Excerpt from ABC by  Michael Slezak. Read the full article here or listen here.

Australia has signed up to an international convention promising to restore thirty per cent of our degraded environment and the federal government has charged private enterprise with the task. The Nature Repair Market aims to incentivise investment by awarding tradable credits for repairing nature – much like carbon credits are awarded for avoiding greenhouse gas emissions.

“The Earth is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event — the first caused by humans — and Australia is at the forefront of the problem.

Globally, mammals are being lost at a rate perhaps 100 times what would be expected without human-induced changes.

Australia has experienced more extinctions of mammals than any other continent. Thirty-five per cent of all global mammal extinctions since 1500 have happened in Australia.

Recognising that, Australia signed up to an international agreement in 2023 committing us to nature restoration at a scale never seen before.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework binds Australia to restore 30 per cent of all degraded land, rivers and marine areas by 2030.

Michelle Ward from Griffith University said that amounted to about 5 million hectares of land.

Work by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists suggests there’s another 18 million hectares of land around inland lakes, wetlands and rivers to repair to meet the agreed target, and meet other environmental goals.

Combined, that’s an area about the size of Victoria.

Dr Ward said there were some good initiatives restoring nature, but it’s nowhere near the scale required.

“It needs to be ramped up, and there needs to be other markets in there to help drive these huge initiatives,” she said.

And if that doesn’t sound difficult enough, the federal government says it’s going to reach that target without direct funding or intervention.

Instead, it plans to incentivise businesses to use the voluntary Nature Repair Market.

However, investors famously don’t like uncertainties — and regulatory uncertainties are a big problem.

Dr Bell-James said investors would likely ignore restoration projects that face complex approval processes.”