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Thursday 3rd December 2009
1-2pm, in Fenner School FORESTRY LECTURE THEATRE, Forestry building 48
Market Based Ecosystem Services - A proposed National Model
Sam Archer, 2008 scholarship recipient of Nuffield Australia Farming Scholars
Discussants: Geoff Gorrie, Regional Economic Development Associates, and
Dr Philip Gibbons, Fenner School of Environment and Society.
Abstract:
The world's ecosystems face competing demands from agriculture, mining, forestry and urban development. Forecasts indicate the world's population will increase 50% by 2050 and food demand will double in the next 50 years. These influences will place increasing pressure on the ability of ecosystems to provide vital environmental goods and services, including food and fibre production. A balance, however, is required between food security, climate change initiatives and ecosystem preservation. The world’s farmers have the greatest capacity to protect and enhance the world's ecosystems. They manage 60% of the world's productive landmass and 70% of it's freshwater and have already developed numerous innovative ecosystem service schemes.
Despite Australian Governments, both State and Federal, embarking on a number of pilot environmental stewardship schemes, these nascent programmes and the institutions that support them have repeatedly suffered at the hands of capricious Governments. Consequently, there has been a loss of continuity, market confidence, stakeholder engagement, corporate knowledge and national oversight of the collective work that has been, and is being, undertaken. The Australian Government clearly does not have the resources to fully fund a national stewardship scheme. It should, therefore, provide enabling legislation, allow a non-government organisation to administer the scheme and the private sector to develop and drive the market place. This would enable ecosystem management to move beyond the current piece meal approach, fund initiatives beyond traditional three-year cycles and address the issue of ecosystems and their services crossing spatial boundaries.
Central to this is a National Ecosystem Services Scheme (ESS) encompassing a private sector funded/consumer pays, whole-of-landscape approach as a cornerstone of a national climate change initiative. It would be voluntary, implemented on marginally productive land, and paid as a performance-based, annual cashflow stream utilising a range of Market Based Instruments (MBI’s). Farmers would be encouraged to identify their least productive land which might be a combination of, but not limited to; riparian zones, acidic or saline soils, remnant vegetation, water logged areas, wind swept ridge lines, highly eroded or degraded sites. They would manage these marginal areas to deliver ecological goods and services, be they carbon, water, biodiversity or soil related. These environmental "credits" would entitle the farmer to an annual cashflow stream, provided they continued to deliver the environmental benefits to a standard of peer reviewed industry best management practice which were over and above the farmer’s environmental duty-of-care.
Bio:
Sam Archer |
Sam Archer was awarded an Australian Nuffield Farming Scholarship in 2008 and travelled throughout the Americas, Europe and India researching private sector funded environmental stewardship schemes broadly based around carbon, water and biodiversity.
He runs a mixed farming system with his wife, Sabrina, based on livestock, cereal production and native pastures at Gundagai. Their farm has been a research site for the CSIRO's Sustainable Ecosystems programme and the Australian National University's Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies. In 2002 it was selected as a pilot site for the Australian Government's national environmental stewardship programme.
He is Chair of Murrumbidgee Landcare, representing 2,000 land managers in the Murrumbidgee catchment, a member of the Australian Farm Institute’s Research Advisory Committee, the BioBanking Ministerial Reference Group, a Board Director of the NSW Farmers Association and Chair of the Association's Business, Economics and Trade Committee.
During the nineties he worked with aboriginal resource agencies delivering socio-economic programmes to remote communities in Western Australia and, when not farming, has since been engaged as a corporate trouble shooter within the logistics, utilities and environmental sectors. He holds a BCom (1990) and a BArts (1995) in Commerce and Anthropology (Hon 1st class) from Deakin University and the Australian National University respectively. |
The Fenner School Seminar Series is held in the Forestry Lecture Theatre, Forestry Building 48, Linnaeus Way (comes off Daley Road), Australian National University, Canberra ACT
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