Submission to the Climate Change Authority Evidence Platform Issues Paper

ATSE's submission supports the work of the Climate Change Authority in developing an evidence platform to monitor Australia's emissions reduction and climate adaptation progress. We recommend improvements to proposed metrics across R&D, heavy vehicle decarbonisation, consumer energy resources, embedded emissions and ruminant livestock. We also recommend bringing forward the inclusion of skills and workforce as an immediate critical enabler.

ATSE also welcomes the Climate Change Authority’s planned focus on green growth, adaptation and critical enablers.

ATSE makes the following recommendations:

Recommendation 1: Include measures of lead indicators for the renewable energy roll out, including measures of mean renewable project approval times and mean time from financial close to grid connection.

Recommendation 2: Include measures of relevant R&D intensity as a lead indicator of future emissions reduction.

Recommendation 3: Develop metrics for the decarbonisation of heavy vehicles through electrification or use of low carbon liquid fuels.

Recommendation 4: Include metrics tracking the availability of vehicle to home and vehicle to grid charging, either by tracking the proportion of the population able to access bi-directional charging or by the number of EVs and charges sold that support bidirectional charging.

Recommendation 5: Ensure metrics fully account for embedded emissions in infrastructure.

Recommendation 6: Investigate the feasibility of developing a measure of expected methane emission change from agriculture based on uptake of technologies to reduce methane from ruminant livestock.

Recommendation 7: Bring forward the inclusion of skills and workforce within the critical enablers domain for development in 2026.