Murray Watt has explicitly ruled out the use of a “climate trigger” in Australia’s reworked environmental laws — allaying fears it could kill off any new major resources projects.

Activists have long called for the legal mechanism to be added to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to specifically protect from the wider effects of climate change .

As it stands the Federal Government is obliged to step in and assess new projects that are deemed to have impacts on “matters of national environmental significance” — but climate change does not fall under that remit.

It means that projects with a large carbon footprint are not automatically referred.

Speaking in the Senate on Tuesday the environment minister said he was “happy to rule out” a climate trigger p

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