Page 4090 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011
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I was disappointed, but perhaps not surprised, by Mr Seselja’s contribution where he focused on the Greens and not the issue. I am not sure whether that was because he does not understand the issue or whether he does not care about the issue. Beyond that, I am not even sure which is worse—that he does not care or that he does not understand. But it is a shame that he could not actually engage on the topic that was on the table and instead just took the opportunity to make it a political point-scoring exercise.
It is important to consider these issues, firstly because close to home we need to consider the impact of our own lives on our local environment as well as looking at that in the context of what impact our consumption might be having on other parts of Australia as well as other parts of the world. An ecological footprint assessment attempts to take a broader perspective than just electricity consumption or water consumption; it factors in the resource use that is built into our consumption of goods and services, travel, shelter and food. This is important because it is clear that, while we can be responsible in looking after our own backyard, we also need to be cognisant that the national and international trading economy effectively means that every time we buy something at a shop the resources embedded in the production of that item come from somewhere outside the ACT, and often somewhere outside Australia.
Our governance of course does not stretch that far, so that is why we need to be mindful of how the products are generated. What we can think about here is what products we bring in, how we might do it more efficiently and what as a personal contribution we want to do about it.
The ACT’s footprint, when we stop and look at it, is really quite large. In 2009 the University of Sydney study commissioned by the environment commissioner estimated the ACT’s footprint to be 9.2 global hectares. That is 3½ times the global average of around 2.7 global hectares. If you can imagine the scale of our impact, it translates to an area around 14 times bigger than the ACT. The average ACT resident has a footprint some 13 per cent bigger than even our fellow Australians, so we really are boxing above our weight in terms of our resource consumption.
There is a message about equity in this for us if we choose to hear it. This same imbalance in the use of resources is represented in the climate change debate, where the wealthiest Western countries continue to grow their emissions, and low income countries, while experiencing substantial growths in population, have seen relatively little increase in their emissions over the past 25 to 30 years.
As I said, the ACT’s ecological footprint is large and it is also still increasing in spite of the growing awareness of sustainability issues. In fact, it has increased from 7.4 global hectares in 1998-99 to 8.5 global hectares in 2003-04 and is now up at 9.2 global hectares. So we still have a long way to go.
Of course the amount we consume per capita is not the only thing that is going to affect our impact on the environment or our need to access more resources. The elephant in the room in these conversations is always population. It is not rocket
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