Determining how to stretch NRM funding is hard

Got a bucket of money to invest in NRM? Congratulations!

Now, how will you spend that money to achieve the best outcomes?

Investing in on-ground projects for environmental improvement is always fraught with the problem of working out what is the most useful way to spend what is never enough money.

The answer to this problem is some form of prioritisation, which usually involves some variation of an expert driven qualitative assessment which often includes maps and crayons or a digital version thereof.

The process is not ideal. It is expensive, takes time and can be difficult to replicate.

Truii has created Natural Capital Region to optimise NRM funding

Truii have been grappling with the problem of how funds can be invested to achieve the greatest on-ground benefit.

Our approach is to create a process that is science driven, pragmatic and rapid.

Natural Capital Region provides a legacy of prioritisation decisions so that each subsequent investment prioritisation builds upon the previous prioritisation exercise, rather than starting from scratch each time.

The outputs are consistent from region to region, allowing the comparison of like for like and creating a base language from which to consider alternative investment strategies.

The basic premise of Natural Capital Region is that there is a limit to the things we care about (outcomes), and there is a limit to the things we can do in terms of on-ground actions.

Natural Capital Region is essentially a regional collection of all the on-ground actions that are likely to be done, and a quantification of the impact of each action on the outcomes.

From this basic relationship you can conduct endless prioritisation studies by varying the relative importance of the outcomes or by filtering the potential actions.

The idea is simple, putting it into practice is more challenging.

Indicators to report outcomes

To determine what outcomes are consistently use in NRM planning, we trawled through NRM plans and ran workshops to ultimately come up with the following seven indicators against which investment programs report:

• Water quality
• Biodiversity
• Social Economic
• First Nations
• Climate change (carbon, methane reduction)
• Land resilience (farming capacity to withstand a drying climate)

Underlying these six indicators we have 20 sub-indicators.

Libraries of on-ground actions to prioritise

To determine what actions are possible, we have used NRM plans and historical investment programs plus workshops and meetings to curate regionalised libraries of on-ground actions. The range of actions varies by region, however we have found that the lists typically range between 30 and 100 possible actions per region.

These actions are rarely unique for a region (e.g. grazing land management practices apply anywhere there are cattle), but their impact may vary depending on local biophysical conditions.

Options for investment prioritisation scenarios

Once set up for a region, running an investment prioritisation scenario requires setting a budget and identifying the priorities for the investment (e.g. prioritise projects that provide biodiversity benefits, benefits to First Nations peoples and/or carbon sequestration).

Natural Capital Region also includes some second order features that can be used in the potential portfolio generation process. These include:

• Temporal response: some actions take many years to see the benefit realised.
• Confidence: the confidence in the prediction of the action benefits can be used as a basis for investment prioritisation.
• Adoption potential: the likelihood that landholders will willingly engage in the action can also be used a prioritisation factor.
• Scale opportunities: prioritise actions in locations where a lot of land change opportunity exists.

Availability of Natural Capital Region

Natural Capital Region is developed on a region-by-region basis using region specific data and region-specific libraries of potential on-ground actions with their local benefits and costs.

Currently, Natural Capital Region is available for:

• South East Queensland
• Queensland Murray Darling Basin
• Burnett Mary
• Mackay Whitsundays
• Margaret River Region (Western Australia)
• Qld Lake Eyre Basin
• Northern Rivers NSW (under development)

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.