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...

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...

There has been growing interest in the use of market-like instruments to achieve cost effective environmental outcomes, and a range of new tools are being explored. While competitive processes such as BushTender have been successfully designed to establish conservation contracts on private land,...

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...

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...

Conservation auctions such as the Conservation Reserve Program in the United States and the BushTender Program in Australia have been used to identify landholders who can provide on-farm conservation and biodiversity protection actions at lowest cost. These conservation auctions are typically...

The main objective of the study outlined in this paper was to examine how the inclusion ofan additional labelled alternative, to provide respondents with more choice in a statedpreference survey, impacted on choice complexity. The valuation context was to elicitpreferences for improvements in...