Observations of fire regimes and vegetation dynamics across living memory are critical for Australia’s conservation management. Fire frequency has reduced across Queensland over the last 60 years, causing woody thickening and loss of native grass cover. Increased regular burning, every few years with good soil moisture, is recommended for eucalypt forests and woodlands of north-eastern Australia, including South East Queensland. This paper captures perspectives derived from a conversation about fire management in Queensland, which occurred in Cairns on 26 February 2024, amongst three fire statesmen: Peter Stanton, Dave Kington and Mick Blackman; with combined fire ecology and implementation experience of around 150 years. Contributors to the discussion were fire ecologists Eleanor Collins, Leasie Felderhof, Diana Virkki and Paul Williams. Outcomes of the discussion captured in this paper are based on decades of observations in different ecosystem types. The importance of frequent, low-intensity burning is highlighted as a continuous land management practice for healthy ecosystems in Queensland and north-eastern New South Wales.

Australia is committed to including natural flood management (making space for water), a nature- based solution in disaster resilience programs to meet its obligations under the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. The impacts from global warming may be coming sooner than previously predicted, affecting water cycles, including the small water cycles that have already been degraded by land clearing and land management practices. Queensland is the most disaster- affected part of Australia. The Brisbane floodplain where more than 200,000 people live is the most flood-affected area in Australia. Most Queenslanders live on or near the coast, which will be increasingly affected by compounding and cascading global changes. We can learn from overseas experience with nature-based responses to flood risks and degraded water cycles. We can change our laws and practices to become more responsive to flood and coastal risks by including natural flood management. We can use nature to help us, rather than continue to fight it at great cost. Implementing the creation of space for water programs can be challenging. Queensland can add natural flood management techniques to its resilience strategies without detracting from our existing disaster management and resilience-building efforts. The Queensland Reconstruction Authority has been described as a model for the rest of Australia. Natural flood management helps link disaster resilience, climate change adaptation, and land and seascape management. Actively incorporating natural flood management techniques in Queensland s disaster resilience programs can reduce flood risks, ameliorate drought, save lives and infrastructure, reduce recovery costs and meet international obligations.

The Economics of Diversity: The Dasgupta Review (Dasgupta, 2021a) is an erudite and detailed publication that discusses the key issues of biodiversity and economics and the need to integrate them. This need is illustrated by the following quotes, from experts: The drive toward perpetual expansion—or personal freedom—is basic to the human spirit. But to sustain it we need the most delicate, knowing stewardship of the living world that can be devised (Wilson, 1988, Chapter 1, p. 16). Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal (Wilson, in Sheppard, 1990, p. 4). ...maintenance and regulating (biosphere) services are the foundation on which we exist (Dasgupta, 2022, p. 1019). The global economy has accumulated produced capital and human capital in the Anthropocene but has degraded natural capital to an extent that we have been endangering our collective futures (Dasgupta & Besley, 2023, p. 761). (Biodiversity issues) are inextricably linked to multiple Earth system interactions that couple human, economic and social activities to the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and litho- sphere. While this complexity makes tackling biodiversity loss challenging, it also provides opportunities for solutions (Australian Academy of Science, 2021, p. 2). Economists have gone from the beginning of their discipline assuming that the economy and the environment can be analysed in separate boxes. ...In an era of climate change and grow- ing loss of species, this is clearly untenable. The economy and the natural environment that sustains it have to be joined up (Gittins, 2023, p. 1). This article informs the reader about the content of the Dasgupta Review, recounts reactions to it, describes its adoption by the United Kingdom Government, shows that Australia has been lagging in dealing with biodiversity problems and that action is needed on several issues. The following overview highlights the significance of the Dasgupta Review and includes a summary of suggestions to provoke thinking about its relevance for decision making in Australia.

Broad-vision land-use planning by government is a societal need, little known, little understood and little appreciated by society, even though it is essential to good decision making by governments across a wide range of functions. The need to gain the greatest long-term societal good from politically limited public funding and objectively limited biophysical resources is greater now than ever before. Yet, in Queensland and nationally, the capacity and even the desire of the public service to deliver that long-term societal good is in decline. The working philosophy behind this planning needs to be that of the sustainable management of the nation s natural resources. However, increasingly, state government planning units now regard the promotion and approval of economic developments project by project as their primary function, with strategic and sustain- ability considerations regarded as secondary. The situation is made worse by other worrying trends. Commitment to the task of supplying information to decision-making procedures is faltering. National units responsible for supplementing and coordinating the work of state and territory governments in this field have been disbanded. Scientific advice is increasingly discounted or ignored by planners. There is a lack of transparency in the mechanisms of the planning process. The regional organisations created to carry out the functions of natural resource management now struggle to do so with ever-decreasing funding. If governments in Australia are to make consistently good decisions about the development and use of land and natural resources, the systems behind those decisions need to be substantially improved.

This paper presents a hypothetical integrated strategy using a whole-system framework in a time of increasing human population density and accelerating climate change.1 Right now a whole-system perspective is needed to integrate spatial and temporal strategies (Hynes, 2020, pp. 176 & 181; 2021, p. 95) for resilience proofing these geographical regions (Hynes, 2022, pp. 164–166). However, contradictions emerge as management prescriptions suitable for flood and drought control and ecosystem resilience can conflict with wildfire control strategies. The following hypothetical case focuses on the period of the 2019–2020 drought conditions and fires and the recent period of exceptional rainfall and flooding 2020–2022. It assumes that preparation to address these events commenced around 1960 and that the judicious recognition of scale in achieving relevant management systems has been accommodated in planning and development strategies.

This report covers the period from January 2023 to 8 December 2025. The Society’s mission as a learned society, concerned with rational, evidence-led intellectual enquiry in all disciplines, not just the natural sciences, was established at its foundation in 1884. More emphasis has been given to this wider perspective in recent years.

This Short Communication highlights the layered complexity of the institutional arrangements that apply to the management of water catchments and, in particular, the fragmentation of ownership and authority in a manufactured service delivery system that should rather be guided by the natural systems.

We review seismic hazard factors observed around the world resulting from mining coal seam methane by the process of ‘fracking’. The process of fracturing coal and sediment strata then pumping large volumes of water out of the well reduces hydrostatic pressure in the seams, releasing more gas. This has potential to induce leakage of water from other aquifers into this zone, through existing or fracking-created-fissures in surrounding sediment layers. Fracking is a micro-seismic event, which can activate existing or create new geological faults to increase leakage of water and gas through them. The high pressures required for fracking create tension in sedimentary layers surrounding the well and these pressures can be transmitted over several kilometres and lead to concurrent micro-seismic or continuous aseismic ‘creep’ events, long after the initial activity. Globally, it is well recognised that fracking causes earthquakes. Changes in pressure in the sediment layers around mined coal seams also leads to subsidence of overlying strata and depletion of water in the aquifers, with irreversible drastic negative effects on farming. In our study area in Queensland, Australia, gas is extracted from the Walloon Coal Measures within the Surat Basin and Bandanna Coal Formation in the Bowen Basin, aquifers associated with the Great Artesian Basin. The Queensland Government stopped measuring seismic events in 1986. Geoscience Australia provides located earthquake data of Richter magnitudes Mb >3.5, meaning numerous more relevant smaller events are not recorded or located. ‘Making good’ the effects of CSG mining, as required in Conduct and Compensation Agreements between mining companies and landholders, cannot be readily fulfilled. Tolerating ignorance of recognised seismic risk factors is a breach of the ‘precautionary principle’, a policy commitment of the Queensland and Australian Governments since 1992 and abrogates their obligation to protect the public interest.