2019 has
not been a good year for the natural environment either in Australia or elsewhere. Here climate change has delivered a worsening
drought and an escalating megafire disaster - both of which have caused
devastating damage to the natural world as well as to the human world.
Will
2020 be any better for the natural world?
It’s not looking at all promising at the moment.
Although
I find it difficult to be optimistic about any improvement, I believe that our
governments – and the politicians who serve in them – have been given a strong
wake-up call that could lead to some positive action.
Below
are some of the changes I hope to see in the coming year.
We need
a commitment by all political parties to radically reduce carbon emissions as
well as a bipartisan plan to phase out fossil fuel use. Obviously we also need to plan a just
transition for those communities which currently rely on fossil fuel
industries.
Furthermore,
as global citizens, we need to accept that coal should be left in the ground
and acknowledge that opening new coal mines and expanding existing mines is not
in either our interest or the global interest.
The tax
breaks given to fossil fuel companies should be abolished and fossil fuel
company donations to political parties should be banned. The Australian community needs its
politicians to focus on the national interest, not the interests of polluting
fossil fuel companies and their shareholders.
We need
a serious effort to halt the biodiversity crisis that Australia is currently
facing. Much attention has recently been
given to koalas, an iconic species, but they are a symbol for the hundreds of
other species of flora and fauna that are also under threat of extinction.
The NSW
Government needs to take seriously this threat and give the natural environment
a priority it has so far failed abysmally to do. Laws relating to land-clearing and forestry
operations need to be drastically changed.
Will any
of this happen? It could if enough
concerned community members force politicians to re-think their priorities.
- Leonie Blain
This article was originally published in the VOICES FOR THE EARTH column in The Daily Examiner on January 6, 2020.
