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...

Key policy issues relating to protection of the Great Barrier Reef from pollutants generated by agriculture are to identify when measures to improve water quality generate benefits to society that outweigh the costs of reducing pollutants. The research reported in this paper makes a key...

Option values may be an important component of non-use values when development options for environmental assets are considered. These are values that the community might hold for maintaining options to make future choices about allocating resources. However, option values are very difficult to...

Policy makers are often interested in transferring non-market estimates of environmental values from a ‘source’ study to predict economic values at a ‘target’ site. While most applications of the benefit transfer process involve an opportunistic search for suitable source studies, there...

Growers in the sugarcane industry have been struggling under financial pressure for several years. One option to improve farm viability might be to diversify farm enterprise income. Choice Modelling, an economic valuation technique, was used to explore the trade-offs growers make between...

Metrics for evaluating environmental trade-offs can be developed with varying levels of consistency across case study sites. A key issue is whether standard evaluation experiments can be conducted over multiple sites, or whether experiments have to be tailored to each case study application. To...

The focus of this report is to report choice modelling experiments that have tested the consistency of values across differently scoped dimensions of an environmental asset. The case study involved the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia, where a key policy question is to identify if...

This report compares evaluation frameworks for selecting landholder proposals to improve water quality. A water quality tender performed in the Burdekin region in Northern Australia in 2007/2008 was used as a case study. Tender bids can be assessed using an inputs-based best management practice...

A number of studies have examined the effects of distance decay and the influence it might have on both use and non-use values. However, the relationship between environmental values and distance effects is less clear cut when iconic or special assets are involved. In this report, the effects of...

Invasive species create particular challenges for policy makers .Some deliberately introduced species contribute significantly to agricultural production and other purposes. However, many invasive weed and animal pests generate substantial costs through impacts on agricultural production,...