The Goulburn Broken Catchment, Victoria

Stretching from close to the outskirts of Melbourne in the south to the Murray River in the North, the Goulburn Broken Catchment is home to nearly 200,000 people and is often referred to as "the food bowl of Australia". The catchment generates agricultural output estimated to be worth $1.35 billion annually with a regional economic output of $7.8 billion.

Pilot Study 3: Development Offsets

In many areas subject to significant development pressure, important ecosystem services are being impacted upon. In rural areas near large cities these impacts may arise from growth in lifestyle farms, while in peri-urban and urban infill areas, these impacts may result from higher density development. The use of a Market Based Instrument could be a possible mechanism to alleviate the future development pressures on ecosystem services, whilst providing flexibility to developers. These outcomes may also be achieved at significantly lower costs than on-site actions using an off-set scheme.

The scheme could involve defining suitable 'offsets' that would apply to specified impacts of rural development, such as water quality, quantity and biodiversity impacts. In other words, an action that damages ecosystem services on one site could be undertaken, as long as a separate activity to increase ecosystem services (the 'offset') is undertaken at the same site or elsewhere.

In this case, the Murrindindi Shire in the southern region of the Goulburn Broken catchment provides an excellent opportunity to trial a project that could target ecosystem services that are threatened by development on rural lands. At this stage it is thought the study will link local government development offsets to Goulburn Broken CMA targets. >> Fact Sheet

Pilot Study 4: Treading Salty Water or Trading Salt & Water

Dryland salinity imposes a range of costs on the community including reduced production due to soil salinisation in new or increasing groundwater discharge sites and heightened in-stream salinity due to both increased saline base-flows and salt wash-off from salinised areas. This project will develop the concepts to support a tradable property rights structure to aid in addressing these external or 'beyond landholder' impacts of dryland salinity. The framework will be developed using experimental economics to identify critical market parameters such as the detailed specification of the property rights involved, the nature and levels of uncertainty related to the necessary salinity information and methods to incorporate spatial and temporal variation in the impacts of management changes.

The project will draw on recently completed hydrological modelling within the Victorian Department of Primary Industries in association with Sinclair Knight Merz (Cheng et al. 2003 South West Goulburn Salinity Study) and within the Heartlands Project in CSIRO to assist in trialing a property right based solution.

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