Diversification leases provide a great potential opportunity for upscaled conservation efforts within Western Australia’s Crown land estate.
By both global and Australian standards, Western Australia’s Crown land estate is huge. Diversification leases provide a great potential opportunity for upscaled conservation efforts within Western Australia’s Crown land estate. This includes the potential to create both the certainty and the pathways required to drive much-needed investment in conservation. Scaling up conservation is squarely in the public interest.
The proposed Policy Framework and accompanying summary of proposed legislative amendments to the Land Administration Act 1997 (WA) do not reflect the initial encouraging signals that the conservation of habitat and biodiversity would feature prominently, and that its value as a land use would be elevated. There is significant opportunity to strengthen this. Subject to the important sensitivities of environmental conservation, the Government’s efforts at encouraging renewable energy at-scale within diversification leases are both important and welcome in helping transition Australia’s fossil-fuel dominated domestic and export economy into a model that causes less damage to our global climate and human wellbeing.
However, the connected but parallel environmental crisis – which is now increasingly understood – is just as important to address to sustain Australian and global prosperity, as well as to mitigate the impacts of a changing climate.
The Federal Government has recently publicly confirmed their own increasing recognition of this importance by committing to both domestic and global targets for the protection of 30% of Australia’s seas and 30% of Australia’s land by 20306. As Australia’s largest state, Western Australia sits in the box seat to capitalise on the potential for Federal Government co-investment into its public and protected area estate. However, if clear pathways for private conservation are not clarified and elevated within the structure of the new diversification lease, this opportunity may be lost and potentially redirected to other State jurisdictions.
Federal Government investment is not the only opportunity for conservation funding that may be foregone – international philanthropy, carbon market offerings with a biodiversity premium, and nascent but rapidly emerging biodiversity markets are all mechanisms that can be effectively leveraged. To do this will require that the new diversification lease can create certainty and a clear pathway for conservation investment.
The current drafting of the Policy Framework and legislative amendments do not clearly reflect ALCA’s vision of a brighter environmental and economic future in Western Australia that the new diversification lease has the potential to deliver.
There is considerable concern at what the reforms may mean for the existing, long-term investments in the Western Australian conservation estate, including those in the state’s pastoral lands, and consequentially, the implications for the Federal Government investment that helped underpin these assets and acquisitions. Safeguarding these existing investments is an at-minimum requirement for the conservation sector’s support for the diversification lease reforms.
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