Report: Australia's Record 'Poor' on Combating Climate Change

Fairfax - Lucy Cormack

Poor report card: Australia's record on combating climate change and carbon emissions is unsatisfactory, report says.

One Australian produces more than three times the amount of carbon dioxide produced by individuals in leading industrialised countries on average, a report into the readiness of the world's richest countries to combat climate change has found.
The Sustainable Development Goals: Are the rich countries ready?report revealed that most OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries are a long way off reaching United Nations development goals, with Australia 18th out of the 34 OECD nations.
It said that while Australia falls somewhere in the middle of industrialised countries when it comes to environmental sustainability, its record on combating climate change and carbon emissions is poor.

Messages in support of action to combat climate change are projected onto the side of the UN building in New York, ahead of the international summit that begins this month. Photo: AP

"It's shocking but it's expected. We are, along with Canada, the world's pariah with international climate policy at the moment and this is something the report finds," said Dr Donna Green, senior researcher at the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales.
"It's a result of our dysfunctional climate policies. We're currently hemorrhaging jobs, not only in the renewables sector, also in the mining sector. It's really a very serious situation."
However Dr Green said, one way to look at it is to be optimistic that it "feels almost like we're seeing the last death throes of an increasingly desperate fossil fuel industry".

"We're currently hemorrhaging jobs, not only in the renewables sector, also in the mining sector. It's really a very serious situation:" Dr Donna Green. Photo: Paul Jones 

In his forward for the report, former secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan said the new Sustainable Development Goals would be a universal set of goals for all countries, including the rich nations of this world.
"High-income nations must become leading examples of truly sustainable development. The Sustainable Development Goals should be workable and understandable by people so they can ask governments to act," he said.
"Civil society must be able to put pressure on governments to hold them to account for what they pledge at the UN summit."

Former secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan said the new Sustainable Development Goals would be a universal set of goals for all countries.

The report has been released ahead of the United Nations Global Sustainable Summit this month, and measures the preparedness of OECD nations for the imposition of the UN's new sustainability development goals for 2030.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland are the best performing countries, the report says.
Mexico is the lowest ranked nation, followed by Turkey, Hungary, Chile and Greece.
On both greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions, Australia ranked 33rd out of the 34 and it has the OECD's highest rates of domestic materials consumption, at 47 tonnes a person.
Australia came in 30th in the OECD for domestic municipal waste output (647 kilograms a person) and on its efforts to combat climate change.
It was not all bad news for Australia, which was among the top-ranked nations for average life expectancy in full health (73 years), household space (2.4 rooms a person), clean air and the safety, resilience and sustainability of its cities and towns.
It also scored in the top five for sustainable use of its ocean and marine resources, even though 15 per cent of its fish stocks are over-exploited.
Despite some of the damning results in the report, Dr Green said she does not expect it to garner any great response from the Australian government, ahead of December's 21st Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
"I would say it probably washes over them. They've already decided what they're taking to Paris. What they are taking to Paris is exactly the same level as what we see in this report," she said.
"This just reconfirms everything we've always known. It's unfortunate it's reconfirmed it in such an iron-clad way that we're at the bottom of the heap, in terms of climate policy. The frustration is it's not we don't know there are ways to get out of this, we're choosing not to take them."
The report was prepared by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the non-profit foundation established by German media corporation Bertelsmann.
It came one day before Wednesday's announcement that Australia will get up to 10 new large solar power stations as part of an unprecedented $350 million tie-up between the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, who will collaborate to offer, respectively, grants and loans to get major solar projects off the ground to feed into the energy grid.