Coupling environmental modelling and economic information to guide investments

Optimising investment prioritisation based on a range of evidence is challenging

The Queensland and Australian governments fund extensive on-ground land management programs to support the Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan.

A perennial challenge is to be able to prioritise the focus of new funding rounds.

The investment prioritisation process is not a one-off set and forget process. Rather, it is a continuous process of change and adaptation as new information becomes available and new requirements must be served.

Many elements are constantly changing such as the areas for priority, the appetite for different sectors to conduct environmental works, the capacity of delivery organisations, accounting for work that has already been completed, and an increasing emphasis to also achieve co-benefits (not just water quality improvements).

In the past this problem has been handled by conducting a new prioritisation study to support each new funding initiative.

Fortunately, where the Great Barrier Reef is concerned, there is a tremendous resource in the ongoing modelling conducted by the Paddock to Reef program as well as the collective experience of previously delivered projects in terms of project costs and likelihood of adoption.

Reefonomics makes investment prioritisation easy and accessible to decision-makers

Truii has created Reefonomics. Reefonomics has had a long gestation period, commencing in COVID times and with a series of pauses as reef funding programs have been revised through a change in Australian government delivery approach. Reefonomics is currently undergoing a major rework, but the fundamentals summarised here all still apply.

What does Reefonomics do?

Reefonomics creates investment portfolios of the ~80 alternative on-ground actions (e.g. fertiliser management in Sugarcane, grazing practice change, gully rehabilitation) and predicts the likely water quality benefit and cost to deliver the investment portfolio. There are three modes:

• Meet a budget – the portfolio will implement actions until a given budget is exhausted.
• Do selected actions – run a pre-selected portfolio of actions and report the cost and likely outcomes.
• Meet targets – what it would cost to meet all Reef water quality targets (this is a large number).

What data does Reefonomics use?

There are several underlying data sources:

• Current condition (pollution generation by land use by catchment) is generated from the Paddock to Reef program modelling team as used in the interactive Reef Water Quality Report Card.
• Action effectiveness is generated from the Paddock to Reef program modelling team who have created several thousand modelling simulations covering a range of practices across different agricultural sectors. The CSIRO stream and gully toolbox is also used to quantify the effectiveness of stream and gully rehabilitation projects.
• Area available to do work is based on the Paddock to Reef program ongoing monitoring of practice change adoption levels in Reef catchments.
• Cost to implement actions is an ongoing challenge and is based on a series of program level costs reviews.