Posts Tagged ‘Carbon Expo’
Day 2 of the Carbon Expo began with the same energy, enthusiasm and focus of Day 1. It started with a panel of Australian ex-pats who are working within the climate change industry across the globe. It brought insight into the success and learnings of the European ETS, the rollout and challenges of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the challenges that exist at a global level in shifting Asia towards a carbon centric economy.
Hearing from Australians about the perception of Australia by the rest of the world, it became clear that while Australia used to be on the forefront of trading emission scheme design, we have become a bench warmer for the last few years. With the Rudd government’s attention on the CPRS we will once again move to become a leader – certainly within the Asian market where we punch above our weight. While our carbon output is small, on a global scale our potential to influence world policy debates and channel investments into clean technology development in emerging nations is great, but only if we have a story to tell of how we are succeeding back home.
With a focus back on home of current policy debate, the treasury model and CPRS design, the discussion moved to what industry will be like once implementation begins, considering issues of the role the regulator will play, auditing standards of carbon accounting, impacts of capping the carbon price, how the industry will develop the necessary skills shortage and supply chain impact among other things.
The conference had a great range of workshops focusing on specific challenges and topics of debate and an exhibition of over 100 business representing the emerging industry, showing positive signs that private business was positioning itself to help tackle the problem – all supplementing the main plenary sessions.
As the inaugural Carbon Markets Expo, Greensense would rate it as a success and as the conference closed there was a clear, overwhelming need that it return next year.
The image below shows the exhibition hall at the conference.
Over 24 countries represented, 100 guest speakers and 1000 delegates — this is the first industry hosted carbon market expo – and Greensense was there. As Tim Flannery said this afternoon “this event is about turbo charged learning”.
The conference was kicked started with an opening from James Cameron of Climate Change Capital London, commenting on the fact we should not be pessimistic about our ability to deal with both the Global Financial Crisis and Climate Change at the same time and that while Australia as made significant progress in the last 12 months on it’s climate change policy our current start to the CPRS looks modest.
This was followed by the Honorable Penny Wong, Federal Minister for Climate Change and Water, who, ahead of today’s release by the treasury on the economic modelling of emissions trading, spoke of the pending introduction of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and Australia’s global advantage with its geographical, geological and economic positions.
The conference has brought together industry leaders and shows positive signs that a strong platform in Australia is being built to help our nation transition into a carbon driven economy.
We will add more on output from the conference soon.
Below — the Hon Penny Wong being interviewed by Tony Jones, host of the ABC’s Lateline.
