Socio-economics: triple bottom-line accounting. A technical report to the Australian Government from the CSIRO Flinders and Gilbert Agricultural Resource Assessment, part of the North Queensland Irrigated Agriculture Strategy

[摘要] This report presents the methodology and results of the triple bottom line (TBL) assessment completed as part of the Flinders and Gilbert Agricultural Resource Assessment (FGARA). A TBL assessment of benefits and costs of a development typically includes monetary indicators describing environment and economy as well as broader social considerations.The TBL assessment brings together a number of results and pieces of information from the FGARA project and uses a Bayesian Decision Network (BDN) as the tool estimate the utility of irrigation development in the Flinders and Gilbert catchments. Specifically, results from other activities in the FGARA project (land suitability, aquatic ecology and irrigation costs and benefits) are summarised for input into the BDN. A BDN has many properties that make them useful for performing a triple-bottom-line assessment, in particulartheir ease of construction; their ability to handle quantitative and qualitative data types; their preservation of system knowledge and; their ease of use in aiding decision making.This report aims to:1. Capture expert knowledge estimating potential impacts to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems from irrigation development;2. Survey regional stakeholders on their values associated with ecosystem services, their priorities for managing ecosystem services, and their preferences for irrigation development more broadly (i.e. social values);3. Review and summaries the unit economic values of ecosystem services supplied by land and water ecosystems in the region, and;4. Build a BDN that integrates results from 1-3 above to estimate the utility of irrigation development based on social, environmental and economic benefits and costs.5. Identify and investigate scenarios that could increase the utility of irrigation development.6. Discuss the institutional and natural resource management options that minimise trade-offs between irrigation development and ecosystem service impacts.

[发布机构] CSIRO

[学科分类] 地球科学(综合)