Dryland salinity is one of the most prominent and intractable problems facing farm managers in the extensive non-irrigated farming systems of southern Australia. The issue was ignored by policy makers until late in the twentieth century, but is now the sole or partial subject of government...

Environmental policy evaluation is characterised by a paucity of information. Bounded sets may be more appropriate for representing this ambiguity than traditional probability distributions. A formal calibration method for regional policy models, positive mathematical programming, is thus...

A number of Australian governments have established or planned programs to assist farmers in adapting to climate change. This paper considers a potential range of policy responses that may be appropriate for climate change adaptation in agriculture. It discusses the extent to which different...

The removal, alteration and fragmentation of habitat are key threats to the biodiversity of terrestrial ecosystems. Investment to protect biodiversity assets (e.g. restoration of native vegetation) in dominantly agricultural landscapes usually results in a loss of agricultural production. This...

INFFER (Investment Framework for Environmental Resources) was developed to help investors of public funds to improve the delivery of outcomes from environmental programs. It assists environmental managers to design projects, to select delivery mechanisms, and to rank competing projects on the...

Paying private landholders for environmental services, rather than input-based payments, has been proposed as a way to improve the performance of contracts for conservation agencies. A challenge is that the assessment of environmental services is subjective, raising the question of how...

Weeds can cause significant problems to natural ecosystems. Although there have been numerous studies on the economics of weed control, relatively few of these studies have focused on natural ecosystems. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by assessing the cost-effectiveness of a...

Investment in natural resource management (NRM) by regional organisations in Australia has been widely criticised for failing to achieve substantial environmental outcomes. The Investment Framework for Environmental Resources (INFFER) is a tool for developing and prioritising projects to address...

Perceptions are known to play an important role in the innovation adoption decision. Once influential perceptions have been identified, there is the potential for information to influence adoption by changing these perceptions. In this paper, the influence of an extension workshop targeting...

Dryland salinity, as an externality, has an impact on various public assets, including roads, biodiversity and public water supplies. This has been seen as an important justification for government to take action and internalise the pollution. Economic policy instruments have been identified as...