees” and hectares of koala habitat."

“I think people are losing tolerance for corruption and conflicts of interest, and it is justified by the fact that they’re seeing their country falling apart around them. And the government’s answer is, well, let’s have another market.”

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https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/carbon-offsets-2023/biodiversity.html
#NatureRepair #market #nature #privatisation #commodification #extractivism #BiodiversityOffsetMarkets #GBF #GreenWallStreet #Australia #values #governance #regulation #koalas #NativeForests #Ecosystems #ComplexSystems #biodiversity #climate