Newcastle fights climate change at a local level

Australia’s seventh largest city is taking climate action into its own hands.

Despite being the world’s largest coal exporter and part of the biggest coal producing region in NSW, Newcastle has emerged as a state leader in local government action on climate change.

In September 2019, thousands of protestors of all ages marched down Newcastle’s main streets demanding climate action from government leaders in support of the School Strike 4 Climate movement.

Following the climate change protests, Newcastle Council supported the Climate Emergency Declaration and the principles and targets of the Paris Climate Agreement, and began engagement to develop a climate action plan for the city.

Novocastrians have shown support for these steps by council, and enthusiasm for climate action initiatives. A 2019 council survey identified that community members are concerned about a range of potential climate change impacts, and seven in ten participants agreed or strongly agreed that council operations should move to 100 percent renewable energy.

Following through with their plans, the City of Newcastle became the first NSW council to be powered by 100 percent renewable energy in January this year, and in August they released the draft 2021-2025 Climate Action Plan for public comment.

The plan adopts the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals as guiding principles and provides a five-year roadmap towards a zero emissions future, focusing on utilising sustainable technologies to target electricity and fuel consumption, and supporting low-emissions industries.

Newcastle Greens Councillor Dr John Mackenzie highlights the adoption of a 100 percent renewable power purchase agreement.

“We are the first council to implement that in NSW and one of the first in the country and that’s really set a standard that other councils have to now meet,” he said.

But Mackenzie said while Newcastle’s response to the climate crisis has been progressive, the city’s ties to fossil fuels poses challenges.

“As the largest coal port, the onus is on us,” Mackenzie said.

“It’s not contradictory to say we have to work harder on getting to a carbon neutral city, and then beyond that to a renewable energy superpower.”

The Newcastle Climate Action Plan has now been published and the council is currently reviewing community feedback before it is formally adopted.

Local community organisations have been helping to advocate for climate action and a clean energy future for the city of Newcastle.

Climate Action Newcastle (CAN) has been working to educate the community to act on climate change, and promote solutions to households, government, and industry since 2006.

One of the groups long-term projects is assisting businesses to purchase rooftop solar installations, and the group recently attracted attention for their work with local bowling clubs.

“One of the first big activities CAN did was to organise a group buy for solar panels at a time when it was quite expensive to get solar panels on your roof, and CAN found a way to make it a bit more affordable for the Newcastle community,” CAN Committee Member James Whelan said.

“More recently we have partnered with bowling clubs and community organisations to help them get medium scale solar on their roof, so that’s emission reduction in a concrete way, but we also do a lot of educational work and advocacy.”

Community and business uptake of solar in Newcastle has continued to climb, with data from the Australian Photovoltaic Institute showing that approximately 21 percent of Hunter households have rooftop solar panels.

The youth-led School Strike 4 Climate movement is another group advocating for climate action in Newcastle. As the most vulnerable to future climate impacts, young people are particularly affected by climate anxiety, with the Australian Psychological Society’s Psychology Week 2019 Report stating that 95% of Australian youth see climate change as a serious problem, and 4 in 5 are anxious about climate change and how it will affect their quality of life in the future.

Psychologist, and Founder of Melbourne organisation Psychology for a Safe Climate, Carol Rider said concern or anxiety about climate change is a reasonable response but there is hope, and connecting with others can help.

Whelan said that tackling climate change requires a large-scale collaborative approach.

“We speak about a climate movement, that to solve the problem of climate change our whole society, and probably most of the world’s societies, need to embrace the idea and welcome a safe climate and move in that direction,” Whelan said.

“So we don’t think that we can solve the problem by ourselves, it’s not enough for a local group here and a local group there and a local group over there to do terrific things in their local communities. It will take all of us working together in quite a strategic way to prepare our society for those changes and to kind of win the hearts and minds as its pretty contested and there’s a lot of resistance from vested interests to moving beyond fossil fuels.”

As for the council’s Climate Action Plan, Whelan said it needs a stronger focus on emission reduction beyond councils’ operations, and that CAN has made a submission calling for changes to the plan.  

“We feel that council could and should be more ambitious in setting a target for the city’s emissions,” Whelan said.

“Councils’ own activities represent a very small proportion of the city’s overall emissions. An emissions reduction strategy for the City of Newcastle can’t just focus on the four or five percent of the city’s emissions that council is responsible for.

“We’ve got such a small window of opportunity to avert catastrophic climate change, and catastrophic climate change will impact our city, Newcastle, more than many places. This is not a problem we can put off.

“Climate change has been described as a wicked problem, it’s certainly more than complex, it’s so big, it will never be sufficient for any of us, whether an individual or a council to say we’ve done enough.”

Mackenzie said that although the council is not responsible for the city’s emissions, it needs to get more involved in reducing community emissions for the welfare of the city and can play a facilitating and enabling role.

“When you put it in the context of a city, and the context of a region you’re looking at something where council’s interventions have not been anywhere near adequate to the scale of the problem,” Mackenzie said.

“Earlier climate action plans that council had, had developed actions and interventions for education, for businesses, for residential, and all of that has been stripped back to a focus almost exclusively on council’s actions.

“In our new climate action plan there is 30 pages dedicated to the remaining carbon intensive components of council’s operations, and about two pages at the end on what the community can do.

“It really falls short in that area, and that’s got to be the primary focus in the next decade.”

The ‘community emission reduction’ part of the plan concentrates on switching homes, businesses and industry to renewal electricity, energy efficiency initiatives, and supporting zero-emissions industries. Using this approach, the plan proposes a pathway to a net zero emissions Newcastle by 2040.

Fossil fuels, and their extraction and burning, are responsible for more than 80 percent of total emissions in NSW and renewable alternatives are becoming increasingly popular as a way to cut emissions and energy costs.

A 2018 Lowy Institute poll shows growing public support for clean energy, with more than eight in ten Australian’s agreeing that the Federal government “should focus on renewables, even if this means we may need to invest more in infrastructure to make the system more reliable.”

To accomplish their goal of operating on 100 percent renewables Newcastle Council built a 5 mega-watt solar farm at Summerhill Waste Management Facility in 2019.

The 14, 500 panel solar farm has already exceeded expectations, generating almost double the predicted annual revenue – with forecasts of $250,000 per year, and more than $420,000 already generated between mid-November 2019 to the end of April 2020.

Newcastle Lord Mayor Nuatali Nelmes said in June that the solar farm, combined with the power purchase agreement and battery storage, has provided resilience to the city’s energy strategy.

“The business case showed the solar farm would save ratepayers around $9 million, after costs, over its 25-year lifespan – and so far, it’s on track to do even better,” Nelmes said

With strong industrial connections and a long history of acting to reduce emissions, Newcastle has become a hub for renewable energy research and innovation.

In January 2020, The University of Newcastle started a seven-year contract with Red Energy, becoming the first University in Australia to be powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

The university’s Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources (NIER) is working on sustainable energy projects, such as printed solar cells and carbon capture technologies.

Newcastle is also home to the CSRIO’s Energy Centre, which hosts their solar field and energy research hub. The centre is working on various projects, with a focus on affordable and sustainable energy sources, including research on energy networks, battery storage, and reducing the costs of solar energy.

CSIRO principle research scientist Dr Chris Fell said Newcastle is “absolutely an energy hub”.

Fell said the next step in renewable energy technology is adapting the electricity grid.

“Renewable energy sources tend to be variable and now we just have to adapt our grid to be able to handle that,” he said.

“Frankly, the technology is there, it’s not even that expensive, solar and wind, it’s probably the cheapest on a per energy generation basis, so what’s the only missing link? And that is the stability of our electricity supply grid.”

Newcastle has led the way for other local councils to take climate action, and is among seven of the ten local governments in the Hunter Region that have joined the Cities Power Partnership (CCP), an initiative which requires the councils to make five pledges relating to ways of combatting climate change such as renewable energy or transport. Newcastle is part of the CCP alongside MidCoast Council, Upper Hunter Shire Council, Muswellbrook Shire, Lake Macquarie, Port Stephens and Cessnock. Maitland, Singleton and Dungog are the remaining Hunter councils yet to take part.

The Morrison Government has been criticised for taking the middle ground on energy policy, and not committing to a national net zero target, despite all Australian states and territories having formal targets to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

Many are also concerned by the Federal Government’s desire for new investment in fossil fuel in the Hunter Region, with the 2020 Climate of the Nation report finding that more than two in three Australians want a renewable led economic recovery, and believe Australia should have a national target for net-zero emissions by 2050.

Mackenzie said energy policy was not the formal responsibility of council and “the levers to make change are limited”. But, “it has to start somewhere, and it has to begin with at least one representative level saying we are going to focus on this,” he said.