It’s part of the knowledge economy. We need to know how people and the environment are interacting on a range of scales. Colleagues and I have recently been gobsmacked that state governments do not have ready to wear summaries of recent economic performance across all sectors and actvities. They do not have population, land-use etc baselines and projections in common format. Pick a fast growing region of Australia, figure out what services (transport, hospitals, schools, water, energy) they will need for 2020, map the energy demand of that growth and realise it can derail energy and environment policy bigtime. Can our ecosystems survive the double whammy of land-use and climate change?

All of this data is somewhere but it is not in a form that can be used for strategic foresighting. Any ecological planning done outside of such a framework will always be second best.

The three tiers of government need to work together to ensure that information is scaleable up and down from local government to national level. Local government does not have the resources to do this on its own and needs the resources of higher levels of government.

This shows that too much of current decision-making (to list these would be a career-limiting move on my part, so make your own list) is seat of the pants stuff and shows that the evidence base required in decision-making is lacking.

I agree that the environment/sustainability thread in the summit was a little disappointing, but am waiting to discuss with those who went whether the big ideas came up in discussion. Most of the big ticket items are actually cross-cutting between the themes of the summit. For example, root and branch investigation of the tax system needs to examine the transition to a carbon neutral economy. All tax and regulations with perverse incentives need to be rooted out asap.

Australian science is good at ecology, but the frame in which it has to work needs urgent examination

Yet again for eg the Auditor-General noted the dissatisfaction of not being able to confidently measure the outcomes of the now several billion dollars of invesment into NRM via the Natural Heritage Trust - now rebranded and moved back 3 steps by Garret the Git as ‘Caring for Our Country’.

The reason we can’t satisfactorily measure outcomes is there is a terrible lack of clear baseline information, and no cohesiveness to what little long-term environmental monitoring is done in this country. Professer David Lindenmayer of ANU, has noted that Australia has less long-term environmental monitoring sites that such paragons as Nigeria - from memory from a recent conference keynote I heard him give. Come to think of it was he at 2020? As an identified leading innovater in environmental conservation and thinking, he should have been.

Until Australia invests significantly, nation-wide and consistently in core environmental monitoring, we’ll always struggle to say what progress we’re making. The other elephant in the room is until Australia stops keeping its trade/export primary production, land development and environmental ’sustainability’ streams of investment and thinking separate, we’ll keep throwing money after more money to ‘fix’ our environment because our economic practices entrench and give primacy to practices that the investment in better environmental management cannot possibly overcome without practice change.

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good luck, professor possum

We do have a five yearly State of the Environment Report. But who reads that outside a very small circle? No one, that’s who, and that’s because few people are actually interested.

That’s why I’m suggesting we use the star power, such as it is, of the Prime Ministership to highlight the very, very short version.

NRM is data rich, but information poor. Weeding out the relevant stuff is a not at all easy task.

“credible, popular and independent national environmental accounts/metrics”

credible - well yeah sure, that’s nice, but so often the data is just a guesstimate, and always will be.

popular - hmmm, does that mean of no use to practitioners? Extinctions would be a popular measure. Except there’s a 30 year lag between last sighting int he wild and declaring extinction.

independent - that wont happen, the relevant experts (and there aren’t that many of them) are all locked up in the relevant state agencies already (which is sensible and logical).

We do have a five yearly State of the Environment Report. But who reads that outside a very small circle? No one, that’s who, and that’s because few people are actually interested.