Project 2.2
Development of an Ecosystems Services Strategy for Australia

The need for an Australian ecosystems services strategy

Until recently the vital importance of Australia’s ecosystem services was not well understood or valued. As a result, they have been neglected and over-exploited, with the focus on production - livestock, crop yields, timber, water for consumptive uses. This has created major local, regional and global problems - rising salinity in rivers, rapid expansion of saline soils, increasing areas of acid soils, algal blooms in waterways, loss of biodiversity, rising CO2 levels and associated climate change.

National population growth, continued rural decline, climate change and increasing global demand for food and other resources are combining to place further pressures on the resilience and viability of many of our critical ecosystems.

We now need to move quickly to integrate ecosystems services into our economic, environmental and social objectives and include this understanding in Australian natural resource management policies and programs. Such a framework needs to include:

Knowledge about the state of critical ecosystems: indicators of the status and trends of ecosystems, habitats and species.

Sustainable use: integrated analysis of the key drivers of ecosystem change such as urbanisation, agriculture and forestry.

Knowledge about threats: tools to analyse challenges from socio-economic change, including scenarios of possible futures.

Policy analysis: how environment and socio-economic policies can together deliver necessary change.

Economic value of ecosystem: estimates of the economic and social value of biodiversity and ecosystems, including the costs of inaction.

Implementation of the framework needs to happen urgently to avoid piecemeal and potentially costly or high risk actions at a national or regional level. For example, it is not at all clear whether the current Federal spending proposals to address the problems of the Murray Darling Basin are optimal in terms of costs and risks from an economic and environmental perspective. Nor is there any rigorous framework for evaluating the economic and environmental benefits and risks of a major northward shift in food and fibre production in Australia.

There is currently no agreed implementation strategy for establishing and resourcing an integrated national ecosystem services framework across Australia. Valuable work is being undertaken across Federal and State agencies in this area but the primary focus is on natural resource management with fragmented and piecemeal data and assessment techniques. This reflects data limitations, a lack of agreement on conceptual issues and concerns about roles and responsibilities and the potential costs of implementation.