The challenge
Alluvium Consulting led a project to support the Great Barrier Reef Foundation investment planning process. The outcomes of Alluvium’s work were tens of alternative investment actions spread across 224,000km2 of the Great Barrier Reef. Truii’s challenge was to create a web-based tool to allow the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to rapidly create and investigate alternative investment portfolios to assess the cost and water quality improvement of each portfolio.
Our solution
The Reef Planning and Investment Tool had three main modes of operation:
- Targets: This created a portfolio of investment activities required to achieve reef water quality targets for selected areas.
- Budget: This created a portfolio of investment up to a budget figure across selected areas.
- All actions: This mode predicted a water quality improvement and cost for a predefined set of interventions.
The Reef Planning and Investment Tool used a recursive, pragmatised, marginal cost abatement curve approach. The marginal cost abatement curve approach was used to order actions from best return on investment to least return on investment. The ‘pragmatised’ feature allowed users to reorder actions according to other ‘pragmatic’ decisions, such as co-investment opportunities or likelihood of adoption. The recursive feature referred to the fact that performing some on-ground actions could make other actions available or open up more opportunities for previously performed actions.
