Farmers and land managers can play a pivotal role in conserving biodiversity in the Murray-Darling Basin as pressure continues to grow on Australia’s plants and animals.
The 2021 national State of the Environment report highlighted the growing list of nationally endangered species, while the devastating 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires have exacerbated pressures on endangered species as they had towards extinction.
In addition, rural communities in inland Australia feel they have been increasingly removed from decisions regarding natural resource management that impact their farms and livelihoods.
A recent paper published in the Journal of Environmental Management and Restoration by academics from Charles Sturt University and a group of irrigation farmers outlined how well – and not so well – that ecological research has supported natural resource management and intensive agricultural production in the Mid-Murray Valley, a major irrigation area in the Murray-Darling Basin.
Specifically, the authors explored relationships and communication between landholders and government agencies and universities as they carried out research projects in the catchment, including the successful Environmental Champions program and various Fencing Incentive programs, as well as the at-times fraught Plains‐wanderer program.
They reflected on the positive and negative aspects of relationships between landholders and others in these programs, and they argued for a more holistic, collaborative approach for making decisions when implementing biodiversity conservation on private and public land.
This approach aligns with principles around reconciliation ecology: it emphasises that when grass‐roots communities are included in research and decisions regards natural resource management, biodiversity is better conserved on cleared agricultural lands.
And this has to be good for the future of Australia’s farmers and endangered wildlife.
Details on the paper are here: Ward, W.S., Bond, J., Burge, L., Conallin, J., Finlayson, C., Michael, D., Scoullar, S., Vanderzee, M. and Wettenhall, A. (2022), Biodiversity on private land: Lessons from the Mid-Murray Valley in South-eastern Australia. Ecological Management & Restoration. https://doi.org/10.1111/emr.12560