LitFuse

Professor David Pannell, a Federation Fellow from the University of Western Australia, recently gave an impressive presentation at the Living Laboratories Workshop on “Integrated landscape science and management forum“, supported by ICE WaRM and DWLBC.

He described a simple tool for helping regional decision makers in Australia decide on where to focus their investment to get the greatest benefit per dollar invested. He has designed the tool to help regional councils to trade off the hard nosed decisions needed to get good environmental outcomes (in Australia, we call it “natural resource management outcomes”) and the expectations of the local community. It is a formal, structured way to understand the integrated outcomes of investments.

The framework he uses is called the Salinity Investment Framework, which is based on the understanding of a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, but which uses a simple, paper-based tool to decide on priorities. The decision framework develops practical and economically feasible options that trades-off private benefit and public benefit from any particular investment. It provides advice on what action regional decision makers could take to get the best outcomes from their investment using simple rules-of-thumb based on integrated scientific analysis.

When applied with a regional authority in Victoria, Australia, the investors in that region were able significantly increase the focus of their investment, which was now based on an integrated understanding of the likely impact and benefits of the investment for the environment, the local economy and social outcomes. The authority decided to reduce the number of projects and increase their scale, which should deliver significant improvements in investment outcomes.

David proposed four essential elements for deciding where to invest in environmental management and restoration, without which, the investment outcomes will be no different than investing randomly:

1. Relative value of environmental assets

2. Threat and impact and level of urgency

3. Technical feasibility of reducing impact

4. Adoptability ofdesign practices

There was the usual call that all scientists always repeat which is to shift policy in “natural resource management” in Australia to be focussed on measuring outcomes rather than inputs (with real data and analysis, not just “performance stories” as a proxy).

David Pannell’s website

Written by Paul Dalby, 23 March 2008