Good land management is essential for improving reef water quality, but unless those on the land have profitable, productive and sustainable enterprises we’re not going to achieve our goals. Supporting graziers in the Bowen, Broken, Bogie (BBB) catchment to achieve this is a primary focus for the Landholders Driving Change project.
This project is as much about social outcomes as environmental ones. And even though the focus is on the grazing community and sediment control, we also really want broader community involvement. To achieve this there has to be a place in the project for mining activities and other big industries, local government, and urban areas. We want this project to help the whole community understand the need to improve water quality flowing to the Reef.
We know there needs to be some immediate actions undertaken, but we are also looking to create some enduring change beyond the life of this project. This will help us achieve the ambitious targets set through the Reef 2050 plan, and the Reef Water Quality Plan.
This project has involved landholders from the beginning so they have clear ownership of its outcomes. The level of community involvement that we’ve seen to date is fantastic. This project has created some great networking opportunities.
We wanted this project to generate solutions from the ground up, and we have kept our expectations pretty broad about what actions the community will come up with. But we certainly hope we’ll see a mix of actions including some land-based rehabilitation, some repair to wetland systems, increased and improved engagement with landholders, more extension, and looking at where there’s a place for incentives to try to drive some of that practice change.
It’s very important for us that the landholders actually see some on ground results from the projects. We actually want them involved in creating and delivering the solutions, and seeing the outcomes and the monitoring results so they can relate those results directly back to their property and hopefully pass their learning onto others.
We are really committed to doing all we can to determine if this approach works. The signs are very good so far and we are really happy with the positive interaction occurring between all involved in the project – NQ Dry Tropics, landholders and the BBB community, government, and scientists. If this project can demonstrate that injecting significant funds into specific high priority catchments delivers a better outcome, then hopefully we can transfer this delivery model to other catchments within the reef community.
- Scott Robinson is one of the directors in the Queensland Government Office of the Great Barrier Reef. It's funding NQ Dry Tropics’ Landholders Driving Change project.