Catchment Stewardship in Victoria – Building on the legacy (#44)
Adam Hood
1
,
Jess Horton
1
,
Luke Murphy
1
,
Shayne Annett
2
,
Steph Drum
2
,
Brooke Hermans
2
,
Dan Garlick
3
,
Deb Archer
3
- Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action, East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- RM Consulting Group, Camberwell, Victoria, Australia
- West Gippsland Catchment Management Authority, Traralgon, Victoria, Australia
- Victorian Catchment Management Authorities have been coordinating the delivery of Integrated Catchment Management in Victoria for more than 25 years. The recent evolution of the Our Catchments Our Communities policy and program seeks to build on that legacy for better stewardship of our catchments. This recent reinvigoration and focus on stewardship meant we needed to know more about what the current theory and practice of Catchment Stewardship is. We needed to collectively agree and explain why we need it, how it is delivered, and what success looks like. This paper charts the process and progress to agreeing the currency of catchment stewardship to date.
- The project to create a current framing of catchment stewardship involved hundreds of people with four years of reflections, peer learning and exchange. This paper will describe more recent focused effort engaging thought leaders and practitioners including project managers in Catchment Management Authorities, Traditional Owner representatives, academics and policy and program leadsto create a current framework of catchment stewardship. The framework defines catchment stewardship, its principles and outcomes and provides on-ground case studies demonstrating how it is being achieved across Victoria.
- Although the term catchment stewardship is often discussed in papers, policies and project design, the way it was defined varied, and existing definitions did not align with on-ground practices. We found thatcatchment stewardship involves both individual and collective efforts in managing catchments to create intergenerational benefits for the environment, people, and place. It focuses on:
- Active management of natural resources to build resilience or protect or enhance their condition.
- Supporting Traditional Owners and Aboriginal people to heal and care for Country.
- The condition of Victoria's catchments has declined since European settlement with most indicators remaining in moderate to poor condition and neutral or concerning trends over time. This is a direct result of two hundred years of development; land clearing; increased invasive pests; changed land use and management; poor farming practices including drainage alteration, stock and effluent management, fertiliser application, crop tilling and harvesting practices. These threats continue to impact on catchment condition.
- Victoria’s response is to strengthen catchment stewardship because it recognises that people and places are connected. Successful examples of the implementation of catchment stewardship in Victoria, provide an integrative approachthat enriches and sustains relationships between people and the environment in which they live, work, and recreate.
- Bennett, N. J,. Whitty, T. S., Finkbeiner, E., Pittman, J., Bassett, H., Gelcich, S., and Allison, E. H. (2018). Environmental Stewardship: A conceptual review and analytical framework. Environmental Management, 61(4), 597-614.
- Bieling, C., and Plieninger, T. (2017). Leveraging landscape stewardship: Principles and ways forward. In C. Bieling and T. Plieninger (Eds), The Science and Practice of Landscape Stewardship (pp. 366-377). Cambridge University Press.
- Roberts, B. (1992). Land care manual. Sydney: New South Wales University Press.
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