LAUSR

This paper provides a critical commentary on the high profile Australian National Outlook (ANO) Report, published in late 2015 by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) (Hatfield-Dodds et al., 2015a). The report’s findings were also published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal Nature (Hatfield-Dodds et al., 2015c), suggesting that the conclusions are robust and should be accepted. The report argues that with collective effort and sound policy, Australia can ‘achieve economic growth and improved living standards while also protecting or even improving our natural assets’ (Hatfield-Dodds et al., 2015a: 12).1 The report therefore aligns closely with a broader range of literature arguing that economic growth, no matter how environmentally damaging it has been historically, can be ‘decoupled’ from environmental impacts by way of technological innovation, resource efficiency improvements, pricing mechanisms, and conservation efforts (see Hatfield-Dodds et al., 2015a: 4; see also UNEP, 2011; Grantham Institute, 2013; Blomqvist et al., 2015). The findings of the report are underpinned by several scientific papers that will also be considered throughout our critique (Schandl et al., 2015; Hatfield-Dodds et al., 2015b; Hatfield-Dodds et al., 2015c; Baynes, 2015). We maintain that the ANO Report has not established a convincing case for the decoupling strategy, a conclusion that has implications beyond the Australian context.