Shortfalls in water supplies are perhaps the greatest practical NRM policy concern in Australia today, looming larger in many minds than the great international debates on greenhouse gasses, climate change and biodiversity. Because forest land cover uses more water than any other, wide expansion...

Making conservation program payments conditional on outcomes offers potential efficiency and innovation improvements over input based contracts. This paper explores the trade-offs involved in choosing the payment criteria for biodiversity tenders. A model where the budget for a conservation...

In the last decade, the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB), Australia faced a severe drought which affected its agriculture production. Sustainable diversion limits as proposed in the Australian Government's basin plan together with climate change are expected to impact on future agriculture...

Auctions, or competitive tenders, can overcome information asymmetries to efficiently allocate limited funding for ecosystem services. Most auctions focus on ecosystem services on individual properties to maximise the total amount provided. However, for many services it is not just the total...

Ensuring the continued viability of rural and regional communities in Australia has become a high priority politically. Economic and environmental forces are perceived as threats to viability. Declining terms of trade for agricultural commodities along with decreased relative prices for...

The Fitzroy basin in central Queensland is the largest basin in the Great Barrier Reef catchment area. The large quantities of sediment and nutrient export are of concern and come predominantly from diffuse sources in the grazing industry. The focus of the research reported in this paper was on...

In this paper, we describe how real option techniques and resilience thinking can be integrated to better understand and inform decision-making around environmental risks within complex systems. Resilience thinking offers a promising framework for framing environmental risks posed through the...

In recent times, use of market-based instruments to facilitate enhanced protection or production of ecosystem services has achieved a high public profile. However, much work remains to apply these tools in practice. Particular issues include definition and measurement of ecosystem services,...