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Using economic analysis to prioritise improvements in environmental conditions is particularly difficult when multiple benefits are involved. This includes ‘bundling’ issues in agricultural pollution management, where a change in management action or farming systems generates multiple improvements, such as reductions in more than one pollutant. In this study, we conceptualise and compare two different approaches to analysing cost-effectiveness when varying bundles of benefits are generated for a single project investment. Each approach requires data to be transformed in some way to allow the analysis to proceed. The index approach requires the transformation on the benefits side so that the effects of multiple pollutant changes can be combined into a measure for each project which can then be compared to costs. By comparison, the disaggregation approach requires the transformation on the costs side where costs for each project have to be apportioned across the different pollutants involved. The paper provides novel insights with an application to agricultural water quality improvements into the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, demonstrating that while both approaches are effective in prioritising projects by cost-effectiveness, the disaggregation approach provides more insightful results and values that may be relevant for use as upper value guidelines in future project selection.

Industrial harbours are a complex interface between environmental, economic and social systems. Trying to manage the social and economic needs of the community while maintaining the integrity of environmental ecosystems is complicated, as is the identification and evaluation of the various factors that underpin the drivers of economic, community and resource condition. An increasingly popular strategy to deal with the identification and evaluation challenges in complex human-environmental systems is to use a report card system which can be used as a summary assessment tool to monitor the health of aquatic ecosystems. The use of environmental report cards has become increasingly common but reporting has principally focused on environmental indicators. It is only very recently that attempts are being made to include social, cultural and economic indicators. There has been limited consensus in the selection of social and economic indicators applied in different aquatic report cards but as recreation is such an important activity, typically some measure of recreation benefit is included. However, there has been no commonality in the measures applied to assess its performance as an economic indicator. This paper is focused on the assessment of recreational benefits as an indicator of economic value in the report card for Gladstone Harbour in Queensland, Australia. It is the first aquatic health report card to include an assessment of the nonmarket value of recreation which makes it a more comprehensive indicator of economic value compared to estimates in other report cards based on measures of employment, participation or expenditure. There have now been three consecutive years of reporting (2014-2016) of the Gladstone Harbour report card, and the results indicate that the recreation index appears to be effectively monitoring changes over time.

Funding programs to improve water quality into the GBR are difficult to evaluate, and administering agencies typically need to allocate funds without a clear assessment of the cost-effectiveness of proposals. This is particularly the case for agri-environmental schemes where policy makers set targets for improvements in water quality from agricultural lands and then need to identify funds and programs to encourage changes in practices. The priorities for actions are often driven by bio-physical assessments of risks on the natural environment with little information about the opportunity costs and challenges in changing land management. The goal of the research reported in this paper is to develop a supply function for water quality improvements in agricultural lands in the Great Barrier Reef catchments. Costs of supply have been estimated from multiple sources, including modelling, expert opinion, and the analysis of water quality tenders and Reef Rescue grant programs. The study addresses challenges in reconciling cost estimates from different sources, dealing with heterogeneity across industries and catchments, and managing different influences on costs from factors such as risks, adoption issues and transaction costs.

Evaluating land use change in economic frameworks often requires non-market values to be assessed. However non-market valuation experiments can be sensitive to the way the trade offs are framed. The aim of the research reported in this paper was to examine the influence of varying the valuation scope and combination of attributes in a split sample choice experiment focused on assessing the impacts of increased mining activity (coal and coal seam gas) in the Surat Basin in southern Queensland, Australia. The region had traditionally been dominated by the agricultural sector. The survey was designed to assess the largely, but not exclusively, non-use values of a distant population (Brisbane (capital city) residents) for tradeoffs between positive and negative impacts, which incorporated economic, social and environmental issues. Four impact attributes were identified: A)local jobs in the mining sector; B) house prices in the non-mining sector; C) wage rates in the non-mining sector and, D) inspections and independent monitoring activity at coal seam gas mining sites (a proxy to address environmental concerns). The results indicate that varying the combination of attributes had a significant influence on preferences and welfare estimates, which varied across attributes and valuation formats

Two choice modelling studies in Australia were designed to test for the effects of variations in geographic scale and scope on WTP values. One case study assessed values for improved natural resource management in a river catchment, and the other assessed values for improved protection of the Great Barrier Reef. The results show that increases in the amount of an amenity offered are valued positively and display diminishing marginal utility. Unit value estimates vary inversely with increases in the geographic scope over which an amenity improvement was offered. In the case studies, marginal values for the same unit of environmental improvement could be several thousand times higher when only very small areas were considered compared to when the whole amenity was framed. These results confirm that calibration factors are needed in benefit transfer applications between different geographic scopes. A close inverse relationship was identified between the ratio of quantities involved and the ratio of the WTP amounts. A log-log form of this relationship is recommended as a simple and efficient way of performing this calibration.

Assessing the value of ecosystem services in a particular area helps provide information about the economic benefits these services provide to the community. In many situations, to avoid the full cost of primary data collection, value estimates may be applied from secondary sources in a process known as benefit transfer. However, in many countries, including Australia, the stock of economic value estimates for ecosystem services is limited and this restricts the application of benefit transfer. In this paper, the non-market values of three ecosystems (native vegetation, waterways, and wetlands) in a coastal peri-urban town are assessed using benefit transfer. Ecosystems in a peri-urban environment are generally fragmented and in a degraded condition, but can have very high values within the residential urban area. Three main limiting factors are identified. First, there is a general paucity of relevant source study estimates. Second, there is a need for scale adjustment factors so that source study estimates which are often assessed at a catchment or regional level can be adjusted to a small local council jurisdiction. Third, there is a need for some level of scope adjustment to account for the very high values of very small patch sizes, with low ecological value, within an urban area.

Key policy issues relating to protection of the Great Barrier Reef from pollutants generated by agriculture are to identify when measures to improve water quality generate benefits to society that outweigh the costs of reducing pollutants. The research reported in this paper makes a key contribution in several key ways. First, it uses the improved science understanding about the links between management changes and reef health to bring together the analysis of costs and benefits of marginal changes, helping to demonstrate the appropriate way of addressing policy questions relating to reef protection. Second, it uses the scientific relationships to frame a choice experiment to value the benefits of improved reef health, and links improvements explicitly to changes in ‘water quality units’. Third, the research demonstrates how protection values are consistent across a broader population, with some limited evidence of distance effects. Fourth, the information on marginal costs and benefits that are reported provide policy makers with key information to help improve management decisions. The results indicate that while there is potential for water quality improvements to generate net benefits, high cost water quality improvements are generally uneconomic. One implication for policy makers is that cost thresholds for key pollutants should be set to avoid more expensive water quality proposals being selected.

The focus of this report is to report choice modelling experiments that have tested the consistency of values across differently scoped dimensions of an environmental asset. The case study involved the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia, where a key policy question is to identify if protection values for one part of the reef can be transferred to different sections and scaled from local case studies to the whole reef area without adjustment. The study involved 12 split-samples in three CM experiments to assess values for the whole GBR, a regional section of the GBR and a local reef area while controlling for variations across populations, the scope of the choice tasks, and survey formats. The results demonstrate that issues of geographic scope and scale remain challenging in CM experiments. Contrary to expectations, the proportional values for different regions of the GBR remained consistent when geographic scope and scale increased, while absolute values declined. This was despite substantial efforts in designing and presenting the surveys to define the amenity of interest to respondents. The results indicate that it is difficult to identify single unit values for an environmental amenity that can be easily transferred and extrapolated across geographic regions and scales. However, there may be good theoretical reasons why marginal values for specific areas of interest in the GBR have much higher protection values, which then decline as larger and more general areas are considered.

In this paper the results of a choice modelling experiment to value increased protection of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is reported. There are very few previous studies that identify protection values for the Great Barrier Reef, making it difficult to evaluate whether the community benefits from future additional protection measures are larger than the costs involved. The valuation experiment that has been conducted is novel in two important ways. First, different management policies to increase protection have been included as labels in the choice experiment to test if the mechanisms to achieve improvements are important to respondents. Second, the level of certainty associated with predicted reef health has been included as an attribute in the choice profiles, helping to distinguish between outcomes of different management policies. The results show that protection values vary with the policy scope of the improvements being considered. Values are sensitive to whether protection will be generated by improving water quality entering the reef, increasing conservation zones or reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the level of certainty of outcomes. The average household willingness to pay for five years for each additional 1% of protection is approximately $26.37 when the broad management options to generate improvements were included in the choice sets. These results can be extrapolated to a total value held by Queensland households of $132.8M to $171.5M per 1% improvement, depending on the assumptions used about the discount rate.

The main objective of the study outlined in this paper was to examine how the inclusion of an additional labelled alternative, to provide respondents with more choice in a stated preference survey, impacted on choice complexity. The valuation context was to elicit preferences for improvements in the future condition of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. A split sample experiment was implemented where one survey included four labelled alternatives: a status quo option and three specific policy management options (restricted choice). The other survey provided respondents with an unrestricted choice set by including a fifth alternative choice, labelled as “a combination of management options”. While the additional option improved opportunities to find an attractive choice profile, adding an extra alternative increased the complexity of the survey. The tradeoff between choice flexibility and complexity is examined in terms of changes in respondents’ choice behaviour and the performance of the different models. The results provide some evidence that adding a combination policy alternative did change the ways that respondents viewed tradeoffs, but that choice behaviour and subsequent value estimates were consistent across the two survey formats.

The focus of this report is to test if protection values at a particular GBR site may be easily transferred to other case studies of interest in the region. The research involved valuing three local case studies in the GBR and testing how values were consistent across site and population characteristics. The sites were chosen to reflect substantial heterogeneity in extent, ecological composition and condition, while values were assessed for both local and distant populations. The results are encouraging, indicating that although significant heterogeneity was identified with the mixed logit models, values were robust to various site and population differences. No significant difference in protection values between the three local case studies could be identified, and there was no significant difference in values between the local population and the Brisbane population. However, some evidence for distance effects was identified for the Brisbane population, with closer sites valued more highly. As well, potential losses were valued more highly (in absolute terms) than potential gains. The implication of these results is that protection values are likely to be higher for closer reef areas with risks of losses than these with opportunities for improvements.

A number of studies have examined the effects of distance decay and the influence it might have on both use and non-use values. However, the relationship between environmental values and distance effects is less clear cut when iconic or special assets are involved. In this report, the effects of distance decay on protection values of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia are explored using two split sample choice experiments. The results suggest that the Townsville (local) population had larger use values than the Brisbane (distant) population. However, for iconic resources, where perceptions of responsibility, substitutes and information are reasonably consistent across population groups, non-use values remain constant across spatially different population groups.