FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT
Four break-out group discussion 3: Planning for water and population
Chair: Dr Ian Prosser
Rapporteur: Mr Leo Carroll
Leo Carroll: We had a diverse group of planners, academics, scientists and some local government people I think those were the main people in the group.
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We focused primarily on planning and how science can be better used in the planning process. In the spirit of planning, I have developed a nine-point plan of the sorts of things we might want to consider.
The first thing we thought was that it is important to make sure that planning frameworks actually have things in them that need to be in them. The comment was made that once it's in the framework, it's in there and it's then something that everyone has to follow. At the moment, some things just aren't in the planning frameworks as effectively as they need to be. One of those things is water planning. This needs to be done at the local level, and moreover it needs to be linked to the National Water Initiative (NWI).
Another broad planning issue, which I think has been touched upon by Karen Hussey already, is the idea that we need some sort of national vision for where we are going. We need to say where we want to be in 20 years' time, or 30 years' time or 50 years' time. And this national vision needs to plan ahead, not just react to problems as they come up. We thought, for instance, we would like to have more Murray cod and less 'red brick fungus', so we should put that in the vision and then we can all aspire to get there. At the moment we don't really have that.
A particular part of the national planning framework that we thought we needed was better policy on urban planning, so I have put that in the list of points as a key thing to remember.
We talked about a number of things at the local level. We thought that the development application process and the environmental impact assessment process shouldn't just mitigate the impact of development but should actively try to create benefit through development. At the moment we try to mitigate the environmental impact of developments as they go through. Presumably all that does in the long run is just slow down the rate of environmental degradation. If, on the other hand, the process were geared towards actually measuring in some cases, hopefully, or many cases how developments could augment the environment, we think that would be a good thing.
We also thought that at the local level there was just a need for better criteria on how the planning process could incorporate things such as water. Local councils, I think, were perhaps feeling that there was a little lack of direction in this area.
Moving on from planning, a second area that we looked at was the idea of communication and how different stakeholders should be involved in the process. We thought it was important that social scientists be involved, as a matter of priority. We noted that there had been a fair bit of technical discussion today, generally in the context of water, but social issues are important as well. One particular area that we covered was the idea of values, and what different sections of the community actually think about some of the issues we are discussing. For instance, what do Australians really think about our water policy? It seems that we don't always know what views people have on a lot of the things we are talking about.
We thought there was a need for scientists to engage better with other stakeholders in the process. For instance, we could create some sort of national body that would help scientists engage with government, the media, industry and so forth, and I think the Blair government in the UK had created something along those lines that was mentioned as maybe a starting point.
We thought that pilots might be useful to illustrate how to do things better, and if there were good examples, then they should be promoted and shown to others as a good starting point.
We also thought that planners needed to talk to scientists more about what they needed. We thought that perhaps there could be some sort of 'state of knowledge of the environment' report to provide a list, if you like, that planners could give to scientists, saying, 'These are the sorts of things we need to know so we can do our job better.'
Finally, we thought that the word 'sustainability' was inherently problematic and needed to be better defined and better understood if the planning process is to be more effectively implemented.
Comment 1: I am glad to see the importance of values in your list of points. Linking it back to your 'more Murray cod, less red brick fungus' point, it reminds me of one thing that came up a little bit in our group but is interesting to note here as well. Some people really, really like red brick fungus as in urban sprawl. I worked at Defence Housing and a lot of the people that I talked to there love red brick fungus, love it! They demand it. So it's interesting to note that there is not consensus on that, and to consider how we deal with that.
Comment 2: I just want to reinforce a point that follows on from what Steve Dovers was saying. I think the debate is a little bit lopsided because in trying to match national water policy with local level planning whether it be state, regional or local what's missing from this whole debate is what Steve called a settlement policy, whilst I would call it a national cities policy, or a national urban policy. Until we get that, this debate really is all lopsided.
Graeme Pearman: I think in some of the discussion there were examples of specific science and technology that could be done. The problem often is that there are excellent research activities taking place at a disciplinary level, but trying to actually insert them into a system where there were many, many aspects to that system beyond just whether something was scientifically or technically feasible was part of the problem that's the reason why part of the science needs to be much more integrated, so that you are simultaneously looking at the economics as well as the technical feasibility and so on.
That's exactly the same problem I think exists for the energy cycle, and that at the end of the day we don't really have the answers. And so a strategy needs to build on what we do know, but keep flexibility, keep resilience in the system, because we will actually get some surprises and there will be new things that come on the horizon from science and from other fields that will change what we do as we go forward. To me, part of acting sustainably is keeping that resilience open.
