14.02.2025 Dan Leverington
The Northern Rivers is a microcosm of global climate change. Its natural beauty is known around the world, the hinterland’s proximity to the beaches a rare occurrence anywhere on the planet. So, too, is the ferocity and frequency of its natural disasters.
It’s this dichotomy we can lean on as we enter the crunch time for climate action at a societal, industrial and individual level.
Human environmental practices on this land throughout history tracks ahead of the global curve. Stewarded by the many clans of the Bundjalung Nation for over 12,000 years, the first twenty-one farming licences were awarded under the Crown Lands Act for settlers along the Richmond River in the 1840s, which soon became Lismore. Each licensee agreed to fell and sell the trees from their parcel of land as highly-sought after timber, achieving the two-birds-with-one-stone trick of converting this newly cleared landscape into grazing paddocks for cattle and dairy production. This was the basis for the first of many commercial booms for the region.
Once the easy-to-reach trees along the river banks had been cut down, attention turned to the Big Scrub, which resulted in twenty million years of rainforest bring reduced to one percent of its size in sixty years.
Possum Shoot, McLeods Shoot, Coopers Shoot. Each were given their name due to their steep gravitational paths for logged trees to be sent down to the valley floors, transferred along the newly-formed roads and onto the Northern Rivers Steamship Company’s ships to the manufacturing hubs of the Pacific.
Fast forward to May 1973, Nimbin was a sleepy town in the hills left behind by the once-booming local dairy industry concentrating operations in Lismore. That was until the Age of Aquarius festival came to town, fifty-two years ago this year. As the first-known event in Australia to request permission from traditional owners to use their land, the festival transformed Nimbin and the wider Northern Rivers, becoming a strong magnet for those wanting more than life offered in the ‘Big Smoke’.
Unfortunately, this magnetic attraction has had a perverse side. A region populated by those who have worried about, cared for and committed their time to preserving the environment is also the front lines of natural disasters escalating in their severity: the Lismore floods in 1974, 2017 and 2022, bushfires in 2019/2020, and even Tropical Cyclones Debbie and Oma (in 2017 and 2019, respectively).
The devastation brought by these disasters has been widely-experienced, from Murwillumbah to Mullumbimby, Lismore to Casino, Coraki to Ballina. And yet, the results have not just been the resilience, mitigation and adaption embedded at a local level, but the lessons and guidance now being shared with the rest of the country, as more councils look for guidance in the face of increasing climate threats.
In fact, the collaborative regeneration of six-hundred hectares of the once-cleared rainforest by the Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy (formerly Big Scrub Landcare), along with current landowners, is just one example of the power we have to positively impact the planet at the individual level.
Scotsman Patrick Geddes coined the term ‘Think Global, Act Local’ in the early 1900s, and a century later, it’s continues to provide the framework we require to navigate the coming decades. The patchwork quilt created when each of these individual efforts are combined allows the global picture to emerge as one of justifiable optimism.
At the recent global summit for COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, stated he has seen over the past five years that, for the first time, global “economics and ethics have become one”. That is to say, the once-diametrically opposed forces of Finance and Environment are now in sync.
This is why 2025 will be the inflection point for climate integration into society at the Government, Commercial and Individual level.
1.
Government: Mandatory Climate Reporting is Here
Government: Mandatory Climate Reporting is Here
Climate risk is now recognised as financial risk by governments, investors and insurance companies. As such, access to accurate climate risk data is now critical for Australia to be compliant under the unilateral Paris Agreement target of restricting global temperatures from warming more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, as much as possible.
The year begun with a requirement instated to the largest 6,000 companies in Australia, and their supply chains, who now are required to provide mandatory climate reporting to the Federal government, stating the risks and opportunities the changing climate will have on their business operations.
These businesses are now legally obligated to quantify the emissions created as a result of their operational activities and explain how they’re evolving their business practices to proactively reduce their impact on the planet. These disclosures require the same rigorous audit process their Boards currently sign off for financial reporting, coupled with similar fines, penalties and jail terms for non-compliance.
2.
Commercial: Local B Corps in a Global Picture
Commercial: Local B Corps in a Global Picture
Beyond companies now needing to be compliant with regulatory reporting, there are companies who already combine profit with purpose across the environment, workers, employees, community and internal governance structures. B Corps are role modelling many of the actions businesses across all industries will need to implement to maintain their competitive advantages over the coming years.
Well ahead of the curve, these businesses have identified the need to provide consumers and businesses the opportunity to ‘do good while doing well’. There are now more than 6,000 around the world, including 750 in Australia and New Zealand.
We’re lucky to have many B Corps in the Northern Rivers, ranging from Flow Hive, Summerland Bank, Cape Byron Distillery & Brookies, Spell, Quiip, Stone & Wood, Verdecon, Underwear for Humanity, Owners Collective and many, many more. I’ve linked to each of their Sustainability and B Corp pages above so you can see the work they’re doing, and how and where you spend your money does matter.
3.
Employee Engagement: It’s The Economy, Stupid
Employee Engagement: It’s The Economy, Stupid
A 2023 employee engagement survey conducted by Deloitte illustrated that of twenty-three thousand employees, “55% of respondents reporting that they research brands’ environmental impact and policies before accepting a job, and more than 40% reporting that they already have, or plan to, change jobs due to climate concerns.”
Another B Corp, Culture Amp, has also quantified the importance of a company being genuinely committed to climate action, rather than having an undefined strategy to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
These two studies prove the why employees having a sense of purpose isn’t just for the privileged few. It lifts productivity levels, strengthens staff retention and candidate attraction, increases annual revenues, and generates larger profits than traditional work cultures tied to the ‘bottom-line at all costs’ mentality responsible for the current situation we’re in.
While there’s clearly still so much to be done on such a large scale, and multiple fronts of opposition to navigate, the conversations at the policy and corporate levels have shifted considerably since a former PM strolled into Federal Parliament and told us not to be afraid of coal.
Just as the new arrivals to Nimbin foresaw the current climate degradation fifty years before it happened, by standing on their shoulders our generation finds ourselves in a position to not only see the green shoots starting to peak through, but cultivate them into our future successes.