Environmental Management In Australia Research Articles

The Relationship between Income Distribution and the Cost of Environmental Management in Australia

Australia is highly dependent on its natural resources; therefore it needs to develop a national accounting system whereby the concept of natural resource asset depletion is incorporated into its national income accounts. The present study suggests that if the national income accounting system of the economy is deficient in highlighting the gap in estimated income and sustainable income, then such a system needs to be improved [Ahmed and Mallick (1997)]. In a previous analysis of the Australian economy [Mallick, Sinden, and Thampapillai (2000)], showed that reconciliation between the goals of sustainability and employment may be achieved by a real wage reduction of approximately 8-10 percent. The analysis was structured within the framework of a simple Keynesian model of income determination and a Cobb-Douglas production function.

友永雄吾著, 『オーストラリア先住民の土地権と環境管理』, 明石書店, 2013年

友永雄吾著, 『オーストラリア先住民の土地権と環境管理』, 明石書店, 2013年

Lessons learned at the interface of marine ecology and environmental management in Australia

Marine scientists and environmental managers engaged in a roundtable discussion at the Australian Marine Sciences Association conference in July 2014 to identify areas where linkages could be improved between the two groups. Here, we summarize the key themes and outcomes from the discussion, including the need to clearly define management objectives, to identify the scale of the issue, to conduct effective science communication, to address uncertainty, and to perform iterative engagement. We also discuss some of the challenges inherent in establishing new linkages, and provide a set of examples where effective collaborations have been achieved between marine ecologists and environmental managers working in Australia.

Current issues in environmental management in Australia: what do people think?

In 2010, the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC) published their Grand Challenges in Global Sustainability Research, seeking to mobilise researchers in a 10-year scientific effort to address what they call the “grand challenges in global sustainability”. In this paper, we ask whether these Grand Challenges are relevant to Australian environmental management. We examine this from two angles, insights from public perception surveys, and our own survey data. Public attitudes surveys indicate public ambiguity on the knowledge base, a finding that implies an immediate need for improved public communication of scientific knowledge. Our on-line survey, attached to a conference, Innovative Solutions for Environmental Challenges, targeted Australian environmental managers and scientists’ views on critical issues. The results mirrored global scientists’ views on the need to find ways for the scientific, social and political communities to work together to develop innovative approaches to solving future environmental concerns. Importantly, we found that the specific responses were context and scale dependent, while highlighting the inherent tensions between maintaining production and consumption, and protection of resources and ecosystem services.

The big ecological questions inhibiting effective environmental management in Australia

AbstractThe need to improve environmental management in Australia is urgent because human health, well‐being and social stability all depend ultimately on maintenance of life‐supporting ecological processes. Ecological science can inform this effort, but when issues are socially and economically complex the inclination is to wait for science to provide answers before acting. Increasingly, managers and policy‐makers will be called on to use the present state of scientific knowledge to supply reasonable inferences for action based on imperfect knowledge. Hence, one challenge is to use existing ecological knowledge more effectively; a second is to tackle the critical unanswered ecological questions. This paper identifies areas of environmental management that are profoundly hindered by an inability of science to answer basic questions, in contrast to those areas where knowledge is not the major barrier to policy development and management. Of the 22 big questions identified herein, more than half are directly related to climate change. Several of the questions concern our limited understanding of the dynamics of marine systems. There is enough information already available to develop effective policy and management to address several significant ecological issues. We urge ecologists to make better use of existing knowledge in dialogue with policy‐makers and land managers. Because the challenges are enormous, ecologists will increasingly be engaging a wide range of other disciplines to help identify pathways towards a sustainable future.

Color Blind

The dominant approach to environmental management in Australia involves the decentralization of authority and resources to regionally organized citizen boards or statutory committees. The article examines Australian Indigenous participation in a national environmental management program— the Natural Heritage Trust. This program emphasizes regionally scaled implementation and community engagement and ownership. The management of Indigenous lands is of increasing importance in Australia because of the size of this estate, its environmental value, and its role in Indigenous community and economic development. Programmatic efforts to assist Indigenous landowners manage their lands have been largely unsuccessful. This research is concerned with understanding whether regionally scaled, civic approaches to environmental management enable improved levels of Indigenous participation. Results show that this regional environmental management program achieved poor levels of Indigenous participation. This finding, the authors suggest, has important implications for the optimistic claims made about regional environmental management.

Cosmopolitan Natures: Paradigms and Politics in Australian Environmental Management

Environmental management in Australia has recently shifted away from local rural communities into the hands of largely urban environmental and government agencies, sparking an intensifying contest for the control of land and resources between geographically and socially stable communities and more mobile translocal groups. There are major disjunctions between the conceptual models promulgated in this contest. Highly specific, holistic, and integrative cultural paradigms of human-environmental interaction vie with an increasingly dominant technomanagerial environmental model emerging from global discourses and knowledge practices. Categorizing "Nature" as a separate, nonhuman domain, this more cosmopolitan approach fails, intellectually and practically, to integrate social and cultural issues into environmental management. Nevertheless, its proponents are provided with increasing authority by their relationships with wider agencies of governance. Building on long-term ethnographic research in Far North Queensland, this paper explores how local and cosmopolitan environmentalisms are contested in a particular ethnographic context.

Multiscalar Governance and Regional Environmental Management in Australia

At a moment when regionalisation and regionalism are being widely promoted across a range of policy sectors, this paper argues that much regional activity, including regional environmental management, is often the product of interactions, resources and opportunities at other scales. The paper shows how local and extra-regional interactions, resources and opportunities influence environmental management at the regional level in Australia by the development of a case analysis of Far North Queensland. It finds that much of the current thinking about regionalisation and regionalism ignores these multiscalar dimensions. This can impede and undermine efforts to manage the environment effectively at the regional level. The paper identifies some opportunities to improve regional environmental management activities in Australia and draws out the broader implications for other policy sectors and other countries embracing the movement towards regionalism/regionalisation. The relationship between governance by network at the regional level and the power and control of central government is highlighted. The paper also calls for further research into how governments and other actors successfully manage multiscalar relations of governance in order to promote (or impede) specific public policy initiatives.

Critiquing environmental management in indigenous Australia: two case studies

The notion of community participation in sustainable environmental management is well documented, but applications between environmental scientists and indigenous Australians are less known. Many indigenous Australians are socially and culturally marginalized, and agencies debate over appropriate designs for collaborative, cross‐cultural environmental programmes that will alleviate marginalization. This paper presents two case studies from northern Australia, where indigenous people participated in an environmental project exploring the commercial potential of the local sea cucumber resource. A framework with principles of participation and knowledge exchange guided project implementation at both localities. Participant observation data that related to these principles suggests that abuse of power imbalances and exploitation (institutional racism) may be more easily disguised within formalized governance structures than in the informal networks and structures that can be supported through less formalized representation. Linking informal and formal governance structures and canvassing a range of governance modalities will ultimately connect the human behaviours and governance structures needed to progress indigenous environmental management in Australia.

Response to Lane et al. (2004): Decentralisation and Environmental Management in Australia: A Comment on the Prescriptions of The Wentworth Group

Response to Lane <i>et al.</i> (2004): Decentralisation and Environmental Management in Australia: A Comment on the Prescriptions of The Wentworth Group

An Agnostic View on Regionalism, Decentralisation and other Silver Bullets: A Response to Thom

[Extract] We welcome Bruce Thom's response to our paper on The Wentworth Group's (TWG) proposals for reforming environmental management in Australia (Lane et al ., 2004). We are also pleased that he has responded to our essay in the spirit in which it was written: in the cause of healthy, rigorous academic debate about the great challenge of our time. Since the paper was published, we have been delighted by the large number of responses we have received from land managers (especially), public servants and academics from around the country. We take this less as a compliment on our work and more of an indicator of the thirst for vigorous debate about how best to respond to the failings of current approaches to environmental governance and the pressing problems of environmental degradation.

Decentralisation and Environmental Management in Australia: a Comment on the Prescriptions of The Wentworth Group

AbstractThe prescriptions of The Wentworth Group of scientists for delivering improved environmental management and remediation are reviewed against the backdrop of international experience with decentralisation. The Group's preferred means of implementation — here referred to as decentralised regionalism — is examined and shown to be idealised and therefore naive to its complexities and potential pitfalls. Five problem areas are highlighted: 1. defining a ‘region’; 2. power, conflict and community; 3. developing mechanisms for accountability; 4. subsidiarity, and 5. the tensions between democracy and technocracy

Birds and Environmental Management in Australia 1901–2001

This article reviews the central role of birds in environmental management in Australia throughout the twentieth century. Ai well as being indicators of the health of the environment, birds are also central to many ideas about the environment, as examples from three periods of environmental history show. In the early federation era around 1901, the central concern was for the birds themselves, threatened by the plumage trade. In the mid-century years, there was a growing concern for habitat, as conservation ideas became dominated by national parks. The last decades of the twentieth century, the ‘age of biodiversity’, have seen the emphasis move to species-richness. Because birds are conspicuous, diurnal and much loved by people, they have dominated ideas about environmental management. The advantages of using birds as environmental indicators include free labour' and community participation, but these also magnify responsibilities to ensure that the science that is built on amateur time, freely given, will give the best possible result for the environment.

From Environmental Impact Assessment to Environmental Design and Planning

This article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of Environmental Impact Assessment, or as we prefer Environmental Assessment (EA), as a tool for environmental management. EA has had many roles: a passive role of advising decision-makers, a more active role of mitigating impacts through design changes, an important educative role, and a community empowerment role. While EA has had a pivotal role in the development and evolution of environmental management in Australia and elsewhere, and remains an important tool, it is no longer at the cutting edge. By and large there has been far too much focus on procedural aspects of EA to the detriment of the substantive purpose of EA. We suggest in this article that we should steadily be moving beyond narrow conceptions of EA to incorporate the many valuable perspectives and techniques that have evolved as part of the collective experience of conducting environmental assessments directly into project design, land use planning and policy development activities. EA co...

Toward an ecological framework for sustainability: considerations for ecosystem management

Increasingly, resource and environmental management issues are considered within the emerging framework of sustainability (sustainable development, ecologically sustainable development, sustainable environmental management). While this notion has great potential as an integrative framework, current mainstream approaches and definitions tend to be vague, inoperative and do not translate well to the level of management in specific ecosystems. The current debate about "sustainable development" lacks structure, clarity, and an operational direction. In particular, it is difficult to translate the general concerns of sustainability in a manner useful to a task such as ecosystem management. This paper takes a long-term, systems view to construct an integrative approach to sustainability. This approach is more cognisant of ecological realities than the notion of sustainable development as presently construed. Extending the principles thus identified; a checklist of questions to guide considerations in ecosystem management at a more practical level is then constructed. Two examples from resource and environmental management in Australia ? fisheries and the conservation of terrestrial species (particularly the Koala . Phascolarctos cinereus) ? are analysed to support the discussion.

Industry Agreement Acts and environmental management in Australia

In Australia many major developments are authorized by agreements negotiated between companies and the state government and ratified by Parliament as Agreement Acts The means by which these are negotiated and ratified, their terms, and their legal status are thus of great importance to Australian resource and environmental management These aspects are examined, revealing a lessening of the tendency to provide special rights and privileges and a trend towards the inclusion of more resource and environmental management provisions in the Acts It is argued that major developments require special conditions beyond the scope of general laws in order to control their social and environmental side effects, and that Agreements Acts could be a valuable means to this end Ways of improving them from this point of view are discussed

J. M.Powell, Environmental Management in Australia, 1788-1914 (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. xi 4-197: $8.95 (paper)

Australian Economic History ReviewVolume 18, Issue 2 p. 185-186 Book Review Powell, J. M., Environmental Management in Australia, 1788-1914 ( Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. xi 4-197: $8.95 (paper) Selwyn Cornish, Selwyn Cornish Australian National UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Selwyn Cornish, Selwyn Cornish Australian National UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 January 1978 https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.182br2AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume18, Issue2January 1978Pages 185-186 RelatedInformation

Reviews

Restructuring Employment Opportunities in Australia, edited by G. R. Linge Environmental Management in Australia 1788–1914. Guardians, Improvers and Profit: an Introductory Survey, by J. M. Powell Ideas for Australian Cities by Hugh Stretton Family Planning in India: Diffusion and Policy by Piers M. Blaikie, Edward Arnold Brisbane at the Census: 1971 A Social Atlas. Prepared by Cities Commission with the assistance of G. T. McDonald, D. Biernoff, R. Jensen, P. Mullins, J. Skinner and P. Wood.