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Environmental impact assessment (EIA) promotes considered and participatory decision-making, which can delay development and, at times, lead to projects being temporarily halted or permanently discontinued. Over the past decade, governments in a number of jurisdictions have proposed ‘streamlining’ reforms to eliminate perceived causes of unnecessary delays and stoppages. A target of these reforms has been environmental citizen suits (ECS): legal or merits-review proceedings initiated by private parties to uphold public environmental rights or interests for predominantly public purposes in order to generate public environmental benefits. This article reports the results of an empirical analysis of delays and stoppages attributable to ECSs in the NSW Land & Environment Court over the period 2008 to 2015. Key findings include: 109 finalised ECSs were identified over the period; 33 of the determined ECSs were successful (broadly defined); in 27 of the 33 successful ECSs, the activity that was the subject of the proceedings was subsequently approved or otherwise allowed to proceed; and the median major project delay caused by ECSs was 4.4 months. The results suggest the claims ECSs significantly hinder economic growth by delaying and stopping development are largely baseless. ECSs were relatively uncommon, rarely stopped development, and rarely caused major project delays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the provisions of the Fair Trading Act 1987 of New South Wales concerning the relevance of value judgments or policy considerations in damage by misleading or deceptive conduct. Overview of the legal perception that misrepresentation will rarely be the sole cause of loss; Causation between the negligent misstatements the respondents made and the loss the appellant suffered; Involvement of value judgments in determining questions of liability.

Climate change mitigation benefits from the land sector are not being fully realised because of uncertainty and controversy about the role of native forest management. The dominant policy view, as stated in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, is that sustainable forest harvesting yielding wood products, generates the largest mitigation benefit. We demonstrate that changing native forest management from commercial harvesting to conservation can make an important contribution to mitigation. Conservation of native forests results in an immediate and substantial reduction in net emissions relative to a reference case of commercial harvesting. We calibrated models to simulate scenarios of native forest management for two Australian case studies: mixed-eucalypt in New South Wales and Mountain Ash in Victoria. Carbon stocks in the harvested forest included forest biomass, wood and paper products, waste in landfill, and bioenergy that substituted for fossil fuel energy. The conservation forest included forest biomass, and subtracted stocks for the foregone products that were substituted by non-wood products or plantation products. Total carbon stocks were lower in harvested forest than in conservation forest in both case studies over the 100-year simulation period. We tested a range of potential parameter values reported in the literature: none could increase the combined carbon stock in products, slash, landfill and substitution sufficiently to exceed the increase in carbon stock due to changing management of native forest to conservation. The key parameters determining carbon stock change under different forest management scenarios are those affecting accumulation of carbon in forest biomass, rather than parameters affecting transfers among wood products. This analysis helps prioritise mitigation activities to focus on maximising forest biomass. International forest-related policies, including negotiations under the UNFCCC, have failed to recognize fully the mitigation value of native forest conservation. Our analyses provide evidence for decision-making about the circumstances under which forest management provides mitigation benefits.