Salinity conference

Risk and investment analysis
Dr Andy Green

Most of you are probably aware that I am a technologist, and started out that way. So you are asking yourselves what the hell am I doing here in this session on risk and analysis. And it's a very good question. It is a combination of things to do with the program and all sorts of things. But it is an opportunity for me to take off that technology hat and put on an economic rationalist hat with respect to the things that we have been doing in much of these geophysical and other types of surveys.

What I am going to go through is something of a cautionary tale for the discussions we are having. I think it applies to the airborne geophysics, but it also applies to many other salinity mapping techniques that we have here. I am not going to go into great detail, but let's just take a sampling of some people who have been looking at this.

I want to quote from an article that Richard George and Peter [Woodgate] wrote some time ago in a geophysics journal:

Airborne geophysics has been developing as a tool for catchment management for at least 15 years. However, today its value is being debated, as the data have largely failed to alter either the current trajectory of salinity, or the plans that have ensued, in any catchment in which it has been used. Why, when we acknowledge that the technology has developed and now provides unparalleled insights into soils, geology, and regolith structure, have we failed to use it successfully ...

This is Richard's interpretation, and of course people will contest 'failed to use' and all those sorts of things. But I think it is not an unrealistic perception in many quarters of what the story is for airborne geophysics and other salinity mapping techniques.

Richard goes on to argue that there is a gulf between collection and interpretation of data, and the application of the interpretations to land management problems. In other words, he says we can collect it, we can interpret it, but there are no people applying it to land management problems.

When I go back and look at the surveys that I have been part of and observed over 10 or 15 years or more, I think that probably in many of them – certainly not all of them, and there are special cases where it is not true – it has not been a gulf, it has been a precipice. We have been standing up there with all this geoscientific information and there has been nothing to leap out to in terms of real, cost effective management options that people want to take up and run away with. At least, that is my looking-back-on-it perception of what might have been happening.

David Pannell has reinforced this impression, when he says:

It is remarkable, the extent to which one hears the view expressed that there must surely be sufficient information out there and all we need to do is make sure it gets to the farmers. In reality the problem is not lack of information, but lack of options. We have enough information about existing options to know that in most cases they are not sufficiently beneficial to individual farmers, even in the long run, to offset their direct and indirect costs.

Again I am not expert in this area, but it is a commonly stated position in this, and other papers have stated it before.

What worries me is that we have got to the situation where we are talking in this forum here about acquiring the data, acquiring the land information, but we are not talking about it in the context of things people are going to do on the ground to manage their salinity. If there are no options out there for them to manage the salinity on their place, why are we collecting those particular data sets? And then, if there are options, why aren't we working back from the salinity management strategy – in other words, what he is going to plant, where he is going to do it, or how he is going to defend an asset – to the data? Somehow, the data seems to have been interspersed in the whole equation here without direct connection to the people that are applying the technologies on the ground. So that is the first point that I want to make.

We made this point to Peter, in a previous review of this thing, that we need to focus back on the final usage in terms of its relationship to the data – the final, on-ground implementation of a management option. But it is extraordinarily difficult to do, because in many of the instances, it seems to me, especially where we are talking about recharge management as opposed to defending assets, that connection has not been made, certainly with a lot of airborne geophysical surveys.

The other thing I wanted to say something about is cost benefit analysis, which is getting even further out of my area of expertise but I know Simon [Veitch] wanted some words said in that particular instance. I think the issue there is really this same issue about options. How can we assess the cost effectiveness of acquiring an airborne EM survey for management of salinity when the options at the end of it, that you are going to apply the salinity management to, are of marginal benefit? Of course the added cost of another geographical data set onto the implementation of a marginal option is always going to give you a poor cost benefit analysis.

So, with regard to many of the issues that are coming up when we are considering cost benefit analysis of an airborne EM survey, of an airborne geophysics survey, of analysing Landsat data, I think it is absolutely impossible to consider them on their own and they have got to be considered in terms of being carried through to final management options. In many of the cases where I have seen these surveys being studied, that connect has been missing. And that makes it very hard for Peter and Brian, when they are compiling a report on the usefulness of these techniques, when there is not an enormous number of these studies available on the direct connections between on-ground management options and the data sets.

Finally, it is instructive, just at a human nature level, to think that on many occasions we have been seduced by our data into wishful thinking. I think in many instances it is hard to believe that these superb data sets of where the conductive groundwater is, what the soils are and so on cannot or will not have a major impact on how you manage the salinity. That was certainly the basis I started out on in these particular exercises: 'Well, it's got to work. It's got to be useful.' But I never saw the connection through to management options on the ground, just for not looking carefully enough. I am not going to go into those things any more until you go into an area and you know there are realistic, cost effective options for action in an area before you start that work, and there is a genuine commitment to these mechanisms for action on the ground, and then those options drive the need for geoscientific information to enable successful action. And, finally, can you get it from somewhere else? So there are those three points.

These points are being flagged in other places and there was good discussion about this in a LEME paper presented at the recent conference in Queensland. But those issues I think are important. They are the overriding ones. They are, in the end, more important than all the issues we have been talking about here in terms of data management and so on: it is the connection of these data sets through to on-ground management options.

I have not said much about cost benefit studies, just because I think I am going to run out of time, but the issue there is always going to be that cost benefit studies are going to end up applying discounted cash flow analyses to systems where you are spending money now on an airborne EM survey or a ground study, for a benefit that might appear 20 years down the track in profitability or in a profit you don't lose. So it is only the geophysical techniques or the survey techniques that are going to give you cash flows very early on in terms of a new crop or some new management strategy, that are going to come up cost effective in these particular instances. I haven't really gone into that in much detail, but I think it is worth thinking about in these sorts of general terms later in the discussion period, and certainly people who are more expert than I in these areas addressing them.

Phil McFadden – Thank you, Andy. A strong message, one that scientists don't usually like to hear. I think that is something we will have to come back to in the discussion, to test those views out in the audience.