Brett Bryan

Over two centuries of economic growth have put undeniable pressure on the ecological systems that underpin human well-being. While it is agreed that these pressures are increasing, views divide on how they may be alleviated. Some suggest technological advances will automatically keep us from transgressing key environmental thresholds; others that policy reform can reconcile economic and ecological goals; while a third school argues that only a fundamental shift in societal values can keep human demands within the Earth's ecological limits. Here we use novel integrated analysis of the energy-water-food nexus, rural land use (including biodiversity), material flows and climate change to explore whether mounting ecological pressures in Australia can be reversed, while the population grows and living standards improve. We show that, in the right circumstances, economic and environmental outcomes can be decoupled. Although economic growth is strong across all scenarios, environmental performance varies widely: pressures are projected to more than double, stabilize or fall markedly by 2050. However, we find no evidence that decoupling will occur automatically. Nor do we find that a shift in societal values is required. Rather, extensions of current policies that mobilize technology and incentivize reduced pressure account for the majority of differences in environmental performance. Our results show that Australia can make great progress towards sustainable prosperity, if it chooses to do so.

Discounted cash flow analysis, including net present value is an established way to value land use and management investments which accounts for the time-value of money. However, it provides a static view and assumes passive commitment to an investment strategy when real world land use and management investment decisions are characterised by uncertainty, irreversibility, change, and adaptation. Real options analysis has been proposed as a better valuation method under uncertainty and where the opportunity exists to delay investment decisions, pending more information. We briefly review the use of discounted cash flow methods in land use and management and discuss their benefits and limitations. We then provide an overview of real options analysis, describe the main analytical methods, and summarize its application to land use investment decisions. Real options analysis is largely underutilized in evaluating land use decisions, despite uncertainty in policy and economic drivers, the irreversibility and sunk costs involved. New simulation methods offer the potential for overcoming current technical challenges to implementation as demonstrated with a real options simulation model used to evaluate an agricultural land use decision in South Australia. We conclude that considering option values in future policy design will provide a more realistic assessment of landholder investment decision making and provide insights for improved policy performance.

Competition for land is increasing and policy needs to ensure the efficient supply of multiple ecosystem services from land systems. We modeled the spatially-explicit potential future supply of ecosystem services in Australia's intensive agricultural land in response to carbon markets under four global outlooks from 2013 - 2050. We assessed the productive efficiency of greenhouse gas emissions abatement, agricultural production, water resources, and biodiversity services and compared these to production possibility frontiers (PPFs). While interacting commodity markets and carbon markets produced efficient outcomes for agricultural production and emissions abatement, more efficient outcomes were possible for water resources and biodiversity services due to weak price signals. However, when only two objectives were considered as per typical efficiency assessments, efficiency improvements involved significant unintended trade-offs for the other objectives, and incurred substantial ...

... 2005). Wimmera regional salinity action plan strategy 2005-2010. wcma.vic.gov.au/ index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=42&Itemid=50 Weeks, A., Christy, B., Lowell, K. and Beverly, C. (2008). The Catchment ...

Resource condition targets have been specified for river salinity, biodiversity conservation, and wind erosion mitigation in the South Australian Murray-Darling Basin (SA MDB). The revegetation of cleared, privately owned agricultural land with deep rooted perennials has been widely promoted as one approach to satisfy the resource condition targets. Current estimates indicate the scale of revegetation necessary to meet the targets

... highest priority natural capital assets for management but they also considered that the impact on both built and financial capital, and social capital was ... public money in management and restoration programs and to mitigate and reverse further environmental degradation. ...

... Brett A. Bryan ... ANUCLIM and BIOCLIM have been extensively used to investigate biotic/abiotic relationships in the environment (Nix 1982, 1986; Busby 1986; Mackey 1993) and in the assessment of representativeness (Mackey et al. 1988, 1989; Belbin 1993). METHODS ...

This study provides a broad scale assessment of the distribution and dynamics of agricultural land use and the economic returns to agricultural use of land and water resources from 1996/97 to 2000/01 in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), Australia. The aim ...

... The process was designed to balance the need for accuracy and time efficiency. ... stream channels are important for flows of water, sediment, nutrients, pathogens, and ecological ... To improve analytical precision and specificity, the experimental analysis introduced a supply curve ...

... 8 Five MCDA workshops were held with the Board and each of the four regional advisory groups to quantify the management priority of capital assets and ecosystem services based on the framework above (Table 1). The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP; Saaty 1980) and the ...

ABSTRACT The agriculture and forestry sector accounts for approximately 24% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Australia. Over the years researchers have produced new knowledge about agricultural GHG emissions and energy use patterns and opportunities to decrease them, albeit in small-scale studies or large-scale ones with coarse resolution. Linking the multiple, diverse and rich datasets around agricultural production in Australia into one dataset that allows for an estimate of GHG emissions and energy use related to agriculture at a national scale and high resolution has not been done before. The approach we describe here is based upon a link between operational data sourced from gross margin (GM) handbooks and life cycle assessment (LCA) process data. We have collected and processed these datasets to produce a comprehensive database of typical agricultural operations covering 72 commodities grown in 42 regions across Australia. We have also created a system that estimates the GHG emission and energy use patterns of the aforementioned commodities using the best available LCA process data. To capture GHG emissions of non-domestically produced fertiliser, we queried the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (COMTRADE) to analyse the fertiliser and pesticide import patterns for Australia between 2000-2010. This analysis determined the average country energy-mix for fertiliser and pesticide manufacturing and allowed linking the associated GHG emissions to Australian agricultural production. Finally we spatialised agricultural operational data, emissions and energy use at the national scale using the latest Australian Land Use Map (2005/06). Our findings suggest that in 2005/06 greenhouse gas emissions related to Australian agricultural production equate to a total of 95.8 Mt CO2-e using 75.7 GWh of energy. According to our results 29.4% of these emissions come from sources that were categorised as non-agricultural (e.g. industrial processes or energy use) in the Australian National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (NGGI) 2006. We find that the provision of transparently modeled GHG emissions and having them linked to a spatially explicit component helps identifying new opportunities for emission reduction and facilitates an assessment of their effects. For example, our findings suggest production of ethanol from corn stover and sugarcane bagasse could have avoided 4.37 Mt CO2-e emissions (4.56% of total) without affecting food production.