Like 2020 summit participant Professor Hugh Possingham (though possibly for different reasons), I’m a little bit disappointed with the 2020 sustainability sub-summit outcomes. But he does mention one interesting, positive development:
One very good recommendation to emerge was a call for credible, popular and independent national environmental accounts/metrics. At least if we count some important things for a while, and we can deliver that to the public in a meaningful and engaging way, the nation may get a better handle on some of the big environmental issues, like extinctions, and want to do something serious about them.
But it’s not just the sustainability stream that called for better statistics - and, just importantly, better reporting of statistics - in areas important to public policy. The “strengthening communities and supporting working families” stream floated the idea of a “national development index” reporting measures of social inclusion - homelessness was the one specifically mentioned by Tim Costello. And, while it didn’t come up in the indigenous 2020 stream, we’ve already had the pledge to close various health and educational outcome gaps. So we’ve got all these measures of Australia’s progress on various issues floating around - statistics which aren’t necessarily new, but are being given more priority. Which raises the question of how they can be placed on the nation’s collective agenda more prominently.
One suggestion in the strengthening communities forum was that their development measures should be reported in the budget papers, which I suppose isn’t a bad idea, but is likely to get swamped by the immediate hip-pocket questions that tend to flood the media in the aftermath. But it’s by far the highest-profile slot in the federal political calendar outside the election period. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not true in the USA. While the budget remains a major event in the US political calendar, the biggest political set-piece of the year is their annual State of the Union address, which, theoretically, encapsulates the entire spectrum of responsibilities of the federal government. Couldn’t we do something inspired by that, where the Prime Minister of the day reports to Parliament - aided, perhaps, by graphics, which I know isn’t normally done in Parliament but would certainly help improve the show for television - on how Australia is going according to a range of social, economic, and environmental goals, what policy changes they propose to do better on these measures?
This wouldn’t be a carbon copy of the American State of the Union; that speech is traditionally long on soaring rhetoric and short on specifics besides the occasional piece of soft-ball (oh, let’s spend $50 million on kids with cancer!!!). This would hopefully be a serious look at how we’re going compared to previously-announced targets, backed with detailed reports across the various government departments for the media to chew on afterwards. Of course, they’ll attempt to put a favourable spin on things, but there’ll be plenty of room for the media - and the Opposition - to critique their version of events.
And, by setting up a set-piece on these issues with similar prominence to the budget, it might help break the strangehold that a very narrow view of economics holds on Australia’s political life.
While I thoroughly endorse Pr Possingham’s intent, it would be an academic who would call for this stuff, unconstrained by the reality of what all this information means or if it means anything, whether it would be used, and what the data collectors are currently up to.
NRM is data rich, but information poor. Weeding out the relevant stuff is a not at all easy task.
“credible, popular and independent national environmental accounts/metrics”
credible - well yeah sure, that’s nice, but so often the data is just a guesstimate, and always will be.
popular - hmmm, does that mean of no use to practitioners? Extinctions would be a popular measure. Except there’s a 30 year lag between last sighting int he wild and declaring extinction.
independent - that wont happen, the relevant experts (and there aren’t that many of them) are all locked up in the relevant state agencies already (which is sensible and logical).
We do have a five yearly State of the Environment Report. But who reads that outside a very small circle? No one, that’s who, and that’s because few people are actually interested.
Damn. I had the chance to see Possingham speak at QUT regarding environmental metrics and using Operations Research mathematics (queueing, cost optimisation, etc.) to come up with a plan of action for conservation measures. I would’ve gone along had I known he would be at the 2020 summit.
That’s why I’m suggesting we use the star power, such as it is, of the Prime Ministership to highlight the very, very short version.
That’s an interesting - and rather dispiriting - insight by Prof Possingham. I thought the results from the sustainability stream looked very thin, and his comment suggests a reason why that is.
wilful, you make some interesting points. as i understand it, much environmental data has very large ‘error bars’ and is also highly variable on a seasonal basis and can show longer-term fluctuations - both in time and space. so the data collection is beset with difficulties. and the modelling is very difficult. i’m not against data-gathering, but the INTERPRETATION of data is where the hard thinking starts…
good luck, professor possum
Useful article about impending , inappropriate funding cuts to the Bureau of Stastistics.
[link]
It’s a pity that Prof Possingham wasn’t taken more seriously. His insights on biodiversity and extinction have always been interesting.
It’s not ’statistics’ we need per se in the world of environmental management, it’s a baseline.
Yet again for eg the Auditor-General noted the dissatisfaction of not being able to confidently measure the outcomes of the now several billion dollars of invesment into NRM via the Natural Heritage Trust - now rebranded and moved back 3 steps by Garret the Git as ‘Caring for Our Country’.
The reason we can’t satisfactorily measure outcomes is there is a terrible lack of clear baseline information, and no cohesiveness to what little long-term environmental monitoring is done in this country. Professer David Lindenmayer of ANU, has noted that Australia has less long-term environmental monitoring sites that such paragons as Nigeria - from memory from a recent conference keynote I heard him give. Come to think of it was he at 2020? As an identified leading innovater in environmental conservation and thinking, he should have been.
Until Australia invests significantly, nation-wide and consistently in core environmental monitoring, we’ll always struggle to say what progress we’re making. The other elephant in the room is until Australia stops keeping its trade/export primary production, land development and environmental ’sustainability’ streams of investment and thinking separate, we’ll keep throwing money after more money to ‘fix’ our environment because our economic practices entrench and give primacy to practices that the investment in better environmental management cannot possibly overcome without practice change.
Prof Huge Possum has a point, but I would refer it to new federalism rather than environmental metrics.
It’s part of the knowledge economy. We need to know how people and the environment are interacting on a range of scales. Colleagues and I have recently been gobsmacked that state governments do not have ready to wear summaries of recent economic performance across all sectors and actvities. They do not have population, land-use etc baselines and projections in common format. Pick a fast growing region of Australia, figure out what services (transport, hospitals, schools, water, energy) they will need for 2020, map the energy demand of that growth and realise it can derail energy and environment policy bigtime. Can our ecosystems survive the double whammy of land-use and climate change?
All of this data is somewhere but it is not in a form that can be used for strategic foresighting. Any ecological planning done outside of such a framework will always be second best.
The three tiers of government need to work together to ensure that information is scaleable up and down from local government to national level. Local government does not have the resources to do this on its own and needs the resources of higher levels of government.
This shows that too much of current decision-making (to list these would be a career-limiting move on my part, so make your own list) is seat of the pants stuff and shows that the evidence base required in decision-making is lacking.
I agree that the environment/sustainability thread in the summit was a little disappointing, but am waiting to discuss with those who went whether the big ideas came up in discussion. Most of the big ticket items are actually cross-cutting between the themes of the summit. For example, root and branch investigation of the tax system needs to examine the transition to a carbon neutral economy. All tax and regulations with perverse incentives need to be rooted out asap.
Australian science is good at ecology, but the frame in which it has to work needs urgent examination