Towards a national platform for Australia’s islands

Abstract

Islands are important for maintaining a range of biodiversity, cultural and economic values. However, islands around the world face major and complex conservation challenges, often shared across multiple islands. The variety of tenures and uses also means there is a lack of coordination in policy and management. Addressing these challenges requires sharing lessons of success and failure. To facilitate knowledge-sharing, we need to develop common frameworks, platforms, guidelines and legislation to devise, advise and support actions and collaborations aimed to enhance island conservation. These need to consider both human needs and biodiversity, interactions, research, practice, and information sharing across islands. Pathways may include knowledge, data and experience sharing to ensure that cross-State and Territory coordination can disseminate the lessons learned from island projects to island stakeholders and vice versa. We discuss examples of existing organisational management structures that can potentially form the basis for a timely new platform focusing on Australia’s islands. We propose an island alliance be established as a multi-disciplinary platform to improve coordination among Australia’s islands, and to represent Australia’s environmental island challenges and solutions. Such an alliance would aim to bridge island communities, practitioners, managers, researchers and cultural advisors across diverse and complementary spheres along the continuum from biodiversity and ecosystems to people and social entrepreneurship. This alliance would have a mandate to develop national environmental collaborations, research and standards relating to island environments, facilitate business entrepreneurship with complementary outcomes to manage the threats that face Australian islands, and contribute to improving biodiversity conservation outcomes. The platform would draw together practitioners, natural and social scientists, policymakers, and importantly indigenous and non-Indigenous island communities to lead innovative collaborations and support Australian islands.