Attendees of Australia’s first Global Nature Positive Summit lauded the government for hosting the event, but the current political troubles it faces and lingering questions over how to incentivise private sector investment are not going away.

Closing out the Sydney conference Wednesday, Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek summarised what she thought the shared conclusions and outcomes of the conference were.

“The summit has showcased the innovation, traditional knowledge, and on-ground work underway in Australia, the Pacific, and around the world to restore and repair nature,” she said.

The themes she raised included that nature needs to be factored into economic and business decisions, that clear and consistent metrics are important, Indigenous leadership is key to sustainability, and nature-positive and net-zero objectives work together.

“Nature positive is not a campaign. It is not just a slogan. It represents how we are approaching nature repair – and driving action underpinned by measurement. And importantly we are doing this together,” she said.

Attendees emphasised the importance of the summit, in and of itself, noting it is the first time a conference of this kind had been held globally, and that it could help build an ecosystem to drive genuine change. It was held just two weeks before delegates gather in Cali, Colombia for COP16 to discuss the implementation of the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework.

“It reinforces the importance of nature and it brings together a lot of the key people who are real advocates, and the people who are supporting nature tech, nature innovation, nature policy, so in that regard it’s a really unique opportunity to have a lot of players here, including some from overseas,” Martijn Wilder, co-founder of Pollination told Carbon Pulse.

Kelly O’Shanassy, chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation, noted the conference highlighted that nature and climate change are inextricably linked and also praised the government’s efforts to raise the voices of Indigenous leaders from Australia and across the Pacific throughout the summit.

However, she said it was “disappointing” that much of the conversation at the summit was focused on nature repair rather than nature protection.

“It’s a lot easier to protect what we have left, than to damage it and then fork out several billion times more to repair it,” she said.

POLITICAL HEADACHES

O’Shanassy highlighted the awkward situation the government faced during the summit, with its legislation to establish federal environmental protection and information agencies stuck in the senate and the reforms to the laws underpinning them pushed off indefinitely.

She placed the blame on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for being unwilling to negotiate with the crossbench to pass the bills, while at the same time being critical of the lack of direct funding in the government’s budget to go towards nature protection and restoration.

“The government has a credibility issue on nature right now, and I think the minister did a decent job in her speeches at the summit, but what a terrible position to be in when you haven’t been able to deliver your key reforms, and you’ve also made some decisions that are very nature negative, climate damaging, in the lead up to the summit,” she said, referring to three coal mine extensions the government approved a fortnight before the summit.

“A lot of people in the room knew [about] that,” she added.

“[The summit] was an opportunity for the government to showcase the wonderful things that it’s done for nature, but they just haven’t done much.”

DRIVING INVESTMENT

In the lead-up to the summit, the government said it would use it as an opportunity to help drive private sector investment into nature repair and conservation.

However, participants said the government has little to offer in terms of policy mechanisms or frameworks that will actually achieve this.

Pollination’s Wilder said more focus is needed on how and what conditions and policies are needed to drive private capital into nature.

“One of the challenges that we currently face is that a significant amount of funding for nature relies on carbon finance, and carbon finance is currently facing significant challenges,” he said.

“So, in the absence of carbon finance, we need to find additional revenue streams for biodiversity finance, finance for ecosystem services, [and] we also need to have new policy mechanisms.”

He raised examples like the UK’s biodiversity net gain plan and Queensland’s Land Restoration Fund.

John Connor, CEO of industry body the Carbon Market Institute, echoed Wilder’s comments.

“We actually need to have something which has got a broader framework for biodiversity protection and that’s still a piece that’s missing. It would have been good to have more focus on that,” he said.

“It was disappointing that there wasn’t more on the stick side, in terms of the broader policy rules and other things that need to be developed around this.”

Other sources noted the summit seemed to lack dedicated sessions that specifically focussed on how to finance projects, and that there were few venture capitalists or investors in attendance.

MARKET QUESTIONS

The government is in the process of finalising its national voluntary Nature Repair Market, which is expected to be operationalised at the start of next year.

Questions are still being raised, however, over where demand for the scheme’s biodiversity certificates will come from, and how exactly it will be run.

Connor noted the government’s first NRM methodology is intended to be able to be “stacked” on top of Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) projects, but said there needs to be greater clarity on how exactly that will work, noting the risks it could entail.

“There’s a concern about jamming the carbon and nature markets together, I’ve described it as like dragonflies mating, we’ve got to do this pretty carefully, because one could trash the machinery or the integrity of the other,” he said.

He also emphasised that “markets themselves shouldn’t be the driving policy instrument”.

Commenting on a closed-door presentation on the NRM that was held during the summit, Phil Ireland, CEO of Carbon Neutral, wrote in a LinkedIn post that “my question to the government was how are they properly going to resource the Clean Energy Regulator to administer this? (subtext: when ACCU Scheme governance is already under resourced, IMHO)”.

ACF’s O’Shanassy said the government needs to provide credible environmental protection policies and restoration targets to the business sector before they can seriously consider to begin to invest.

“There’s no nature positive target that’s legislated in Australia, there’s no equivalent to a Safeguard Mechanism that’s being discussed … the nature protection laws are broken, and [the government] haven’t fixed them,” she said.

“I think there are a few things we need to do in Australia … to actually set the framework around nature like we’ve started to do around climate. The government needs to do that before it can expect businesses to be talking about millions and billions of dollars that they’ll invest in nature.”

By Mark Tilly – mark@carbon-pulse.com

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