Protecting water quality in urban estuaries: Australian case studies

Estuaries provide important environmental, social, cultural, and economic services. The provision of these services is often negatively impacted by urban development within the catchment and along shorelines, most notably through habitat loss and alteration of hydrological and sedimentation regimes influencing system structure and function. Mitigating the effects of urban development on estuaries provides a great challenge for managers, particularly when considering the diversity of estuaries and catchment characteristics. The management of urban stormwater is a challenging issue where no single solution is apparent but requires varied approaches. Using three distinctly different Australian estuaries, this chapter presents an account of combined management plans, restoration, monitoring/research, and education efforts used in addressing and managing the issues of urban pressures on water quality surrounding Port Jackson, Gold Coast Broadwater, and the Ross River estuary. Although the case study estuaries significantly vary according to rainfall seasonality and intensity, population density, and catchment size, a survey of implemented protection and management initiatives, illustrates a consistent theme of management practices across the case studies: (1) catchment/estuary management policies and plans including stormwater quality improvement device initiative practices; (2) low impact and purpose-designed development options including water-sensitive urban design options, including specific design adaptations required for effective operation in varying climatic zones and catchment conditions; (3) restoration programs; (4) water quality monitoring programs; (5) research activities; and (6) stakeholder and community education campaigns. The best management outcomes for urbanized estuaries require implementation of catchment-based management plans that are supported by clear objectives regarding ecosystem services and regional challenges

Does MODSS offer an alternative to traditional approaches to natural resource management decision-making?

There is an increasing awareness, on the part of decision-makers, of the need to develop new or to extend traditional evaluation techniques to facilitate a multidisciplinary and participatory approach to decision-making. Such an approach would be particularly appropriate for decision-making with respect to the management of natural resources. Not only are there multiple objectives involved but also many of the identified objectives are competing and conflicting. Traditional techniques to assist decision-making which focus on establishing the economic efficiency of an investment or management decision, do not pay sufficient attention to providing information about the nature and extent of the trade-offs involved. This article presents a multiple objective decision-support system (MODSS) which was developed to assist decision-making for a catchment in Far North Queensland. The MODSS approach is shown to be a process, capable of incorporating information from a number of disciplines as well as the preferences of identified groups of stakeholders, to support the prioritisation of options to manage land and water resources

Environmental social controls and capital investments: Australian evidence

Environmental social controls (ESCs) such as mandatory disclosure, regulations, subsidies, and stakeholder opinion are intended to improve firm environmental performance. This paper reports ESC importance to Australian financial managers in making capital investment decisions. A decision-making experiment showed managers to be most responsive to stakeholder opinion (42 per cent), followed by subsidization (26 per cent) and regulatory cost (22 per cent). Mandatory disclosure has very little influence (10 per cent). ESC interaction effects are limited so coordination of ESC policy is not a primary concern. High degrees of managerial self-insight suggest policy changes would be enhanced by close consultations with the managers involved. Copyright (c) The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2006 AFAANZ.