Climate Change Policy Formation in Australia: 1995–1998

Australia was one of the earliest ratifiers of the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. However, in the years since then, there has been slow progress in Australia reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. In 1997, Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Committee published the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory: 1995. The results show that in 1995, excluding the land use sector, Australia’s net greenhouse gas emissions had increased by 6 per cent above 1990 levels and that in the energy sector, emissions had risen by 8.2 per cent above 1990 levels (see Table 1). According to another Australian government publication, Australia’s CO₂ emissions from the energy sector were estimated to be 11 per cent above 1990 levels in 1995–1996 and without further measures, they could rise to 40 per cent above 1990 levels by 2010.1