Collaborative work key to Nature campaign success

Advice from Nature campaign experts. Lessons in running a successful campaign to save Nature: Acting quickly, comprehensively and collaboratively

A small but highly experienced team put together a comprehensive plan to ensure that the new Labor governments commitment to Climate legislation, which required consequential amendments to the Renewable Energy Act, would remove native forest biomass as an eligible source of renewable energy. 

The Wilderness Australia team kick started a campaign to remove burning Native forests as a source of renewable energy from the Renewable Energy Act. The campaign succeeded because it was a very clear and agreed goal across the whole forest movement that also secured support from key climate and renewable energy players and important influencers of government policy.

There was not a single person who had any doubt that it was essential to remove the regulation that allowed native forests to be burned in the name of renewable energy from the Renewable Energy Act. We pushed just enough different buttons and secured support from sufficient key sectors, to be able to achieve the change we needed in a period of about four months, which is the fastest campaign I've ever been part of. 

There were many reasons for our success. Wilderness Australia could draw on its extraordinary board of highly experienced people, plus experienced campaigners Alec Marr and Andrew Wong. We were able to seize the opportunity presented by the Climate Change Bill that Labor introduced to include the needed amendment to the Renewable Energy Act. We thought, “well, let's get rid of this”. 

We did just enough: gaining support from key influencers like the Climate Council, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Smart Energy Council; achieving a little bit of publicity in Renew Economy; and demonstrable public support through thousands of submissions from both the Forest Movement and the Climate Movement.

We knew that several large coal fired power stations were examining transitioning out of coal and into forest biomass because under seriously flawed carbon accounting rules emissions from wood (which are at least as high as emissions from coal) are counted as zero when wood is burned. Loy Yang B [power station] in Victoria, was in discussions with UK coal/forest biomass producer Drax about how to co-fire coal with wood. Stanwell Coal in Queensland was also looking at co-firing with wood, and there was a proposal in Singleton called the Redbank proposal, that was a live proposal to  convert a defunct coal-fired power station into a wood-fired power station.

But, we surprised everyone. We moved so quickly, and so comprehensively, few were aware of  what we were doing. We were just ahead of the game. I suspect we also faced very little opposition at that time from the timber industry or coal fired power stations because they either didn’t see nor understand what we were doing.  

The Tasmanian government is still pushing for it. Trying to develop small scale wood-fired power operations in hospitals and schools to try to bring it in surreptitiously. But because you can no longer earn clean energy generation certificates from burning wood, you can't do it at scale. The Tasmanian government is still lobbying for that to change.

It normally takes about 10 years to save anything major in Australia. Systemic or legislative change can take even longer.

There are various stages in any campaign and you don't necessarily have to be able to do everything yourself, but you have to have enough collaborative effort to be able to pursue different strategies as a campaign evolves. You might need legal action or an intensive political lobbying effort, or to increase understanding and awareness in the general community, or highlight the failings of a particular business enterprise  or find innovative ways to demonstrate a high level of community support. At some point in a campaign, you're going to need all those tools particularly if it's a really difficult issue.

You've got to have some kind of understanding of the complexity of campaign work, who is doing what on any given issue, and form collaborative partnerships. They are key to big campaigns - you will never end native forest logging without collaborative work, you won't end broad-scale tree clearing in Queensland without collaborative work.