Our successes | Environment Victoria

At the 2010 Walk Against Warming we (and thousands of other committed Aussies) put the hard word on Tony Abbot and Julia Gillard to commit to a credible climate policy that will cut greenhouse pollution in the next term of government. In Victoria, we mixed it up a little and took our message straight to the people who matter the most - the voters - just 6 days before the Federal election. 1000 local peeps came together in the three key areas of Melbourne, Deakin and La Trobe to letterbox a message to the next Prime Minster to take serious action on climate change. And now we’re finally seeing a little light down that tunnel.

The One Million Homes Alliance comprising 27 groups from the environment and social sector (headed by yours truly) gladly welcomed the Brumby government’s commitment to 1) increase the energy efficiency of Victorian homes to an average of 5 stars by 2020 and 2) a comprehensive retrofit / green makeover program that includes support for low income households and public housing tenants. This decision was based on our One Million Homes energy and water efficiency campaign and turned out to be a quick and easy win, no doubt due to the fact it was such a good idea! This program will help many Victorians along the way to greening up their lives and so we couldn’t be happier!

In July we welcomed the Brumby Government’s Climate Change White Paper which set a target to reduce Victoria’s greenhouse pollution by 20% by 2020 (based on 2000 levels). This target is head and shoulders above any other state or national emissions reduction target in Australia. It sets a new standard for climate action in Australia, and is in stark contrast to the weak targets and lack of policy from both the Federal ALP and Coalition. With a little pushing and prodding from us over here, the Premier is now building a bridge between what we are currently doing about climate change in Australia and what we need to be doing.

Until now, environmental water has been managed by Government Ministers. In dry times, water has been removed from rivers and given to other users. Environment Victoria successfully campaigned for the creation of an independent environmental water holder, which is now being legislated by the State Parliament.

Our Regional Sustainable Living Program has been working across the state for the last three years, and in 2009/2010 we consolidated it by working intensively in the Latrobe Valley. We had 435 direct program participants and indirectly reached over 1200 people through participants and community events. Over 90 percent of our participants reported taking action in their homes and communities to live more sustainably, with 500 homes receiving sustainability audits and local people and community enterprises installing 400 retrofits. Not a bad community effort!

Our hands-on work with the community won a wopping $10,000 for the prestigious Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge back in August. What an honour! It was awarded for our innovative programs working face-to-face with migrants and refugees, young people, seniors and the economically disadvantaged to empower these groups to raise awareness of climate change within their own community, and help others live more sustainably. But this prize doesn’t just recognise our work. It recognises that communities everywhere, and people from all walks of life can be a part of the solution. So we’re pretty chuffed!

Environment Victoria is a leader in working with multicultural communities on sustainability. In 2009/2010 our GreenTown project’s good work was acknowledged by a significant grant from the Sustainability Fund, while our Multicultural Leaders in Sustainability project trained 17 young people from six cultural backgrounds to be environmental leaders.

We all know that legislation and information are important, but to get to a sustainable future we need to change the way we behave. With years of experience under our belts running behaviour change programs, we got together with our partners at the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Department of Sustainability and Environment, and distilled all those learnings into the Activating Change report. The report has helped influence the government’s Climate Change White Paper, which commits it to investing more in behaviour change programs just like ours.

Our new ground-breaking campaign to Replace Hazelwood scored a commitment from the Brumby Government to retire 400 MW of brown coal by 2014. That’s one quarter down, three quarters to go. We even managed to get it on the national political stage, with both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott grilled on the issue in the lead-up to the 2010 Federal Election.

We finally saw a reversal of fortunes for our much-loved Yarra and Thomson Rivers. After a long battle and strong media campaign led by Environment Victoria, we got the state government to return 3 billion litres of water to the Thomson and 7 billion litres to the Yarra. It’s only a fraction of what’s been raided out of the rivers over the years but it will give them some much needed breathing space.

In 2008 we said we needed to ramp things up to safeguard our environment in the face of climate change, dwindling rivers and unsustainable lifestyles. So we set ourselves a bold (some might say impossible) task of helping 5 million Victorians to take Green Action. A couple of years in and we’ve already helped Victorians take 410,124 Green Actions with 104,974 taken in the last year alone. And that’s just the ones we’re directly involved in! We put together over 20 sustainable living fact sheets and lots of online green actions for our supporters to get involved in. Our Victorian Green Renters Guide alone was downloaded thousands of times. We’ve also helped create new laws and schemes that give 5 million Victorians the chance to recycle their computers and install affordable solar power. Now more Victorians can affordably retrofit their home for water and energy efficiency. And every one of the 5 million of us in the state can green up our lives!

We'd been saying it for ages, and the state government finally agreed with us. In May 2010 they finally raised the landfill levy from $9 to $30 per tonne. It may sound like peanuts, but it makes a big difference. In the words of our erstwhile CEO: "Raising the landfill levy is the most significant policy plank required to increase recycling rates and reduce waste." Code for nice one.

Care workers work with a particularly vulnerable part of the community. They go into the homes of frail elderly people and people with disabilities. In the last year, we’ve trained hundreds of care workers to look at the sustainability of their clients homes and offer them advice and assistance to make their homes more comfortable and their bills cheaper. We’ve continued to develop and improve our training and to deliver it to more care workers across the state.

Care workers work with a particularly vulnerable part of the community. They go into the homes of frail elderly people and people with disabilities. In the last year, we’ve trained hundreds of care workers to look at the sustainability of their clients homes and offer them advice and assistance to make their homes more comfortable and their bills cheaper. We’ve continued to develop and improve our training and to deliver it to more care workers across the state.

Not to sound too uppity but when the federal government introduced the Renewable Energy Target last year to guarantee that Australia would source 20 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020, we told them their scheme was flawed. The scheme’s design meant that investment in small scale renewables was crowding-out the large scale renewable projects like wind and solar projects, making it unlikely that we’d meet the 20 percent target. Thanks to a generous donor and our fellow environment groups, we campaigned for improvements to the scheme and won. We unlocked billions of dollars of investment into large scale renewable energy and ensured that small scale renewables can continue to grow. Some day there’ll be a solar panel on every roof!

As our world leaders gathered in Copenhagen to decide how much they were prepared to do about climate change, we got together to make sure the voice of the people didn’t go unheard. 40,000 Victorians poured into Melbourne for this day of climate action in what was the biggest walk in the country. They sent a clear message that Australians want real and immediate action on climate change and formed a massive human sign across Princes Bridge with the message SAFE CLIMATE. DO IT!

When the state government proposed to allocate billions of tonnes of brown coal, we sprang into action. Our short, sharp community campaign forced them to back down on plans to give coal to Exergen to export to India, or to allocate coal to other companies. In December 2009, Minister Batchelor confirmed that Exergen wouldn’t be getting the go-ahead and that there were no immediate plans to allocate coal. That’s 13 billion tonnes of coal that’ll stay in the ground for now. And we plan to keep it that way.

While our colleagues at VNPA, The Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth did most of the legwork, Environment Victoria played a supporting role in the campaign to establish new Red Gum Parks along the Murray River. The National Parks, jointly managed with traditional owners, were proclaimed in November 2009 adding nearly 100,000 hectares to the Parks estate. Now we’re working hard to get some water for those wetlands.

Currently 14 million televisions and computers are dumped in landfill each year. Enter Environment Victoria and our electronic waste campaign. Together with our friends from the Total Environment Centre, we convinced the federal government to introduce a national scheme requiring manufacturers of televisions and computers to take back their own products at the end of their lives. The new scheme will require manufacturers to recycle 80 percent of their produce over the next decade. That’s a massive boost for recycling, a reduction in greenhouse emissions from landfills and a big win for our environment.

We have big goals to achieve, and we knew that to achieve them we’d have to go the extra mile. That’s why we drastically changed the way we looked and sounded to increase our reach and our supporter base. What’s more, it’s working! Since launching our new logo and new-look website, we’ve more than doubled our number of supporters and increased traffic to our website by 1600 percent! More than 33,800 people visited the site between it’s launch in September 2009 and June 2010. And the numbers keep on growing.

It was a smallie, but a goodie. By conducting our biannual DUMP awards for the most damagingly packaged product, we forced Coles supermarkets to take lemons packed on a polystyrene trays off the shelves. Viva la packaging revolution!

Environment Victoria worked with farmers and government agencies to convince the state government to change water trading rules in northern Victorian irrigation areas to allow environmental water purchases. As a result, the federal government will now buy 460 billion litres over the next five years for northern rivers like the Campaspe, Goulburn and Lodden, and of course the mighty Murray, ensuring the survival of Australia’s food-bowl and giving the rivers a chance to recover.

Environment Victoria had strong support from across the state when we rallied for improvements to the state government’s solar feed-in tariff; a key solar incentive program. After intense community campaigning, the scheme was finally improved to allow larger solar systems, community buildings and small businesses to benefit from the scheme. As a spin-off result, the Brumby government committed $100 million towards a new solar power station in Victoria.

The River Red Gum forests of northern Victoria and southern New South Wales are unique ecosystems enjoyed and loved by thousands of people. Environment groups, led by the Victorian National Parks Association, The Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth, and supported by Environment Victoria, worked tirelessly for their protection in new National Parks. The Parks have been declared, but the fight to make sure that the wetlands receive the water they need to survive continues.

The creation of Cobboboonee National Park, a 18,400 hectare park in south-west Victoria is a great win for Victorians. This induction into the National Parks Act ensures that the habitat of threatened bird and animal species such as the Powerful Owl, Spot-tailed Quoll and Southern Brown Bandicoot will now be protected and biodiversity can thrive. Environment Victoria played a key role in this campaign in the early years, and alongside other environment groups in more recent times, working hard to win the new national park.

Two weeks before the 2007 federal election, Environment Victoria held the Melbourne Walk Against Warming. Itis still the largest climate rally anywhere in the world with 50,000 people coming together to demand that the federal government take real action on climate change. Four weeks later, the newly appointed Rudd government finally ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

Environment Victoria played a lead role in persuading the state government to overhaul Victoria’s northern irrigation region. Through our persistence, the Northern Victorian Irrigation Renewal Project was conceived and granted a $1 billion budget aimed at delivering upgrades to aging irrigation infrastructure, particularly in the Goulburn Murray Irrigation District. A massive 75 billion litres of the water saved from these upgrades will be returned to rivers like the Goulburn and Loddon, providing a much needed boost to help them survive.

One of the toughest fish in the Murray River, the Murray Hardyhead, has survived droughts over thousands of years. However by 2007 a combination of drought and over-allocation of water resources meant this little Aussie battler was facing extinction. Environment Victoria provided a strong voice in support of emergency environmental watering of the wetlands, where the few remaining populations of Murray Hardyhead are left in Victoria. Without this water the Hardyhead would have been in danger of becoming extinct in Victoria over the 2007/2008 summer.

Over 40 young people from Sudanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Burmese and Pakistani origins graduated from Environment Victoria’s Multicultural Leaders for Sustainability program. This innovative program trains young leaders from diverse backgrounds to live more sustainably. It not only inspired them to make changes in their own households, but also led to wider awareness and proactive behaviour within their wider communities. As individuals, these participants achieved amazing feats, reducing their water consumption by 42 percent and greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent.

To reduce household energy use, the state government introduced the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target, designed to decrease household energy use by 10 percent by 2010. The framework aims to promote the efficient use of energy and reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by providing rebates for the purchase of efficient household appliances. Environment Victoria lobbied government hard for this energy efficiency target.

Off the back of our climate campaign leading up to the 2006 state election, and our campaign for the closure of the Hazelwood power station, Environment Victoria played a big role in the state government’s decision to establish a mandatory target for renewable energy. This ensured that at least 10 percent of the state’s electricity would come from renewable sources by 2016, which was a three-fold increase in the amount produced as of 2006. It was a fore-runner to the national 20 percent renewable target announced in 2009.

The multicultural and rural communities sustainable living program worked directly with over 2000 households over four years and trained over 100 champions to help reduce their environmental impact. Run in partnership with the Australian Conservation Foundation, and with the support of the state government, this is one of the largest sustainability programs to be delivered in Victoria and has multiple awards to show for it. The main reward however has been in helping Victorians save over 131,400 tonnes of CO2 and 24,600 kilolitres of water a year. Nice one, Victoria!

The state government announced it would return 17 billion litres of water to the Yarra to ensure its long-term health as part of its Sustainable Water Strategy for Melbourne, in response to a concerted campaign by Environment Victoria and our supporters. Unfortunately this legal commitment to return environmental flows to the Yarra, Thomson, Barwon, Werribee and many other Victorian rivers is still to be honoured.

In the past if we needed more water for a city like Melbourne, the government would build a new dam. In 2006, Environment Victoria was successful in stopping any new dams from being built when the state government committed to not building any new dams for Melbourne.

Instead, new water conservation targets were introduced for Melbourne to save water and provide environmental flows for the Yarra River. Environment Victoria convinced the government to raise the water conservation target for Melbourne from 15 per cent to 25 per cent by 2015. Melbournians have responded brilliantly to these targets, prompting Environment Victoria to continue to push for policies to ‘lock in’ these savings forever.

As a part of the state government’s Victorian Greenhouse Strategy, a mandatory 5 Star standard for new homes was implemented. This initiative ensured that new homes in Victoria would generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions and use less water. A huge saving for the environment, not to mention the hip pocket. Environment Victoria gave its full support towards this important initiative and to this day, continues to campaign for improved building standards.

Over two years, hundreds of Vietnamese households in Melbourne saved over 1000 tons of carbon, as a result of their participation in Nha Dep (Beautiful Home), Environment Victoria’s first sustainability program within a multicultural community. It was born out of the Cool Communities project and worked closely with the Vietnamese community in Footscray , encouraging households towards sustainable action.

We all know that rivers can’t fix themselves and that we all need to invest in their protection. In 2004, Environment Victoria successfully lobbied for a the state’s first ever environment levy to be placed on water sales. In effect, the state government placed a 5 percent levy on urban water sales and 2 percent on rural water sales. This has raised over $227 million since 2004 for river rehabilitation and protection.

The Thomson is one of Victoria’s great rivers, rich in natural and cultural heritage and the source of much-needed freshwater inflows to the treasured Gippsland Lakes. However huge volumes of the river’s water is diverted to Melbourne and for irrigated agriculture. This poses serious risks to the survival of the river and the life that depends on it. Environment Victoria played a key role in the Thomson-Macalister Taskforce, a mutli-stakeholder group which recommended 47 billion litres of water be returned to the stressed river system. The Taskforce’s work resulted in the state government promising increased flows for the Thomson. But this is a promise that is yet to be fully delivered. Never fear, we are still putting pressure on the government to get the results the Thomson needs.

Environment Victoria, local community groups and individuals successfully bound together to campaign against the state government’s proposal to develop housing on the Point Nepean public land. This region will now be kept in pristine condition, preserving its unique habitat, cultural historical significance and dazzling coastal scenery.

Cool Communities was the first national climate change program in Australia, working with thousands of households across the country to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption in their own home. With help from local councils across the nation and the Western Bulldogs Football Club, Environment Victoria was able to provide information and tools to help communities become ‘cooler’. Talk about ahead of the times.

A forest campaign led by Environment Victoria drew national attention to the use of native forest woodchips by Kimberly-Clark Australia to produce Kleenex Tissues. After immense public outcry, Kimberly-Clark Australia announced they would cease purchasing native forest woodchips from the Central Highlands making this a big win for our forests!

Under the Convention on Wetlands, 11 of Victoria’s wetlands are listed as Ramsar sites which provide a home for 450 species of native animals and as many as 1,300 species of our native plants. The most recent addition to this list is the Edithvale-Seaford Wetlands, the last remnants of the Carrum Carrum swamp. Environment Victoria played a key role in its addition to the convention by contributing research on the area to the Ramsar application.

Prior to an intervention by community and environment groups, more than 99 percent of the Snowy River’s headwaters were diverted through the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme to the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers supporting the irrigation industry. Environment Victoria was part of a team, led by the Snowy River Alliance, to get the NSW, Victorian and Commonwealth governments to commit to returning water back to the Snowy. As far as we know, this was one of the first legal commitments to an environmental flow in the world. But the full commitment has yet to be honoured and we continue to pressure governments to return water to the Snowy.

One of Victoria’s last wild and free-flowing major rivers, the Mitchell River had been under threat of being dammed since the mid 1960s. However with the support of the East Gippsland community, Environment Victoria was able to place enough pressure on the new Labor government to stop the damming of the Mitchell River and thus preserve its unique ecology. But as always, we need to be vigilant to make sure that the Mitchell continues to flow freely.

With the key aim to reduce urban pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, Environment Victoria established the first major community sustainability program within Victoria known as Smogbusters, later referred to the Sustainable Living Program. By targeting schools, community clubs and the corporate world, this program worked to encourage sustainable living through action programs and has since become a key part of the organisation and a leader in its field winning several impressive awards.

Lobbying alongside other green groups, Environment Victoria’s continued effort reaped the rewards when a set of national air quality standards, applying to all states and territories were put into place. Since then our air quality has only improved. So take a deep breath in and marvel at how much fresher the air feels Ahh.

To reduce Victoria’s green house gas emissions, Environment Victoria successfully lobbied state government to overturn a ban on green electricity in 1998. Out of this work, the GreenPower scheme was created, allowing accredited retailers to provide consumers with assurance that their green electricity purchased is generated from non-polluting renewable energy sources. Now over 900,000 customers buy GreenPower. What a win for Victorian and all Australian households!

Following extensive community protests led by Environment Victoria, the Town and Country Planning Association and the Victorian National Parks Association; the Kennett Government withdrew its proposal to build a four-star hotel in the Wilsons Prom region, protecting a safe, healthy and happy haven for local wildlife.

Our hardy member groups in the Westernport area bound together and persistently battled to prevent Shell-Mobil importing oil using large tankers through Crib Point in Western Port Bay. This cooperative put forward a formidable scientific case that resulted in the proposal being ‘deferred indefinitely’. Unfortunately, Westernport is under threat again from a port expansion so the battle is on again to protect this unique part of the world.

Not only posing a serious health risk, motor vehicle exhausts were producing 90 percent of lead in the atmosphere prior to the phase-out of leaded petrol. Environment Victoria campaigned on this issue supporting and endorsing the National Consultative Committee on Lead in Petrol’s new standards and quick phase-out of leaded petrol.

Environment Victoria's research and lobbying for better public transport services bear fruit with the announcement of $2.5 million in the federal budget to put faster and more frequent trains on existing lines. The announcement is a direct result of our work on the Sandringham rail experiment which showed that more trains meant more passengers, more money for the MET and fewer cars on the road.

The Conservation Council of Victoria is renamed Environment Victoria to reflect the broader range of issues we work on. Our job has always been to mobilise people to take action for our environment. These days we work directly with communities to help them save water, energy and waste and to connect them with nature.

The challenges we face today are much bigger then in our early years, so our actions must be bigger. That’s why we are mobilising every single Victorian, all 5 million of us, to take action.

A major thoroughfare in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD is the Swanston Street Walk. With increased car, tram, bus, bike and pedestrian traffic in this vicinity, improving access and services became an immediate concern to the Conservation Council of Victoria (now Environment Victoria). In order to make this street easier to navigate and thus more efficient to use, we detailed low-cost actions such as priority access to trams and bikes, improving bike parking facilities and increasing train and bus frequency.

In the 1990’s the Conservation Council of Victoria began its work on transport with a focus in public transport to cut pollution and reduce car use. In the early 90’s we campaigned successfully to keep the Upfield railway line open and not only did it stay open but was granted $200 million for an upgrade in 1995.

Upon acknowledging the unique environment of the Alpines, home to a variety of rare and endangered flora and fauna, the Conservation Council of Victoria provided the impetus for the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act. This act provides the protection and management of threatened species and was the first in the world to provide protection on private land.

To protect the rare Mountain Pygmy-possum from the impact of tourism in Mount Hotham, the Conservation Council of Victoria, the Victorian National Park Association and the Australian Conservation Foundation, lobbied members of State Parliament to exclude the area identified as habitat for this species from the Alpine Resort Act. This campaign resulted in the addition of 250 hectares to the Bogong National Park, encompassing a Pygmy-possum reserve and allowing the species to roam freely.

Through intense campaigning by Victorian communities, the state government drew together existing parks and land in the Alpine Region to create the Alpine National Park. This park is now the state’s largest, covering 646,000 hectares and it has the greatest range of flora and fauna of any national park in Victoria.

The Water Resources Bill was one of the first pieces of legislation in the world to recognise that sufficient quantities of water should be supplied to conserve flora and fauna. The Conservation Council of Victoria was actively involved in its development. This marked the start of a long and ongoing battle to return water to our rivers which continues today.

After a considerable wake-up call from the community campaign to save the Little Desert, the state government realised that they needed to get serious about protecting our environment. In 1970, the state government formed the Land Conservation Council (now Victorian Environmental Assessment Council) after heavy lobbying from grassroots communities and the newly formed Conservation Council of Victoria.

The Land Conservation Council was formed to protect public land and waterways and to undertake investigations into its use. Over the decades, the Land Conservation Council has recommended the protection of vast tracks of Victoria’s forests, river and wetlands and marine waters.

The Conservation Council of Victoria (now Environment Victoria) was formed on October 30 1969 by a handful of local environment groups. The council aimed to provide a collective voice for our environment and to represent the views of grassroots communities to government and business.

From inception the Conservation Council worked hard to get policies and legislation in place to protect our environment. This is something we still do today.

In 1969 a group of Victorians - scientists, naturalists and rural and suburban dwellers - joined forces to prevent the Little Desert’s unique environment from becoming an agricultural development. Because of their passion and dedication, this relatively untouched land in Victoria’s far north-west was spared and the Little Desert National Park was established.

The park still stands today and is of one of Victoria’s most unique landscapes. It’s home to more than 600 species of native plants, 140 species of bird, 19 native mammals and 24 reptiles.

The declaration of Little Desert was a watershed win for the Victorian environment community. It marked the beginning of a new environmental consciousness which had a profound impact on environmental decision-making. It also fired up this small group of Victorians to take on more challenges as they saw the need for a peak group that focused on environmental issues at a state-wide level. And that’s how Environment Victoria got started.