There are growing calls on Minister Tanya Plibersek to ensure the country's main environment law takes climate change into account when assessing new fossil fuel and forestry projects. Pip Hinman reports.
Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999
Labor is rushing a dangerous amendment though parliament that would exempt the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines from important environmental protections. As Bevan Ramsden argues, this has be strenuously opposed.
Australian scientists, led by Tim Flannery, want federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek to heed the science and ensure all assessments of new gas and coal projects are evidence-based. Pip Hinman reports.
Australia has national environmental laws — the Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act). Yet given the staggering rates of land clearing taking place, resulting in the extinction and endangerment of plants and animals in Australia, these laws are clearly not working.
Conservationists say the Strzelecki Ranges hold “one of the most important koala populations in Australia”, after completing surveys that may suggest a population of several thousand koalas across the region.
Surveys conducted in Victoria's Strzelecki Ranges and South Gippsland over 2013–2016 indicate a population of almost 1000 koalas in the 10,500 hectare area surveyed, koala expert Dr Steve Phillips told Green Left Weekly.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is seeking to make changes to Australia’s national environment act to stop conservation groups from challenging ministerial decisions on major resource developments and other matters of environmental importance.
Vital nesting trees for Australia's critically endangered Swift parrot in a forest at Buckland in southern Tasmania, have been illegally logged.
They were caught in the act by researcher Dejan Stojanovic from the Australian National University, who said: “There was two cars worth of blokes standing around the base of one of my nest trees ... This site is one of the most important locations for Swift parrots on mainland Tasmania.
“Since 2010, of the 18 nest trees that I've been monitoring with motion-activated cameras, 10 have been cut down.
The federal Coalition’s plan to repeal a section of a 16-year-old environmental law can only be for one reason — to support mining companies at the expense of communities and the environment.
Attorney General George Brandis announced on August 19the government planned to repeal section 487 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (the EPBC Act) which gives the community the right to enforce Australia’s environmental laws and hold decision makers and corporations to account.