Long Oral Presentation 11th Australian Stream Management Conference 2024

Natural Capital Plan: Quantifying the multiple benefits of Natural Resource Management (#97)

Nick Marsh 1 , Robin Ellis 1 , David Waters 1 , Lindsay Bradford 1 , Thomas Maalem 1 , Tory Grice 1
  1. Truii.com, West End, Qld, Australia
  • Natural Resource Management on-ground actions typically have multiple outcomes across water quality, biodiversity, social, First Nations, economic, land resilience and climate change. However, we could not find examples where all of these outcomes are quantified to allow the stacked benefits to be considered in investment portfolio planning.

 

  • We created the Natural Capital Plan application which is applied at a regional level to develop portfolios of the most cost effective on-ground actions by quantifying the combined benefits of each potential on-ground action. Natural Capital Plan quantifies the outcomes of potential on-ground actions for 20 indicators. Users define the investment outcome priorities across these indicators for each portfolio scenario. We have implemented the approach across six Natural Resource Management regions.

 

  • We have learned that a Natural Resource Management region scale delivery approach allows high quality local data to be used, compared to state or national delivery scales. We also found that the range of potential on-ground actions across regions is finite. We have developed ~80 alternative on-ground actions. Most actions are shared by at least three regions. The collation of the science to represent the effectiveness of actions creates a knowledge resource that can be shared between Natural Resource Management regions.

 

  • The approach matters because the current practice is to conduct new prioritisation studies for every investment opportunity. The Natural Capital Plan allows the same finite range of potential on-ground actions to be prioritised according to each new investment focus. This provides a consistent and repeatable process for quantifying and comparing investment programs.
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