Understanding the populationenvironment debate:
Managing the population–environment nexus under climate shift: The ultimate challenge to integrated natural resource management and planning
Dr John Williams
John Williams heads the Natural Resources Commission in New South Wales. John is an eminent scientist who retired from CSIRO as Chief of Land and Water in 2004, having been Chief or Deputy Chief since 1996. Most recently John was Chief Scientist and Chair of Department of Natural Resources’ Science and Information Board and Adjunct Professor in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management at Charles Sturt University. John has extensive experience in providing national and international thought leadership in natural resource management, particularly in agriculture production and its environmental impact.
In coming into the forum I am talking about things that may not seem as exciting but may help us to bring together the issues that Graeme Hugo has raised, where we have got complex systems of people and we have got complex systems that underpin the functioning of our planet.
What I want to talk about is managing the population–environment nexus under climate shift. I think what we are confronted with is the ultimate challenge to integrated natural resource management and planning. I know ‘natural resource management and planning’ and ‘integrated’ are jargon words, but Australians seem to have a very great wish to not plan. I feel that to get us through this next period we are going to have to change that attitude.
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What I want to do in this presentation is not to advocate what we are trying and struggling with in New South Wales as being a solution for anybody else, but to recognise that what we are trying to do there is, in an embryonic form, a framework which, though it certainly needs much reform, legislative reform, development and capacity building – and bear in mind all those weaknesses – has some strengths within it, that can help us deal with the integration between the complexity of the people issues and the complexity of the scientific issues.
So I want to look quickly at some of the population movements and pressures on natural resources in New South Wales, particularly (but it is the same story around the continent). I want to have a look at what we are trying to do in the sense of saying, ‘Can we make our way forward by establishing as first principles some visions and some actual targets for natural resources and environment?’ If as a community we can establish what we want, then we might step back and start to think about how we plan and pull together the competing issues, and maybe – just maybe – we will be able to reform our institutional structures, which will allow us to move to all these goals.
I tend to agree with Graeme Hugo: I am worried that our institutional clumsiness may be the real constraint to our responding to these population and climate change pressures which we face. Let’s see if you think it makes sense.
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If you look at a little place like Merimbula, on the south coast, you see the population pressures happening in our coastal areas. The facts are that 75 per cent of rural population is in coastal Local Government Areas. We know that the coastal growth rate is around 2 per cent and, as we saw earlier, that is about 60 per cent higher than the national average of 1.2 per cent. Centres like Kempsey and Shoalhaven are growing at 2.4 and 2.6 per cent.
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This issue is illustrated in these satellite images from 1972, when the resolution was less, through to 2004. First let us take a place like Batemans Bay, which many of you would recognise from that 1972 image.
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When we come to what it looks like in 2004, you see the urban pressure and change – bearing in mind the resolution differences.
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If we take St Georges Basin in 1972 …
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…and in 2004, we see the same thing.
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To move closer to where we are now, let’s look at Shellharbour in 1972. You see there Lake Illawarra and the Wollongong region.
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And now we put up the changes in 2004.
So you can see the issue of increased urbanisation. When you put the population and the climate shift information together, we have a double whammy on our hands. Ecological disturbance is huge, the water demand is very large, we see the changing land use, the impacts on people, and the way we put ourselves together in those environments.
We are confronted with a shifting pattern of climate – well-known in eastern Australia – and are experiencing rainfall much more like what we had in the first 50 years of federation. We have built our coastal infrastructure and our cities since the 1950s in periods which generally have had higher rainfall and shorter droughts. We need to recognise that we have got a shift back to perhaps drier circumstances, in addition to the impacts of climate change and rising temperatures.
We have got to face up, then, to this double whammy, and it is really a critical issue of saying, ‘Well, how might we manage it?’
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New South Wales – not wishing to press it – has basically spent some time trying to say, ‘Can we take an approach where we agree across the community and across the whole of government that we have some targets for natural resource management?’ Those targets would set down what we are trying to achieve in terms of measures that you might call biodiversity, water, land and the community.
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In that sense we see that the targets for biodiversity by 2015 are around increasing and improving the native vegetation cover and condition, increasing the number of sustainable populations of a range of fauna species, increasing the recovery of threatened species, populations and ecological communities, and reducing the impact of invasive species.
The point is that if, as a society, we can agree on where we want to arrive, we might have some chance of getting there. But if we don’t do that, I don’t think we have much chance at all.
Therefore, rather than arguing and saying, ‘What is the population, and how are we going to manage the climate change?’ let’s put the focus on what sort of natural resource and environment we want.
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New South Wales, then - in terms of water - is looking at improvement of the condition of the riverine ecosystems, and making sure that we have got an improvement in the ability of groundwater systems to support groundwater dependent ecosystems and designated beneficial uses.
We don’t want a declining condition of our marine waters and ecosystems. We want an improvement in the condition of the important wetlands and their extent, and an improvement in the condition of the estuaries and coastal lakes.
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In our land-based systems, our targets are to ensure that by 2015 there is an improvement in soil condition and an increase in the area of land that is used within its capability.
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Further, and most importantly, we recognise that the environment and our ecosystems also have people in them, and that we need economic sustainability, social wellbeing and the capacity to know how to manage this complex system.
That could all be seen as superficial in some quarters, but I think it is important to realise that it is a first step.
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Then how will you try and make sure that we as a community work in a coordinated way towards delivering those targets? Well, there are four parts to the plan, and we shall see whether it is going to work. It needs reform and legislative teeth that it currently hasn’t got. But let’s see how it might work.
First are the Catchment Management Authorities and the Catchment Action Plans, where we start to set down what are the important environmental and natural resource amenities, and what are our plans to maintain them.
Then we have the Standard for Quality Natural Resource Management, addressing the issue of how we do business. How do we try and deal with those complexities that Graeme Hugo talked about, as a community? Have we got some ways of doing business where natural resource management and environment isn’t just something that’s warm and cuddly and feels good but is actually a hard-nosed business process in delivering those targets?
Critically, in all this, unless we monitor and evaluate and report and audit, we don’t know where we’re going.
We really have to bring about collaboration between all the natural resource managers – and there are many on the playing pitch.
And through all that, we are weaving people and science and policy and legislation, and it is so important to learn how we might do that.
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We have got the Catchment Management Authority (CMA) systems, with a community-based board, a general manager and staff.
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And then we’ve got Catchment Action Plans, which in some ways are very embryonic but they are 10-year strategic plans. They are not regulatory, but they are trying to identify the regional natural resource management priorities and the linkages to national and state priorities. They have great potential, if we can get them in good shape.
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We have the Standard for Quality Natural Resource Management, recognising the importance of adaptive management, and understanding where we are in a planning process, where we are in an implementation, audit and response process. We all know these things, but at the moment a process and a standard like that does not exist in local government, it doesn’t exist in state agencies, and it certainly, as far as I can see, is quite rare to see it in the way they go about business in the Commonwealth.
Yet at least if we did do some of those basic things set out in the standard, we would have some chance of directing our investment and our policy frame towards delivering the targets that we believe we want.
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In the Standard we talk about the collection and use of knowledge: this issue of how we get policy-ready knowledge from our sciences – the social sciences, the biophysical sciences and the economic sciences.
How do we manage the problem of making decisions at the optimal scale? With each decision made incrementally you can end up with death by a thousand small cuts. And we see plenty of examples of that.
We need to consider opportunities for collaboration and community engagement. And how do we manage the risk, particularly the huge risk we face from climate change? On our coasts this is extremely important, but is that built into the way we develop our local environmental plan for Batemans Bay, or for Maroochydore? No, it’s not. Graeme Hugo is in the process of moving around the countryside speaking about the challenge, as I am too, trying to get our regional communities to start to think about risk management: what is at risk with the climate shift we are facing, and on the coast what is at risk with the population trends?
Monitoring and evaluation and how we manage our information are so fundamental.
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But we have a muddle. Take the roles of the new players in the natural resource management scene. (Seeing John Langford here I would mention that the equivalent bodies in Victoria may have names that are a little bit different but they face the same old problems.)
You have got Catchment Management Authorities, you have got a myriad government agencies, you have got the importance of local government who make the local plans of where this drainage water actually goes, where they are going to put the next development and where the heck the water is going to come from – or is there any thought on how that might be? You have got industry and community driving the growth. People want prosperity, and naturally so, but how do we pull that together?
In New South Wales we have the Natural Resources Commission, which is put in place to audit this complex scene.
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The Commission, then, is only very small but it is a body which is charged with auditing the effectiveness of the implementation of the Catchment Action Plans. We need to know where we are tracking, it is critical we have independent monitoring and, particularly, auditing of how we are going. Typically, such monitoring and auditing is rare, so usually we cannot tell if we are making progress.
Even when we do have agreed targets – most of the time we don’t even have that – do we spend our effort in making sure we audit and report, independently and transparently, the progress towards those targets? The answer is no. But there is an embryonic start to do that in the system I am part of.
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When you look at the integration of planning – that is, land-use planning, town planning, where we put suburban areas, where the infrastructure goes – and natural resource management, and the people, we see that they aren’t pulled together. We have so many agencies: local environmental plans (LEPs), with land-use strategies, local government, Catchment Management Authorities and regional strategies. Rarely, however, have they actually addressed the three big issues on our agenda: water, climate change and population. Those are the drivers.
But the Catchment Action Plan is trying, in a very basic way, to say, ‘How do you possibly put all that together so that it may in fact deliver the targets, using the Standard?’ Can we put together all those complex interactions of people and knowledge, so that we actually address those biodiversity, water, land and community targets? That is the question and that is the challenge.
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Taking a little piece of coast, we have a Catchment Action Plan, a CMA responsibility, and we have a regional plan in most instances at another scale, with another set of values, usually done by a government agency. And then there is a local government who has some sort of local environmental plan which suggests where you can and can’t build, and where we are going to put the new suburbs.
So that is the nuts and bolts that we have to manage if we are going to manage population, climate shift, and economic growth.
One way we could put all that together is to carefully audit each of those operational planning processes as they occur, to see if they really are likely to produce the targets that we have agreed on.
If you use the Standard to approach natural resource management in each of those jurisdictions you might get there, but the point is that at the moment they are all pulling in different directions. So maybe some auditing towards delivering those targets is appropriate. There is bipartisan support from the New South Wales government and Opposition that this is a worthwhile thing to start to do, because to get some auditing of whether all this stuff that is going on is going to lead us anywhere, and how we are going to cope with these problems, is one way forward.
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I think one important way to deal with this huge issue that we are confronted with today, of population, climate shift, water and urban development, is to put some effort into saying, ‘Well, what is it that we want in terms of environment? What are our natural resource targets?’ If we have that in place, we then have to ask how we put regulation, planning, land use, infrastructure and natural resource management together into something that will actually deliver that outcome we seek.
We have got population issues driving on one side of this diagram; we have had climate shift and change driving on the other side, and most importantly we have the economic growth and other drivers at the bottom. It is usually the two on the left- and right-hand sides that are currently not in the equation. Those two are not even being put into the actual planning, regulation and management structure. They are absent. So I think the opportunity to go down this track has some real merit.
We need science, using prediction of the consequences of given regulatory and planning action, to enable us to say something sensible about whether what we are planning on doing, given the climate and the population, is likely to move us towards the targets and aspirations we might have as a society – that is, clean estuaries and lakes or rivers or whatever we choose that is important to us. But the process of getting the science in a form that can actually inform us of whether our actions will deliver the desired outcomes or not is at very best rudimentary. Yet it is so important.
It is extremely difficult science, and extremely difficult social and institutional arrangements that we need to put together. I believe that it is possible to pull it together if we actually start to give some focus to firstly what it is we want to achieve, and secondly focus on how we put the puzzle together, both socially and scientifically, to deliver those targets, and thirdly whether we have got the scientific tools and social process to get us there.
To me, there are two critical areas that make this model likely to work. The first one is monitoring and the second one is audit. We need to audit the progress towards our goals, based on what we are doing, and we can only do that if we have got good monitoring and measurement. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. And measurement is a huge absence when you start to look at even the simplest of things in national water accounts. This is something I know is very close to John Langford’s heart, and I am pleased to see in the new National Water Initiative that this has been recognised at last and the Meteorological Bureau has been given a bit of a nudge to see if we can make it happen.
It is so fundamentally important. We recognise that when we audit and when we monitor, it feeds back to our regulation, our policy, our planning, so that we may then make a better effort towards delivering our targets.
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But suppose you take, for example, a simple thing of land-use planning, decisions and regulations, and ask the question: how will this impact on the delivery of a target? Take water, for example – and work by Peter Cullen – we understand that growth needs water, and we need to reverse the practice of the last century, where we allocated development and then asked the engineers to provide the water. Now we will need to show where the water will come from before the development can take place. That’s a huge change from what we currently do.
The second thing: when we have over-allocated available water, we need to return the surface and groundwater systems to sustainable levels. To do that, the impacts on the targets become very clear. So each of the actions that we can talk about will impact on the actual targets for our water system. At the moment, our planning and operational engineering are rarely asked the question by an auditor, ‘How is your action going to deliver the agreed target?’ That is never done, but it is very easy to do it. And it has quite profound consequences when you ask it.
If someone is going to put a marina into Shellharbour, and we say to them, ‘Show me how that marina is going to improve the health of this coastal lake,’ that is a very important question for planning and development which, at the moment, is not asked.
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So what do we need? Obviously, we have got to have an integrated approach that links planning and regulation to the delivery of our natural resource and environmental targets. Local environmental planning legislation in New South Wales does not require any reference to natural resource targets. It is really important that this is changed so we start to put together the picture that I have outlined.
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Secondly, we must have condition monitoring and evaluation.
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And, thirdly, I believe we need strong audit to drive the adaptive management towards the targets.
We need to get those three things operational – the integration of natural resource management planning, together with the targets; the issue of monitoring and evaluation; and thirdly the ability to audit our progress, in an independent and transparent way – underpinned by the knowledge sets we so desperately need. If we can do that, I think we can take a step forward towards addressing the nexus between population and environment under climate shift.
Discussion
Question: John, I like your model but I am curious to know, firstly, how you get an alignment of values to actually deliver, for example, enhanced biodiversity, when a lot of developers, for example, don’t care at all for it. Secondly, I wonder how the incentive structures to actually drive your target-based approach might work.
John Williams: A lot of those pieces are not in place. But as one of the Commission’s first tasks – it took two years – we did go through a community process and whole of government process to get some agreement on those targets. That was not an easy process, but the Cabinet as a whole said, ‘Yes, this is what we are about as a government.’ The Catchment Action Plans were approved by the whole of government. They are not a Minister for Natural Resources plan, they are a whole of government plan.
So the answer to your question is that I think you have got to have legislative teeth with the requirement to drive all of our action towards delivery of those environmental and natural resource targets.
