State of the Environment Report
Tasmania’s 2024 State of the Environment (SoE) report identifies a “stable” greenhouse gas emissions trend for the five years to June 2021 and warns that stability falls far short of what is needed. The report recommends urgent and substantive action to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. Prepared by the Tasmanian Planning Commission with input from government agencies, environmental organisations and research institutions, the 2024 SoE report was tabled in Parliament on 17 September.
Among its key findings, the report reviewed emissions across Tasmania’s economy. The most transformative changes are found in forestry. For many years to 2005, forestry was Tasmania’s biggest emitter, but since 2012 its net-negative emissions have helped reduce the state’s overall emissions. This incredible reversal is the result of a decline in logging, which enabled regrowth to outpace logging from 2012 onward, resulting in net-negative emissions as forests absorbed carbon. These impressive reductions are not mirrored anywhere else in the economy. In other sectors, the report finds percentage-point reductions over the five years to June 2021, with energy reporting the largest at 4.4%. Moreover, emissions increased in industrial processes, manufacturing and construction sectors.
The SoE report suggests Tasmania's net emissions perform well compared to Australian states and territories but rank poorly globally, at 39th out of 44 economies. Tasmania also falls short of meeting international obligations for the global carbon budget aimed at limiting warming to 1.5°C, with Tasmania’s per-person emissions 47% above our share of this budget. This figure challenges Tasmania’s “clean green” image, especially as over half of industrialised countries and the ACT operating within their share of the carbon budget.
As a final note about these comparisons in the report, in terms of gross emissions, Tasmania’s per capita rate is the same as the rest of Australia. This fact is absent from the SoE report, and certainly dims the only bright spot in the comparative data. Nonetheless to appreciate this fact is to fully understand the scope of the challenge set out in the report’s final recommendations: “transformational action across all sectors is essential to reduce emissions and limit global warming”.
The report does not recommend specific actions, but the science is clear. Fossil fuels are the primary driver of global warming through greenhouse gases emissions. A hard pivot away from fossil fuels to renewable energy across the Tasmanian economy is the transformative action required. Our state is a leader in renewable energy production, but 60% of the energy we use in our vehicles, homes and industry still comes from oil, coal and gas. Eliminating Tasmania’s dependence on these fossil fuels through an urgent and rapid transition to renewable energy will put the state in a leading role to achieve sustainable net-zero economy and to help avert the worst impacts of climate change.
If we don’t act, unnatural disasters will increase in frequency and ferocity. Extreme events like the recent severe storms across Tasmania and the 2019 bushfires—which burned over 2.5% of Tasmania, including parts of the World Heritage Area—are likely to become more frequent and intense as global warming increases. The latest SoE report is a stark reminder that the time to reduce emissions is right now.
