Geoff McDonald

Regional Natural Resource Management: Is It Sustainable

In an effort to achieve sustainable Natural Resource Management (NRM), the Commonwealth and State governments have moved to a regional focus for their major funding programs. This approach was driven by the belief that previous arrangements had been unable to achieve the required amount of change at the appropriate landscape scale and that state and national priorities were not being addressed. The authors, with a background in regional and national NRM and Landcare across the three Eastern States, have used their experience and knowledge of recent literature in this area, to evaluate the regional approach to NRM. As part of our evaluation we review the assumptions behind the move to the regional model and explore its strengths and weakness. Some of the key strengths of the approach are that it facilitates landscape-scale management, enhances integration across agencies and governments, and builds partnerships and enhances the capacity of participants. A key weakness is that there continues to be a focus on outputs rather than outcomes and this hinders our learning about how to improve NRM. Other weaknesses are poorly developed methodologies to underpin integration at the regional scale, the high transaction costs involved in operating across the federal structure, insufficient autonomy for regional groups, and a lack of forward funding commitments.

The assets, threats and solvability (ATS) model for setting environmental priorities

Abstract Environmental and natural resource management agencies routinely encounter the task of setting priorities. Limited time, staff and financial resources result in some projects, programmes or issues being given greater attention than others. In multi-stakeholder and multi-objective settings the decision-making process is complex. The task is often made harder by incomplete or inaccurate datasets. Decision makers will aim to adopt a procedure that is analytically robust, auditable, transparent and understandable. This paper presents the assets, threats and solvability (ATS) model for structuring an environmental priority-setting problem. A brief illustration of its use for setting priorities in the Wet Tropics of North Queensland is given. The ATS model provides a structured decision procedure applicable with limited information in a multi-objective policy environment. It helps guide the selection and application of priority-setting criteria under these conditions.

Ecologically sustainable development and the better cities program

As part of the appraisal of the Building Better Cities Program, the Commonwealth conducted a multipurpose and retrospective evaluation of the 26 project program, including its contribution to the achievement of Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD). The program included projects as diverse as urban consolidation, public transport, waste treatment, housing and inner urban redevelopment. This article reports the results of that evaluation. The article defines substantive and decision-making process criteria for ESD evaluation, based largely on the National Strategy for ESD, and applies them to each of the projects. Some of the projects contribute directly to ESD objectives for example to achieve energy use efficiency through encouraging public transport and increasing urban densities or to reduce environmental pollution by better waste management. No project was judged to be negative in an ESD sense although for many of the projects the links between expected project outcomes and ESD are much more tenuous, such as “improving the quality of life”, “improving urban amenity” or enhancing the “sense of community”. All projects made a commitment to improved integration between planning agencies involved in urban management and to involving the community which are important ESD objectives.

An integrated decision support framework for ecosystem management at the local scale

Ecosystem and landscape management presents a complex array of problems for decision-makers at all levels of government. Land-use planners and natural-resource managers are faced with the dual complexity of incorporating existing policy and planning constraints with scientific understanding about ecosystem and landscape processes, into the decision-making process. This requires enhanced decision-making frameworks, improved access to scientific knowledge, and an ability to apply this knowledge effectively across multiple spatial scales. This paper outlines an integrated decision-support framework and, as part of this framework, describes a decision-making tool (ECO-DECISION) for ecosystem management at the local scale in Queensland, Australia. ECO-DECISION integrates scientific understanding of ecosystems and sustainable landscape management with existing legislative and policy arrangements for native vegetation management. In Queensland, loss and fragmentation of habitat caused by land clearing poses the greatest threat to biodiversity and resource sustainability. ECO-DECISION provides support for the management of native ecosystems on individual, predominately rural properties (hectares), as well as their distribution in larger landscapes (100s-1000s hectares). It works by assigning vegetation-clearing controls to native ecosystems based on rules derived from both existing policy codes and landscape ecological theory. It links property-scale decisions with outcomes over entire landscapes, and evaluates these decisions according to landscape ecological indicators such as patch size and total area. ECO-DECISION demonstrates that spatial decision support tools are an effective means for incorporating scientific research into landscape management and planning.