Greenhouse, land management and carbon sequestration in Western Australia

This report examines options for greenhouse emissions abatement by changing land management practices and establishing terrestrial organic carbon sinks in Western Australia.It recommends the following priorities to the Greenhouse Task Force.? Expand the already successful Kyoto Protocol Article 3.3 plantations, as carbon sinks.? Determine the potential of Kyoto Protocol Article 3.4 sink activities (cropland management, grazing land management and revegetation) to contribute to carbon sequestration in Western Australia

Establishing IUCN Red List Criteria for Threatened Ecosystems

The potential for conservation of individual species has been greatly advanced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature\u27s (IUCN) development of objective, repeatable, and transparent criteria for assessing extinction risk that explicitly separate risk assessment from priority setting. At the IV World Conservation Congress in 2008, the process began to develop and implement comparable global standards for ecosystems. A working group established by the IUCN has begun formulating a system of quantitative categories and criteria, analogous to those used for species, for assigning levels of threat to ecosystems at local, regional, and global levels. A final system will require definitions of ecosystems; quantification of ecosystem status; identification of the stages of degradation and loss of ecosystems; proxy measures of risk (criteria); classification thresholds for these criteria; and standardized methods for performing assessments. The system will need to reflect the degree and rate of change in an ecosystem\u27s extent, composition, structure, and function, and have its conceptual roots in ecological theory and empirical research. On the basis of these requirements and the hypothesis that ecosystem risk is a function of the risk of its component species, we propose a set of four criteria: recent declines in distribution or ecological function, historical total loss in distribution or ecological function, small distribution combined with decline, or very small distribution. Most work has focused on terrestrial ecosystems, but comparable thresholds and criteria for freshwater and marine ecosystems are also needed. These are the first steps in an international consultation process that will lead to a unified proposal to be presented at the next World Conservation Congress in 2012

Capitalized amenity value of urban wetlands: a hedonic property price approach to urban wetlands in Perth, Western Australia *

Up to 60 per cent of potable water supplied to Perth, Western Australia, is extracted from the groundwater system that lies below the northern part of the metropolitan area. Many of the urban wetlands are groundwater-dependent and excessive groundwater extraction and climate change have resulted in a decline in water levels in the wetlands. In order to inform decisions on conserving existing urban wetlands, it is beneficial to be able to estimate the economic value of the urban wetlands. Applying the Hedonic Property Price approach to value urban wetlands, we found that distance to the nearest wetland and the number of wetlands within 1.5 km of a property significantly influence house sales price. For a property that is 943 m away from the nearest wetland, which is the average distance to the wetland in this study, reducing the wetland distance by 1 m will increase the property price by AU$42.40. Similarly, the existence of an additional wetland within 1.5 km of the property will increase the sales price by AU$6976. For a randomly selected wetland, assuming a 20 ha isolated circular wetland surrounded by uniform density housing, the total sales premium to surrounding properties was estimated to be around AU$140 million (AU$40 million and AU$230 million). Copyright 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation 2009 Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.

Community acceptance of biodiversity offsets: evidence from a choice experiment

International audienceThis study of the community's acceptance of biodiversity offsets in Australia provides insights relevant to future revisions of offset policies of both State and Commonwealth Governments. A choice experiment was used to measure preferences for the general acceptability of offsetting, and for a number of attributes that define how an offset can be implemented. Based on a sample of 204 respondents from Perth, WA, we found that the majority of respondents did not object to the practice of biodiversity offsetting in general. A minority of respondents preferred that offset actions be direct, but most accepted a combination of direct and indirect actions. Individuals generally preferred that the offset be located near the site of impact, and it became more unacceptable the further away that it was located. However, there was heterogeneity in preferences for protecting the impacted species or a more endangered one