Exploring New Incentives report

The Landholders Driving Change: Exploring New Incentives report has:

  • Reviewed relevant land management practices with a focus on grazing and gully remediation and analysed the public and private benefits of practice change;
  • Collated and assessed potential incentives to facilitate adoption of desirable land management practices;
  • Reviewed and summarised learnings from previous incentive programs; and
  • Summarised incentive programs currently available to BBB landholders.

The report provides six recommendations to support and trial incentives within the LDC project and to support longer-term practice change.

They are:

  1. Develop a gully calculator.
  2. Collect and improve data about land and landholders.
  3. Implement a suite of complementary incentives to support graziers in ongoing land management for water quality benefits ( a): LDC support BBB landholders to understand their current regulatory obligations; b): LDC provide ongoing assistance for landholders to access information, extension services and subsidised training; c): LDC refine the current grants scheme to reward on-ground change and improved maintenance of benefits over time; d): LDC to provide social recognition and support innovation with leading  landholders.
  4. Rigorously evaluate all incentives used within the LDC and advocate for better use and access to evaluation reports
    Recommendations to influence longer-term outcomesThe level of investment and the integrated delivery approach of the LDC project provides a unique opportunity to broker longer-term arrangements to support improved and ongoing incentives to improve water quality from grazing lands.
  5. Institutionalise long term approaches to catchment repair.
  6. Investigate collaborative approaches to supporting best practice grazing land management.

Read the report here.

Scoping workshops

Exploring New Incentives is looking at ways to address barriers and constraints, financial and other, to the adoption of improved grazing land management practices and landscape remediation options that improve water quality in the Bowen, Broken, Bogie (BBB) catchment.

A series of workshops have been held in the BBB with landholders, scientists, technical experts, and NQ Dry Tropics staff, to scope out how best to meet the needs of this Activity Area.  These were held in the first half of 2018 and allowed landholders to have input on different incentives that could be trialled as part of the LDC project.

The workshops were facilitated by Senior Research Fellow at James Cook University, Rachel Eberhard, Director of Natural Decisions Dr Anna Roberts, and Environmental Economists at CSIRO Brisbane, Dr Anthea Coggan.

The outcome was the Landholders Driving Change: Exploring New Incentives report, commissioned by NQ Dry Tropics, and funded by the Queensland Government, to support the trial and evaluation of new incentive approaches as part of the Landholders Driving Change (LDC) project in the BBB.  The report does not necessarily represent the views or policy of either NQ Dry Tropics or the Queensland Government.

It provides six recommendations to support and trial incentives within the LDC project and to support longer-term practice change. Recommendations relate to the current LDC project and timeframes and to the LDC’s ability to influence longer- term outcomes.

The LDC project panel is considering which recommendations to adopt.