14/05/2019

Labor's $1.5b Plan To 'Unlock' Gas Would Create More Emissions Than Adani Coal Mine, Experts Say

Fairfax - Peter Hannam | Cole Latimer

Labor's $1.5 billion plan to "unlock" Northern Territory and Queensland gas would create far more emissions in Australia than Adani's coal mine, making it much tougher for a Shorten government to meet the nation's Paris climate goals.
The proposal to help fund gas pipelines linking northern gasfields would allow pilot projects to be expanded, adding the equivalent of millions of tonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions a year.
The gas industry is a fast-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia - and could be a much larger one if Labor's plan to develop northern Australian gas fields go ahead. Credit: Bloomberg
Labor has pledged to beat Australia's current 2030 Paris targets by cutting emissions 45 per cent compared with 2005 levels. The pipeline plan would undermine that goal, according to analysts.
The NT's proposed Beetaloo gas fields alone have the potential to create 1240 petajoules of gas a year, according to the territory government's Fracking Inquiry report.


Assuming the fields leak methane at 1.7 per cent of production - a baseline used by the International Energy Agency - the NT could add at least 30 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year, said Bill Hare, director of global research group Climate Analytics.
By contrast, Adani's scaled-down Carmichael mine would add a relatively modest 240,000 tonnes of direct CO2-equivalent emissions, excluding the pollution from the coal's combustion.
Mr Hare said Labor's climate goals imply cutting annual emissions by 200 million tonnes from current levels by 2030, and so the NT fields would "add 15 per cent at least" to that abatement effort.
"It will make it much more difficult to meet the Paris Agreement targets," he said.
Tim Forcey, a former BHP engineer and Melbourne University energy researcher, said the leakage rates from gas fields in the United States are often much higher than the 1.7 per cent estimate, and so the emissions impact may be higher still from the new fields that would follow Labor's proposed pipeline plan.
The latest government data show Australia's emissions were up 0.9 per cent to 536 million tonnes in the 12 months to September last year. So-called "fugitive emissions" mostly from the gas industry jumped 7.3 per cent, the biggest increase in any sector.
Mr Forcey said "the time is not far away" when the gas sector contributed more greenhouse gases in Australia than the coal industry. "There's nothing stopping the rampant development of the oil and gas industry."
Origin Energy is one of the developers with high hopes for its Beetaloo gas resource in the NT. Credit: Peter Eve
The Greens have signalled they would press Labor on the issue if they held the balance of power in the Senate.
"When your house is on fire, you don’t break open the gas main next door," Greens climate spokesman Adam Bandt said.
“Even if most of the gas is exported, fracking leaks so much toxic methane into the atmosphere that this project will be a giant taxpayer-funded carbon bomb."
Labor climate spokesman Mark Butler said large emitters would be covered under an expanded so-called "safeguards mechanism" already in place if his party wins government.
"The safeguards mechanism will be properly implemented to cap and bring down pollution, and Labor will work with emissions intensive trade-exposed industries to cut pollution while protecting competitiveness and jobs, including through our $300 million Strategic Industries Reserve Fund," he said. Both the 2030 goal and a 2050 net-zero emissions target for Australia could be met, he added.
"The Liberals have no policy to tackle climate change," Mr Butler said. "Their own government data shows under the Liberals inadequate policy, emissions will continue to rise all the way to 2030."
Resources Minister Matt Canavan, said “Labor doesn’t support coal mining jobs in the Galilee Basin so it’s hard to believe they would support gas jobs or infrastructure in the same area".
“The Labor Party has turned its back on Australia’s resources and mining industry, regardless of whether it’s for energy use here or for exports," he said.
Major gas companies Santos and Woodside said they are offsetting emissions by selling liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Asian consumers who would have otherwise used dirtier coal.
"For every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted during LNG production in Australia it saves between 3 and 10 tonnes of emissions when it is used for power generation in Asia,” Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher said at his company's annual general meeting earlier this month.
The NT's Labor government said the fracking inquiry made more than 100 recommendations to limit impacts from increased gas development.
“We are undertaking significant reforms based on the scenarios outlined in Justice Pepper’s final report, which predict that greenhouse gas emissions could increase by from between 1 million to 25 million tonnes per annum," NT Minister for Primary Industry and Resources Paul Kirby said on Monday.
“The NT government and the federal government have commenced discussions around options to minimise the net impact on Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions as a result of onshore gas production.”

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Life As We Know It

New York Times - Editorial Board | Illustrations Yann Kebbi

Plant and animal species are disappearing faster than at any time in recorded history. We know who is to blame.


Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatán Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth. A few years ago, in a book called “The Sixth Extinction,” the writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed or diminished by human activities.
This time, she made clear, the asteroid is us — and we will pay heavily for our folly.
Humanity’s culpability in what many scientists believe to be a planetary emergency has now been reaffirmed by a detailed and depressing report compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies. A summary was released last Monday in Paris, and the full 1,500-page report will be available later in the year. Its findings are grim. “Biodiversity” — a word encompassing all living flora and fauna — “is declining faster than at any time in human history,” it says, estimating that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades,” unless the world takes transformative action to save natural systems. The at-risk population includes a half-million land-based species and one-third of marine mammals and corals.
Most of the causes of this carnage seem familiar: logging, poaching, overfishing by large industrial fleets, pollution, invasive species, the spread of roads and cities to accommodate an exploding global population, now seven billion and rising. If there is one alpha culprit, it is the clearing of forests and wetlands for farms to feed all those people (and, perversely, to help them get to work: The destruction of Indonesia’s valuable rain forests, and their replacement with palm oil plantations, has been driven in part by Europe’s boundless appetite for biodiesel fuels.)
Add to all this a relatively new threat: Global warming, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels, is expected to compound the damage. “While climate change has not been the dominant driver of biodiversity loss to date in most parts of the world, it is projected to become as or more important,” said Sir Robert Watson, chairman of the biodiversity panel and former chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose most recent alarming report on global warming has given that issue new currency in American politics. Rising seas and increased extreme weather events propelled in part by climate change — fire, floods, droughts — have already harmed many species. The most obvious victim is the world’s coral reefs, which have suffered grievously from ocean waters that have grown warmer and more acidic as a result of all the carbon dioxide they’ve been asked to absorb.
As The Times’s Brad Plumer recently noted, many ecologists insist that species are worth saving on their own, that it’s simply morally wrong to drive any living creature to extinction. The new report deliberately adds a powerful practical motive to the spiritual one: Biodiversity loss, it says, is an urgent issue for human well-being, providing billions and billions of dollars in what experts call “ecosystem services.” Wetlands clean and purify water. Coral reefs nourish vast fish populations that feed the world. Organic matter in the soil nourishes crops. Bees and other threatened insects pollinate fruits and vegetables. Mangroves protect us from floods made worse by rising seas.
“Most of nature’s contributions are not fully replaceable,” the report says. But humans can stop or at least limit the damage. One critical task is to protect (and if possible to enlarge) the world’s natural forests, which, according to a recent paper by eminent ecologists in Science Advance, are home to fully two-thirds of the world’s species. Intact forests also absorb and store enormous amounts of carbon, so preserving them assists not only the species that live there but also the struggle against climate change. Conversely, cutting trees to make way for farming and other purposes — as Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is determined to do in the Amazon — is a disaster for both the species and the climate; recent estimates suggest that deforestation accounts for slightly over 10 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, much smaller than the emissions from vehicles and power plants, but significant (and avoidable) nonetheless.





To Professor Watson and many other scientists, there are two important parallel approaches to the interconnected climate and species crises. One is to transform agricultural practices, the other is to enlarge the world’s supply of legally protected landscapes that cannot be touched for any commercial purpose. As to the first, farmers could figure out how to produce more food on fewer acres, and in ways that help the soil retain carbon; consumers could help by making smarter food choices, like eating more locally sourced food, and cutting back on meat and dairy products that require immense amounts of land for livestock.
Second, governments should mandate a significant increase in protected areas, both on land and at sea. Partly as a result of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a treaty agreed upon in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro along with a landmark agreement on climate change, nations have set aside about 15 percent of the world’s land and 7 percent of its oceans by setting up wilderness areas and nature preserves. Because this is only a fraction of the areas needed to protect biodiversity, the authors of the paper in Science Advance recommend a twofold increase in the protected land area and a fourfold increase in marine reserves over the next decade. If rigorously policed (which many parks are not today), that would effectively quarantine about 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans.
This proposal, which its authors call a Global Deal for Nature (echoing the Democrats’ Green New Deal on climate), will be further refined before the next meeting of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2020 in China. Though it always sends a delegation to these meetings, the United States has never ratified the treaty; President Bill Clinton signed it in 1993, but the Republican Senate failed to ratify it for various reasons, including unfounded fears that the treaty threatened American patent and intellectual property rights.
It is hard to believe that the Trump administration and the current Senate will be any more enthusiastic about preserving biodiversity than the Senate was then. This is an administration, after all, that has proposed to shrink national monuments and reduce protections for the imperiled sage grouse in order to accommodate the oil, gas and coal industries; that is moving to open up the species-rich coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling; that plans to make available now-protected waters along America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts for the same purpose; that proposes to sacrifice parts of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging; that, most tellingly, aims to weaken the Endangered Species Act, approved in 1973 with Richard Nixon’s signature in what seems a distant era when there was fairly deep bipartisan support for environmental values.
Few of the Democratic presidential hopefuls who have spoken about climate change and jumped with varying degrees of enthusiasm on the Green New Deal bandwagon have commented on the biodiversity report, despite biodiversity’s obvious connections to climate. They should read it, and make it part of their post-2020 agenda.

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Australia’s Major Parties’ Climate Policies Side-By-Side

The Conversation - 

If climate action from every country was as inadequate as Australia’s, the world would be on track for 4°C warming. AAP
The majority of Australians see climate change as the number one threat to national interests. However in 2018 Australia was ranked 55th out of 60 countries in a Climate Change Performance Index.
Research from the University of Melbourne found if all countries’ climate action was as inadequate as Australia’s, the world would be on track for 4°C warming.
With an election on Saturday, lets dig into the major parties’ climate policies, and see how they track against Australia’s Paris commitments.
Kids are taking to the streets to call for stronger action on climate change. Brisbane, March 16, 2019. AAP
• LIBERAL
The Liberal Party introduced the Climate Solutions Package in February 2019. The package includes a range of measures, but most notably a continuation of the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF), which remains the coalition’s key climate policy.
The Climate Solutions Fund includes another $2 billion to be used for ERF auctions until 2030. The package does not include any plan to increase renewables beyond the current 23.5% 2020 target.
The package also retains Australia’s current emissions reduction target of 26%-28% below 2005 levels by 2030. This target falls far short of what is required to meet the Paris climate agreement goals.
• LABOR
Labor has released a Climate Change Action Plan that leads with a renewable energy target of 50% electricity generation by 2030, household rebates for solar batteries, and investment in energy efficiency.
Labor will extend the existing “safeguard mechanism” to function as a pollution cap for industry, while the agriculture sector will participate in a revived Carbon Farming Initiative.
Labor’s climate target will commit Australia to emission reductions of 45% on 2005 levels by 2030, and to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
Labor’s policy document states this target is informed by advice from the independent Climate Change Authority (CCA), yet the CCA’s 2015 targets review concluded Australia’s fair share of a global target for 2°C was an emissions reduction of between 40-60% below 2000 levels by 2030.

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The CCA review pre-dated the adoption of the Paris Agreement in December 2015, which raised global ambition to keep warming “well below 2°C” and ideally below 1.5°C. The CCA 2015 targets review can therefore be considered out of date, so Australia’s fair contribution to the Paris climate agreement would have to sit at the upper end of (if not above) the 40-60% range.
Labor’s target is still inadequate from a global perspective and would not put Australia on track to meet its Paris commitments. But it is a big step forward from our current targets, and would at least bring Australia in line with the inadequate action pledged by the rest of the world – current global pledges put the world on track for 3°C warming.
• GREENS
The Greens are the only political party in Australia with climate policies that put forward targets that would enable us to meet our international obligations according to the science.
They have an emissions reduction target of 63-82% by 2030 and a trajectory to get emissions to net-zero by 2040. The Greens manifesto calls for a total transition away from fossil fuels.
Cost of climate (in)action
The Liberals claim their climate policies meet our climate commitments “without wrecking the economy” and have released economic modelling suggesting Labor’s 45% target will cost the economy billions.
This modelling has been widely debunked, and Labor’s budget costings show climate policies to have a cost of around $800 million to 2023.

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Labor in its manifesto emphasises the “devastating costs” climate change will have for the Australian economy over the long term, and points out that the cost of not acting on climate change must also be factored in. Research in 2018 estimated the global cost of 4℃ warming would eventually reach US$23 trillion per year, costing Australia A$159 billion every year.
In light of the IPCC report on the urgency of limiting warming to 1.5°C, this may be a more salient point than the year on year costs of implementation of any near-term climate policy.

What are other countries doing?
Far greater ambition is required from all nations, including Australia, for the world to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The UN has invited Paris Agreement signatories to submit revised national targets in 2020.
Several countries are raising their national climate commitments. The UK Parliament has just declared a climate emergency and has been advised by its independent Committee on Climate Change to adopt a target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
The European Union has set an emission reductions target of 55% by 2030 and the EU Parliament has endorsed a net-zero climate target for 2050.
Nearer to home, on Wednesday the New Zealand prime minister introduced the Zero Carbon Bill, which calls for net-zero carbon-dioxide emissions by 2050, and creates a legal obligation to plan for supporting New Zealand towns and cities, business and farmers to adapt to increasingly severe storms, floods, fires and droughts caused by climate change.
While all of these actions are far more ambitious than Australia’s targets, the IPCC found net-zero emissions will need to be reached earlier than 2050 for a chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C without overshoot (overshoot risks potentially irreversible ecosystem loss).
So far no developed nation is taking seriously the equity considerations of the Paris Agreement, which require financial and technology support to help developing countries both reduce emissions and adapt to the already severe consequences of climate change.
Limiting warming to well below 2°C and aiming for 1.5°C as required by the Paris Agreement will indeed require that fossil fuel use declines to zero over the next few decades. This is a trajectory that governments around the world – the UK, the EU, NZ and others – are beginning to acknowledge.
If Australia sees more of the same in terms of climate policy we will inevitably continue our dismal track record of inaction – with devastating consequences.

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The Climate Change Election: Where Do The Parties Stand On The Environment?

The Guardian - 

With the global and local environment at crisis point, Australians have a clear choice at Saturday’s election. Here are the parties’ key policies 
Drought is affecting large swathes of Australia, including western New South Wales. Photograph: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images
This has been called the climate change election, and with good reason: concern about the climate and environment has never been greater.
A Lowy Institute poll found nearly two out of three adults believe climate change is the most serious threat to Australia’s national interests, an 18-point-increase in five years. It was taken before a landmark UN global assessment defined the extent of the unprecedented biodiversity crisis facing the planet, with a million species at risk of extinction and potentially dire consequences for human society.
Australia has a big stake in these issues. It is one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters on a per-capita basis and in the top 20 for total pollution, with a footprint greater than Britain or France. It is already experiencing the effects of climate change, including increased heatwaves and mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, and is the global leader in mammal extinction.
There are clear choices between the parties on these issues at this election. Guardian Australia looks at how the policies of the Coalition, Labor and the Greens line up.

• EMISSIONS
Carbon pollution in Australia has been rising since the Coalition repealed carbon price laws in 2014. The country is on track to meet its modest Kyoto protocol target – that emissions be 5% lower in 2020 than in 2000 – but not 2030 targets.

– Coalition
Under the Paris climate deal, the Coalition says it will cut emissions to 26% less than they were in 2005 by 2030. It is significantly less than what scientists advising the government say is necessary for Australia to play its part in meeting the goals of the Paris deal (a 45%-63% cut by 2030 compared with 2005).
Scott Morrison explained in February how he planned to meet this goal. About eight points of the cut would come from using what are known as Kyoto carry-over credits. Unlike international and domestic carbon credits created through offset projects, Kyoto carry-over credits do not represent an actual reduction in carbon dioxide. They are bonus credits that Australia wants to award itself for beating the low 2020 target it set itself. It would just mean counting the same emissions cut twice. It is unclear if they will be allowed under the Paris deal; almost all other developed countries have said they will not use them. Developing countries do not have the option.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull at the Paris climate talks in 2015. Australia is still using credits carried over from beating its feeble Kyoto targets to meet commitments made in Paris. Photograph: Francois Mori/AP 
The Coalition nominates two other significant sources of emissions reduction. One is the direct action emissions reduction fund, now rebadged as the climate solutions fund, under which farmers and businesses bid for cash from taxpayers to cut pollution. The government announced in February it would spend an extra $2bn on it over 10 years, but that was stretched to 15 years in the April budget, including just $189m over the next four. While some projects backed by the fund are widely considered worthwhile, an investigation by Guardian Australia has found questions over its design and uncertainty over what taxpayers were getting for their money.
The biggest flaw is in the administration of the other half of the direct action program, known as the safeguard mechanism. It was supposed to put a limit on industrial emissions to ensure they did not just wipe out the cuts taxpayers are buying through the emissions reduction fund, but in practice industrial emitters have mostly been allowed to increase pollution without penalty. The Coalition has criticised Labor for planning to use the safeguard mechanism to do what government frontbencher Greg Hunt designed it to do: reduce emissions.
The other major measure on the Coalition’s carbon budget chart (see p8) is “technological improvements”, which have not been explained.
An analysis by scientists from Climate Analytics released on Friday found the Coalition’s target was insufficient to deal with the climate challenge and said there was no evidence the government planned to release further policies.

– Labor
Labor has a more ambitious emissions target: a 45% cut by 2030, which Climate Analytics says falls just within what is necessary for Australia to play its part in limiting global warming to 1.5C, and net zero emissions by 2050. Rather than an across-the-board carbon price similar to what it introduced in 2011, it is promising different policies for different parts of the economy.
Labor leader Bill Shorten launches Labor’s electric vehicles policy. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/EPA 
On electricity, it wants to bring in a national energy guarantee, a policy devised and abandoned by the Coalition. Similarly, for heavy industry, it plans to toughen up the government’s safeguard mechanism to set limits and reduce them over time. It is yet to say what the limits would be and the trajectory – how fast they would be cut – but it says both the electricity and industrial sectors will have to meet the 45% target.
It wants 50% of new cars to be electric by 2030 and has pledged vehicle emissions standards to limit transport pollution, building on work done under the Coalition but not adopted. It would boost the use of carbon offsets from Australia, allow business to buy an undefined amount from offsets from overseas and has suggested it would limit land clearing.
Despite some scary headlines about costs, Labor’s ambition and direction has been praised by policy analysts and scientists. But unanswered questions remain. It has not released a carbon budget explaining how it would hit the 45% target. And it has been accused of hypocrisy for a promise to spend $1.5bn to boost natural gas supply in Queensland and to connect the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo sub-basin to the east coast. Green groups say the emissions that result could dwarf those from Adani’s proposed Carmichael coalmine.
Speaking of which: Labor has struggled to articulate a position on the mine. Shorten has expressed personal reservations but not committed to either blocking or supporting it.

– Greens
The Greens want emissions cut by between 63% and 82% by 2030 compared with 2005, and zero emissions by 2040. Their policies include ending fossil fuel subsidies, phasing out fossil fuel mining and electricity generation by 2030, vehicle emissions standards that become a ban on new petrol-fueled cars by 2030 and an economy-wide carbon price to reflect the true cost of pollution. A new public authority, Renew Australia, would lead the transition to low emissions.
Climate Analytics says the Greens’ goals sit well within what the scientific literature says would be Australia’s fair share of emissions cuts.

• RENEWABLE ENERGY
– Coalition
The government does not have a renewable energy policy for beyond 2020. It stresses there was significant investment – about $20bn – on large-scale clean energy last year. Most of this has come from the national renewable energy target, which it considered abolishing under Tony Abbott but ultimately reduced under a deal with Labor. The target won’t fund new generation after next year but existing support is maintained through to 2030. While the industry is surging, and the Australia Energy Market Operator has found there was likely to be about 46% clean energy by 2030 on the current trajectory, analysts expect new investment to fall if the target is not replaced.
The Coalition is betting heavily on pumped hydro. Scott Morrison poses in front of the Tumut 3 power station at the Snowy Hydro scheme. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP 
The Coalition’s big clean energy play is hydro. It is putting $1.4bn into Snowy Hydro 2.0, which is not expected to be operational until 2024, and supporting the “battery of the nation” project in Tasmania. Both promise “pumped hydro” – energy storage that can be called when needed. These projects have been found to make economic sense only if more coal plants close, but Morrison denies this is the plan.
The government has indicated it would underwrite some new energy projects, having released a shortlist of 12. The list includes one coal upgrade project in New South Wales.

– Labor
Bill Shorten has promised 50% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030. He says he will aim to win support in parliament for the national energy guarantee, which would force energy companies to reduce emissions and meet reliability obligations. If unsuccessful, he would tip $10bn into the government’s green bank, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and create a $5bn fund to modernise the power grid. Other promises include $200m over the next four years for a household battery program, with a goal of 1m homes having batteries by 2025.

– Greens
The Greens want the electricity grid to be 100% renewable energy by 2030. They would extend and boost the renewable energy target and back public investment, feed-in tariffs and regulations for clean generation, storage and energy conservation.

• ENVIRONMENT PROTECTION AND THREATENED SPECIES
Green groups, academics and lawyers have been campaigning for changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, the national environment law introduced by the Howard government 20 years ago. They say the law is designed to maintain the minimum viable population of a species or habitat while developments are approved, that the environment minister of the day has too much discretion over decisions and that Australia’s natural estate is declining rapidly on its watch.
The endangered growling grass frog. Photograph: Kristian Bell/Getty Images/RooM RF 
– Coalition
The government rejects claims the EPBC Act is not fit for purpose. It would review it, as required under the legislation, but not replace it. It promises a $100m environment restoration fund to clean up coasts and waterways, protect threatened species, boost recycling and reduce waste. Up to $10m of this would be dedicated to creating safe havens for threatened species.
Scientific assessments of the policy range from not adequate to poor, especially in light of a 38% cut to the federal environment department budget. Fewer than 40% of threatened species had recovery plans last year to prevent their extinction, and the department has admitted it does not know if the recovery plans that are in place are being implemented. The Coalition does not have a policy to limit land clearing, one of the major threats to biodiversity. Morrison’s response to the shocking picture painted by the UN biodiversity report was to warn about the impact of “green tape” on business and to claim the government had passed legislation that does not actually exist.

– Labor
Shorten says he would introduce new environment laws and a federal environment protection authority to oversee them, meeting a call from the Labor environment action network. There has been little detail on what the laws would do and what powers the authority would have. Its environment spokesman, Tony Burke, has said not to expect the changes in the first year of a Shorten government. The ALP promises a $100m native species protection fund, $200m over five years to double the number of Indigenous rangers managing the land and $200m for urban rivers and corridors. It would reverse the Coalition’s reduction in marine protected areas.
Scientists said Labor’s plan appeared to be a positive initial step towards addressing the disaster highlighted by the UN but many questions remained unanswered. They stressed the need not just to protect threatened species, but to save and restore ecosystems to prevent further decline, and said more funding would be required.

– Greens
The minor party also backs new environmental laws and a federal environmental protection authority but stresses it must be independent of politicians and have real teeth. It has proposed a $2bn nature fund to tackle invasive species, create new safe havens for threatened mammals, fund recovery plans for at-risk species, pay for 10,000 environment managers and boost the number of Indigenous rangers. It promises an expanded, science-based network of marine parks and an end to native forest logging.
Scientists consider their policies the most thorough, though it has been noted that – as with the major parties – they are not making explicit the impact biodiversity loss would have on the economy.

• WASTE AND RECYCLING
With China shutting down its market for Australia’s recycling and growing community desire to cut rubbish, all parties have made commitments to reduce plastic and deal with other waste. The commonwealth, the states and the territories have a goal of 100% of Australia’s packaging being reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025 at the latest.
Recycled paper at the northern Adelaide waste management authority’s recycling site. Photograph: Brenton Edwards/AFP/Getty Images 
– Coalition
The government promises $100m for a recycling investment fund, $20m to accelerate recycling of batteries, electrical goods and plastic oil containers and wants to halve food waste by 2030. It would spend $20m researching new ways to deal with plastics, including using recycled material in manufacturing and construction.
Green group WWF has criticised the government for not promising to ban single-use plastic. It says the European Union, which is targeting 10 types of single-use plastics, should be the benchmark.

– Labor
The ALP says it will ban lightweight, single-use plastic bags and micro-beads by 2021 and create a national container deposit scheme that would pay people for recycling drink vessels. Other commitments include a $60m national recycling fund and targets for federal government purchasing of recycled products.

– Greens
In addition to phasing out single-use plastics, the Greens would bring in a national container deposit scheme and similar programs for electronic waste, tyres and mattresses. They want an extra $500m over five years for infrastructure and a plastics research centre. Their headline goal is zero waste.

• GREAT BARRIER REEF
The world’s biggest living structure suffered mass coral death due to increased ocean temperatures in 2016 and 2017, a disaster that has drawn attention across the globe.
Aerial surveys have revealed the extent of bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Photograph: Ed Roberts/ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies 

– Coalition
The government’s 2050 reef plan is designed to reduce local pressures and increase resilience to climate change, but not deal with climate change itself, the biggest threat facing the reef. Last year it gave $444m to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a charity set up by business leaders that at the time of the announcement had only six full-time staff. The money is to be spent on improving water quality, crown-of-thorns starfish control and research. The Coalition has not explained why the foundation was chosen over government agencies.

– Labor
The ALP says it would strip the foundation of most funding and reinvest it with public agencies dedicated to reef protection. It promises to work internationally to improve the response to climate change and to protect biodiversity and oceans.

– Greens
The Greens say they would commit $2bn to improve water quality and stress the need for substantial action on climate change.

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