What is the likelihood of adoption of your management action?

Likelihood of adoption matters, when planning investment

There is never enough money to go around to invest in natural resource management (NRM).

Consequently, new funding announcements are usually followed by an investment prioritisation process.

What most investment prioritisation activities fail to address is the fact that most NRM investment takes place on private lands. Because of this, the success of any investment program depends heavily on the willingness of landholders to get on board.

When looking to implement a cost-effective action, if the number of willing landholders is low, we rapidly move on to less cost-effective actions. For an investment program, this is likely to result in less beneficial outcomes that are more expensive than initially predicted.

Not all landholders get on board and those that do may take time to be convinced of the benefits. This lag time is not compatible with short program funding cycles.

What is an on-ground action?

Before we consider rates of uptake and timeframes for adoption, we need to frame what an on-ground action is.

In our investment planning and prioritisation tool, Natural Capital Region, we consider an ‘Action’ to be both the on-ground work (e.g. stock exclusion) AND the support associated with the on-ground work.

That support includes all the things that motivate the landholder to adopt the practice, like financial (grants), extension support, and regulatory compliance.

Actions are more likely to be adopted if they have low out-of-pocket expenses, increased productivity for the landholder, and financial or extension support.

The ADOPT method

CSIRO’s Geoff Kuehne and co-authors have developed and tested a method for predicting landholder uptake. The Adoption and Diffusion Outcome Prediction Tool (ADOPT) predicts the peak level of adoption and the time to achieve that adoption level. The method is based on a 22-question survey.

The survey questions are about:

• the characteristics of landholder cohort (e.g. graziers vs grain growers)
• the characteristics of the on-ground action
• the combination of the on-ground action, within the context of the landholder cohort, and the relative advantage of the on-ground activity
• the benefits of the collective action (on-ground action plus support) and how long they are likely to take to be realised.

A formula is applied to the survey responses to predict both a likely level of adoption and a timeframe to reach that adoption level.

Kuehne et al (2018) tested the method for six specific agricultural practices:

1. using autosteer (GPS guidance in tractors)
2. growing insect-resistant transgenic cotton
3. growing a new species of legume crop (lupins)
4. growing a new wheat variety (Mace)
5. using no-till cropping
6. planting saltbush forage shrubs

Those practices had observed adoption rates from 5-90%, and adoption timeframes from 6 to 22 years. These observed values were well predicted using the ADOPT method with a remarkable R² of 0.98 for peak adoption level and 0.82 for adoption time (noting the small sample size, but excellent prediction).

Using ADOPT in prioritisation

In Natural Capital Region, for every action we apply the ADOPT method to predict the likely level and timeframe for adoption.

When running Natural Capital Region, the likelihood of adoption can be used as a prioritisation parameter (e.g. provide a higher weighting to those actions which are more likely to be adopted). Additionally, when

Natural Capital Region predicts the outcomes of a scenario it can apply the levels and timeframes predicted by ADOPT to demonstrate how important the consideration of adoption is for a given NRM investment portfolio.

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