Lesley Hughes | How Australia's flawed environmental legislation fuels the climate crisis

And every bushwalk, every snorkelling trip, every view of a gorgeous natural landscape is a reminder of why I still am.

Nature provides our food, our fibre, our oxygen, and nourishes our wellbeing.

We would quite literally perish without it.

It's no wonder that so many Australians, like me, are fiercely protective of our glorious natural world.

But our natural world is deteriorating before our eyes, and the principal federal law that should be protecting it, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, is patently failing.

The act is a relic of the Howard-era and has many flaws, but chief among them is that it has allowed hundreds of polluting fossil fuel projects - many of which will outlive us all - to proceed.

A Climate Council analysis has uncovered the shocking extent of the problem.

Since the year 2000, 740 fossil fuel projects have been approved under the EPBC Act. Of these, 185 got the green light after full environmental assessments.

Another 555 projects were simply waved through without any requirement at all for a detailed look at their environmental impact.

Collectively, these polluting projects will continue to pump millions of tonnes of harmful carbon pollution into our atmosphere every year, threatening nature and us.

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The Black Summer bushfires, turbocharged by climate change, are a striking example of how climate change is devastating our life support system.

Millions of hectares of bushland were incinerated in fires fuelled by the warming climate, resulting in more than three billion vertebrate animals - birds, reptiles and mammals - and 60 billion invertebrates killed or displaced.

Our Great Barrier Reef has endured four mass coral bleaching events over seven years due to intensifying marine heatwaves fuelled by Australia's immense fossil fuel exports.

Yet projects that will continue to cook our oceans are still going ahead, with the Australian government's blessing.

This pattern is clear across Australia: extreme weather exacerbated by climate change batters ecosystems already made fragile by habitat loss and other threats.

Our iconic landscapes are deteriorating, and our national environment law does not directly address the primary culprit.

The federal government has acknowledged flaws in the EPBC Act and has proposed reforms.

But these reforms are languishing on the government's to-do list.

The government seems to have two speeds - a go-slow for fixing our most important environment law and full-steam-ahead for fossil fuel approvals.

Maintaining a safe climate must be central to a strengthened law that rejects high polluting new projects, and accelerates responsible renewable energy developments.

We need a national environment law that explicitly requires decision-makers to consider climate impacts, using science-based carbon budgets.

A law that takes account of the full lifetime emissions of proposed projects - including both domestic and international emissions.

Coal and gas are harmful, wherever they're burned in the world.

We need a national environment law that rejects the use of flawed offsets and unproven technologies like carbon capture and storage as a basis for allowing polluting projects to proceed.

And we need a law that can distinguish between projects that will help us tackle climate change - like renewable wind and solar - and those that will cause more harm.

The window to protect our incredible flora and fauna - and our amazing outdoor way of life - is rapidly closing.

The Albanese government claims Australia has gone from a laggard to a leader in climate action.

Now is the time to prove it.