by Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists

Why, given how much environmental data is already collected by researchers, government, interest groups and industry, is it we are still unable to get a national picture on the state of our environment? Why are monitoring programs frustrated by temporary funding? Why can’t we account for the benefits from the dollars invested in the environment?

It is because we do not have a framework to capture and use this data. We need an institutional means to track and react to environmental change, make informed investment choices, inform how and where we produce our food and fibre, and guide the new terrestrial carbon economy.

The lack of an environmental accounting framework is one of the great failures of public policy of our generation and is at the core of our environmental problems.

It has resulted in policy and land use decisions that have caused significant and unnecessary damage to our natural environment, it has resulted in the massive waste of billions of dollars of public funds aimed at repairing this damage, and now as climate change imposes its footprint on the Australian landscape, it means we do not have the tools in place to adapt to these changes.

This can not be resolved by simply re-structuring the delivery of existing programs. It can only be fixed by building a national, but regionally based monitoring, data collection, evaluation and reporting system.

Last year the Wentworth Group, in association with other experts, put forward one model for building the National Environmental Accounts of Australia.*

The model is a regionally based system for monitoring the health of our key environmental assets and the change in condition of these assets over time. 

In essence, the National Environmental Accounts model produces three complementary benefits:

Firstly, it reduces the amount of information that needs to be collected to produce a systematic accounting framework that can operate at all scales, rather than require the collection of an impossibly large number of indicators (e.g. the 200 indicators still unresolved by the NRM Minco after over 10 years of argument).

Secondly, the information is in a format that indicates whether we are making a net loss or gain for investments in environmental management.

Thirdly, the accounts can be used by any institution, for any asset, at any scale, to guide policy or economic investment decisions, because they are built from a common currency.

This applies as much to seascapes as landscapes. In October this year, a parliamentary committee on the impacts of climate change on Australia’s coasts recommended that coastal zone environmental accounts be established**.

If we are to have any hope of managing the great environmental challenges of the 21st century, of which climate change is but one, we are going to have to apply the same discipline to environmental management that we apply to managing our economy. 

* Wentworth Group, 2008.  Accounting for Nature.  A Model for Building the National Environmental Accounts of Australia. May 2008. http://www.wentworthgroup.org/blueprints/accounting-for-nature

** House of Representatives Parliamentary Standing Committee, 2009. Managing our coastal zone in a changing climate: The time to act is now Commonwealth of Australia. October 2009. Canberra.

Accounting for Nature is available at http://www.wentworthgroup.org

Contact: jmcdonald@wentworthgroup.org