Have you heard about Nature Positive? It’s a global movement to stop all the damage we’re doing to the natural environment – to forests, rivers, plants and animals – and start reversing that damage. It’s an idea whose time has come. And it’s coming to Australia next week.
Tuesday week will see the world’s first global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney, hosted by federal Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek and NSW Minister for the Environment Penny Sharpe.
The summit will be “the next step towards turbocharging private sector investment in nature repair”. It will bring together ministers, experts, environmental groups, businesses, First Nations people, community leaders and scientists.
It will “bring together global leaders to discuss next steps for a nature-positive future, so that our kids and grandkids will be able to enjoy the wild places we love today”, Plibersek says.
Sharpe says that “getting nature on the path to recovery is as important as tackling climate change. Nature positive, and investing in nature, are newish concepts, and they are key to turning around destruction and pollution of land, waterways and air, and stopping biodiversity loss”.
The summit’s sessions and site visits will cover driving sustainable ocean economies and “blue finance”, developing nature reporting frameworks, business leadership on sustainability, boosting First Nations leadership in nature repair, and showcasing nature repair in practice, across landscapes, seascapes and borders.
Well, that’s great. At this late stage, you’d have to be pretty boneheaded not to agree with all that. The question is, what should we do to stop the continued destruction and start repairing the damage we’ve already done?
Well, the answer’s obvious – obvious to economists anyway. Surely, what we should do is create the incentives necessary to discourage destructive behaviour and encourage helpful behaviour.
We need to set up something similar to the present “safeguard mechanism”, which requires businesses in industries with major carbon emissions to limit and then reduce their emissions.
Where this is impractical, they must “offset” any excess emissions with “carbon credits” purchased from farmers and others who do things that reduce an equivalent amount of carbon emissions. These “Australian carbon credit units” are certified by a government agency to ensure they’re genuine.
Get it? Rather than just ordering companies to stop emitting greenhouse gases, the government uses an “economic instrument” that offers incentives to businesses to do the right thing. The government creates a new market where businesses unable to reduce their emissions can pay other businesses to reduce emissions for them.
The emissions are reduced by those businesses that can do so cheaply, rather than the firms for which doing so would be much more costly. The market thus allows the community to reduce climate damage at the lowest available cost.
Neat idea, eh? One small problem. We have to be sure the businesses being paid to reduce their emissions really do so to the extent they claim. But these carbon-credit schemes are notorious around the world for being dodgy or downright fraudulent.
One problem is ensuring the carbon isn’t locked up (“sequestrated”) for a few years and then let go. Another is being sure people aren’t getting paid to do something they fully intended to do anyway for other reasons.
Officialdom insists that our federal carbon-credit system is kosher. But various whistleblowers beg to differ – and that’s not hard to believe.
With nature first, the schemes you use to reduce carbon emissions can be adapted to preserving and repairing bushland and plant and animal habitat. With bushland, there’s a fair bit of overlap between the two problems.
The NSW government has been running a biodiversity offsets scheme since 2017. But in its own politely ponderous way, a performance audit by the NSW Auditor-General in 2022 tore it limb from limb.
It found that the government department responsible for the scheme had “not effectively designed core elements” of it. There were “key concerns around the scheme’s integrity, transparency and sustainability” creating “a risk that biodiversity gains made through the scheme will not be sufficient to offset losses resulting from the impacts of [economic] development, and that the department will not be able to assess the scheme’s overall effectiveness”.
The point is, by now we’ve had enough experience of attempts by governments to create “markets” out of thin air, just by passing laws and setting up regulatory bodies, to know this doesn’t leave us with markets that work the way real markets work – let alone the markets that exist in economics textbooks.
When it comes to the environment, the trouble with government-created “markets” is that governments are creating the demand for something – a carbon credit, or a biodiversity credit – and also determining the supply of that something, by deciding who’s done something that entitles them to sell a credit.
So the buyer has been ordered to buy things called credits, while the seller has been allowed to sell things called credits. See what real markets have that this market doesn’t? Customers.
A customer is someone who wants value for their money and, if they aren’t getting it, will either go somewhere else or decide to go without.
But in this so-called market without customers, buyers have to buy credits just to please the government, while sellers who’ve been granted a piece of paper called a credit have a guaranteed buyer.
So sellers can sell anything they’ve persuaded the government to class as a credit, while the buyers forced by the government to acquire officially designated credits, have no reason to care whether the credits they buy are good, bad or indifferent.
It’s hard to imagine a “market” where the risk of buying something that’s no good could be higher.
Now get this. As originally intended, the purpose of the Albanese government’s Nature Repair Act, passed late last year, was to establish a nature-repair market. But the Greens would pass the bill in the Senate only if it didn’t permit miners and other developers to harm nature. And if they did, the polluters would have to offset any damage by buying biodiversity credits.
So, in the end, the Act created only half a market. It gives the government power only to award farmers and others who do nature-enhancing things with “biodiversity certificates”, which they can sell.
Who’d want to buy such certificates? Only philanthropists, environmental groups, companies trying to enhance their environmental credentials, or governments coughing up taxpayers’ money.
You get the feeling the Greens don’t have much faith in creating artificial markets to fix the environment. They don’t seem to share most economists’ conviction that governments shouldn’t order people about – particularly businesspeople.
So how else can we pursue nature positive? Well, here’s a radical thought: governments could stop logging native forests, stop further land clearing, stop subsidising fossil fuels, stop permitting new mines and gas fields, and start spending a lot of money restoring land and habitat.