The four steps needed to align Australia’s environmental laws and policies with a nature positive future.

In a new article in Science, a joint UQ, Griffith and QUT team has identified four key steps that are needed to align Australia’s national biodiversity conservation law with a ‘nature positive’ future.

According to lead author and Biodiversity Council Early Career Leader Hannah Thomas, “Nature positive is important because many ecosystems have been so degraded that they no longer support ecosystem functioning or sustain nature's contributions to people.

“Given our economies, livelihoods, communities, and overall well-being are intricately linked to the natural world, it is imperative that we urgently halt nature loss and begin to recover biodiversity.”

Hannah says that our existing legislation is very unlikely to deliver nature positive outcomes for three reasons.

“At present measuring gain is ‘relative’, so simply slowing the loss of biodiversity can be counted as a gain. Instead, we need to move to ‘absolute’ net gain, which actually leads to an increase in nature.

“Irreversible biodiversity impacts continue to accumulate. The mitigation heirachy was designed to avoid and then minimise impacts to biodiversity before finally offsetting remaining unavoidable impacts. Unfortunately this heirachy is being weakly applied resulting in more impacts occurring and then the offsets for those impacts are frequently inadequate to compensate for the biodiversity loss.

“We can’t become nature positive just by reducing the impacts of new developments. We also need far greater action and investment in restoring threatened species populations, through actions like habitat restoration and invasive species control.”

The four steps recommended are:

1. Legislate for ‘absolute net gain’: Australian law must ensure that any biodiversity loss from development is fully compensated and that conservation efforts result in an absolute net gain in biodiversity, not just improvements relative to ‘business as usual’. Currently, the Australian definition of nature positive deviates from the internationally accepted definition, which would allow biodiversity to continue to decline.
2. Limit and compensate for biodiversity loss: The study warned against allowing developers to compensate for environmental damage through payments that may not directly benefit the impacted ecosystems, which risks replacing more threatened and harder to replace habitats with ecosystems that are less threatened and/or easier to replace. Further, some biodiversity is irreplaceable, and so it is important to limit, and if possible, avoid negative impacts to irreplaceable biodiversity in the first place.
3. Secure net gains beyond development impacts: Australian law must address and reverse biodiversity decline beyond simply compensating for the loss of nature from development impacts. This will require a significant boost to conservation funding and resourcing.
4. Enforce transparent monitoring: Effective and transparent implementation of biodiversity policies is crucial. Dr Ward highlighted that many threatened species in Australia lacked proper monitoring, making enforcement of biodiversity protection laws difficult.

Co-author Dr Michelle Ward from Griffith University’s School of Environment and Science, said Australia’s current Nature Positive Plan falls short of ensuring a truly nature-positive future.

“Australia has the opportunity to lead the world in aligning conservation laws with its nature-positive ambitions,” Dr Ward said.

“But the proposed reforms need significant improvements to deliver on this promise.”