Event
Date
by John Schooneveldt, Director Sustainability Science Team
Presented at the Manning Clark House forum Making Canberra Sustainable, 17-18 October 2005
Short Biography
John Schooneveldt has been a Canberra resident since 1968. He is a member of Nature and Society Forum and a director of the Sustainability Science Team. He has a PhD in applied ecology and for the last 20 years has worked as an independent business adviser both in Australia and overseas.
INTRODUCTION
We have heard how a changing climate, escalating oil prices, aging demographics, polarised wealth, growing poverty and an inability to effectively manage our own destiny conspire to make Canberra unsustainable.
And there are other problems less often talked about. The aging of our expensive infrastructure (such as our beautiful roads and separate education and health bureaucracies) that we have inherited from the Federal Government, the lack of an adequate public transport system and, during the already forgotten drought, water shortages.
These problem areas, along with our over-capitalisation, impose additional costs on our small population. We are already the highest taxed people in the country even though we only have two levels of government. In future we can expect maintenance costs of our excellent infrastructure to impose even greater burdens on our Canberra community so much so that economic sustainability looks increasingly dubious, to say nothing about the city’s social and environmental sustainability.
In this paper I want to suggest a way forward but first I ask how Canberra might position itself to address these challenges. Not by producing yet another glossy ‘vision’ paper (there have been dozens over the last thirty-seven years that I have lived here) but to position itself to take into account the present social/market reality and set Canberra on a path of becoming a truly sustainable city/region.
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
First, we need to remember that Canberra is a compromise. The people of Australia wanted a Federation and to achieve that they had to create a new capital. For them a small, token capital was and is all that is needed, and they are determined to keep it that way. They are especially determined that it should not rival any of the cities of the founding States and even smaller cities such as Darwin, Newcastle, Geelong and Launceston see benefits in keeping Canberra a small and dependant economy.
The Federal Government, when it dumped responsibility for maintaining most of the city on us, the people of Canberra, it made sure it kept overall legislative control. It can and has over-ruled local decision making when it suits and it will not be easy to chart a new course.
In this Canberra is not alone. There are a number of similar compromise capitals around the world. Washington was a compromise between the industrial north and the agrarian south. Ottawa was a compromise between English and French speaking Canadians. The Hague was a compromise between the great port cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Likewise with New Dehli which was stuck in the middle of India (between the competing ports of Bombay and Calcutta) and Brazilia, away from everything, (especially Sao Paulo and Rio).
Typically, compromise capitals are placed in areas of no strategic significance and without significant resources. Imagine if Canberra had been built on one of the splendid natural harbours such as Eden or Jervis Bay. It could have competed directly with Sydney and Melbourne. No, it had to be placed well inland, in some over grazed sheep paddocks with difficult and arduous access to the coast. From the start, the battle for water rights was long, tortuous and complicated. And today transport arrangements into and out of the ACT, dominated as they are by Macquarie Street, are pathetic. The promised railway line between Canberra and Jervis Bay has not yet materialised.
There were of course many visionaries who saw in Canberra an opportunity to create an ideal City Beautiful, "the Pride of Time", a beacon to democracy and representing the highest standards of the planning and engineering professions. In 1913, Walter Burley Griffin proclaimed "I have planned a city not like any other city in the world. I have planned an ideal city."
Two world wars, a depression and a bureaucracy comfortably domiciled in Melbourne, resulted in minimal progress. After 40 years we had a temporary Parliament House, a few support office buildings and a few residential areas served by a handful of shops. If you wanted a drink, you travelled outside the Capital Territory, to Queanbeyan, a kind of low-cost servicing centre for people who could not afford or did not want to meet Canberra’s stricter planning requirements. It was not till the 1950’s that Prime Minister Menzies created the climate where some progress could be made towards Griffin’s original vision.
Notwithstanding all the rhetoric, planning effort and resources poured into it, the city looks rather conventional. A few outstanding buildings, two small concentrations of high rise in Civic and Woden, and about 110,000 typical suburban bungalows connected by freeways. Its unique features are its lakes, open spaces and increasing tree cover.
Although I have not measured it, I suspect the contribution to ecosystem services made by these lakes, trees and gardens, both in quantity and diversity, far exceeds what the grasslands contributed before the city was built.
For those of us who live here and have grown to love the place, its value is much more than its clean air and physical beauty. Its proximity to the snow fields, surf beaches, inland rivers, prime agricultural areas, and accessibility to our two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, give us ready access to a range of lifestyle experiences rarely available in one place anywhere on earth. And then there is the quality of services especially in education, health, research and public administration. They provide the employment opportunities that make the city special.
We might be a compromise, but we have much to be thankful for and a great basis for moving forward.
WHAT WOULD A SUSTAINABLE CITY LOOK LIKE?
- Environmentally, the city would deliver clean air, water and soil, and support a rich biodiversity. It would deliver high quality eco-system services through both its built and natural environments.
- Socially, the city would provide affordable housing, transport, food security, and facilities for healthy life styles and a rich quality of life
- Economically, the city would offer work and income security, infrastructure quality and a reliable business framework.
While Canberra already has many of these features, many originate outside our area or are under the control of others and this brings me to what I see the central issue for our long-term sustainability. This issue can best be described through a story.
Some 20 years ago, a microbiologist colleague of mine, then working with CSIRO, was interested in nutrient cycling: the way micro- and other organisms breakdown organic matter to free up nutrients and make them available to the next generation of plants. Nutrient cycling systems are the key to understanding the resilience and hence, sustainability, of plant communities and natural eco-systems. He was especially interested in the rainforest areas of Fraser Island for these were of very recent origin and especially rich and diverse, supporting not only numerous plant species from small herbs to giant trees, but also a wide variety birds, animals and in times gone by, people. It is well known that rainforests typically grow on nutrient poor soils, but in the case of Fraser Island, the rainforest communities are built on a platform of pure sand with no nutrient holding capacity at all, and for that matter, very little water holding capacity either. How is it possible, he wondered, that such a rich diversity of living organisms can thrive under these conditions.
What he did was to take a leaf soaked in a nutrient solution with an isotopic marker and laid it on the ground. His intention was to measure the time it took for the microbes and fungi on the forest floor to take up the nutrient from the leaf and transfer it to the roots of a large tree, travel up its trunk and turn up in the leaf canopy.
Whenever I tell people of this little experiment I ask them to guess about how long it would take for the nutrient to find its way to the leaves. Answers vary from somewhere between several months when the leaf has fully decayed, to a few weeks with some people who suspect from the way I pose the question that the time is short, suggesting a few days. None get close to the real answer that is, incredibly, 30 minutes.
The implication of this is breath taking. It demonstrates that rainforests cycle nutrients at an incredible rate. Everything is used and reused. There is no waste anywhere. For all its richness and diversity, it is a relatively closed system. Other than air and water, there is very little coming in or going out. Rainforests are not alone in this. Coral reefs are the ocean equivalent of an incredibly rich and diverse living systems that also thrive in nutrient poor waters.
The question I and my colleagues on the Sustainability Science Team are asking themselves is whether the way these magnificent systems function have design features that we can learn from, work with and use as models for designing sustainable economic systems. Are there ways that money, the nutrient on which economies run, can be circulated more quickly through a local economy to diversify activities, boost productivity but still operate within the same footprint?
Remember current economic systems are linear. They take resources from one place, use them, sometimes only once, and discard them as waste. They favour large over small, uniform over diverse, parsimony over quality. They encourage stinginess and hoarding, and worst of all, they are unsustainable and self-destructive as more and more is produced of less and less value.
Remember too that most economies and even civilisations began as closed systems. It was only when they reached a certain stage that they became powerful enough to no longer live within their own footprints. When they reached this stage some remained the same size and only a relatively few grew and grew. It is instructive to look at the cities of the world that have been around for 1000 years or so and compare those that have stabilised with those growing exponentially. The growing ones all involve sucking in vast quantities of resources both human and material, first from their hinterland and then, for those who expand further, other people’s hinterlands. And as every archaeologist knows, the ones that don’t make it are buried under their own muck.
So the central issue is whether Canberra can evolve into a diverse, prosperous and sustainable city, like a rainforest or coral reef, on a small resource base, without having to depend on raiding other people’s hinterland, and without the abundant supplies of cheap oil based energy of the past.
Then the question is: where are the impediments to Canberra being sustainable and what strategies do we need to adopt to get around these impediments.
IMPEDIMENTS
As always, the major impediment is the status quo as supported and reinforced by the assumptions and attitudes of the majority of citizens and their take on ‘reality’. For the minority concerned with sustainability, the idea of ever-growing economies, unrestrained consumption and never ending progress are dangerous illusions. Despite paying lip-service to ‘visions’, political and media self-interests benefit from setting this ‘reality’ at the lowest common level so that the resultant social insecurity can be used to manage expectations and minimise their own performance requirements.
So while many of us desire sustainability, the scepticism, insecurity and cynicism ensures that we see ourselves as isolated and constrained by the status quo and, short of lobbying governments for change, see little prospect of achieving it.
The second impediment is governments and their supporting bureaucracies. They epitomise the status quo and operate on three cardinal principles: (1) always put-self interest first, (2) avoid all risk, and (3) put the best spin on everything to the point of lying if you think you can get away with it. Governments are in the business of crowd appeasement and maintaining the status quo. They are very good after an event in working out what should have been done, especially after a change of government, but it is impossible for governments to plan and think long term.
The community sector is also a source of impediments to sustainability. When one group arises advocating a specific action, another group will spring up to push in the opposite direction. The public debates that arise through these processes are useful in informing the public and taking some action at the level of individuals. But serious collective action, especially if the opposing sides are reasonably balanced, is impossible.
This leaves the commercial sector. Business interests are rather more vulnerable than people generally realise. They get a licence to operate from the community and can only continue to operate if they maintain a high level of trust. Those that misbehave not only risk fines and legal suits, they risk a drop off in sales and equally important for CEO’s, a drop in the share price.
Multi-national businesses have the benefit of minimising tax liabilities by moving their operations, assets and income around, but this also increases the number of eyes watching them. And in some ways this makes them more vulnerable. When James Hardie moved its head office to the Netherlands it was not able to avoid its responsibilities for compensating its former asbestos employees in Australia. Tobacco companies have failed to insulate themselves against the legal action taken by people suffering lung cancer as a result of smoking. The principle "polluter pays" is well entrenched in national as well as international law, and WTO rules increasingly make manufacturers responsible for their products.
Like governments, companies are risk adverse, but unlike governments, they are not constrained by the status quo. If they see a risk they are free to position themselves to meet that risk.
EXAMPLES OF COMMERCIALLY DRIVEN STEPS TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY.
1. Autonomous Water Systems.
Developers around the outskirts of Canberra and not subject to ACT planning restrictions are working with local government bodies to build around 10,000 new houses over the next 5 years or so. As Canberra is only growing by around 3% that represents almost all of the predicted growth for the period.
The ACT Government is not prepared to supply water or sewerage facilities to these developments so their proponents are looking to develop small scale autonomous water systems that catch and treat water and sewerage at the household level.
The work being done at this scale suggests capital requirements per household for these autonomous systems at around $30-40,000 per household. This compares with a cost of some $60,000 per household for the construction of a large dam and extensive delivery system. This is without the cost of tapping into and expanding existing sewage treatment works.
Thus autonomous systems are roughly half the price of centralised ones.
But the real pay-off is for sustainability. These smaller systems, when managed well, are much less expensive to operate, do not involve stealing other people’s water or dumping nutrients in other peoples’ back yards, and like a rain forest, involve rapid local nutrient cycling and stimulate local biodiversity.
Incidentally, the Commonwealth Government, by locating new infrastructure developments outside the ACT is inadvertently perhaps aiding this process.
2. Sustainable Energy Initiatives
Canberra has no homegrown energy supplies (oil, coal, or electricity generating capacity). This gives us a chance to develop our own on a more sustainable basis. A member of the Nature and Society Forum, Derek Wrigley, has shown how house design that involves positioning to capture solar energy, incorporating thermal mass to buffer temperature variations, and using materials that are renewable can make a huge difference to the thermal performance of a house. When solar hot water is added, a relatively small scale photovoltaic system can meet the remaining energy needs for his household.
We do not know what is the most efficient scale for operating these sustainable energy sources. We do know that the existing grid system is incredibly inefficient. Around 40% of the energy in the coal is lost in the process of turning it into electricity. Of the 60% sent out from the power station, 80% is lost through reticulation and wiring. In other words only 12% of the original energy is delivered at your home. We also know that these large systems are vulnerable to overloading, breakdown and sabotage. Small-scale systems minimise all these difficulties and have the potential to educate users to take only what they need.
3. Retrofitting
All buildings need regular maintenance programs if they are to function optimally throughout their life. In addition, the needs of occupants change as families get larger when children arrive and smaller when they leave. Some families want to add a granny flat, rumpus room, conservatory, garage, carport or shade house to their existing homes. Is it possible to design these extensions in such a way they add to the energy efficiency of the whole house thus saving in operating costs to offset the cost of the addition.
In the United States builders are able to offer packages where the builder meets the full cost of a retrofit. The savings in energy meet the builder’s costs until the pay-back period is complete. Then the savings pass on to the householder.
Owners of commercial buildings are leasing roof space to small utility companies who install photovoltaic systems on the roof and sell electricity to the tenants.
4. Healthy soils
As we have seen with our rainforest example, the resilience of the rainforest depends on its diversity and capacity for nutrient cycling. While rainforests are able to do this on relatively poor soils, this is not the case for broad acre agricultural systems. The Sustainability Science Team is working on three integrated strategies. The first we refer to as mosaic land management that uses satellite and other spatial data to map land areas that are highly productive, in need of some supplements, or needing complete rehabilitation. Second, we have developed a process of capturing and holding rainfall in the soil profile for longer. We call it hydrolation. Thirdly, by strategic planting of shelter woods in specific areas we can reduce desiccation from productive areas so that soil water remains available longer. Putting these three strategies together we can achieve considerable savings in input costs as well as productivity increases from the additional water and extended growing period.
CONCLUSION
The above four strategies have been developed through two processes we call material flows analysis and systems mapping. The Sustainability Science Team has identified around thirty initiatives using this method which enables firms and regions to position themselves to meet changing conditions whether due to climate change, oil price increases, environmental and heritage demands or changes in market expectations. A paper on these techniques is available from the SST website.