Climate Change

Mr COWDREY (Colton) (14:43): My question is to the Minister for Environment and Water. Can the minister update the house on how the Marshall Liberal government is seeking to restore our precious coastline through world-leading seagrass projects?

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Minister for Environment and Water) (14:43): I thank the member for Colton for his question in relation to seagrass. I know he is a passionate advocate and champion for the coastline, not only in his own electorate of Colton but also across our state. We have 5,067 kilometres of coastline in South Australia. The Marshall Liberal government believes that caring for that coastline is an incredibly important part of the front-line fight against climate change.

We went to the 2018-19 state election with a commitment to significantly increase our spending by $5.2 million on coastal protection and coastal projects. We are committed to putting funding towards practical projects that have a clear impact on climate change, whether that is adapting to climate change, mitigating the impacts of climate change or reducing our emissions.

We know that blue carbon is a particularly interesting and growing sector within the carbon sequestration economy. Blue carbon—that is, using marine environments to store carbon—actually provides a much greater opportunity to effectively store carbon than on-land efforts. While they are more challenging to get established, it is worth directing effort towards blue carbon projects because, if we can get those to establish, if we can develop methodology around them and if we can get them working really well for us here in South Australia, we can of course take that knowledge and leadership to other parts of the world as well.

We are a leader in dealing with climate change here. That is something that has occurred under the leadership of governments of various political persuasions—

Mr Hughes interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Giles is called to order.

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS: —and it is something that this government is continuing. When it comes to seagrass and blue carbon, we get multiple benefits. That includes not only having a place to sequester carbon but also creating habitat for wildlife and for conservation purposes, and also slowing down the speed of wave action, which of course results in less erosion and a reduction in the effects of increasing storm events. We know that one of the impacts of climate change here in South Australia, with our particularly vulnerable coastline, is the impact of storm events.

Our seagrass project will see $1 million spent on re-establishing seagrass meadows across our metropolitan coastline. Over the last 50 years, we have lost around one-third of the seagrasses of metropolitan Adelaide, equating to some 6,000 hectares of lost seagrasses—largely as a consequence of nutrient outflows from our rivers, creeks and wastewater plants. We know that those nutrients have dropped off in recent years. It has become a really good time, with increasing water quality, to get seagrasses re-established.

At 15 sites, largely between Outer Harbor and West Beach, we will be looking at opportunities to implement a world-first type of seagrass restoration, using hessian sacks implanted with seagrass plants. We will be dropping those at 15 sites in June. Into September, we will be monitoring those to work out how the recruitment is going. Then, in the following year, we will be looking at expanding those sites up to an area of up to one hectare of seagrass restoration. It's a really exciting project: it's good for our environment, it creates habitat and it sequesters carbon as well, which is key in our fight against climate change.