Abstract
Land use change is the most significant driver linked to global species extinctions. In Northern Australia, the landscape is still relatively intact with very low levels of clearing. However, a re-energized political discourse around creating a northern food bowl means that currently intact ecosystems in northern Australia could be under imminent threat from increased land clearing and water extraction. These impacts are likely to be concentrated in a few regions with suitable soils and water supplies. The Daly River Catchment in the Northern Territory is an important catchment for both conservation and development. Land use in the Daly catchment has been subject to clearing guidelines that are largely untested in terms of their eventual implications for the spatial configuration of conservation and development. Given the guidelines are not legislated they might also be removed or revised by subsequent Territory Governments, including the recently-elected one. We examine the uncertainties around the spatial implications of full implementation of the Daly clearing guidelines and their potential effects on equity of opportunity across land tenures and land uses. We also examine how removal of the guidelines could affect conservation in the catchment. We conclude that the guidelines are important in supporting development in the catchment while still achieving conservation goals, and we recommend ways of implementing the guidelines to make best use of available land resources for intensified production.
Highlights
The Earth is experiencing a new era, the Anthropocene, in which human actions have become the main driver of global environmental change, with many planetary boundaries being approached or already transgressed, and an already significant and accelerating loss of biodiversity [1]
In order for either approach to be effective in mitigating proximate threats to biodiversity, conservation planners must first be able to predict changes in the extent and intensity of threatening processes, such as land conversion, so that potential loss can be minimized [5,6]; both conservation objectives and limits on clearing should be informed by potential clearing of particular ecosystems
Simulation Results For each scenario - four constrained by the cascade rules and one unconstrained - we calculated the average percentage cleared for each vegetation type on each property across the 100 runs
Summary
The Earth is experiencing a new era, the Anthropocene, in which human actions have become the main driver of global environmental change, with many planetary boundaries being approached or already transgressed, and an already significant and accelerating loss of biodiversity [1]. Human activities are the main drivers of greatly increased species extinctions, with land-use change being the most significant [3]. In order for either approach to be effective in mitigating proximate threats to biodiversity, conservation planners must first be able to predict changes in the extent and intensity of threatening processes, such as land conversion, so that potential loss can be minimized [5,6]; both conservation objectives and limits on clearing should be informed by potential clearing of particular ecosystems. If planners have spatially explicit data on potential future patterns of land-use change such as areas of high likelihood of clearing of native vegetation, these data can be used to minimize the loss of biodiversity by: 1) adjusting conservation objectives, 2) avoiding more threatened areas where there are spatial options, 3) selecting threat-specific actions, and 4) scheduling conservation actions [5,11]. Scheduling acquisition of protected areas can minimize the extent to which conservation objectives are compromised by land clearing while the protected area system is being established [12,13,14]
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