SEI champions climate adaptation in Net Zero Commission submission

The Sydney Environment Institute (SEI) welcomed the opportunity to make a submission to the New South Wales Net Zero Commission’s 2025 consultation process. The commission has responsibility for advising on both mitigation and adaptation strategies for the state. Drawing on the expertise of a multidisciplinary teams of researchers from across the University of Sydney, the submission underscores the urgent need for systemic, inclusive, and locally grounded approaches to climate adaptation and resilience.

SEI has addressed seven questions from the submission, reflecting SEI’s strength in adaptation research, community engagement and justice. The concerns and recommendations outlined in SEI’s submission are empirically informed by SEI’s research across several projects that are conducted from a ground-up, community-based approach that foregrounds local knowledges while integrating it with systemic socio-ecological analysis.

Priority recommendations

Drawing on the recommendations made throughout the submission, SEI identified ten priority recommendations for the Net Zero Commission’s consideration:

1. Increase the proportion of funds invested in resilience and adaptation to lower the cost of disaster response.
2. Make clear where responsibility lies in the NSW government for disaster response, disaster relief and resilience planning.
3. Continue to embed climate risks into sectoral decision making with embedded posts in Departments (e.g. Treasury, Health, Infrastructure etc.) to enable climate risks to be incorporated in regular decision making.
4. Bring in communities as genuine partners in the planning, preparation and execution of community resilience and adaptation strategies. Valuing community expertise, and, crucially, providing support to communities to build further expertise, enhance the capacity of locally-based resilience organisations, and the social side of social infrastructure.
5. Implement evidence-based heat solutions including shaded bus shelters, disaster payment for heatwaves, the HeatWatch application and fan first cooling across the State.
6. Implement the ‘Social Asset Mapping Tool’ developed by AECOM (with SEI guidance) for the NSW Reconstruction Authority in local councils and increase available funding for effective, efficient social infrastructure investment.
7. Replicate the inclusive and discursive process used by WSROC to develop the recommendations in the Heat Smart City Plan across the State.
8. Mandate and financially support the retrofit of old building stock, including social housing and rental properties.
9. Develop annual tracking of consumer hardship related to electricity costs that extends the hardship tracking by the AER in ways that can identify whether underconsumption of electricity is increasing as electrification proceeds.
10. Develop a state-wide approach to community co-benefit processes, including community benefit agreements for the location of utility scale renewables, batteries, and transmission lines.

SEI’s submission is grounded in the rich expertise of its membership, bringing together voices from engineering, environmental studies, health, architecture, and social sciences. Contributors include Professor David Schlosberg, Sydney Environment Institute; Professor Danielle Celermajer, Sydney Environment Institute; Associate Professor Michele Barnes, Faculty of Engineering; Associate Professor Nader Naderpajouh, Faculty of Engineering; Associate Professor Amanda Tattersall, Faculty of Science; Dr Lee White, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; Dr Federico Tartarini, School of Architecture, Design and Planning; Dr Rebecca McNaught, University Centre for Rural Health (Lismore); Dr Blanche Verlie, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; and Ms Emma Bones, Sydney Environment Institute. 

SEI was pleased to see the focus on adaptation in the Net Zero Commission’s questions and looks forward to further engagement on the topic.

Read SEI's submission here (pdf, 338KB).

Header image: Daria Nipot on Shutterstock