Planning Minister Rob Stokes in May announced plans to revisit a failed bid by the government in 2013 to overhaul the state's planning act for the first time in three decades.

In a report to be released on Wednesday, the EDO called on Minister Stokes to make the planning system "part of the solution to avoid dangerous climate change".

"What we need is provisions within our law that our decision makers need to adhere to," Sue Higginson, EDO NSW's principal solicitor, said.

"What is our carbon budget? We need to know how many emissions we can approve [in terms of new projects]," she said. "Otherwise, we are in absolute wilful blindness."

Australia has committed to cutting 2005-level emissions by as much as 28 per cent by 2030. What gets approved by the states in a range of sectors from transport to energy and even land clearing can have carbon pollution impacts lasting decades.

"Contributions to climate change are coming from all directions," Ms Higginson said. "Mitigation is precisely the role of the planning law."

EDO NSW made 14 recommendations ranging from NSW setting a clear goal in cutting emissions to requiring the minister consider potential cumulative impacts of the project.

Miners and other developers should be required to issue a climate impact statement, while building efficiency standards haven't been updated since 2006, the group said.

"At the moment, the best we can expect is that they will do an assessment of what those emissions might be," Ms Higginson said.

"There's no regulation or expectation of regulation of them - it's a pretty low threshold."

Fairfax Media sought comment from Minister Stokes.

Adam Searle, Labor's shadow minister for energy, said his party backed Federal ALP's emissions and renewable energy targets that are more ambitious than those of the Turnbull and Baird Coalition governments.

"The Baird government has pushed renewable energy to the back of the queue, with NSW lagging behind other states," Mr Searle said.

"We are a long way short of the 20 percent renewable energy by 2020 target and they have no road map to get there."

Greens MP and Planning spokesperson David Shoebridge said the Coalition government had gone backwards in NSW, such as its 2012 decision to withdraw sea-level rise benchmarks, allowing coastal councils to adopt their own sea-level rise estimates.

"The core of all planning decisions should be ecologically sustainable development, and the Greens have consistently tried to implement this core objective in NSW law," Mr Shoebridge said, adding his party had moved amendments to the proposed planning laws in 2013 that were rejected by all other parties.

BASIX, which sets sustainability standards for buildings, had the potential to be a major driver for curbing emissions but had not played that role, he said: "Rather than being expanded, it has largely stagnated with most of its targets being achievable through minor design changes or energy efficient appliances".

Jane Fitzgerald, NSW executive director of the Property Council, said her organisation agreed on the need to cut pollution from the built environment, which now contributes almost a quarter of Australia's annual carbon emissions.

Still, the preferred approach was for coordination across all levels of government, with incentives rather than sticks. "It's clearly one of those 'one state can't do it alone' problems," Ms Fitzgerald said.

The mining industry said there was no need for an additional climate impact statement, noting existing requirements to provide a "comprehensive assessment" of a project's greenhouse gas emissions and to report on "the feasibility of measures" to cut them.

"This is already standard practice and included in mining project assessments in NSW," a spokesman for the NSW Minerals Council said.

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