Canberrans are environmentally complacent, wasteful and the most selfish people in Australia, according to the latest ACT State of the Environment Report.
Canberra’s ecological footprint - a per capita estimate of the amount of land and water needed to support the city’s lifestyle - is 13 per cent above the national average. It is the second highest in Australia, just marginally smaller than Perth’s.
Driven by higher than average incomes, the size of this footprint has increased by 8 per cent in the past five years, and is now 9.2 hectares a person. This means Canberrans are using 14 times the land area of the ACT to support their cashed-up lifestyles.
”Canberrans are on average the most affluent people in Australia,” the report said.
”If everyone in the world lived in the same way as the average person in the ACT, we would need five Earths.”
Launching the three-volume report yesterday, the ACT Commissioner for the Environment and Sustainability, Bob Neil, urged Canberrans to do more to curb their wasteful habits by using public transport, switching to greener energy options and making their home more energy efficient.
”Governments can only do so much - the community needs to make changes too,” Mr Neil said.
The ACT Environment Minister, Simon Corbell, said the report highlighted a number of areas where improvements could be made, ”especially with the continuing issue of population growth, climate change and increased waste generation.”
But the ACT Greens’ environment spokesperson, Shane Rattenbury, said the report showed the Gallagher government’s policies were ”driving the territory in completely the wrong direction” .
”The good news stories coming out of this report are almost all community-based actions, the failings are largely on the government’s end,” Mr Rattenbury said.
Opposition Leader Zed Seselja described the report as ”a major embarrassment” for the ACT minority government’s Labor and Greens alliance.
”We haven’t seen real environmental improvements, despite all the talk,” he said.
The report is provided to the government every four years, and provides a detailed, scientific analysis of the state of the ACT’s land, water, air quality, biodiversity and progress in tackling big challenges such as climate change and urban sprawl.
The latest report estimates the ACT’s greenhouse emissions have increased by 8 per cent over the past five years, with electricity use accounting for 12 per cent of the city’s ecological footprint. But a University of NSW scientific paper, included in the report, appears to contradict government claims that residents need to do more to cut energy consumption.
”Of course, were it not for household energy-efficiency measures being in place, the ACT’s ecological footprint would be even higher,” the University of NSW expert paper said. It points to high energy use by Canberra’s retail sector for lighting, food preparation and air-conditioning.
The State of Environment Report revealed Canberra’s waste generation is up by 28 per cent - chiefly driven by the city’s construction industry - and is increasing at a faster rate than population growth.
”Construction and demolition, as well as commercial and industrial wastes, have been largely driving this increase and, along with organic waste, should be diverted from landfills,” the report said.
It warns Canberra ”could lose its green spaces”, with the area of land zoned for housing developments increasing by 9 per cent over the past four years. Land clearing for urban development had already affected water quality, with the state of Canberra’s river and creeks evenly split between ”severely impaired and moderately impaired”, the report said. Outbreaks of toxic blue-green algae in Canberra’s lakes have become more frequent and the report calls for ” greater focus” on lakes management ”to improve water quality so that recreation activities are not restricted”.
