2020VISION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY

MELBOURNE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY INSTITUTE

The Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) at the University of Melbourne, Australia, brings together researchers from different disciplines to help create a more sustainable society. It acts as an information portal for research at the University of Melbourne, and as a collaborative platform where researchers and communities can work together to affect positive change. This book can be freely accessed from MSSI’s website: www.sustainable.unimelb.edu.au.

Cite as: Pearson, C.J. (editor) (2012). 2020: Vision for a Sustainable Society. Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne

Published by Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute in 2012 Ground Floor Alice Hoy Building (Blg 162) Monash Road The University of Melbourne, Parkville Victoria 3010, Australia

Text and copyright © Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the catalogue of the National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au 2020: Vision for a Sustainable Society, ISBN: 978-0-7340-4773-1 (pbk)

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The last two centuries have seen extra-ordinary improvements in the quality of

human lives. Most people on earth today enjoy access to the necessities of life that was once available only to the elites. Most people enjoy longevity, health, education, information and opportunities to experience the variety of life on earth that was denied even to the rulers of yesteryear. The proportion of humanity living in absolute poverty remains daunting, but

continues to fall decade by decade. The early 21st century has delivered an acceleration of the growth in living standards in the most populous developing countries and an historic lift in the trend of economic growth in the regions that had lagged behind, notably in Africa.

These beneficent developments are accom-panied by another reality. The improvements are not sustainable unless we make qualitative changes in the content of economic growth. The continuation of the current relationship between growth in the material standard of living and pressures on the natural environment will undermine economic growth, political

stability and the foundations of human achievement.

The good news is that humanity has already discovered and begun to apply the knowledge that can reconcile continued improvements in the standard of living with reduction of pressures on the natural environment.

The bad news is that the changes that are necessary to make high and rising standards of living sustainable are hard to achieve within

our current political cultures and systems.Hard, but not impossible. That is a central

message from this book, drawn out in Craig Pearson’s concluding chapter.

This book introduces the reader to the many dimesions of sustainability, through well-qualified authors.

Climate change is only one mechanism through which current patterns of economic growth threaten the natural systems on which our prosperity depend. It is simply the most urgent of the existential threats.

Climate change is a special challenge for Australians. We are the most vulnerable of the

Foreword

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developed countries to climate change. And we are the developed country with the highest level of greenhouse gas emissions per person.

There are roles for private ethical decisions as well as public policy choices in dealing with the climate change challenge.

This book is released at the time of ‘Rio+20’, a conference in Brazil to review the relatively poor progress we have made towards sustainability in the past 20 years, and soon after the introduction of Australia’s first comprehensive policy response to the global challenge of climate change. Australia’s emissions trading scheme with an initially fixed price for emissions permits comes into effect on 1 July 2012. The new policy discourages activities that generate greenhouse gases by putting a price on emissions. The revenue raised by carbon pricing will be returned to households and businesses in ways that retain incentives to reduce emissions. Part of the revenue will be used to encourage production

and use of goods and services that embody low emissions.

The policy has been launched in controversy. Interests that stand to gain from the discrediting of the policy argue that it is unnecessary either because the case for global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the associated climate change has not been proven, or that the new policy places a disproportionate burden on Australians.

The health of our civilisation requires us to bring scientific knowledge to account in public policy. Everyone who shares the knowledge that is the common heritage of humanity has

a responsibility to explain the realities to others wherever and whenever they can.

The argument that the new policy places a disproportionate burden on Australians can be answered by seeking honestly to understand what others are doing.

The critics of Australian policy argue that the world’s two largest national emitters of greenhouse gases, China and the United States, are doing little or nothing to reduce emissions, so that it is either pointless or unnecessary for us to do so.

China has advanced a long way towards achieving its target of reducing emissions as a proportion of economic output by 40 to 45 per cent between 2005 and 2020. It has done this by forcing the closure of emissions-intensive plants and processes that have exceptionally high levels of emissions per unit of output, by imposing high emissions standards on new plants and processes, by charging emissions-intensive activities higher electricity prices, by

subsidising the introduction of low-emissions activities, and by new and higher taxes on fossil fuels. China has introduced trials of an emissions trading system in five major cities and two provinces. This adds up to a cost on business and the community that exceeds any burden placed on Australians by the new policies – bearing in mind that the revenue from Australian carbon pricing is returned to households and businesses.

The US Government has advised the inter-national community of its domestic policy target to reduce 2005 emissions by 17 per cent by 2020. President Barack Obama said

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to the Australian Parliament that all countries should take seriously the targets that they had reported to the international community, and made it clear that the United States did so. United States efforts to reduce emissions are diffuse but far-reaching. They now include controls on emissions from electricity generators, announced in March 2012, effectively excluding any new coal-based power generation after the end of this year unless it embodies carbon capture and storage. From the beginning of next year they will include an emissions trading system in the most populous and economically largest state, California.

The United States is making reasonable progress towards reaching its emissions reduc-tion goals, with some actions imposing high costs on domestic households and businesses.

Australia has now taken steps through which we can do our fair share in the international effort, at reasonable cost. It would be much harder and more costly to do our fair share

without the policies that are soon to take effect.What Australians do over the next few years

will have a significant influence on humanity’s prospects for handing on the benefits of modern civilisation to future generations. This book will help Australians to understand their part in the global effort for sustainability.

Ross GarnautUniversity of Melbourne

15 April 2012

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ContentsForeword by Ross Garnaut v

Table of Contents viii

Author Biographies x

Drivers 1

1 2

2 10

3 17

4 27

5 37

People 47

6 48

7 57

8 64

9 70

10 79

11 86

12 94

13 104

14 114

PopulationRebecca Kippen and Peter McDonald

Equity Helen Sykes

ConsumptionCraig Pearson

GreenhouseGasEmissionsandClimateChangeDavid Karoly

EnergyPeter Seligman

EthicsCraig Prebble

CultureAudrey Yue and Rimi Khan

AwarenessandBehaviourAngela Paladino

LocalMattersMatterKate Auty

PublicWisdomTim van Gelder

MentalHealthGrant Blashki

DiseasePeter Doherty

CorporateSustainabilityLiza Maimone

GovernanceJohn Brumby

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NaturalResources 123

15 124

16 132

17 141

18 150

Cities 161

19 162

20 170

21 177

22 184

23 192

24 200

25 210

Outcomes 221

26 222

Further Reading 234

Index 241

Ecosystem-BasedAdaptationRodney Keenan

WaterHector Malano and Brian Davidson

FoodSunday McKay and Rebecca Ford

ZeroCarbonLand-UseChris Taylor and Adrian Whitehead

ChangingCitiesPeter Newman and Carolyn Ingvarson

AffordableLivingThomas Kvan and Justyna Karakiewicz

BuiltEnvironmentPru Sanderson

InfrastructureColin Duffield

TransportMonique Conheady

AdaptiveDesignRay Green

HandlingDisastersAlan March

TwentyActionsCraig Pearson

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Local Matters MatterKate Auty

Anyone who works on environmental, scientific and/or engineering projects

knows that incorporating ‘the local’ is fundamental when trying to achieve sustainability. Many past failures in environmental science, community development and aid work inform this view, where theories have been put into practice without sufficient local consultation. We need to actively seek out local knowledge and combine it with scientific findings in order to carve out successful, sustainable responses to environmental challenges.

Science works to inform local understanding and yet, at its purest, it works in isolation from

local issues. Subsequently it struggles for a broad, communicative appeal and dialogue. Clear communication of scientific findings is crucial for sustainably, and sharing knowledge about environmental issues is a fundamental part of this process.

As It Always WasWhen examining Australia’s cultural and environmental foundations, local understanding of environmental matters, as distinct from ‘scientific data’, has always had huge importance. This is evident from the earliest experiences of non-Indigenous travellers. In the early 20th

century, surveyor Alfred Canning would not have been able to carve the 1850km Canning Stock Route from Wiluna to Halls Creek without using local Aboriginal knowledge. Canning and his survey team chained and coerced Aboriginal people to lead them through vast expanses of desert from native well to well, enabling the party to map the new stock route. Their captive guides’ knowledge of the land saved the survey party from dehydration and failure. Other early white pathfinders, who are reported to have resisted the practice of chaining local Aboriginal people to extract essential water knowledge, still relied heavily

upon them, and exploited their store of local knowledge extensively and collaboratively.

When the Woomera rocket tests were being carried out in Western Australia in the 1960s, the Martu people of the Western Desert used their knowledge of water sources in and around the Percival Lakes to evade those trying to remove them from their home-turned-testing-zone.

These examples illustrate how valuable local water knowledge was. While non-Indigenous people had all manner of mechanical, technical and scientific perspectives of the times, they needed local knowledge in order to put them to good use.

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Local Matters Matter

In southeast Victoria in the 1990s, the Bryant family native title claim in Gunai Kurnai country disclosed highly specific, long-standing, local Indigenous knowledge about fresh water sources on the coastal fringes, none of which was mapped in the non-Indigenous archive. The Bryant family were not of the Gunai Kurnai people but had been residents of the Aboriginal settlement at Lake Tyers until they were evicted in the 1960s as a function of what they and Aboriginal people called ‘the half-caste law’. They moved to a specific place in the coastal reserve land where Gunai Kurnai people showed them a concealed freshwater soak some distance back from the beach. The Bryant (and their now extended Gunai Kurnai) family took native title lawyers directly to this fresh water source in the 1990s, to demonstrate ongoing cultural connections. The information was particularised, localised, age-old and continuing. It was this fresh water that made the lives of the Bryants possible on the fringe of white townships.

Many other examples of localised knowledge about the environment will be stored by non-Indigenous people. As Paul Carter suggests in his study of the Victorian Mallee bio-region, these stories will be of variable quality and depth, they will evoke tensions and contradictions, but they will nevertheless exist and be informative. Contextualised, these stories are ostensibly about biodiversity, water, environmental memory and ground-truthing, but they are also culturally grounded and comprise information and knowledge that we need to build sustainable futures. Local matters matter: sometimes intensely so.

As the Victorian Commissioner for Envir-onmental Sustainability, I am dedicated to local consultation in order to find out local knowledge. I believe science communication will be improved if environmental reporters incorporate localised understandings, infor-mation and knowledge as well as scientific data in discussions of environmental quality and sustainability issues. Each of these sources can contribute meaning, impressing upon us possibilities for, and alternative routes to, sustainable outcomes. The Victorian ‘State of the Environment Report’ is specifically required to include rounds of consultation with the community and its object is to both inform and incorporate citizens as well as policy-makers and politicians.

A Form of ConsultationIn consulting with the public, we – effectively a team of five working on the ‘State of the Environment Report’ – carved the state into

quadrants (very mechanical and Western) and members of my team have assumed roles compiling and collating information from the regions. Simultaneously we have been conducting a broad cities conversation, meeting with metropolitan groups and individuals as invitations and issues arise.

What my staff and I have learned in the past two years as we have travelled around Victoria, speaking and listening to members of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous community about environmental issues, is that they want to be consulted; they believe they have insights to offer; they regard the information they wish

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to share as grounded in their practical daily lives, their work, and their cultural, social and leisure practices; and they think it important that the centre heeds the local and regional knowledge. It is clear that the information proffered by non-Aboriginal people does not have the same historical and cultural depth as that offered by Aboriginal people for whom this country is their only memory, but it has legitimacy and should also be referenced when reporting on the environment.

Our regional consultation has involved local media presentations, public meetings, and broad-ranging question-and-answer sessions over five days in each region, with follow up as necessary. We have held numerous meetings with individuals, local organisations (both aligned and non-aligned), state and local government, and schools. People have

volunteered their time because they are interested in what we are doing and because they believe they have a contribution to make to the conversation about environmental matters. Three short examples of this attitude are in Heyfield, a timber town where the community has developed an innovative energy-saving project that is marked with coloured flags on rooflines across the whole town. At Clear Lake, the Jackman family has set aside productive land for the installation of a wetlands. The Wimmera River Improvement Committee have been developing wetlands and encouraging people to enjoy this very interesting waterway for 30 years.

Across the whole range of meetings, only four people have rejected the IPCC climate science. Notwithstanding the often expressed, and concerned, view that scientists are being

Some of the Heyfield Flags team, the Jackman family Clear Lake wetlands, members of the Wimmera River Improvement Committee.

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‘rubbished’ – that has not been my experience. In fact, regional people in agricultural settings, in large and small country towns, in schools and in gender-specific groupings, have a long and respectful relationship with agricultural scientists and this appears to be the general tone of the discussions we have had. Regional people do not think that the scientific community is engaged in a massive ‘conspiracy’ to misinform them.

There has been an extraordinarily enthusiastic localised take-up of the infor-mation we have provided. Among well-informed people we have found a keen, often unsatisfied, interest in reports, journal articles, and even the development of their own networking lists. There is a great appetite for credible, authoritative information: people want a sustainable world and they want to play a part in its creation, thoughtfully and with purpose. The ‘State of the Climate Report 2010’ (CSIRO and BOM) has been actively sought out and avidly taken off tables.

Our meetings made it possible for people to extend and even commence networking. I assumed that networks existed everywhere and that they were robust and well supported. This is not necessarily the case, and people need to be provided with opportunities to meet and talk around the specific questions of sustainability, environmental concerns and climate change. The level of community engagement is uneven and it can be either undeveloped or robust in the most surprising places, depending on the assumptions we may make about community cohesion. This revelation has implications for the manner and method of communicating

environmental science and sustainability issues and reinforces my view that it is important to recognise and attempt to speak to local people. Fundamentally, Victorians have expressed concern about the level of information that they can access and they say they want information that they can digest, not dense impenetrable reports full of jargon and acronyms.

A Common Language It appears to me that we have to find a common language to overcome communication dif-ficulties in environmental reporting. We need to recognise that academic disciplines and employment contexts can produce ‘codes’ that make commentary opaque to outsiders.

We have heard from all parts of Victoria about the need for better communication. At the local level the students of the Middle Kinglake Primary School (burnt down in the February 2009 fires) are amongst those who have spoken to us about better communication:

they want a ‘State of the Environment Report’ that uses new technologies but also picks up on their issues – about biodiversity protection, food production and waste management (including in the National Park and the skate-park).

The community has welcomed suggestions that we find ways to incorporate specific case studies in sustainability reports. Case studies, as exemplars of local practice, are instructive, engaging and can be illuminating well beyond their narrow narrative confines. The use of case studies to illuminate issues has long been a methodology used in narratives about aid and its successes and failures, and this method finds

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Practical local changeLocal consultations have raised other issues including enormous interest in environmentally sustainable innovation. This has been evidenced, for example, in the work of no-till farming and specific agricultural possibilities in relation to climate change. The South East Councils Climate Change Alliance (SECCCA) used a 2010 Agricultural Greenhouse Emissions Project at Koo Wee Rup to show a productivity improvement of 15 per cent, reductions in energy use of 35 per cent, and reductions of waste to landfill of 54 per cent. The Blackberry Taskforce working out of the far northeast has gen-erated a participatory method that has now started to spread to other regions. Farmers came in from work in their overalls to talk about the success they were having in their endeavours. Blackberry control might have been the focus of their discussions but climate change and adaptation were also elevated in their minds and conversations. Local meetings provided the focal point for these discussions and community and individual action.

a ready audience amongst those about whom it reports and to whom it speaks directly.

Local government is also driving change in a number of ways with its proposal for a pyrolysis plant in the Wimmera, to a shire-wide solar panel installation program organised by the Shire of Toowong (Corryong) and, across the state, the establishment of in-house sustainability teams and State of the Environment and Sustainability Reporting. In listening to Victorians talk about their highly diverse local environmental interests, we heard some similar and divergent, place-specific, local concerns and many stories of best practice. As an indication of same-but-different complexity, planning is inextricably

tied to environmental sustainability issues everywhere. Planning is capable of addressing

a range of very different problems such as isolation, population and urban encroachment, or access to environmental information. For example, people in Orbost have very different planning concerns to those in Mansfield.

People said they continued to struggle with the lack of information available to help them make choices that favour innovation, and it was clear again that better communication and better connections with local people and organisations is necessary.

I also heard from many people making environmentally sustainable choices quietly and purposefully. For instance, I visited a farm

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where Landcare (see box on next page) was an active part of the farming enterprise and the young, next generation farmer, having returned to farm after a time away in the metropolis, took pleasure in pointing out a stand of Bulloak which had received Australian government protection status under the ‘Environment and Biodiversity Conservation Act’.

Biolink zones (see box on next page) were mentioned all over the state and their importance is increasingly well understood. Wetlands that have finally received some water were being fenced and giving joy to farming families who

Stand of Bulloak protected under the ‘Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999’ together with new plantings by Project Platypus and private landowner.

were pleased to surrender land for the potential biodiversity outcomes. Choices about planting regimes and crop and orchard-tree selection are being made with climate change in mind, as a function of the immediate, felt present and the projections for the future.

While we have seen outcomes from personal exertions in tree planting, reductions in energy and other utility use and improved local waste management processes, the public has also spoken extensively about the social and cultural value of the environment, in respect of things as ordinary as soils and as ephemeral

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Dimboola Weir damaged by floodwaters.

Landcare is a community-based action for caring for land. It started with a small group of farmers at St Arnaud, Victoria in 1986. There are now 4500 landcare groups across Australia. They are practising then-Premier of Victoria Joan Kirner’s idea that: ‘Community development requires that the affected community participates in the decision-making, identifies the challenges, develops the solutions and owns the outcome.’Biolink zones are a categorisation of land-classes that was developed for biodiversity conservation and landscape adaptation under changing climates. The term was coined in 1992 and is based on distribution of vertebrate fauna in Australia and scenarios of their likely responses to climate change.

as water and biodiversity. The destruction of the Dimboola Weir by floodwaters and the social meaning of this water resource to the community reflects a real, and yet technically/mechanically immeasurable, understanding of the environment and its value.

This care and concern for the environment played out in this same river system when the public walked with the river as it flowed for the first time in years. For non-Indigenous people the Wimmera has been a sump – a source of water for irrigation, and now it is the subject of an award-winning water conservation pipeline project. The Wimmera is a river of extraordinary localised beauty and national significance given the number and range of Aboriginal canoe and Coolamon trees along its course. Aboriginal people speak of ‘cultural flows’

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just as non-Indigenous people might reflect on social and environmental flows – which are also ‘cultural’ in a different way. These stories and understandings will only become evident to those who turn their ear to the localised voice. It is important to hear these stories as they are an essential part of understanding the environment and its meaning, and therefore of finding ways to protect and conserve it.

Just as water has been given meaning by the people who use and appreciate it in multiple ways, its ephemeral nature in the Australia landscape is also becoming better understood. It is the public as well as bird monitors, water

Lake Condah in southwest Victoria, showing a constructed rock wall leading back into an eel trap.

testers, wetland regenerators, who have drawn our attention to this, in the southwest and northwest. It seems that we are once again coming to terms with rivers and watercourses as they pass across the landscape. Water as a resource in transition can graphically and historically be understood in local settings through local discussions.

Flowing on from this more nuanced understanding of water in the landscape at the local level is an incipient recognition of the uncertainty associated with climate impacts of extreme weather events. The problems associated with the major flooding in northwest

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Victoria in February 2011 were uppermost in people’s minds as our team passed from Mildura to Macedon. People sought clarity and certainty about climate change and its direct connection with such extreme events. For local people, climate change and its impacts have a poignant urgency but it was understood that there were no certain formulaic solutions and this was pondered.

Recognising the cultural importance of the environment, each round of consultation has actively involved Indigenous people. They have suggested that case studies might be drawn from the Gunditjmara application for World Heritage status for the Lake Condah eel traps and wetlands. Figure 4 shows what a beautiful area this is, worthy of both legal preservation and community protection.

The Yorta Yorta people have embarked on work with my office to further the understanding of the uses of the cultural mapping of land and water.

People from the Wotjaboluk cultural enclave are interested in talking to university architecture faculty members to incorporate sustainable design features in potential building programs.

ACTIONS FOR 2020Localising our rounds of consultation in a highly involving and intense manner helps shed our separateness from those with whom we consult. Expertise of local presenters, the commitment of the volunteers and the localisation of their concerns can all be ear-splitting in their quiet insistence about

sustainability and the environment, about ways of valuing the environment and about methods of caring for and cultivating it. It is this insistence that I hope we will be able to capture in compiling the ‘State of the Environment Report for Victoria’, and in other championing of sustainable society. Public and local interest in environmental issues is driven by an ethic of care, which has deep roots in this very localisation. This interest resists centralisation but recognises there is a place for expertise from the outside.

In recognising that local matters matter, we are working towards a better understanding of the ways in which we can continue sharing knowledge about and for the environment in all its manifestations in all the spaces from the local to the central.

Further Reading

Local Matters Matter Bianchi, P. et al. (2010). Canning Stock Route Royal Commission, Perth, Hesperian Press.Carter, P. (2010). Ground truthing. Explorations in a creative region. University of Western Australia Press. Clifford, J., (1986). ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’ in Clifford, J, and George E. Marcus, G.E., eds. Writing Culture. The poetics and politics of ethnography, Berkeley, University of California Press.Davenport, S., Johnson, P., Yuwali, (2005). Cleared Out. First Contact in the Western Desert, Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press.Hendriks, C. M., (2010). ‘Inclusive governance for sustainability’ in Brown, Valerie, Harris and Russell, 2010, eds. Tackling wicked problems. Through the transdisciplinary imagination, London, Earthscan.Mosse, D. ed. (2010). Adventures in Aidland. The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development. In: Groves, L., Hinton, R., eds. Inclusive aid. Changing power and relationships in international development, London, Earthscan.Reynolds, H. (1990). With the White People, Penguin, Ringwood.