Submission to Senate Inquiry into the Abbott Government's Direct Action Plan

This APS submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Abbott Government’s Direct Action Plan examines the likely psychosocial impacts and effectiveness of the Plan, and considers climate threats to health and wellbeing, and necessary action to mitigate the threat of climate change.

As psychologists we are concerned not just about the environmental risks and impacts of climate change, but also by the serious psychosocial and mental health consequences of Government climate policies which fail to adequately address these serious problems. Our concerns include, but are not limited to:

• The current adverse impacts and consequences of climate change, not only for Australia’s natural environments and ecosystems, but for our human communities, and the manifestly greater impacts and consequences over time.
• The largely ignored psychosocial and mental health impacts of climate change.
• The ignored volume of social science research addressing the relative efficacy of differing government policies with respect to engaging and influencing the public on environmental threats and sustainability issues.
• The ignored psychosocial impacts of the Government’s proposed policy response to this escalating crisis which risks eroding people’s motivation and self-efficacy to take action on climate change. A weak policy response also risks building cynicism, loss of trust, and cumulative anger and frustration with the lack of effective action on climate change, and with the perceived broader failures of elected leaders to act in the long-term interests of current and future generations.

The individual and collective psychosocial impacts can be expected to manifest themselves in terms of a greatly altered and diminished quality of life as well as environmental quality, and the myriad psychological and social costs of living under the shadow of an ongoing environmental stressor such as climate change. These impacts will exacerbate the influence of multiple other environmental stressors.

An effective Climate Change Direct Action Plan needs to be both genuine in reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions AND also factor in the real costs of predictable health and community impacts.

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