Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

My preliminary advice is that that science is not accepted by the intergovernmental panel or by scientists around the world. It certainly would be a risk, but I think that has come from one scientist. It has certainly come from New Zealand. I think there is enormous value—and I am someone who sees enormous value, as the government does, because we make a major contribution to it—in the concept of having a very good panel across the globe of the best scientists available from all of the different parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. I think that one of the great achievements of the framework convention is that it has established the intergovernmental panel, and it ensures that any piece of science, such as that which has come out of New Zealand on the Ross iceshelf, can be peer reviewed, can be evaluated and can feed into sensible policy. As I understand it, that is not what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will accept as being the sort of science that we should base policy on.

My understanding from preliminary briefings on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that—if you want to get a window on what is likely to come out of that—the work of Professor Will Steffen from the ANU, in the document that I published and that we commissioned on the best available science on the planet, is the best guidance. I would commend it to Senator Brown if he has not read it. That, from my point of view as environment minister, is the science that I would most recommend to people and take forward in any of my discussions within the government or internationally. It does say that the assessments made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its last report were more likely to come in earlier rather than later. The science is coalescing around the fact that the planet is warming more quickly than the last intergovernmental panel said, at around 0.6 to 0.7 degrees of warming over the last 100 years and double that rate at the poles. So there is a high risk, if there is no action taken or if it is business as usual, of the Greenland icesheet melting. I know there is consensus on that. That is why the world needs practical, real, effective actions, and that is why the world needs an agreement that involves all of the major economies.

If we want to be serious about this, we need to recognise that the old Kyoto protocol, the existing protocol, does not have a pathway towards involvement in commitments by the most rapidly industrialising countries, and we do need that. You cannot have a new Kyoto agreement, a post-Kyoto agreement or a beyond Kyoto agreement—whatever you want to call it—that does not have a pathway towards commitments by rapidly industrialising economies such as China and India. That is not an excuse for not taking action domestically anywhere in the world. It is not an excuse for avoiding concerted international action. What it is, in fact, is an opportunity for a country like Australia to get deeply involved in finding a pathway towards those major rapidly industrialising economies getting involved.

Although Senator Carr and I think to a lesser extent Senator Milne seek to disparage the Australian government’s role, we have worked very hard over the last two years in particular to play a constructive role, and what I might call a bridging role, between the interests in Europe and the interests in our own region finding a way to get commitments from those rapidly industrialising countries. That is very much the focus of what we must do. Just having 35 or 40 per cent of the world’s economies involved in an agreement, and ignoring 60 or 70 per cent of the world’s emitters or economies, and particularly ignoring the rapidly growing ones, is to seek to ignore what can only be seen, by anyone who sits down for an hour or so and looks at the size and scope of the problem, as the real solution.

If you do care deeply about our planet, about our ecosystems and about mankind, that is the approach that we have to take. I think it is a sound approach and I think the Australian delegations at the last two conferences of the parties, the last two UNFCCC conferences and all of the associated inter-sessional forums have done well. I have been very proud to lead both those delegations and to be associated with people like Ambassador Adams and former Ambassador Bamsey, now the head of the dialogue on future action and playing on the international stage. They are great Australians who are working very hard not only for the Australian interest but also for the global interest.

Australia’s interests are intimately tied up with finding this international solution. You do not get the solution for Australia—you do not save the Barrier Reef from coral bleaching, you do not save our alpine regions from losing their snow cover and you do not save our river systems from losing their water inflows—unless you have a robust agreement internationally that delivers you reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. If you do not work hard to bring about that sort of agreement then you will not get that result. That is what Australia is doing and, judging by our results at the Montreal conference and our results at Nairobi, I think we have played a very significant and important role at both of those meetings.