Still hope for the environment in shifting political landscape

If you’re passionate about protecting and restoring ecosystems and taking action on climate, the past week’s major political releases have been something of a roller coaster.

First up, the Victorian State Government. Weighed down by debt and squeezed economically and politically, Treasurer Tim Pallas delivered a budget that some major infrastructure projects into the neverland of future election cycles and made little headway on state debt.

In that context, environmentalists could expect little in terms of major investment in the natural infrastructure essential to sustaining our species. This was the theme underpinning the response to the 2024 State Budget by Environment Victoria’s CEO, Jono La Nauze, who said that up to one third of Victoria’s species were under threat and the Government had repeatedly failed to fund their protection.

At face value this is a fair assertion, but there is a little more to unpack. The Victorian Government did commit $270 million to protect waterways and catchments, the life-giving vascular supports for all ecosystems.

Think of this in the context of climate science, which tells us the south-east corner of Australia will become markedly drier in decades ahead – an outlook that is being taken seriously by farmers and graziers as much as by environmental groups.

The end-to-end stewardship of water from catchment and consumption through to waste recycling and management will be core to the future viability of both natural and agricultural environments.

Within days of the Victorian Budget, the Federal Government popped up with another significant announcement,  Australia’s Future Gas Strategy. This was a significant firming up of the Labor Government’s commitment to gas as a strategic catalyst in the nation’s energy transition. Clearly it aims to defuse criticism about energy costs and reliability and, in part, dull coalition advocacy to rollout nuclear power generation in the backyards of any communities prepared to host a reactor.

The response of the climate action lobby, including the Climate Council, was to hammer Labor’s softening on the transition and pace of shift to renewables. However, the politics of the energy transition made it almost inevitable leading into the 2025 federal election.

With the gauntlet thrown down and gas winning bipartisan support as a transition balancer, environmentalists will need to look within the policy to identify opportunities to leverage it to make gains in ecosystem protection.

The most obvious area for this is carbon sequestration, for which technology has yet to deliver a commercially viable and proven model for engineered capture and sequestration into cavities within the Earth’s crust. There is no guarantee that it will ever work without major government subsidies.

What is proven and viable is natural sequestration on land and sea. Ensuring on-going capacity for this will depend on ecosystem protection and even restoration. There is already considerable research and modelling being undertaken to fully understand and realise the potential of these natural carbon sinks.

Presently, it’s “advantage nature” as the only proven carbon sequestration system. Securing and developing this capacity at pace will be key to setting the need and scope of engineered carbon sequestration solutions into the future.

If natural science moves quickly enough, it can lay the foundations for investment in ecosystem protection and restoration at scale, as policymakers align public investment with the most effective means of delivering essential reductions in net carbon emissions, while navigating an economically and environmentally sustainable energy transition.

The aspirations within the political and natural landscapes will not always align. Those advocating for the environment are forced to work within the realms of realpolitik. In a democracy that is driven by the whims of the electorate, for which support to the shift to renewables is facing into the headwind of rising costs of living.

However, the fine print of the latest pronouncements provides room to manoeuvre. Water management, reducing carbon emissions and protecting ecosystems and species require us to balance a complex symbiosis. None is independent of the other. No matter how you order or articulate the outcomes, positive action and benefits for one delivers similar for the others.

Policies are merely frameworks within which we manipulate the pieces.