Environmental Law: WA legislative refrom

Environmental Law LAWS5183 (2020)
Research Assignment
This Research Assignment is offered as an alternative to the Exam worth 60%.

Your assignment should be a maximum of 3,000 words of text; ie excluding footnotes.
You should look at the criteria for assessment outlined in the rubric adopted for this assignment. It is appropriate to use headings (and sub-headings) with a simple heading numbering system to present a clear structure for your essay. There is no need to apply the AGLC4 heading and numbering style, which is complex and out of date.
Please use standard footnoting technique; for example, the Australian Guide to Legal Citation, version 4, as explained by the Library’s Guide to AGLC4. Alternatively, you may use as a guide an article recently published in the Environmental and Planning Law Journal. It is important to give ‘pin-point’ page citations for the sources of propositions referred to or quoted in your essay.
The assessment is anonymous. Please use this LMS Cover Page – Anonymous Assessment.docx at the start of your assignment before submitting it via LMS. If you wish, you can use this Cover Page file as the file to present your essay.
RESEARCH QUESTION: Question 2.
The Western Australian Government is currently developing a climate change policy to guide Western Australia’s contribution to meeting Australia’s commitments under the Paris Agreement. The WA Government has said that a nationally consistent policy framework is urgently needed to meet those commitments, but the WA Government won’t wait on the Australian Government (Climate Change Issues Paper, Minister’s foreword, p.iv). What State legislative reforms could be considered to strengthen Western Australia’s regulatory framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (‘GHGe’) in ways that can be both complementary to national regulation of GHGe and competent for reducing emissions if national law and policy are not achieving those reductions consistently with the Paris Agreement commitments? In addressing this question, you may find it helpful to consider the legislation of other Australian States, including Victoria, which has enacted:
• The Climate Change Act 2017 (Vic),
• Amendments in 2017 to the Environment Protection Act 1970 (Vic) and further amendments in the Environment Protection Amendment Act 2018 (Vic) to regulate GHGe, and
• The State Environment Protection Policy (Air Quality Management), which applies to emissions within Victoria of greenhouse gases.