The roadmap comes less than a year after the state’s Land and Environment Court found that the EPA needed to address climate change. The case was brought about by the Environmental Defenders Office, which had argued the case on behalf of the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action following the record 2019-20 disaster.

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“As a result of that case, the NSW EPA is now an environmental regulator with teeth,” said the BSCA’s Fiona Lee, who lost her home to the Black Summer fires in 2019. “It has the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from industry and in doing so protect our communities and environment from ongoing extreme weather events driven by climate change.”

But she added more needed to be done to reduce emissions this decade, including rolling out legally enforceable emission targets faster. Lee said the group would continue to work with the EPA.

Environmental Defenders Office Legal Strategy Director Elaine Johnson hoped to see other states and territories roll out similar policies.

NSW EPA chief Tony Chappel said the plan provided a robust framework that would allow the agency to treat greenhouse gas emissions like any other pollutant that it regulates.

“By doing so, [we also] support the decarbonisation, transformation and growth of the NSW economy,” he said.

“In every corner of the state, we are already feeling the very real, costly and devastating impacts of climate change. From unprecedented fires through to recent extensive flood events across regional NSW, each of these disasters is a sobering reminder of the escalating consequences of rising greenhouse emissions.”

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