Global lessons from Australia’s disintegrating environment

As United Nations Secretary General António Guterres recently said “We have a choice: Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.” Amid climate change-driven soaring temperatures in many countries, it appears he was referring to the almost universal backsliding on climate action commitments made in Glasgow at COP26 in November 2021.

However, as many environmental scientists would agree, his words could be applied equally to environmental demise. Indeed climate and environment are two of the four apocalyptic horsemen destroying planet Earth.

In this context, it’s worth examining climate developments globally: a recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court and a report on the environmental decline on Australia’s part of the journey to “collective suicide.”

A government report on Australia’s State of Environment was issued this week and is of relevance to all other countries including the U.S. for it is a detailed description of devastating deterioration and consequences.

The 274-page report assesses every aspect of Australia’s environment and heritage, rivers, oceans, coastal regions, air, land, soil and urban areas. It paints a vivid picture of nature crumbling under the combined pressure of climate change, prodigious land clearing, habitat loss, invasive species, mining and pollution. It is an indictment of the actions of Australia’s 26 million people and their governments in an island continent nearly the size of the United States.

The report was completed in late 2021 but was not publically released in case it figured badly in the May election — which the former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government lost anyway, mainly due to their inadequate climate and environmental policies. The report was only made public this week and now there is considerable anguish over the seven-month delay in commencing restitution.

The report details a litany of environmental damage and species decline; more loss of mammals than any other continent and many other losses of wildlife due to land clearing for sheep and cattle grazing, with 7.7 million hectares (about 19 million acres) of land cleared between 2000 and 2017 with only 7 percent assessed under federal legislation by Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

This act failed over many years to safeguard Australia’s vulnerable plants, animals and ecological communities. Its reform has been stalled in parliament during the past two years with the regulation of mining being the main unresolved political issue.

The inadequacy of legal safeguards is compounded by Australia’s lack of an independent agency like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has not been on the national agenda because of the ignorance of successive governments on environmental issues over the past decade, along with the overwhelming power and influence of the fossil fuel industries — which will be familiar to Americans.

So far, the successful function of the U.S. EPA in protecting human health and the environment has provided a strong case for a similar institution to be established in Australia.

However, the June 30 Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. EPA and other recent decisions could be seen as heralding the demise of an institution that has been the final arbiter in the use of political and commercial power. The impacts are likely to be reduced climate change mitigation as well as diminished environmental and human health protections in the U.S. — and may well be a hindrance to the case for development of an EPA in Australia.

In fact, the U.S. leadership on climate action that many around the world hoped for is compromised and all nations will reap the climate consequences. This is also a likely scenario for the Australian environmental report.

Perhaps the most concerning finding is that in Australia 19 ecosystems have been showing signs of collapse or near collapse during the past five years. Furthermore, intensive cultivation techniques have resulted in the third largest cumulative loss of organic soil carbon of any country behind only China and the United States. Australia is a significant exporter of meat and grain to a world increasingly of need of them.

This economic aspect of Australian environmental collapse has to been seen in context of the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report, reminding us that biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse rank in the top five risks in terms of likelihood and impact in the coming 10 years. Unless this is addressed, it could “bring about societal collapses with long‑lasting and severe consequences”.

The World Economic Forum’s “New Nature Economy Report” from 2020 reminds us that over half of the world’s GDP is moderately or highly dependent on natural capital assets and ecosystem services either directly or through their supply chains. This amounts to $44 trillion of economic value generation.

In other words, the current economies of the world that depend on growth rely on a supply of natural capital which is finite. Economist Herman Daly has raised the question: Does (economic) growth ever become uneconomic?

It seems unlikely that with the addiction to growth this question will be answered till humanity is nearer to collective suicide.

To return to the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling and the Australian environmental report, both will affect our national standings and create a need to act to rectify them. Last year, Australia was refused trade discussion with the EU because of its abysmal climate policies. The door is now open because a new government had increased its climate targets. U.S. standing will suffer because recent Supreme Court decisions are seen to undermine democracy and create yet another focus of national instability and international concern about the U.S. ability to lead.

David Shearman (AM, Ph.D., FRACP, FRCPE) is a professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide, South Australia and co-founder of Doctors for the Environment Australia. He is co-author of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy” (2007) commissioned by the Pell Centre for International Relations and Public Policy.