The focus of this paper is to compare different evaluation frameworks for selecting landholder proposals to improve water quality. The case study is a water quality tender performed in the Burdekin region in Northern Australia in 2007/2008 where bids could be assessed using an inputs-based best...

evaluate appropriate management responses. While some deliberately introduced species contribute significantly to agricultural production and other purposes, many invasive weed and animal pests have the potential to generate substantial costs through impacts on agricultural production,...

Australian governments continue to commit significant resources to the protection of the Great Barrier Reef, with funding for Reef Rescue aimed at reducing the impacts of agricultural production on water quality. A key challenge for policy makers is to identify where funding can be efficiently...

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...

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 are some...

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...

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...