Executive director Mark O’Neill said as a country that generates less than 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, Australia’s support for the development of low emissions technologies was the single most important contribution it could make towards addressing the global challenge of climate change.

“This is the only way Australia could truly influence the global climate outcome,” O’Neill said.

He said the black coal industry was looking at a range of low emissions technology projects to support through its own voluntary $300 million COAL21 Fund announced earlier this year.

Environment Minister Ian Campbell said that to achieve substantial reductions in the long term the Government needed to invest in developing the technologies that would enable those reductions.

“All low emissions technologies need to be considered and, where appropriate, given opportunities to demonstrate their future capacity to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.

“Australia is an energy intensive economy and we have an abundance of coal, a cheap energy source that has underpinned the success of our economy for years.

“It is essential that we look at how we can best develop that resource in the most sustainable way.”

Campbell said once the technologies could demonstrate a commercial capacity they could also be exported to other countries, including Australia’s major overseas partners in the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.