Seq Regional Climate Resilient Alliance

Well, excitingly, a climate alliance is proposed to be established in South East Queensland. And the goal of that is to formalise a partnership between SEQ local governments to work collaboratively together on climate change. What this will provide is regional solutions to climate regional approaches to projects and building resilience and large scale efforts to reduce emissions that will deliver economies of scale, cost savings and regional benefits as well as local ones. So a climate alliance is an established structure of local government partnership and it's originated in Victoria where there's really successful high-profile large-scale projects that have delivered of thousands of tons of emissions reduction and millions of dollars of savings for local governments and their communities so there was in April 2021 there was we joined five other SEQ councils in a climate resilient councils pilot project to assess the best model of regional partnership for SEQ and so what happened was we looked to Victoria and the huge achievements those alliances have done two years later we've come up with a refined model for the Queensland climate resilience alliance to be called SEQCRA the acronym stands for South East Queensland Climate Resilience Alliance so we've got a bit about the current landscape of climate commitments across SEQ of course we share the State government context of 30% emissions reduction by 2030 50% renewable energy by 2050 2030 and it's and net zero by 2050 also local governments have our own targets of course we've got net zero by 2026 and there's several quite variable commitments across the region so what we see is there's no collaborative there's no coordinated approach to these shared goals and that's the space that the alliance seeks to live and exist and work in to help us learn from each other and work together on projects that are going to really make a difference so the structure of so the proposed South East Queensland Climate Resilience Alliance is membership based so there's a tiered membership structure banded according to population. This makes Noosa a $10,000 per annum membership. The partnership is formalised simply by MOU which requests a three-year commitment. So the recommendation well what that membership fees provides is the annual budget for the alliance to be to fund a coordinator a shared staff resource for the region to apply for larger pools of grants and funding for big-scale projects to coordinate manage projects and to coordinate the network of the alliance. It's a pretty simple governance structure so the recommendation from our team to Council is that Noosa join the South East Queensland climate alliance this year for a fee of $10,000 and sign the MOU with a three years that the simple governance structure is two tiered executive steering committee and then coordinators committee and we recommend that the manager of environment sit on the executive committee steering and committee the Carbon Reduction Officer sit the on coordination committee to really work on projects that require technical expertise