Tuesday, 20 February 2024

Climate change

Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (13:26): Communities in Southern Metro, many of whom live near Port Phillip Bay, are now living and suffering through the climate crisis. The Port Phillip Bay coastal hazard assessment finally surfaced last month, and it maps the areas along our coastline which will face inundation when the sea level rises by 1.4 metres as projected by the CSIRO. This coastal inundation will come with an astronomical cost: hundreds of billions of dollars of damage, jeopardising public infrastructure and more than 80,000 homes, and a significant impact on our ecosystems, devastating the habitats of already threatened species.

For decades we have been warned about the impacts of climate change; we are now experiencing them. Every year brings more severe weather events, and sea level rise has begun. Councils are currently bound by woefully inadequate planning laws. It is now clear that sea level rise is currently on track to reach at least 1.4 metres, 60 per cent higher than what is currently built into our planning regulations. Victorian Labor must listen to the science, stop supporting new coal and gas, fix our planning system to reflect climate risks and start holding Victoria’s big coal polluters to account by making them pay a coal climate levy, so big polluters, not Victorians, end up paying the bill for climate change.