Research Papers
I’ve always been interested in how we value nature at scale.
My academic work has been a journey of exploring how farmers relate to their land and how market mechanisms, like carbon credits, can be used as a force for good.
These papers represent nearly two decades of inquiry into the science and social dynamics of landscape restoration.
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Carbon farming programs typically aim to maximise landholder participation rates to achieve desired environmental outcomes. This is critical for programs aiming to tackle both climate change and biodiversity loss simultaneously, as landholder participation in those schemes directly determines the level of carbon sequestered and the potential biodiversity gains. Biodiverse carbon planting is a key private land conservation practice that needs active stakeholder involvement to deliver successful policy design and implementation.
In this study we developed a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) of landholder participation in biodiverse carbon planting schemes to determine factors most likely to influence program participation. An initial conceptual model was developed based on a review of the literature. The model was refined through interviews with participating landholders and other key stakeholders and, finally, parameterised using expert-elicited information.
Our results indicate that participation rates are most influenced by program attractiveness and the identified values of co-benefits (such as biodiversity conservation) rather than financial incentives. Scenario evaluation revealed that providing a combination of biodiversity incentives with more flexible permanence options could increase the program adoption rate. Stacking or bundling credits combined with contract agreements is also likely to increase the participation rate. These findings can assist policy development by focusing on the aspects of policy design most likely to increase participation.
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Poverty, hunger and demand for agricultural land have driven local communities to overexploit forest resources throughout Ethiopia. Forests surrounding the township of Humbo were largely destroyed by the late 1960s. In 2004, World Vision Australia and World Vision Ethiopia identified forestry-based carbon sequestration as a potential means to stimulate community development while engaging in environmental restoration. After two years of consultation, planning and negotiations, the Humbo Community-based Natural Regeneration Project began implementation—the Ethiopian organization’s first carbon sequestration initiative.
The Humbo Project assists communities affected by environmental degradation including loss of biodiversity, soil erosion and flooding with an opportunity to benefit from carbon markets while reducing poverty and restoring the local agroecosystem. Involving the regeneration of 2,728 ha of degraded native forests, it brings social, economic and ecological benefits—facilitating adaptation to a changing climate and generating temporary certified emissions reductions (tCERs) under the Clean Development Mechanism. A key feature of the project has been facilitating communities to embrace new techniques and take responsibility for large-scale environmental change, most importantly involving Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). This technique is low-cost, replicable, and provides direct benefits within a short time.
Communities were able to harvest fodder and firewood within a year of project initiation and wild fruits and other non-timber forest products within three years. Farmers are using agroforestry for both environmental restoration and income generation. Establishment of user rights and local cooperatives has generated community ownership and enthusiasm for this project—empowering the community to more sustainably manage their communal lands.
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This two-part paper considers the complementarity between adaptation and mitigation in managing the risks associated with the enhanced greenhouse effect. Part one reviews the application of risk management methods to climate change assessments. Formal investigations of the enhanced greenhouse effect have produced three generations of risk assessment. The first led to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), First Assessment Report and subsequent drafting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The second investigated the impacts of unmitigated climate change in the Second and Third IPCC Assessment Reports. The third generation, currently underway, is investigating how risk management options can be prioritised and implemented.
Mitigation and adaptation have two main areas of complementarity. Firstly, they each manage different components of future climate-related risk. Mitigation reduces the number and magnitude of potential climate hazards, reducing the most severe changes first. Adaptation increases the ability to cope with climate hazards by reducing system sensitivity or by reducing the consequent level of harm. Secondly, they manage risks at different extremes of the potential range of future climate change. Adaptation works best with changes of lesser magnitude at the lower end of the potential range. Where there is sufficient adaptive capacity, adaptation improves the ability of a system to cope with increasingly larger changes over time. By moving from uncontrolled emissions towards stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mitigation limits the upper part of the range.
Different activities have various blends of adaptive and mitigative capacity. In some cases, high sensitivity and low adaptive capacity may lead to large residual climate risks; in other cases, a large adaptive capacity may mean that residual risks are small or non-existent. Mitigative and adaptive capacity do not share the same scale: adaptive capacity is expressed locally, whereas mitigative capacity is different for each activity and location but needs to be aggregated at the global scale to properly assess its potential benefits in reducing climate hazards. This can be seen as a demand for mitigation, which can be exercised at the local scale through exercising mitigative capacity.
Part two of the paper deals with the situation where regional bodies aim to maximise the benefits of managing climate risks by integrating adaptation and mitigation measures at their various scales of operation. In north central Victoria, Australia, adaptation and mitigation are being jointly managed by a greenhouse consortium and a catchment management authority. Several related studies investigating large-scale revegetation are used to show how climate change impacts and sequestration measures affect soil, salt and carbon fluxes in the landscape.
These studies show that trade-offs between these interactions will have to be carefully managed to maximise their relative benefits. The paper concludes that when managing climate change risks, there are many instances where adaptation and mitigation can be integrated at the operational level. However, significant gaps between our understanding of the benefits of adaptation and mitigation between local and global scales remain. Some of these may be addressed by matching demands for mitigation (for activities and locations where adaptive capacity will be exceeded) with the ability to supply that demand through localised mitigative capacity by means of globally integrated mechanisms.
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Approximately 75% of the Victorian Box-Ironbark ecosystem has been cleared since European settlement. There are few public land areas of high habitat quality, and significant Box-Ironbark remnant vegetation (BIR) is known to exist on private land. A landholder mail survey collected information about BIR to ascertain its size, use and habitat quality. Ground-truthing validated the landholder assessment of habitat quality. Livestock grazing had impacted 50% of BIR, and approximately 20–50% was of moderate to high quality. Fifty-four percent of BIR were less than 15 ha. Remnant size had the largest impact on quality, with larger remnants being of higher quality.
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Box-Ironbark is a generic term for woodland or forest ecosystems dominated by Box or Ironbark eucalypts, once common across the inland slopes of the Great Dividing Range. Since European settlement, an estimated 75% of the original 10,000 $km^2$ of Box-Ironbark forest and woodland in Victoria has been cleared for mining, grazing, and agriculture. The remaining vegetation is highly fragmented, with significant remnants existing on private land ($<40,000$ ha).
These remnants play a vital role in biodiversity and salinity management, yet they are increasingly threatened by commercial activities. While programs like Land for Wildlife and Trust for Nature assist with private land conservation, improved management requires active landholder cooperation. Understanding landholder perceptions of the nature and value of these remnants is essential to establishing effective partnerships.
This Research Report, funded through the National Remnant Vegetation R&D Program, presents findings from a mail survey examining the socio-economic influences and landholder perceptions affecting the management of remnant vegetation on private land in Victoria.
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Forest cover has been reduced from 10 to 5% of the area of the Australian continent, with woodlands ecosystems reduced from 23% to 15% of their cover prior to European settlement. Clearing has been accompanied by a dramatic loss of biodiversity. Protected areas on public land cover only 6.5% of Australia and are fragmented and do not represent pre-European ecosystems adequately. Research reported in this paper investigated the quality and extent of Box-Ironbark woodland ecosystem remnants (BIR) on private land, how landholders valued their BIR, and their plans to manage BIR, particularly in regards to clearing.
Most landholders managed BIR and indicated a strong utilitarian value to them. The habitat and wildlife values of BIR were also highly regarded. A large majority of landholders indicated they would not clear BIR. These and other results provide important information for those attempting to improve the conservation of biodiversity on private land in Australia.