The New South Wales government says the state’s biodiversity is in crisis and must be put on a path to recovery to reverse the decline of beloved species and ecosystems.
The environment minister, Penny Sharpe, has released the government’s “first steps” in responding to a major review of the state’s nature laws, saying: “We cannot ignore the truth: biodiversity in NSW is in crisis.”
The Minns government is proposing to develop a new nature strategy that would be enshrined in law and set targets for conservation and restoration, including landscape restoration, species recovery and addressing threats to nature.
Sharpe said the government would also amend state laws by the end of this year to fulfil its promise to reform NSW’s biodiversity offsets scheme after a 2021 Guardian Australia investigation uncovered serious problems that triggered several inquiries.
“Our goal must be to leave nature better off than we have found it.”
Sharpe said the response, which fully or partially accepts 49 out of 58 recommendations from the 2023 review led by the former treasury secretary Ken Henry, set out immediate priorities and “is the start of concerted action, reform, investment”.
Henry’s review found the state’s environment laws would not succeed without substantial changes and warned that half of the species under threat in NSW were on course to become extinct within the next 100 years.
After the review was released last year, he called for the natural environment to be made the top priority in government policy and legislation.
Henry told Guardian Australia on Tuesday that the government’s response was a “serious attempt” to tackle the problems identified in his review and demonstrated it understood the scale of the nature crisis.
But he said many of the government’s proposed actions would take a long time to deliver and they stopped short of putting laws that protected and enhanced nature ahead of other land management concerns.
“They’re not giving it statutory primacy,” he said. “They seem to want to tackle it in a different way.”
The Minns government’s response proposes several measures to be implemented over time, including:
Introducing legislation next year to enshrine a new state nature strategy with conservation and restoration targets;
Amending laws this year to reform the state’s offsets scheme;
Developing maps that identify current and future areas of high biodiversity value to give “clear guidance” on where environmental impacts should be avoided;
Reviewing other pieces of legislation that affect biodiversity to improve outcomes for the environment.
Among the proposed measures intended to fix the state’s environmental offsets scheme, the government is proposing that the current standard that calls for “no net loss” to the environment be transitioned to a requirement that the scheme delivers a “net positive”.
The government said it was “committed to offsets being a genuine last resort” and it would introduce a new statutory standard requiring developers to demonstrate how they had genuinely avoided and minimised impacts to biodiversity, particularly for species and ecosystems at risk of irreversible impacts.
The steps developers had taken to avoid and minimise impacts would be made public on a new register.
The government is proposing to act on recommendations of a parliamentary inquiry by removing the ability for mining companies to count future rehabilitation of mine sites towards their offset requirements. It is also proposing to limit the circumstances in which developers can pay into a fund to transfer their offsetting obligations to the Biodiversity Conservation Trust.
The report does not set out the specific steps the government will take to stop the state’s high rates of land clearing.
Before the 2023 state election, Sharpe said NSW’s system of environment protections needed more “red lines” to protect ecosystems that were suffering.
The government’s response does not identify any proposed “no-go zones” for development but Sharpe said proposed new biodiversity maps were intended to give clear guidance on where areas of high environmental value were located and where impacts should be avoided.
She said the government’s proposal to enshrine targets for nature conservation was a similar approach to the one it had taken with recent climate change legislation.
“In my view, this leads to the biodiversity crisis being treated as a similar crisis to climate change,” Sharpe said.
In response to a separate review of the native vegetation provisions of the Local Land Services Act, the government is proposing to strengthen some environmental protections and oversight.
But it is proposing a larger independent review of biodiversity protections on rural land in response to high rates of land clearing.
