The design of competitive tenders to purchase environmental services requires judgements to be made about the funding scale and tender scope, with the latter incorporating considerations of geographic area, industries involved and the types of environmental outputs required. Increasing the scale...

Participation is a relative concept. Too much implies high costs of administration and many losers in a competitive process. Too little implies relatively few gains from trade are accessed. Thus the aim is to optimise rather than maximise participation. In this paper we outline some rules of...

Irrigation underpins approximately one-third of the value of Queensland's agricultural production. There have been calls for further development of water infrastructure in northern Queensland to enhance the production of sugar cane, horticulture, aquaculture and other crops. One of the steps in...

The Desert Uplands is a biogeographic region in central-western Queensland that lies within the rangelands area of Australia. In the region, many pastoralists are clearing the scrub and woodland vegetation in order to improve production for cattle grazing. Only limited production gains are...

The Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) and other carbon trading programs have been promoted as alternative sources of income for agricultural producers, particularly those on marginal land. This paper presents the results of a bioeconomic model developed to compare the relative returns from a beef...

Methane is a greenhouse gas that is emitted mainly by livestock, and accounts for about 14% of national greenhouse gas emissions. If Australia is to meet the Kyoto targets, then greater attention is likely to be focused on ways that methane emissions can be reduced. The three main options to...

Assessing the value of ecosystem services in a particular area helps provide information about the economic benefits these services provide to the community. In many situations, to avoid the full cost of primary data collection, value estimates may be applied from secondary sources in a process...

Evaluating land use change in economic frameworks often requires non-market values to be assessed. However non-market valuation experiments can be sensitive to the way the trade offs are framed. The aim of the research reported in this paper was to examine the influence of varying the valuation...

Two choice modelling studies in Australia were designed to test for the effects of variations in geographic scale and scope on WTP values. One case study assessed values for improved natural resource management in a river catchment, and the other assessed values for improved protection of the...