TEN years after researchers recognised the need for an alternative to conventional environment management strategies, a University of Western Australia research project has finally hit the jackpot, scoring top honours at this year’s Australian Museum Eureka awards ceremony in Sydney.

Professor David Pannell and Research Assistant Professor Sally Marsh from UWA’s Centre for Environmental Economics and Policy have been awarded the prestigious Eureka Prize for Excellence in Research by an Interdisciplinary Team for their Investment Framework for Environment Resources (INFFER) project, designed to help government and managers make sound decisions regarding investment in threatened environmental assets.

The Investment Framework for Environment Resources team accepting their Eureka Award / Image: Courtesy Professor David Pannell

Already trialled by 19 of Australia’s 56 regional environmental bodies, the system seeks to develop and prioritise projects to address environmental issues such as water quality, biodiversity, environmental pests, and land degradation, aiming to achieve the best outcomes with available resources.
 
Professor Pannell and the team of researchers from UWA, and Victoria's Department of Primary Industries and North Central Catchment Management Authority were in Sydney to accept the award.

The Australian Museum Eureka Prizes are the nation’s most comprehensive science awards and the biggest national reward scheme for research into environmental sustainability issues.

Professor Pannell described the win as “terrific recognition” of a decade’s worth of work which ultimately sets out to offer an alternative to other environmental management processes.

“There has always been a very high emphasis placed on community involvement as part of the environmental management process and we believe that emphasis has come at the expense of other factors which are equally important such as decisions on technical feasibility for example,” he said.

“Our project really implies the need for a substantial change in that mindset and that has been a challenge for us from day one.

“We are used to running into a quagmire of resistance of one sort or another.

“The Eureka award acknowledges the quality of our work and will be a very valuable tool in getting INFFER considered as a very real and integral part of the environmental decision-making process.

“And it will help provide that degree of credibility to people who perhaps in the past may not have been so easily won over.”

INFFER has been touted as the next generation in environmental management processes, with an emphasis on ease of use and the ability to integrate all the relevant information required to make project-related decisions.

“We have worked very closely with many end-users over a long period of time to ensure the development of a system that is comprehensive in its requirements for information yet  simple to use,” Prof Pannell said.

“The aim is that INFFER is accessible to users who are not specialists in sophisticated decision analysis or modeling and getting to that point has involved a long process of discovery.

“We went back to the drawing board a number of times. We certainly learned the hard way about the crucial role of simplicity in the development of process management tools.”

According to Professor Pannell, INFFER is intended for projects that have a clear focus on protecting or enhancing specific natural resource assets.

Through a very structured and guided process, users collect and integrate information including specific and measurable goals, on-ground actions or management changes necessary to achieve those goals, costs and risk factors.

The information is then entered into a framework that guides the selection of policy mechanisms and the calculation of a ‘cost-effectiveness index’ to assist the comparison of alternative projects.

INFFER is currently in use on a number of environmental assets of national importance, including the Gippsland Lakes in Victoria and the Hamersley Ranges in WA.

Comments (1)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

...
written by Bernie Masters, January 11, 2010

NFFER is claimed to be a process that allows the best projects to be clearly defined so that the highest value NRM assets are targeted by the limited available resources. In fact, the process has the following serious flaws:

1. It places a very high importance and priority on the community's perceived value of NRM assets, possible projects and management options. This is highly dangerous as poorly informed community attitudes can easily lead to perverse or inappropriate NRM priorities being set. Unless science is given absolute top billing in the way in which we understand and rank our NRM assets, with community beliefs and attitudes on NRM priorities being sought only after consultation and effective information dissemination has been successfully concluded, then a well intentioned but poorly informed community is likely to assess NRM assets and values in inappropriate ways. For example, back in the 1980s, the hype was all about planting jojoba trees as a way of making money from their oil while planting a deep-rooted perennial tree would help combat dryland salinity. Today, jojoba oil is a particularly valuable product and farmers are unlikely to have made money from the scheme, but INFFER may well have found that jojoba tree plantings was the highest priority action because, at that time, non-scientific community opinion favoured them.

2. INFFER limits the number of NRM assets being assessed to between 6 and 8 because (it is claimed) it's just too big a task to use the process to fully evaluate all NRM assets within a region or catchment using INFFER. This is far too restrictive, however, within a region as diverse as the Geographe Bay or Peel/Harvey catchments (let alone within the huge South West Catchments Council area) where at least 15 to 20 or more assets need to be clearly defined and assessed to properly allow the land managers to fully understand the value of NRM assets in the region being studied and hence to understand how best to prioritise them.

3. INFFER deliberately removes from the NRM assessment process those assets that are considered to be too expensive to fund or too time consuming to work on or too difficult to effectively protect. But it is important that all highly rated projects are left within the INFFER assessment process so that even the most difficult or costly projects can be given long term goals which people can keep in mind in the hope that, when the right opportunity presents itself or the right political attitudes prevail, then something can be done about them. To delete them from the asset list simply because they're too hard to work on at present is self defeating, highly restricting and far from scientific (but maybe that's what you might expect from a group of economists who are not as interested in people and their communities as NRM experts who actually live in degraded catchments). As an example, if the problems of camels in our inland areas was assessed a year ago by INFFER, it would have been dropped off the list of possible action areas because too much money was required. But then, with a change of federal government and a desire to have an iconic project with strong indigenous involvement, suddenly the needed $19 million is made available. This couldn't have happened if INFFER had been properly applied.

• 
• -1
• 
• 

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment Preview