Submission on the Climate Change Authority’s Evidence Platform

CPD supports the development of an Evidence Platform, and agrees with the scope of the metrics and benchmarks to be developed over time. Our submission proposes a number of additional indicators for three ‘critical enablers’ that the CCA should track:

Social equity and acceptance

• Recommendation 1a: The Evidence Platform should include a metric to measure energy hardship.
• Recommendation 1b: The CCA should extend its proposed metric of access to new energy technologies by renters to also capture other cohorts that face considerable barriers, including those who live in apartments and who have low levels of income and wealth.
• Recommendation 1c: The CCA should advocate to the government to fund a regular survey to better understand how people are experiencing the net zero transition. The CCA should place emphasis on people living in communities experiencing green industry development firsthand.

Finance and investment:

• Recommendation 2a: The CCA should include a metric that tracks the amount of funding for the development of clean technologies from government special investment vehicles (SIVs) that is not simple commercial-grade debt, such as equity, concessional loans, financial guarantees and venture capital.
• Recommendation 2b: The metric should be disaggregated by technology type, to understand whether funding is assisting a range of technologies to bridge the valley of death and not just the safest or most mature.

Policy and governance

• Recommendation 3: The CCA should develop indicators that track progress towards resolving barriers to renewable energy roll-out e.g. in planning approvals, energy workforce and supply of key inputs.