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This week marks a major moment in Australia’s long and frustrating struggle to fix its broken national nature laws. The federal government has finally tabled long-awaited reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, a piece of legislation that has, ever since it was enacted, failed to protect Australia’s unique wildlife and ecosystems.
But the bill the government has put forward, while offering some positive new legal architecture, unfortunately falls far too short. Critical gaps in addressing deforestation and climate impacts from big coal and gas projects remain, and there is far too much leeway in how the federal environment minister is allowed to apply the law under the proposed new provisions. We’re calling on the Australian Parliament to fix these significant problems and pass laws that properly protect nature.
The Background: A Broken System Finally Gets Attention
It’s been widely acknowledged for over a decade that the EPBC Act is deeply flawed. Despite being Australia’s key environmental law, it has done little to stop habitat loss, species decline, and the relentless clearing of native forests. Native habitat equal to an area the size of Tasmania has been bulldozed in Australia since the EPBC Act came into force in 2000—a stark reminder of the ineffectiveness of the laws.
A major independent review five years ago laid out a roadmap for reform, recommending stronger protections for nature and streamlined approvals for business, including renewable energy projects. The idea was simple: if we establish strong, science-based rules up front and create an independent environmental regulator, we can both protect nature and provide greater certainty for ecologically sustainable development.
Last term the government attempted a partial reform, mainly to establish a national EPA (Environment Protection Authority), but unfortunately this did not eventuate. Now, under new Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt, Labor is trying again and attempting to move at great speed to deliver a full package of legislative reforms before the end of the year.
What’s in the Reform Package?
While there is new legal architecture that could be made strong (new rules and standards and a national Environment Protection Authority), ultimately the current package falls well short of what is actually needed to protect nature. Major improvements are essential to the Bill that is now before the parliament.
At Greenpeace we have four major tests of success:
1. Closing the Deforestation Loopholes
In the current laws, agriculture (particularly beef) and native forest logging remain virtually exempt from the Act, even though deforestation is one of Australia’s major drivers of species extinction and carbon emissions. The current provisions in the Bill do not close these glaring loopholes. Without reform here, Australia’s forests, and the wildlife that depend on them remain hideously vulnerable to the mass destruction of bulldozers and chainsaws that currently has our country recognised as a global deforestation hotspot.
This is a big issue we need to keep pushing on to fix—these reforms are not credible without action to close the loopholes around deforestation
2. Stronger Upfront Protections
- The government is introducing stronger upfront environmental tests (the “unacceptable impacts” test), giving the Minister the power to reject development projects outright before assessment if they are going to do serious damage to nature.
This could be made into a strong element of reformed laws
- They are proposing to introduce ‘national environmental standards’ for those projects and regional plans which do get assessed and developed.
This could give clearer delineation of what needs to be done to protect nature but details are yet to be released and there’s too much wriggle room proposed for how these standards are applied
- There will be higher penalties and the power to halt projects that breach conditions are excellent additions.
This is good and has been a long time coming, but does not work as a standalone if the rest of the laws don’t do what’s needed.
- They are proposing to overhaul the biodiversity offset scheme, introducing a ‘net gain’ test where developers are meant to ensure improved overall nature protection and the ‘mitigation hierarchy’ where they have to prove they have tried to avoid and mitigate nature impacts before buying offsets.
But they are planning an offset fund which risks becoming a way for businesses to circumvent obligations, enabling developers to just buy their way out of responsibility- not a good thing.
- A proposal for a system of ‘accreditation’ which would allow states that meet new rules and standards to undertake assessment and approval of development projects.
This is deeply concerning. The Commonwealth should retain its approval powers-especially over damaging fossil fuel projects
- A proposal to expand on a ‘national interest’ exemption, giving the Environment Minister greater scope to circumvent the new proposed rules.
This is also deeply concerning. This exemption should be tightened to emergencies and security purposes only.
3. A Strong and Independent National Regulator
We will finally see the creation of a National Environment Protection Authority (EPA) — a long-overdue step. However, the Minister will still retain the power to override some decisions.
The proposed level of ministerial discretion risks undermining the regulator’s independence and the overall protective functioning of the Act, and would extend one of the core failures of the current system.
4. Embedding Climate Considerations
Astonishingly, the new national nature law still does not require decision-makers to consider climate impacts. The government has ruled out a ‘climate trigger’ that would require assessment of projects with significant emissions. This omission leaves Australia’s environment exposed to worsening heat, drought, bushfires, and floods driven by fossil fuel expansion. In order to be credible, the EPBC must be meaningfully cognizant of the physical reality of the impact of global warming on the environment and biodiversity that it is intended to protect.
This is another big issue on which we need to keep pushing
As our CEO David Ritter put it:
“The Albanese government was returned to power promising to fix Australia’s broken nature laws and the Bills as they stand do not deliver on that promise. We strongly support overhauling Australia’s broken nature laws. But the Bills as tabled fail to address the two key drivers of extinction and the destruction of nature-deforestation and climate change”
The Road Ahead
The Bills have been tabled in Parliament, and debate is about to heat up. Now the reforms head to a Senate Inquiry — where key negotiations with the Greens, the Coalition and crossbenchers will determine the final shape of the law.
If the Senate moves quickly, the reforms could pass by late November. Alternatively the process could carry into the new year when Parliament next sits.
What Needs to Happen Next
Parliament must now work together to fix the gaps in these Bills. Australia needs a nature law that actually protects nature. One that:
- Closes the loopholes that allow deforestation and logging to continue unchecked
- Embeds climate considerations into the functioning of the Act
- Limits ministerial discretion and strengthens the independence of the EPA
- Ensures there are strong upfront nature protections in place
Meaningful action to address the climate and nature crises will not only safeguard ecosystems, it will secure a safer, more liveable future for all Australians and reinforce our global reputation as a clean, green country.
After years of advocacy, research, and tireless campaigning, we’re closer than ever to real change. But the coming weeks will be crucial. The decisions made now will shape the fate of Australia’s forests, wildlife, and climate for generations to come.
So strap in–the fight for Australia to have effective national nature laws is entering its most important phase yet.
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly in 2026 to around 42.6GtCO2.
Each edition of the global carbon budget updates the historical record as new data and methods become available. The chart below shows total emissions in this year’s budget compared with the five previous editions.
This year’s estimates of historical fossil emissions are around 0.3GtCO2 per year higher than in last year’s budget.
This is largely because the report now estimates a smaller “cement carbonation” sink in the wake of research published this year in