How we streamline natural resource management investment prioritisation

Stop wasting time with ‘busy work’

In the world of natural resource management (NRM) funding, a call for grant proposals usually precedes a flurry of collating project opportunities and recasting them to the focus of the new grant funding opportunity.

This means a lot of busy work, an unnecessary transaction cost, which gets repeated every time there is a grant round. It keeps people employed but redirects funds from being spent on-ground.

Understand the boundary conditions

After grappling with the problem of how to generalise investment prioritisation, we have stumbled upon some basic truths about how funding works in the NRM sector.

Firstly, there is a limited set of on-ground actions that we can do (and an even smaller set of actions that landholders are willing to engage in).

Secondly, there are a fixed range of things we care about (outcomes). The subset of outcomes that investors care about varies from grant round to grant round, which in turn defines what we choose from our list of on-ground activities, or projects to put forward for funding.

How Natural Capital Region streamlines prioritisation

Truii’s strategic investment prioritisation application, Natural Capital Region, is fundamentally a collation of the actions we can do and a calculation of their impact on the outcomes we care about.

The trick is to ensure your prioritisation approach can create a subset of on-ground actions that matches the priorities of the day.

Natural Capital Region adopts a marginal abatement cost curve (MACC) approach. The ‘marginal abatement’ bit of MACC is simply the pollution reduction from a baseline, which is then divided by the cost of the action to get a pollution reduction/$ which can be used for prioritisation.

If there are many outcomes to consider, it gets a little trickier unless these improvements are defined with a common unit so that they can be combined. In Natural Capital Region, we consider the marginal abatement as a proportional change from the baseline condition (think percent improvement). This gives a dimensionless proportional value for all the outcomes that we care about and then allows them to be weighted and combined across all outcomes for all actions.

The overall ‘marginal abatement’ score of on-ground actions in Natural Capital Region is based on the user defined combination of the relative importance of:

• each of the ~20 outcome measures (e.g. water quality improvement, First Nations benefits, social benefits)
• the speed at which outcomes are likely to be achieved (e.g. engineered vs natural solutions)
• the likelihood of adoption of the action (some actions are not attractive to private landholders)
• broader opportunities of scale (is there a lot of land available to undertake this action?)
• confidence in the predicted outcome (well established vs experimental actions).

This seems complicated, but in practice, once the collation of possible actions for a region is conducted, recasting them according to different priorities, by turning on and weighting what is important, takes just seconds.

Figure 1: Subset of measures for creating a prioritisation scheme in Natural Capital Region

So far, we have instances of Natural Capital Region for:

• South East Queensland
• Queensland Murray Darling Basin
• Burnett Mary
• Mackay Whitsundays
• Margaret River Region (Western Australia)
• Lake Eyre basin

If you want access to any of these regions, or to develop an instance in your region, get in touch. Our intention is to ultimately achieve national coverage, but our roll out is governed by interest and opportunity.

Read more about Natural Capital Region >>