Evaluating climate change mitigation strategies in South East Queensland

This paper appears in a period of a post-Al Gore \u27climatic awakening\u27 in the Australian community. Hardly a week passes without a sensational representation in the media of the potential impact of sea levels and other elements of climate change. In turn the major federal political parties in the pre-election surge have promised an array of big fix solutions to ensure that they are portrayed as the most competent to guide the country into a path of reduced emissions (of course without causing a ripple within the economy). However how any solution would filter down to the local level has received little discussion. Likewise there is a dearth of studies which examine the best methods or even of the capacity for local governments to mitigate climate change. This paper attempts to contribute to this much needed discussion by assessing the ability of current mitigation strategies in South East Queensland to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to acceptable levels. The reality of climate change can no longer be ignored. If the world fails to implement a substantial reduction of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within the next half century then catastrophic impacts are likely (Metz et al 2006; Stern 2006). There is a growing scientific consensus that in order to avoid irreversible change the global GHG emissions in 2050 need to be 60% below the 1990 levels (Preston & Jones 2006). However many of the serious impacts are not immutable with outcomes dependent on the ability of humans to reduce current emissions and adapt adequately. Attempts to mitigate global emissions span a range of scales with a growing attention to the importance of the local emerging recently. The basic premise of the local argument in climate change mitigation is that as the majority of greenhouse gas emissions occur at the local level it is an important scale to target reduction efforts. Over the past decade there has been a steady increase in commitments to reduce GHG emissions among cities and local governments worldwide. This local focus is also strong in South East Queensland (SEQ) with 11 of the region’s 18 local councils publicly committing to corporate and community emissions reductions through the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP ) campaign (AGO 2006). Notwithstanding the above commitment by these local governments there are no evaluation studies that have examined how the mitigation strategies compare to world best practice. This knowledge gap currently impedes SEQ from ensuring that it is playing its part in reducing human interference in the global climate system. This paper critically examines the SEQ approach to climate change mitigation and provides a comparison of SEQ strategies to identified best practice. This paper presents impediments to SEQ strategies and offers recommendations for the region’s planners and local governments to improve climate mitigation strategies