Wetland Preservation in Australia: The Administrative and Policital Threats

The wetlands in Australia are of great physical,chemical and biological variety due to the continent's age,geological history and climate.The traditional physical and biological threats remain as the main challenges for wetland preservation in Australia.However,it has been increasingly recognized that the immediate survival of wetlands are being affected by more subtle threats,such as administrative and political threats.This paper identifies these non-physical threats and discusses how and why they have become the major barriers for sustainable wetland preservation in Australia.Finally,this paper calls for more practical policies and solutions to be implemented for sustainable wetland preservation in Australia.     

Explaining complexities of environmental management in developing countries: lessons from the Fiji Islands

Development assistance agencies have long urged developing countries to adopt environmental management techniques used in industrialized countries. They have ascribed shortcomings in the way developing states use those techniques to insufficient training, environmental matters being poorly integrated into economic decision making, other institutional weaknesses and lack of capacity. These reductionist explanations ignore the influence that socio-political and economic factors may have on state environmental management. They afford only a limited understanding of environmental practice in the Fiji Islands, a South Pacific archipelago and republic. The attempts of Fijian chiefly élite to maintain their power base – achieved through political participation in the state and economic development activities as much as through maintaining the communal system – shape the state's environmental management practices. Those practices have far less rational and democratic bases than one would expect either from the underlying logic of the techniques used (such as environmental impact assessment, environmental planning and protected areas), or from the way those techniques are applied in western, industrialized countries.     

Erosion of Access Tracks in Kalamunda National Park,Western Australia: Causes and management implications

Construction of access tracks in national parks and other reserves in the south-west of Western Australia is an essential feature of park management. However, their construction was often carried out with little or no appreciation of soil and slope characteristics and potential erodibility, or the effect of slope and stream sedimentation on terrestrial and aquatic flora and fauna. This paper reports on the findings of a study carried out in Kalamunda National Park, a small reserve in the Darling Ranges east of Perth. Tracks were surveyed and the extent of erosion and sedimentation measured. Erosion-indicating and erosion-influencing variables were measured. Track alignment angle (to the contour) and track gradient were the two site variables most significantly correlated with measures of erosion severity. The most important upslope (on-track) factor was track length, and the most important upslope (off-track) factor was the abundance of granite outcrops. Seasonal conditions were important, particularly in relation to soils with relatively high clay contents. When wet, these soils were more likely to suffer from surface drainage problems and increased runoff, associated with decreased cohesion. On the other hand, the more common sand-textured soils are generally more erodible when wet. Several management measures are recommended. These fall into three categories: those relating to track closure or realignment (to avoid the most erosion-susceptible sites); those relating to actual track design and maintenance, or site management; and those relating to modification of visitor behaviour .     

Local provenance in rehabilitation of degraded landscapes: a case study from the Hawkesbury–Nepean catchment, Australia

Throughout Australia thousands of volunteers are engaged in Landcare projects that should help rehabilitate degraded landscapes. Many of these projects involve tree planting, but their seed is not necessarily of local provenance. Based on a survey of 85 Landcare groups working in the Hawkesbury–Nepean catchment, data were collected about Landcare groups' knowledge of their seed source, understanding of local provenance and the ecosystem in which they were planting trees and the source of funding for their projects. The findings from the study indicate that about one in five (21%) of the groups surveyed that introduced plant material were not aware of local provenance issues. Indirect indications were that a large number of Landcare groups state-wide may be doing more harm than good to the landscape while trying to rehabilitate it. The data also showed that one in seven (13%) of the groups funded by the Australian Government through the Natural Heritage Trust (NHT) had limited awareness of local provenance issues. With millions of dollars being spent on 'works on the ground', it would be prudent to allocate some funds to document and monitor current Landcare activities, so that the environmental outcomes can be quantified and more effective Landcare policies can be developed in the future.     

Geographies of energy transition: the case of high-performing commercial office space in the central business districts of Sydney and Melbourne,Australia

As a signatory to the Paris Climate Agreement, Australia committed to reduce emissions significantly by 2030. In a country highly urbanised and dependent on fossil fuels as its primary energy source, one key avenue for meeting these commitments is energy transition in the built environment. Australia has emerged as a leader in the design and construction of high-performance buildings in the premium commercial office sector. In this paper, we address a significant gap in understanding the diverse mechanisms through which building energy transition is being constituted in this sector, focusing on Sydney and Melbourne. In the absence of substantive publicly available data, we draw on mixed methods comprising a database developed around high-performing CBD office buildings and qualitative interviews with a range of sectoral stakeholders. We characterise the building stock in each city, and document five trends constituting energy transitions. We demonstrate that building energy transitions are not only shaped purposefully by dominant governance regimes but also by opportunistic responses to specific material and commercial conditions and legacies in each city. Thus the urban built environment affords significant opportunity for energy transitions, but pathways towards such transitions are necessarily multiple and ultimately shaped by material as well as institutional geographies.     

Community cooperation with natural flood management: a case study in the Scottish Borders

The cooperation of communities and landowners in the upper catchment is vital for the successful implementation of natural flood management (NFM) projects as few incentives are in place to reward them to host such projects. The aim of this paper is to initiate an exploration of the issues that affect a community's decision to cooperate. The results of a case study in Scotland show that willingness to cooperate is affected by concern about alternative flood management techniques, a sense of responsibility to help connected communities at risk of flooding and the expectation of beneficial impacts from the project. Indeed, these issues appeared to over-ride the hostility generated towards the project as a result of poor communication and engagement with the community from organisations associated with the proposed project. The results of the research suggest that if NFM projects are to proliferate, close attention must be paid to community attitudes towards flood management and related communities at risk, and that NFM projects must be developed and implemented according to well-established principles of public participation.     

Community clusters in wildlife and environmental management: using TEK and community involvement to improve co-management in an era of rapid environmental change

Environmental change has stressed wildlife co-management systems in the Arctic because parameters are changing more rapidly than traditional scientific monitoring can accommodate. Co-management systems have also been criticized for not fully integrating harvesters into the local management of resources. These two problems can be approached through the use of spatially-defined human social units termed community clusters, which are based on the demographic or ecological units being managed. An examination of polar bear management in Nunavut Territory, Canada, shows that community clusters provide a forum to collect and analyse traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) over a geographic area that mirrors the management unit, providing detailed information of local conditions. This case study also provides examples of how instituting community clusters at a governance level provides harvesters with social space in which to develop their roles as managers, along the continuum from being powerless spectators to active, adaptive co-managers. Five steps for enhancing co-management systems through the inclusion of community clusters and their knowledge are: (1) the acceptance of TEK, science, the precautionary principle and the right of harvesters not to be constrained by overly-conservative management decisions; (2) data collection involving TEK and science, and a collaboration between the two; (3) institutionalization of community clusters for data collection; (4) institutionalization of community clusters in the management process; and (5) grass-roots initiatives to take advantage of the social space provided by the community cluster approach, in order to adapt the management to local conditions, and to effect policy changes at higher levels, so as to better meet local objectives.     

‘Committing to Place’ at the Local Scale: the potential of youth education programs for promoting community participation in regional natural resource management

Emerging approaches to environmental governance require a greater level of community participation than did previous approaches in which these responsibilities largely rested with government agencies. There is consequently a need for increased engagement with NRM among a broad community sector. This paper examines initiatives by two prominent government agencies, the Murray–Darling Basin Commission (MDBC) and the National Museum of Australia (NMA), to engage school children from regional communities using education programs that focus on place and environmental health. We focus on the MDBC's International Riverhealth Conference held in Mildura in 2003 and the associated Murray–Darling Basin TalkBack Classroom sponsored by the NMA and the Parliamentary Education Office (PEO). We explore how key themes of local scale, place-based identities, youth voice and critical engagement are developed in these programs and consider how they relate to the environmental agency of children. We then reflect on the potential for the kinds of environmental agency promoted through these programs to help build the capacity of local communities to progress larger goals of environmental restoration and sustainability in the Murray–Darling Basin. The evaluation research reported here forms part of the Committing to Place research project, an Australian Research Council Linkage grant involving the University of Tasmania, the National Museum of Australia and the Murray–Darling Basin Commission.