a retrospective of environmental planning at uq

ii AN ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING RETROSPECTIVE

Contributors

Primary authors Allan Dale, CEO, Terrain Natural Resource Management [[email protected]]

Ann Peterson, University of Queensland [[email protected]]

Ben Harman, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems [[email protected]]

Bruce Taylor, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems [[email protected]]

Cathy Robinson, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems [[email protected]]

Clive McAlpine, University of Queensland [[email protected]]

David Pitts, Environment Science & Services [[email protected]]

Dick Osborn, The Australian National University [[email protected]]

Geoff McDonald, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems [[email protected]]

Iraphne Childs, Queensland University of Technology [[email protected]]

Jenny Bellamy, University of Queensland [[email protected]]

Leanne Wilks, Department of the Environment and Water Resources [[email protected]

Leonie Pearson, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems [[email protected]]

Lex Brown, Griffith University [[email protected]]

Marcus Lane, University of Adelaide [[email protected]]

Mary Maher, Mary Maher & Associates [[email protected]]

Michelle Walker, Michelle Walker and Associates [[email protected]]

Mike Berwick, Douglas Shire Council [[email protected]]

Nigel Weston, Caboolture Shire Council [[email protected]]

Suzanne Hoverman, formerly Qld Department of Natural Resources and Water [[email protected]]

Tiffany Morrison, Flinders University [[email protected]]

Other contributors Boonsom Siribumrungsukha, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand

Bruce Mitchell, University of Waterloo

Chatchai Ratanachai, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand

Chris Buckley, Buckley Vann Town Planning Consultants

Christina Jack, University of Queensland

Greg Hill, University of the Sunshine Coast

Daryl Low Choy, Griffith University

Helen McComb, University of Queensland

Ian McPhail, Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Victoria

John Abbott, Queensland Department of Local Government and Planning

John Bennett, Environmental Protection Agency

John Brannock, Brannock & Associates Pty Ltd

John Holmes, University of Queensland

Judy Nankiville, University of Queensland

Lynne Ferguson, Mary Maher & Associates

Mark O’Donohue, Urban Water Security Research Alliance

Paul Sgarbossa, Burdekin Productivity Board

Penny Carrick, University of Queensland

Rabel Burdge, University of Illinois

Rapeepun Suwannatachote, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand

Roy Rickson, Griffith University

Sally Driml, Environmental Protection Agency, Queensland

Sarah Norman, London Borough of Hackney

Stefan Hajkowicz, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems

Susie Chapman, University of the Sunshine Coast

Susanne Cooper, Sinclair Knight Merz

Tim Wrigley, University of Queensland

Tor Hundloe, Griffith University

Weerapant Musigasam, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand

and many others

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GEOFF MCDONALD’S LEADERSHIP, SCHOLARSHIP AND IMAGINATION TO ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING MILESTONES iii

Contents

Contributors ................................................................................................................................ ii

Geoff McDonald’s career milestones........................................................................................... iv

1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1

2 Integrating NRM: the 1975–83 Condamine Basin experiments ...............................................2

3 Local government takes up the challenge..............................................................................4

4 Noosa heats up—listening to the community.........................................................................6

5 Greenhouse effect—Redcliffe Case Study ..............................................................................8

6 Daintree Futures Study—caps for conservation .................................................................... 10

7 Planning in the ‘noughties’: challenging orthodoxies, pushing boundaries .......................... 12

8 Gone troppo—NRM planning in the Wet Tropics ................................................................... 16

9 Planning for the north—Tropical Savannas CRC.................................................................... 18

10 Smart targets: setting targets for the Reef Lagoon and Chesapeake Bay...............................20

11 Future of the cane lands at Nambour—thinking outside the square......................................22

12 Beyond EIA—to environmental planning and design ............................................................24

13 International and integrated................................................................................................26

14 Educator and mentor...........................................................................................................28

15 Geoff’s perspective .............................................................................................................32

16 Conclusion—a gentleman and a scholar .............................................................................. 34

Appendix A PhD students advised by Geoff McDonald ............................................................ 35

Appendix B Key projects on accompanying CD........................................................................ 37

Copies of this tribute document are available from the Planning Institute of Australia website: http://www.planning.org.au/

Image on front cover:

Listening time at Goondiwindi’s Presbyterian Hall, March 1979 (photo courtesy of Dick Osborn, ANU)

Production date: August 2007

http://www.planning.org.au/

iv AN ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING RETROSPECTIVE

Geoff McDonald’s career milestones

Qualifications BA (Hons I) University of New England, 1966; MA University of Toronto, 1968; PhD University of Toronto, 1972

Employment history 1967 Research Officer, Macleay River County Council, Kempsey, NSW

1969–1971 Research Assistant, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto

1971–1972 Lecturer in Geography, University of Toronto

1972–1977 Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Geography, The University of Queensland, Brisbane

1977–1994 Senior Lecturer/Reader, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland

1981 Visiting Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (July–December)

1985 Visiting Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada, (July–December)

1993 Visiting Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning University of Illinois, Urbana (September–December)

1995–2002 Professor and Head, Department of Geographical Sciences and Planning, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland

2000–2001 Visiting Professor, School of Forestry, University of Wisconsin, Madison (September–December 2000, May–June 2001)

2002–2006 Senior Principal Research Scientist, Resource Futures Program, CSIRO Division of Sustainable Ecosystems, St Lucia, Queensland

Professor in the School of Geography Planning and Architecture (fractional)

2002–2006 Professor (fractional), School of Geography Planning and Architecture, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland

2007– Honorary Fellow, CSIRO Division of Sustainable Ecosystems, St Lucia, Queensland

Emeritus Professor in the School of Geography Planning and Architecture, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland

Professional associations • Fellow of the Planning Institute of Australia

• Member, Environment Institute of Australia

• Member, International Society for Society and Resource Management

Board memberships—policy and professional • Member, Rural Futures Committee, Office of Urban Management, Queensland Premiers Department, 2006–2007

• Member, National Assessment Panel for Envirofund, 2002

• Chair, Queensland State Assessment Panel for Envirofund, 2002–2007

• Board of the International Society for Society and Resource Management (US), 2002–2004

• Member, Planning Institute of Australia, Panel of Judges, Awards of Excellence, 1988–2007

• Member of the Judging Panel National Riverprize, 2000–2007

• Chair of the Natural Heritage Trust State Assessment Panel, 1998–2002

• Member, Queensland Land Tribunal, 1992–1995

• Director on the Board of the Wet Tropics Management Authority, 1991–1994

• Member, Queensland Divisional Committee, Royal Australian Planning Institute, 1984, 1994–2000.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GEOFF MCDONALD’S LEADERSHIP, SCHOLARSHIP AND IMAGINATION TO ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING MILESTONES 1

1 Introduction

It was a mild autumn morning in late May this year. Geoff was not feeling a hundred per cent and the prognosis was not good. Geoff was asking me about ‘biodiversity’ and had we all got it wrong in the 1990s when we argued for species protection as our main emphasis in environmental planning. Geoff’s view was that effort directed at protection of individual species and museum-like treatment of nature through locking it up to preserve it had resulted in the rest of the environment and landscape being treated in a business-as-usual manner—and trashed. Coffee with Geoff often meant engaging in these sorts of discussions.

So I came away thinking about all those big ideas that Geoff had kicked around about environmental planning and his way of engaging people in the bigger picture and how to bring it about. Here was a practitioner with an inquiring mind of the highest order and experience with many institutions and many groups, and their agendas. So why not pull some of these ideas and achievements in environmental planning into a handy little publication. After some weighing up I thought that the most accessible format would be a series of ‘vignettes’ about projects Geoff and colleagues had worked on from the 1970s to the 2000s.

I floated the idea with David Pitts, then Ann Peterson and Michelle Walker. The answer was a resounding yes. The next task was to obtain Geoff’s permission, which was given graciously with the proviso that it was about milestones in environmental planning, not about himself.

So this booklet came into existence through the generosity of a few key players. Ann, David, Lex, Michelle, Dick and Lynne took on the liaison and collation task. The limitations of this initiative may be very obvious to readers and colleagues of Geoff’s but it is worth stating what these were:

• the production time has been just five weeks in the making—from concept to completion

• the team encouraged a level of ‘editorial diversity’ and people worked with the idea of two-page vignettes of relevant projects in their own talented ways!

We humbly apologise to those generous contributors whose work was dispatched to us, but which may have perished in cyberspace or have gone astray in the collation process across the team, and to anyone who feels they have been misrepresented or under represented. The extremely tight time line for the booklet has led to a predominance of contributions from those involved in Geoff’s most recent bodies of work at UQ and CSIRO. Finally, we must absolve Geoff of any input whatsoever except for his permission to go ahead with the idea. Any errors or omissions are purely the work of the team who put it all together in something of a hurry!

It wouldn’t have been possible without your help …

The team of Lex Brown, Lynne Ferguson, Dick Osborn, Ann Peterson, David Pitts and Michelle Walker and myself greatly appreciates the dedication and responsiveness of everyone who contributed to this rapid production. We would especially like to thank:

• all contributors—our authors and commentary contributors

• researchers—Leonie Seabrook

• formatting—Debbie Phillips (DP Plus), Ann Peterson, Caroline Francis and CSIRO (Brisbane)

• printing—the School of Geography Planning and Architecture, The University of Queensland

• CD production—Geoff’s daughter, Katina Marchbank, with Dick Osborn and other contributors

• video production – CSIRO (Brisbane)

Mary Maher July 2007

2 AN ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING RETROSPECTIVE

2 Integrating NRM: the 1975–83 Condamine Basin experiments

Dick Osborn

Context Much of contemporary thought sees integrated natural resources management (INRM) as an endeavour of the 1990s. INRM origins, however, go back to at least the early 1970s, with action research centred on four key communication processes.

Horizontal integration Vertical integration

Knowledge sharing

Researchers from one or many institutions form multidisciplinary teams.

Teams engage with stakeholders in co-producing usable knowledge.

Policy learning

Public and private sector organisations form policies by monitoring trends in Physical, Political, Economic, Social, Technological and Trade environments.

Institutional arrangements connect public and private sector policy makers operating through nested communities-of-place.

In the United States, well-established research institutions were early contributors. Planners there developed a general theory demonstrating no final or correct solution can emerge in addressing complex social problems.1 Two groups of systems thinkers there applied computing technologies to integrating for NRM.2 Consistent with ideas on top-down communication, one group modelled future nature–society interactions at global scale to provide national governments with ‘Limits to Growth’ scenarios. Consistent with ideas on two-way communication, the other group developed and tested a decision-support tool—interpretive structural modelling (ISM)—thereby offering entry into an environmental democracy where stakeholders from public and private sectors can engage in collective policy learning. ISM does so by portraying structural relationships between elements in complex land-use and other problem sets.

In Australia, workers in a fledging research institution also contributed to INRM’s origins. They did so through three consecutive experiments in the Condamine Basin during 1975 to 1983, as identified here. Some connections between applying ISM in the Upper Darling Basin during 1979 with other times and contexts are also illustrated.

The Condamine Basin experiments

1975 to 1977 A natural disaster event took place in the Darling Downs in 1973. Damage was judged sufficient to declare the region as an Area of Soil Erosion Hazard under Queensland’s Soil Conservation Act. The declaration triggered many of INRM’s key communication processes. The Australian Research Council (ARC) also called for proposals to build capacity in multidisciplinary research around that time. The fledgling School of Australian Environmental Studies (AES) at Griffith University used both events to gain funding for its first project: ‘The environmental justification for, and the socio-economic

consequences of, declaring the Darling Downs as an Area of Soil Erosion Hazard’.

Building a multidisciplinary research team was the priority for those working on this experiment. Achievements didn’t progress to reporting the evaluations implied in its title. Environmental justification for more investment in soil conservation had become a national issue through the 1975–77 Commonwealth–State Collaborative Soil Conservation Study. Socio-economic consequences within the region were too fluid to assess. The declaration meant state and local authorities had to consider exercising significant powers, including determining use of freehold land. The project’s proponents faced teaching commitments to a rapidly growing undergraduate and postgraduate student body. The ARC decided it wasn’t getting a satisfactory return from its nationwide investment in multidisciplinary research projects, withdrawing funding halfway through their anticipated lives.

1978 and 1979 Researchers cannot pre-determine outcomes in INRM projects. Creating an effective process is often the most useful result. Outcomes vary over time and place according to initiatives and responses that flow within and across all four cells of the above matrix.3 Some AES researchers learnt that lesson from their involvement in the 1975–77 Condamine experiment.

Already constrained by resource limits, the AES needed new actors and institutions to put its INRM learnings into effect. Geoff McDonald’s appointment both to AES, and as Director of its Institute of Applied Social Research (IASR), provided the opportunity. Supported in the design task by a few colleagues, he took responsibility for ‘Planning Futures in the Upper Darling Basin’4 as the second Condamine INRM experiment.

Geoff facilitating an ISM session, Goondiwindi, 1979


Applying interpretive structural modelling

The chronology at www.jnwarfield.com/pdf/HIM/HIM.zip suggests the Upper Darling Basin (UDB) application of ISM probably fits within the first ten of many hundreds conducted at global scale since 1974. How the team led by Geoff McDonald used ISM in 1979 is described at pp 24–44 in the third volume of UDB reports on the CD accompanying this booklet (see Appendix B). How two members of Geoff’s Goondiwindi team repeated the process in 2005 is at www.regional.org.au/au/apen/2006/refereed/3/2911_osbornrc.htm#TopOfPage.

Paul-Marie Boulanger provides more substantive evidence on where ISM fits in dealing with the complexities encountered at Goondiwindi nearly three decades ago. He presents a typology of tools for ‘Integration in Sustainability Impact Assessment: Meanings, Patterns, and Tools’ at www.iddweb.be. Tools have been developed to achieve one or more of four main purposes: to integrate policies; to integrate institutions/procedures; to integrate facts, data, problems, or concerns, and to integrate different values, standpoints, and perspectives.

Integration methodologies &

tools

Cognitive + Evaluative +

Institutional (2 options)

Cognitive + Evaluative (2

options)

Evaluative

Non-Aggregative (2 options)

Monetised(2 options)

Non-Monetised (3 options)

Geographical (2 options)

Accounting (5 options)

ISM & other cognitive maps

5 other options

Cognitive Causal

Aggregative

Adapted from Boulanger PM (2005), Integration in Sustainability Impact Assessment at www.iddweb.be.

Collaboration took many forms. The Hancock family of Ipswich provided a significant donation to the IASR, with other project costs met by state agencies in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia. Researchers from natural and social sciences within the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education, the University of New England, the University of Queensland, and CSIRO’s Division of Soils collaborated with AES staff. They reported from within their disciplines on stocks and flows within many of the Basin’s Physical, Economic, Technological, and Trade environments. A

member of the Darling Conservation Association (David Sommerlad) documented a remarkable local history on community initiatives in managing the Upper Darling Basin’s resources, covering change in the Basin’s Political and Social environments by doing so. Academics (including Geoff McDonald) and extension practitioners used ISM to facilitate knowledge sharing and policy learning between the Basin’s stakeholders during a memorable two days at Goondiwindi in 1979. Many of the approaches used in the Upper Darling Basin experiment (e.g. computerised decision-support tools, satellite imagery, relief models of landscapes) now appear in 21st century inventories of information and communication tools for INRM.5 Their use then would not have been possible without the considerable skills and enthusiasm of AES technical support staff.

1981 to 1983 The Planning Futures in the Upper Darling Basin project became the template for a Murray Darling Basin Project Development Study conducted by CSIRO’s Division of Water and Land Resources. Here, the aims were to brief the CSIRO Executive by providing assessments on condition of the Basin’s resources; by capturing perceptions held among stakeholders on its existing and future water and land use problems, and by recommending strategies for collaborative INRM research consistent with CSIRO’s charter.

Contributors to the Upper Darling experiment assessed resource conditions. Scientists within CSIRO’s Division of Water and Land Resources did the same for the whole Murray–Darling. For example, Geoff McDonald used agricultural census and other small area statistics collected during the period 1950 to 1975 to present spatial and temporal differences of land utilisation within the Upper Darling Basin.6 Henry Nix did the same to differentiate land use regions with the Murray–Darling Basin7, and to provide a platform on which to consider temporal changes between 1947 and 1981 in using MDB resources.8

Convening a stakeholders’ workshop to seek consensus on policy objectives was a key event in the 1978–79 Condamine project. Convening a stakeholders’ workshop to prioritise a set of some 800 land and water problems was a key event in the 1981–83 Condamine project. Geoff McDonald was one among very few of us to co-produce usable knowledge with stakeholders in both the Upper Darling and Murray–Darling Basin INRM projects.

Notes 1 Horst Rittel & Melvin Webber (1973), Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Policy Sciences 4:155–169. 2 For insights into how the work of the two groups evolved over many decades, see Warfield JN & Perino GH (2000), The problematique: evolution of an idea, Systems Research and Behavioral Science 16 (3): 221–226; and Christakis AN & Bausch KC (2006), How people harness their collective wisdom and power to construct the future in co-laboratories of democracy. IAP. ISBN 1593114818. 3 See pp 4–7 in HarmoniCOP (2005), Learning Together to Manage Together at www.harmonicop.info/handbook.php. 4 Osborn RC (ed) (1978–79), Planning Futures in the Upper Darling Basin, v1: The Problem Setting, v2: The Policy Setting, v3: The Planning Process, Institute of Applied Social Research, Griffith University. ISBN: 0-86857-052-4, ISBN: 0-86857-052-2. 5 See the work packages at www.harmonicop.info for contemporary inventories of IC-tools. 6 McDonald GT & Osborn RC (1978), Land Utilization in the Upper Darling Basin, in Osborn RC (ed) Planning Futures in the Upper Darling Basin: The problem Setting. 7 Nix H (1982), Agricultural Regions of the Murray–Darling Basin, 1980–81, in Murray Darling Basin Project Development Study: Stage 1, Working Papers. CSIRO Division of Water and Land Resources. 8 Fleming M (ed) (1982), Current and Future Land Use, in Murray Darling Basin Project Development Study: Stage 1, Summary Report. CSIRO Division of Water and Land Resources.

http://www.jnwarfield.com/pdf/HIM/HIM.zip

http://www.regional.org.au/au/apen/2006/refereed/3/2911_osbornrc.htm#TopOfPage

http://www.iddweb.be/


3 Local government takes up the challenge

David Pitts

Background In the early 1980s environmental planning was yet to appear on the radar of most local governments in any systematic or strategic fashion. It was therefore with some interest, on a February afternoon in 1983, that Geoff McDonald, David Pitts and Errol Stock attended a meeting with Rodd Pahl, Director of Public Relations in the Brisbane City Council.

Rodd was a key player in Lord Mayor Roy Harvey’s city administration. He had sensed the growing community interest in environmental matters and was instrumental in the establishment of Council’s first bipartisan, environmental advisory committee. But on this particular day he had something else to discuss—the Brisbane Conservation Atlas.

This commitment to the people of Brisbane was contained in Roy Harvey’s Brisbane—a Council policy document released on 15 March 1982. The only problem was that the city administration had little idea of what the Conservation Atlas should look like or how it would work. It was for this reason that Council commissioned Geoff, David and Errol, through the Institute of Applied Social Research at Griffith University, to prepare the Project Design for the Conservation Atlas.

Design The team started with a blank canvas—no model to follow; few, if any, existing environmental management systems in place; and an invitation from the client to explore uncharted waters. Each person brought different capabilities, experiences and perspectives to the table. But common goals were soon evident—the need for an information system based on factual data; an appreciation of connectivity and values; integration into Council’s decision-making processes; and community awareness and involvement. Today it would probably be called biodiversity planning at the local level!

The team argued strongly that the Conservation Atlas should be much more than just a collection of maps. It recommended an information system comprising the following three separate but related parts:

1. a register of the city’s key natural assets

2. a series of policy documents to guide future use and management of different ‘natural’ landscapes in the city

3. educational and promotional material for the public at large.

The project design contained a detailed program of tasks designed to improve knowledge and understanding of natural resources and values throughout the city; to build a set of policies to guide urban nature conservation; and to develop mechanisms whereby environmental information could be better integrated into all aspects of Council decision making. The project design was adopted by Council in late 1983. Unfortunately, the project was not necessarily embraced by all line departments within Council.

The beginnings of implementation Early implementation continued to be driven by the Public Relations Branch within the Department of City Administration. There were two initial priorities.

The first was the development of the register of Brisbane’s most highly valued natural assets. This involved the nomination and evaluation of features and places of special environmental significance. The panel of evaluators is shown in the accompanying box—a who’s who of environmental experts in Brisbane at the time.

Register evaluators

Dale Anderson Catherine Bull Ted Coaldrake Bob Coutts Mary Maher Jack Marsh Errol Stock Lawrie Smith Harold Caulfield Peter Saenger John Jell Peter Young

The end result was a listing of more than 250 features that, for the first time, were officially recognised as special places. More importantly, there was now justification for their significance. The register did not have statutory backing and for this reason was not as influential as it should have been in changing the culture of Council departments. Nevertheless, it did succeed in raising community awareness and played a part in some significant victories in the Planning and Environment Court.

The second priority was the classification and mapping of remnant natural areas across the whole city. This was a huge gap in the planning data base. It relied upon specially flown aerial photography and provided the first ‘whole-of-city’ mapping of natural areas.

At the 1985 Council election, the Labor administration was defeated. After some initial hesitation the new administration, led by Lord Mayor Sallyanne Atkinson, embraced the Conservation Atlas project and went further by establishing Council’s first Environmental Management Section.

The Bushland Management Study The Bushland Management Study was a watershed in environmental planning and commitment within Council. It was the first of the policy documents to be prepared under the Atlas project and was undertaken by Environment Science and Services. Amongst other things, it showed for the first time the parlous security of what were, at that time, perceived to be widespread bushland reserves across the city. The decline in the area of bushland since first European settlement was the first shock to the city administration. More than 75% of native vegetation had been removed and was continuing to be removed. Only 10% of rainforest and 4% of Melaleuca woodland remained.


Of even greater shock to Council was the evidence that 63% of all remaining bushland was privately owned and 14% was owned in freehold tenure by Council with much earmarked for future development. Less than one-quarter of all bushland was within any form of reserve tenure and substantial portions of this were earmarked for quarries, schools and headworks. Added to this was the fact that the Town Plan provided almost no statutory constraints on the removal of native vegetation.

Onwards and upwards The Bushland Management Study was the catalyst that drove Council’s current regulatory and policy regime. Of particular significance has been the progressive development of statutory mechanisms to give ‘teeth’ to natural area management strategies. An early example was the introduction of Vegetation Protection Ordinances in 1991 and the introduction of a Conservation Zone into the city’s Planning Scheme. These measures were supported by the introduction of a Bushland Preservation Levy and a range of other initiatives, including waterway strategies, bushland management plans, grants for bush care projects and upgraded resources for fire and weed management. More recent developments have included the Natural Assets Local Law, the incorporation of Biodiversity and Waterway Codes into the Planning Scheme and a broader range of policy instruments.

In the early 1980s it was Council’s public relations people and not the line departments who recognised the need for enhanced environmental management. Over the past 25 years, environmental planning within Brisbane City Council has gone from a novelty and a nuisance to core business; from a marginal activity to a more fully integrated approach; and from the realm of a few Council activists to bipartisan support.

The catalyst for this change was the Brisbane Conservation Atlas. Ahead of its time but a blue-chip investment by Councils of the time. Geoff’s involvement in the study design process should not be forgotten.

Reference and links Pitts DJ, McDonald GT and Stock EC (1983), Brisbane Conservation Atlas: Stage 1—Project Design. Institute of Applied Social Research, Griffith University. Prepared for Brisbane City Council. www.brisbane.qld.gov.au

The Conservation Atlas project in the mid-1980s was the trigger for Brisbane City’s focus on its natural assets. It was dynamite because it not only told BCC what areas of bushland, wetlands and waterway corridors were critical but it did this without fear or favour in terms of whose land these assets were located on. The Bushland Management Study followed hot on the Register’s heels and its big message was that most of the city’s bushland was highly valuable BUT it was mostly privately owned and zoned for urban development. Aerial photography for the period 1985 to 1989 revealed that the clearing rate in the city was an astounding ‘three football fields a day’. Through the work of Geoff, David Pitts and Errol Stock the direction was set for Council to become the first Council in Australia to drive conservation through a range of mechanisms—conservation agreements, comprehensive vegetation clearance regulations, a ratepayer-funded acquisition program and several bushland education centres, to name just a few of these. Between 1988 and 1992 Council’s workforce of environmental officers went from one to 77 … and Council’s ‘greening’ approach was taken up by most other SEQ Councils. In the 1990s, Greening Australia Limited took the greening agenda to Councils nationally, based on BCC’s work.

Mary Maher

Remnant bushland in 1989

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/


4 Noosa heats up—listening to the community

Leanne Wilks, David Pitts and Dick Osborn

Background At the end of the 1970s and into the 80s, Noosa was undergoing its own sea change. It was a time of considerable political turmoil and growing community awareness of, and involvement in, the future of Noosa. It was a time when Geoff and the Institute of Applied Social Research at Griffith University became involved in many of the issues. Not in any partisan way, but as a provider of factual and objective information to better inform community debate and hopefully lead to intelligent decision making.

Of many investigations, the following three were particularly influential:

• The Future of Noosa. Geoff led a team of Griffith University and Darling Downs colleagues (Lex Brown, Tom Earle, Mike McFarlane, Dick Osborn, and Errol Stock) built from the Upper Darling Basin experiment conducted earlier in 1979. A small group of Noosa residents concerned over development proposals engaged Geoff’s team in another move towards environmental democracy. In return for marvellous hospitality over one weekend, his team took delivery of some 400 goal statements collected by the group from other residents, and edited them down to around 30 statements acceptable to workshop participants. A map showing the hierarchy of goals as voted by the workshop was produced in around 90 minutes using the interpretive structural modelling software described earlier. Geoff and Mike facilitated discussion to test community ownership, and a report prepared shortly after the team returned home. In turn, the residents’ group forwarded results to council.

• The Marina Proposal. In 1982, the State government put forward a proposal to develop a major marina at The Spit, near the mouth of the Noosa River. Geoff and David Pitts led a team to measure community attitudes towards this highly contentious proposal. The findings played a major role in determining the final decision. Geoff worked with Lex Brown to conduct similar surveys in following years. When another proposal to develop The Spit was put forward by Club Med in 1986, Geoff and others prepared a follow-up report for Noosa Council—again the survey results played a significant role in the final decision.

• The Economic Significance of Cooloola. In 1982, Geoff and Leanne Wilks undertook one of the first scientific studies to measure the economic benefits of nature-based recreation and tourism. It provided a strong argument to support the declaration of the Cooloola National Park.

The following recollections of the Cooloola economic studies are provided by Leanne Wilks.

Rationale for the Cooloola Study This project served to demonstrate the economic case for national parks by assessing the benefits flowing from associated recreation and tourism activities to the local and regional community. By showing that national parks have a positive economic impact it was possible to inject into the debate the ‘economic worth’ of national parks compared with other competing activities such as sandmining and logging. By calculating these tradeoffs in equal terms, decision makers had access to more balanced information and a stronger, fairer case could be made to support national parks.

Fieldwork fun The main recreational activities in Cooloola were beach camping, coastal four-wheel driving and commercial tour passenger groups. Reliable statistical data was scarce. Half the fun of this project was collecting the visitor data—finding out the number of visitors and how they spent their money to visit the park. This wasn’t particularly easy or straightforward as there were many points of access to the park and the spatial patterns of recreational activity were diffuse.

But Geoff rallied together enough student volunteers who were happy to spend their Easter in Cooloola in exchange for counting and interviewing visitors about their activities, destinations, routes, length of stay, place of residence, modes of transport and dollars spent along the way. I still don’t know why Geoff saw fit to give me charge of the new university four-wheel drive but it added to the adventure and poor application of the handbrake ensured the development of new skills that I never revealed to Geoff. While the students had the ground covered, Geoff took to the skies for the aerial survey of use patterns. Oblique black and white photography was used to identify all vehicles in selected areas and especially the number of illegal campers. From what I recall Geoff paid special attention to the catch of recreational fishers, and the proximity of surfers to sharks in waters along the coastline.

Geoff McDonald and Lex Brown at work in the field, 1987


Findings It was estimated that 136,000 people visited Cooloola in 1982 and 125,000 camper nights were spent there. The expenditure patterns of each user group were established and we were able to show that these expenditures converted into significant benefits in terms of income and employment at the local and regional level. Markedly different impacts of day trippers, campers and commercial tour passengers were found in this area as a result of varying expenditures by visitors and their place of purchase.

Problems in measuring visitor expenditures and inaccuracies in this phase of the research were found to be more significant than those arising from the application of the input-output models and multiplier estimation. While the sample size was sufficiently large to provide reliable estimates of expenditure for the groups present in April 1982, seasonal variation in activities, visitor characteristics, numbers and expenditures were unlikely to be accurately accounted for. In reviewing this study, I was amused to find that in 1982 on a per person per night basis, a camper spent an average of $1.86, a private day tripper spent $8.83 and a commercial day tripper spent $11.23.

This study affirmed that national parks, like other land use, have a definable impact on economic activity. Such information is important for comparing the gross income and employment benefits of alternative resource uses and remain relevant to any rational consideration of both sides of a conflict.

This information is also useful for considering park management strategies that may have a significant influence on the economic impact of the park. Management decisions aimed at regulating visitor use will affect not only the use of the resource but also the economic activity that is linked to this park use pattern. Such decisions cannot be taken in isolation of the impact on local businesses and residents dependent on this use of the park.

References Stock EC, Brown AL, McDonald GT and Osborn RC (1980), The Future of Noosa: A Preliminary Compilation of Goals of its Residents. Institute of Applied Social Research, Griffith University. Pitts DJ and McDonald GT (1982), Community Attitudes Towards the Possible Development of a Marina on The Spit at the Mouth of the Noosa River. Institute of Applied Social Research, Griffith University. Pitts DJ and McDonald GT (1982), ‘Balancing the Scales in Open Space Decision Making’, Planner, 22:1, 2–7. Wilks LC (1983), Economic Impact Study of Cooloola National Park. Honours dissertation, School of Australian Environmental Studies, Griffith University, 19 November. McDonald GT and Wilks LC (1986), ‘The Regional Economic Impact of Tourism and Recreation in National Parks’, in Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, Volume 13, pp 349–366. McDonald GT, Brown AL and Stock EC (1986), Community Attitudes to Possible Development on The Spit at the Mouth of the Noosa River: A Comparison of 1982 and 1986 Survey Results. Institute of Applied Environmental Research, Griffith University.

Achieving sound environmental planning in the Queensland during the 1970s and 1980s was very difficult. Key actors didn’t recognise that the State is blessed with some of the most valuable natural environments in the world. Extremely difficult, frustrating and, at times, acrimonious disputes over land use were common. In these circumstances, Geoff was always the calm, rational economist-cum-planner. He readily recognised what type of practical research had the potential to change the outcome.

Geoff was critical in two major research projects that were going to prove that preserving the Cooloola Coast – Fraser Island region was of greater ecological, economic and social value than utilising them for short-term gain. Many people played an important role in achieving this outcome, but the sound economics and planning research that underpinned the outcome had Geoff at the helm or playing a key role in guiding it.

Tor Hundloe

Geoff loves project work, practical stuff, where you can walk around with a map in your back pocket, a file full of socio-economic data, and some very big ideas in your head. By this process he has made a great difference to both the environment and the people he inspired and touched in a quest for knowledge and its application.

Tor Hundloe


5 Greenhouse effect—Redcliffe Case Study

Iraphne Childs

Villach Statement The 1985 ‘Villach Statement’ (SCOPE 27)* on the role of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in climate change was a milestone. It represented the accumulated evidence at the time that the planet had warmed and sea levels had begun to rise. The Villach Statement was the catalyst for the first major conference on the impacts of climate change in Australia. Jointly sponsored by CSIRO’s Division of Atmospheric Research and the Australian Government’s Commission for the Future, ‘Greenhouse 87: Planning for Climate Change’ was held at Monash University in Melbourne in 1987. Participants were asked to consider a scenario, provided by conference organisers, for climate change in Australia for the next 30–50 years. This was the first national scientific meeting to seriously consider potential impacts of climate change in the Australian context. The aim was not to provide accurate predictions of what was going to happen over the next few decades, but rather to present sensitivity analyses of the likely impacts of climate change, and possible ways to address them. Participants at the conference included scholars from many disciplines, ranging from atmospheric scientists and engineers to geographers and planners.

As a young researcher just starting my academic career at that time, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Geoff McDonald, taking up the challenge to present a paper for the ground-breaking Melbourne greenhouse conference. Our co-authors were Andris Auliciems (from the Department of Geographical Sciences at The University of Queensland) and Tor Hundloe (from the Institute of Applied Environmental Research at Griffith University). All papers presented at the conference were reviewed and published in Greenhouse: Planning for Climate Change (Pearman 1988), as the first significant national collection of Australian research on potential greenhouse impacts.

A project ahead of its time The title of the paper we presented was ‘Socio-economic impacts of climate change: potential for decision making in Redcliffe, Queensland’. Geoff’s expertise on the research team, as both a geographer and planner, and his enthusiasm for tackling something new, was vitally important. We applied the scenario of greenhouse-induced sea level rise to the coastal city of Redcliffe and the Redcliffe Peninsula (see map opposite) and investigated preparedness for decision making related to this hazard at the local government level. This included the nature of the risk to specific geographic areas of Redcliffe, land use and infrastructure at risk, and potential economic, social and political consequences of various hazard impacts. These were evaluated against the perceptions and envisaged responses to the scenario of the Redcliffe community. A telephone survey of local residents revealed that public awareness of the greenhouse effect at that time was very limited. A Delphi survey conducted with key Redcliffe decision makers (politicians, council engineers and planners,

* International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) Scientific Committee on Problems

of the Environment (SCOPE)

business leaders and representatives of community organisations) highlighted a number of significant problems with regard to coping with the impacts of potential sea level rise. These included: inadequate planning horizons and political time frames to deal with long-term environmental hazards such as sea level rise; difficulties in justifying public expenditure on mitigation measures for environmental impacts that were perceived as low probability and too far into the future; and confusion by policy makers over scientific uncertainties and subsequent reluctance to take tough political decisions.

As things turned out, ours was the only paper presented at the 1987 Melbourne conference that attempted to evaluate the socio-economic impacts and perceptions of political decision makers of sea level rise in a local government area. The paper was heralded as one of the most original at the conference—a seminal study. Immediately following the conference, the subject of our paper, and particularly the inundation scenario map, were taken up with great interest and debate in the media, critiqued by the local Redcliffe press, the Courier Mail, and eventually somewhat sensationalised by a Beyond 2000 TV special, which was beamed around the world by the BBC. I recall that Geoff made the comment that perhaps the researchers should ‘lie low for a while …’!

In 1993 Geoff and I were invited to write a chapter for an international volume on climate change, Global Warming: Concern for Tomorrow (Lal 1993). This book, edited by an Indian scholar, brought together a collection of studies from several regions around the world. This time the focus that we took was more theoretical, examining decision-frame analyses for hazard response and policy formulation for global warming issues in the Australian context. Despite the calls for more human impact studies, still at this time most research funds for climate change were being channelled into the modelling of large-scale physical systems rather than to understanding socio-economic implications and deriving coping strategies for communities.

In 2007, twenty years after the 1987 Melbourne greenhouse conference, there has been exponential increase in research on climate change and in the level of public awareness of the issue. Politicians are at last gaining mileage from ‘doing something about climate change’. The political and risk-management problems identified by our 1987 paper, however, still seem to be relevant today. Geoff’s critical expertise in environmental planning and forward-looking approaches in this area of greenhouse effect research, as is now apparent, were ahead of his time.


Redcliffe areas inundated above 1976 HAT by possible future sea levels. Source: Childs et al. (1988:650)

References Childs IRW, Auliciems A, Hundloe TJ and McDonald GT (1988), ‘Socio-economic impacts of climate change: potential for decision-making in Redcliffe, Queensland’, in GI Pearman (ed.), Greenhouse: Planning for Climate Change, CSIRO Publications, Melbourne, pp. 648–664. Childs IRW and McDonald GT (1993), ‘Planning for Global Warming: a hazard-response approach in the Australian context’, Ch. 14 in Lal M (ed.), Global Warming: Concern for Tomorrow, McGraw-Hill New Delhi, pp. 226–239. Kates RW, Ausubel JH and Berberian M (1985) ‘Climate impact Assessment, Studies of Interaction of Climate and Society’, SCOPE 27, Wiley New York, 625 pp. (the Villach Statement).

Sources of inspiration: Ian McHarg

Ian McHarg (1920–2001) was one of the true pioneers of the environmental movement. Born near the gritty, industrial Scottish city of Glasgow, he gained an early appreciation of the need for cities to better accommodate the qualities of the natural environment that, until then, had largely been shunned. After serving in World War II, McHarg went to the United States to attend Harvard University, where he picked up degrees in landscape architecture and city planning. He was responsible for the creation of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1960, McHarg hosted his own show, The House We Live In, on the CBS television network, an early effort to publicise discussion about humans and their environment. In his 1969 book Design with Nature, McHarg spelled out the need for urban planners to consider an environmentally conscious approach to land use, and provided a new method for evaluating and implementing it. Today Design With Nature is considered one of the landmark publications in the environmental movement.


6 Daintree Futures Study—caps for conservation

Mike Berwick and Mary Maher

Why save the Daintree? The Wet Tropics has some of the highest biodiversity values on the planet. In the consultancy work undertaken through the Rainforest Cooperative Research Centre in 2000 the consulting team led by the Rainforest CRC proposed a future for the Daintree coastal region based on protecting environmental values while building a sustainable rainforest community on freehold land north of the Daintree River. Mike Berwick, Mayor of Douglas Shire Council, believes that Geoff played the central role in saving the Daintree coastal lowland rainforests. Small in area, rich in biodiversity, home to the world’s oldest rainforests, the largest remaining tract of coastal rainforest left on the east coast and the only one connecting coast to mountains, saving the Daintree coast has been no easy job. Subdivided into a thousand one-hectare blocks, sold to a thousand different people, partly settled and under heavy tourism pressure, many saw it as a lost cause.

Caps for conservation Geoff’s contribution to the proposed ‘package of solutions’ is apparent. The vision was carefully developed through a highly consultative process with the Daintree community. Articulating the vision is one thing that happens a lot—achieving that vision is a challenge of some magnitude. How do you have a prosperous community where land use change and population growth have well-defined limits (caps) that is balanced with higher tourism activity centred on the eco-assets of the region. The solution set a new benchmark in environmental planning—as illustrated in the figure opposite. Areas were identified for increased or decreased development potential. Mechanisms for implementation had yet to be designed—new financial and planning scheme tools would be needed.

Major findings of the study were as follows:

• A do-nothing option would see the continued development of the residential potential, a consequent loss of high biodiversity values and residential amenity, and reduced attractiveness to tourists.

• There is broad consensus on a vision for the Daintree coastal region that would see the resident community engaged in stewardship of the rainforest on freehold land, equitable access arrangements for access to the protected area estate and partnership between the three tiers of government and the community in management of the area.

• Increased financial return to the local community can be realised through creating opportunities for greater participation in a sustainable tourism industry peaking at about 550,000 visitors a year.

• A revised planning scheme should be prepared by Douglas Shire to introduce planning controls for biodiversity conservation and to reduce ultimate settlement densities to ecologically sustainable levels. Market compensation payable for planning decisions that limit development should have funding sources made available through all tiers of government.

• The extension of mains power to south of Cooper Creek should be introduced when potential settlement densities have been reduced to sustainable levels. In the meantime, the State Government should extend funding to all properties, including businesses, for installation and essential maintenance of remote area power systems.

• A Daintree Land Trust, incorporating government and community representatives, should be established to support compensation and land acquisition programs. This Trust will require seed funding from State or Federal Government and would have the capability to develop sponsorship programs and to recoup costs from property consolidations and land dealings.

Mayor Berwick talks about lessons learnt Now we have turned the corner, the Douglas Shire Council introduced a planning scheme that put biodiversity values before property rights. When the Council went wobbly, the State intervened and put up $10 million to pay for compensation. For the first time in thirty years we’ve been able to say we have turned the corner—there’s a long way to go but we are on the road to recovery.

The foundation to this bold use of planning laws to save a precious piece of biodiversity was Geoff McDonald and the role he played in leading the Daintree Futures Study. It was the Daintree Futures Study that identified how much development had to be wound back to save the environmental and economic values. It set scientific targets, it engaged the community, and it identified the legal and financial mechanisms. It set the thresholds of development and finally led to the current intervention. The Daintree Futures Study was a masterful piece of work that escaped the shelf and was put into practice. It remains as relevant today as ever and a guiding light for the area’s ongoing management. Geoff is a planner and thinker whose knowledge, ability and reputation just kept growing. He wasn’t the only one, but without him I doubt we’d have made it. His planning skills are unique.


The geography of the caps in the Daintree

Source: http://www.wettropics.gov.au/res/res_daintree.html [10 July 2007]

http://www.wettropics.gov.au/res/res_daintree.html


7 Planning in the ‘noughties’: challenging orthodoxies, pushing boundaries

Marcus Lane, Tiffany Morrison, Jenny Bellamy and Suzanne Hoverman

Moving into the ‘noughties’ In the second half of the nineties and definitely by the time the third millennium rolled around, both the focus and the methods of environmental planning had undergone significant, even paradigmatic, change. Whereas Australian environmental policy and planning of the 1980s and early 1990s tended to be focused on a series of place-based environmental disputes over logging, mining and tourism development, environmental planning moving into the ‘noughties’ was more concerned with issues of land degradation and with operationalising and refining environmental policy. Environmental politics, too, had changed: the politics of environmental protection gave way to more fine-grained debates about how the Australian landscape should best be managed. Our conceptualisation and methods of environmental planning were also being reworked in dramatic ways. A new suite of ideas came to dominate both the discourse and practice of environmental planning, including the spectacular comeback of public participation, the American-led interest in collaborative planning, community-based environmental planning, a concerted preference for, in turn, the locality and then the region as the appropriate scale for planning, and the need for integrated environmental planning.

The early ‘noughties’ was a period in which diverse ‘fundamentalisms’ competed for air time. Zealous proponents peddled the ‘fundamental’ importance of the region, or the locality, or the community or collaboration and/or integration. In such an environment, leadership was required. People were needed to rigorously engage with new programs and

approaches—doing the often unrecognised work of trying to make the new processes work. At the same time, of course, agnostics and heretics were also needed. The new orthodoxies needed to be challenged, hard questions had to be asked and environmental outcomes accounted for. Geoff McDonald provided leadership on all counts.

Geoff’s work reveals his unusual ability to simultaneously engage successfully in the practice of environmental planning and detached, scholarly debate and critique. Moving into the ‘noughties’, both were needed. Four diverse areas of his work demonstrate how in both arenas his leadership, foresight and influence challenged orthodoxies and pushed the boundaries over this period.

Settling the ‘bun fights’ in NHT1 In 1996 the Federal Government promised that it would spend over $1 billion from the sale of Telstra in the biggest ever assault on the nation’s environmental problems. Geoff was critical of the representation of the sale of Telstra as environmentally motivated.

Instruments for decision making in the early days of the Natural Heritage Trust (NHT1) were fairly blunt, so it was inevitable that tensions arose around project prioritisation and funding allocations. More rigorous tools were needed and Geoff and colleagues piloted gap analysis and multi-criteria analysis techniques as a way of ensuring debate occurred around core issues and decisions were more transparent.


Suzanne Hoverman writes:

As Chair of the State Assessment Panel (SAP) for the National Landcare Program, Geoff was always trying to increase the capacity of this community panel to make better decisions by making available more relevant information and new techniques to support decision making. This often involved using university students.

In 1989, we used one of Geoff’s students to do the first ever ‘gap analysis’ on Bushcare-funded projects to determine which areas Queensland was progressing in the NHT suite of activities and where gaps existed, providing opportunities for new and different projects. The following year, a gap analysis was presented for both the Landcare and the Rivercare programs.

At about the same time, Geoff was developing an interest in the benefits of using multi-criteria analysis (MCA) to establish objective criteria for indicative allocations of NHT funds. The idea was that a region with lots of rivers to manage should receive proportionally greater Rivercare funds than one with no, or few rivers. The implicit logical tie to funding was that greater river frontage would manifest itself in greater concentration of river-oriented projects. One of Geoff’s young PhD students, Stefan Hajkowicz presented his analysis of natural resource data with interested support from Brian Venz.

Some members remained unconvinced. In 1991, when I headed the secretariat for the SAP, I put my long discarded ‘teacher hat’ back on and led the SAP line by line through the MCA spreadsheet so that, in the end, every member was clear as to what calculations the computer program was making and how those calculations fairly took each SAP member’s assessment of the priority criteria and turned it into a Panel assessment of the important criteria by which to allocate indicative funding to the three main NHT programs funding community projects—Landcare, Bushcare and Rivercare.

Separating the criteria for funding away from the projects themselves, with ardent regional ownership, put an end to the scrapping and one-upmanship that had dominated previous SAP prioritisations of regionally recommended projects—what had been commonly referred to as each year’s ‘bun fight’—replacing it with a robust discussion of the logical merit of the various criteria in good natural

resource management. Arguments for ‘area’ as a criterion could be considered on the merit of its logical contribution to NRM rather than which region had the greatest area.

Some issues continued to surface—issues such as rewarding a history of competence versus encouraging efforts new to a region, or the choice about pouring money into repairing degraded landscapes or to support the maintenance of landscapes in good condition.

Geoff was skilled at getting the best out of each of the panel members.

Community-based environmental planning Community-based environmental planning (CBEP) was an idea whose time had come with the implementation of the first phase of the NHT in 1996. Geoff was involved in the practice of CBEP—by rolling up his sleeves and working on the implementation of the NHT—and by pursuing some key scholarly questions about its internal contradictions. The former resulted in the implementation of NHT in Queensland in a way that was sensitive to the particularities of that state’s environment (including its significant Indigenous populations) and the latter in a well-known paper that interrogated the intellectual and ideological fragilities of CBEP (Lane and McDonald, 2005).

Integrated catchment management Integrated catchment management (ICM) in Queensland emerged at a time when significant investments, both public

and private, were being made in more coordinated and integrated resource management on a catchment scale across Australia, based on partnerships between government, industry and community. From 1995 to 1999, Geoff was involved in a study of the implementation of ICM in Queensland through a collaboration with colleagues in CSIRO, including Jenny Bellamy, Geoff Syme and Andrew Johnson, as well as Phil Rowlands and Don Begbie from the then Queensland Department of Natural Resources and community members of the Herbert River Catchment Coordinating Committee, including Dave Horsley and the late Ray Quabba (see http://irum.sl.csiro.au/icm/). As a comprehensive longitudinal study of catchment management, it gives new insights and direction to catchment managers both in Australia and internationally.

Geoff also provided support for a well-reasoned argument. I remember the year a project came through on the Fruitilliary Butterfly. The community-based SAP had a significantly greater interest in abating land, soil and water degradation than in furthering biodiversity issues, but Geoff insisted on allowing Peter Valentine to make the argument for the endangered status of the Fruitilliary Butterfly and the need for its protection so that in the end the Panel supported the project, which earlier they had all been ready to dismiss.

Suzanne Hoverman

Evaluating ICM—a framework

http://irum.sl.csiro.au/icm/


Funded jointly by CSIRO, Land and Water Australia and The University of Queensland, this project looked at ICM in the Herbert River catchment of north Queensland through its formative stages. Conducted over five years, we (Bellamy et al. 1999; 2001):

• investigated the social, institutional and economic factors that can influence the success or otherwise of integrated catchment management planning

• developed a comprehensive set of recommendations for planning and implementing community-based ICM initiatives in Australia

• developed an evaluation framework to assist catchment managers to evaluate the effectiveness of an ICM process. This framework is an essential tool to improve development and management of policy initiatives in natural resource management and has been validated in six contrasting case studies.

Foretelling some of the key challenges to emerge with the subsequent move by federal and State governments to regional natural resource management planning in the second phase of NHT in the ‘noughties’, through this project Geoff challenged the adequacy of ICM policy frameworks and institutional arrangements to address the degradation of our waterways, rural lands and biodiversity at a catchment scale (e.g. McDonald and Bellamy 1999; Bellamy et al. 2001). He particularly questioned whether community empowerment, so central to the perceived success of the Landcare program, could be translated easily up to the ICM scale particularly to deal with issues of resource rights and regulations (McDonald 1997). Prophetically with a PhD student Karen Vella he also demonstrated the challenges for local government to deliver on ICM through local and other regional environmental planning schemes (Vella 1999). Through the ‘noughties’, Geoff pursued these issues with considerable passion and persistence having a profound influence on many people not only working in research but also in policy, planning and rural industry arenas. For example, his PhD student, Tiffany Morrison, went on to study regional institutional integration in the Far North Queensland region, focusing attention on improving the governance frameworks within which planning sits (Morrison 2004).

Deconstructing the Wentworth prophecies: regions, decentralisation and other silver bullets In the early ‘noughties’, the Wentworth Group of scientists made national headlines by issuing a call-to-arms on natural resource management. A blizzard of press coverage followed their release of two manifestos: Blueprint for a Living Continent (2002) and Blueprint for a National Water Plan (2004). The group’s prescriptions for ‘radical and fundamental reform’ included decentralising environmental management to

‘community-owned’ regional authorities that would be mentored by a ‘business-like’ Natural Resource Management Commission and the use of the market to allocate and manage natural resources.

Geoff, with Marcus Lane and Tiffany Morrison, challenged these prescriptions in a series of three seminal papers (Lane et al. 2004a, 2004b, 2005). The first of these published in Australian Geographical Studies is now the paper most downloaded from the journal’s website and has been widely cited all over the world. The key ‘take-home message’ in these essays is that the challenges of environmental planning are too complex and compelling for normative and ideological prophecies; what is needed instead is a deeper empirical and theoretical understanding of governance and planning. What was perhaps most gratifying was the plethora of letters and emails received from academics and land managers around the country for whom these papers have deep resonance.

Lessons learnt or key insights about environmental planning Geoff’s contribution to environmental planning—empirical and theoretical, planning practice and scholarly engagement—bequeathed a series of important ideas that have had great traction. The key lessons are:

• Environmental planning is inevitably a multi-scale enterprise and privileging the ‘region’ over other scales is problematic. Indeed the concurrent involvement of both central and local or regional government is crucial to effective governance.

• Instead of re-scaling environmental governance (up or down), the reform of environmental governance in Australia should be concerned with institutional integration at multiple scales (horizontal and vertical).

• Planning processes need to seriously engage with questions of power, conflict and difference between stakeholders and their implications for equity and

We agreed that a major challenge for ICM was that it was too easy for ICM strategies or plans to be ignored or set aside as they often did not have statutory authority or credibility. Geoff argued convincingly that, given such a reality, it would be sensible to explore how ICM strategies and plans could be ‘connected’ or ‘linked’ to other initiatives with a statutory base. He specifically suggested there was real opportunity to give credibility to ICM plans if they were connected either to environmental impact assessment processes and/or to official regional or local land use or development plans, as these usually had a statutory foundation.

I was particularly impressed with the way in which Geoff drew on his theoretical understanding of planning for rural development, impact assessment, and catchment management to develop pragmatic solutions for planning issues. This strength was enhanced by his remarkable network with individuals in government, consulting firms, NGOs, and other universities in Australia as well his contacts from work he had completed in Indonesia, Thailand and North America.

Bruce Mitchell

I remember – clearly – the first time I ever heard him speak at an ICM meeting in Ingham in 1998. I’d heard of him but didn’t know him. After that day I wanted to know him. He had that sort of effect on people.

Nigel Weston


democracy. This inevitably raises many challenges that are exceedingly difficult to operationalise, including: (1) enabling ‘community’ action yet respecting diversity and difference, (2) achieving widespread, yet equitable participation, (3) ensuring that community ‘delivers’ as an agent of planning, and (4) developing a deliberative planning process that both respects and utilises diverse knowledge systems.

• There are many unresolved tensions in Australian environmental planning in the contradiction between the advocacy of participation and experiential knowledge on the one hand, and the authority of scientific knowledge on the other that need to be attended to. The co-production of knowledge has much to offer and the task now is to fashion accountable and transparent forums in which this kind of deliberation can occur.

Key articles relating to these projects Bellamy JA, McDonald GT, Syme GJ, Cottrell A, Johnson AKLJ, McCreddin JA, Robinson J and Walker DA (1999), Collected Papers of LWRRDC R&D Project CTC7, Volume 1, Synthesis of Findings. CSIRO Tropical Agriculture, Brisbane. Available at: http://irum.sl.csiro.au/icm/pdf/volumes/volume-1.pdf. Bellamy JA, Walker DH, McDonald GT and Syme GJ (2001), ‘A systems approach to the evaluation of natural resource management initiatives’. Journal of Environmental Management 63(4), 407–423. Lane MB and McDonald GT (2005), ‘The Limits to Community-based Environmental Planning: Operational Dilemmas and Practical Remedies’ Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 48, 5, 709–731. Lane MB, McDonald GT and Morrison TH (2004), ‘An Agnostic View on Regionalism, Decentralisation and other Silver Bullets: A Response to Thom’. Australian Geographical Studies 42, 3, 410–406. Lane MB, McDonald GT and Morrison T (2004), ‘Decentralisation and Environmental Management in Australia: a Comment on the Prescriptions of the Wentworth Group.’ Australian Geographical Studies, 42, 102–114. McDonald GT (1997), ‘The Way Forward: Barriers and Bridges to Progress in Integrated Catchment Management in Australia’. Invited keynote Address to the 2nd National Workshop on Catchment Management. Canberra. Available at: http://irum.sl.csiro.au/icm/pdf/chapters/vol2-ch04.pdf. McDonald GT and Bellamy JA (1999), ‘ICM in the Herbert River Valley’. Available at: http://irum.sl.csiro.au/icm/pdf/chapters/vol3-ch01.pdf. McDonald GT, Morrison T and Lane M (2003), ‘Integrating natural resource management systems for better environmental outcomes.’ Invited paper presented to the Australian Water Summit, Sydney. Vella K (1999), ‘A review of ICM and local government planning schemes in Queensland with particular reference to the Herbert River Catchment’. Available at: http://irum.sl.csiro.au/icm/pdf/chapters/vol3-ch03.pdf.

Sources of inspiration: Gunderson et al

One of Geoff’s favorite books is Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Regional Ecosystems by Lance H Gunderson, CS Holling and Stephen S Light.

Below is one of their ideas about global systemic change.

Called the Panarchy cycle, after the unpredictable Greek god Pan, this group developed an integrative theory (i.e. comprising economic, ecological, and social systems) to better understand the source and role of change in systems both natural and human. In the process, we learn more about the conditions for resilience and adaptiveness in any system. The Panarchy cycle looks like a figure-eight. It consists of two loops, one lurching forward (the growth and building up phase) and the other recoiling backward (the reorganisation and renewal phase.)

Source: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001328.html

http://irum.sl.csiro.au/icm/pdf/volumes/volume-1.pdf

http://irum.sl.csiro.au/icm/pdf/chapters/vol2-ch04.pdf



http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001328.html


8 Gone troppo—NRM planning in the Wet Tropics

Nigel Weston and Allan Dale

The beginnings In the late 1990s, natural resource management in Australia was going through a shake-up—nowhere more so than in the Wet Tropics region of north-eastern Queensland. The world heritage listing of much of the region was only a decade old and new structures were still being bedded down. Geoff had already played a significant role in these new arrangements, particularly in his stint as a member of the Wet Tropics Management Authority Board. He was also a key player in the Cairns Rainforest Unit, which later became the North Queensland Afforestation Association.

This group, driven largely by local government and based in the cosmopolitan city of Cairns, was responsible for disbursing the structural adjustment package that came with the listing. Programs initially focused on getting timber workers re-skilled and re-employed in revegetation programs. When the NHT program was introduced by the Commonwealth Government after the part sale of Telstra in 1997, a new regional group—the Wet Tropics NRM Board—was established down the road in the sugar town of Innisfail. This group had more of a primary producer focus.

For a while the two groups operated in tandem, but before long, there was pressure for both of them to amalgamate. The process wasn’t pretty and Tiff Morrison, one of Geoff’s doctoral students, captured it in her thesis. One fortunate decision taken during this process was to appoint Geoff to assist with the planning process. At the time (mid-2001), Geoff was the Head of School, Geographical Sciences and Planning at UQ and also Leader, Program 1 Regional Planning and Management, at the Rainforest CRC. He was put in charge of preparing the regional plan for the (still forming and storming) new regional NRM body.

On a steamy November night more than four years later, the first Wet Tropics Regional NRM Plan and Investment Strategy was launched by dignitaries on behalf of FNQ NRM Ltd at a gala event at the Flecker Botanic Gardens in Cairns. Geoff was not there, which was typical—he was off on another NRM adventure. But everyone who had been on that long journey knew that he was one of the real stars of the show.

A GM photo with Nigel Weston (centre) and Cath de Voil (right)—camera on a fencepost!

Wet Tropics Regional NRM Plan The project ran from 2001 to 2005. Key collaborators in the process included Nigel Weston, Neil Sing, Mike Berwick, Rachel Wicks and others. The key sectors involved included conservation, primary industries, government agencies, research institutions and the communities of rainforest Aborigines.

Before the new NRM regionalism of the early 2000s, traditionally there had been a diversity of plans addressing various NRM and other issues. Geoff had been heavily involved in the integrated catchment management (ICM) process up until that point; he was a strong and vocal advocate of going regional. Regional planning and management was a topic that had intrigued and motivated Geoff for all of his working (and studying) life. An early stage of the Wet Tropics planning process was to identify the broad themes that a regional plan would need to address. Geoff and the team looked to parallel processes (e.g. State of Environment reporting) for some inspiration so that ‘climate’, for example, was introduced in an NRM context for the first time—long before it became fashionable but at about the time that the potential negative impacts of climate change on the biodiversity of the Wet Tropics was beginning to be understood.

Geoff also saw the potential benefits to landowners of reforestation on the carbon offsets horizon. Geoff drafted distinguished colleagues from his wide network to make a contribution: in this case, the eminent climate scientist Professor Ian Lowe. Another area where Geoff made a difference was in supporting development of the Aboriginal Plan for the Wet Tropics. It required his determined advocacy in the early days.

I always found Geoff a wonderful light of rational discussion within the hot politics of State and regional NRM. He likewise had a clear vision of cooperative and sustainable use of natural resources that delivered on many fronts.

Peter Valentine

The FNQ NRM Plan (Sustaining the Wet Tropics) has been described as an example of ‘best practice’ by many commentators and we can thank Geoff and Nigel Weston for their amazing efforts in delivering such a ‘cutting edge’ Plan for one of Australia’s most significant landscapes. Geoff was also passionate about the Aboriginal people of the Wet Tropics and determined to assist them with their needs and aspirations for the care of their traditional lands. Under Geoff’s leadership and with significant input from Sandra Pannell, Libby Larsen and many Traditional Owners, the team produced Australia’s first Indigenous natural and cultural resource management plan. The so called ‘Bama’ Plan has received national and international acclaim and has since been used as a model for other NRM regions in Australia to emulate.

Steve Turton


Another memorable accomplishment was the May 2004 water quality workshop in Cairns. Geoff brought together farmers, scientists and decision makers to formulate an agreed approach to target setting, something that hadn’t been achievable to that point (see ‘Smart Targets’ in this volume). A fervent belief in adaptive management—where policies and practices are continually improved by learning from the outcomes of previous work—was evident in Geoff’s drive to crack the target-setting conundrum, not just in water quality but other areas like biodiversity. He set the platform early by facilitating the production of scholarly technical reports that established a baseline against which progress could be measured.

In this endeavour, he garnered the support and commitment of colleagues and the community and this legacy lives on in the current NRM arrangements and relationships in the Wet Tropics. Geoff was not always the driver, but without his navigation those at the wheel could only get so far. The plan was successfully accredited by both State and Commonwealth governments, and is still held up as being a plan of national importance.

Lessons learnt This project was one of the first significant partnerships between regional NRM bodies and integrated scientific institutions such as the CRC for Tropical Rainforests. The result was a highly sophisticated planning product. This partnership model spawned a highly collaborative joint venture arrangement between FNQ NRM Ltd, CSIRO and James Cook University. This joint venture is a fundamental part of the Wet Tropics planning system and continues to forge significant influence on the region’s planning processes.

Links and references See the Wet Tropics Regional NRM Plan and associated documents (Sustaining the Wet Tropics Series) at www.fnqnrm.com.au. Dale A, McDonald G and Weston N (2006). ‘Integrating effort for regional natural resource outcomes—the Wet Tropics experience’, Living in a Dynamic Tropical Landscape, N Stork and S Turton (eds), Rainforest CRC, Cairns. McDonald G and Weston N (2003), Wet Tropics Regional NRM Plan: Sustainable Natural Resource Management in the Wet Tropics, Queensland Planner 43(2):10–12.

Geoff had a fundamental role in establishing and managing a UNESCO World Heritage property in Queensland, the Wet Tropics … it was Geoff’s strategic thinking as much as the practical research that he undertook that brought about another national outcome for conservation on a world scale.

Tor Hundloe

Geoff was the one who could see how to relate our science to landscape management. He was also the one who …. could see how to engage indigenous people as well. The way that he related to people of all walks of life was impressive to watch and I believe that was why he was so successful in helping Australia’s development and use of land-based science.

Nigel Stork

http://www.fnqnrm.com.au/


9 Planning for the north—Tropical Savannas CRC

Bruce Taylor, Cathy Robinson, Michelle Walker and Clive McAlpine

Introduction With most of northern Australia characterised by extensive pastoral lands, remote communities, extractive industry and strong Indigenous and ecological values, regional planning takes on quite a different dimension from the metropolitan regions. Different is not to say less difficult for the diversity of values held in natural resources, landscape variability, biodiversity and institutional complexity create their own challenges with a distinctly northern Australian flavour. In its more abstracted form Geoff’s contention has been ‘is planning in the north good enough to deliver on the sustainable development agenda it promotes?’ ‘Good enough’ in this case refers to both the technical ‘ingredients’ of regional plans themselves—as a vehicle for translating policy to action—and the broader institutional arrangements required to support effective regional implementation.

Australia’s tropical savanna regions

The project Between 2001 and 2007, based at CSIRO Resource Futures Program, Geoff has led a suite of work in northern Australia under the banner of the Tropical Savannas CRC. This has included:

• in 2001–03, a comprehensive review of the institutional frameworks, major investment programs and policies driving planning in the Northern Territory focusing largely on the government system of planning and scoping future opportunities for reform

• in 2002–04, developing criteria and protocols for reviewing bioregional plans in tropical savanna regions and in a subsequent work applying those criteria with Clive McAlpine (UQ), Bruce Taylor and Adele Vagg (UQ Gatton) to some 30 statutory and voluntary regional plans across NT, WA and Qld. In 2005–06, a second round of reviews was undertaken to see how far plans had progressed since the advent of more stringent technical

and scientific requirements under the NAP and NHT2 with Bruce Taylor (CSIRO), Michelle Walker (NR&M) and Clive McAlpine (UQ) and later Ann Peterson (UQ), Suzanne Hoverman (NR&M) and Cathy Robinson (CSIRO)

• between 2003 and 2006, two cycles of a longitudinal evaluation of regional planning arrangements were conducted with major contributions from Jenny Bellamy, Tim Smith, Cathy Robinson and Sonja Heyenga with extensive interviews, surveys and participant observation of planning for across the north from the Kimberly to Queensland’s Fitzroy Basin.

The project was also designed so that senior policy officers from Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines were embedded as part of the research team. Michelle Walker, and later Suzanne Hoverman, played this role, providing strong links into the regional planning and monitoring and evaluation units and secondly supporting access to the policy and program decision forums such as the Queensland–Australian Government’s NRM Joint Steering Committee, tailoring the research findings and providing vital policy context to the work.

It was essential that these projects provided a clear and independent assessment of regional NRM planning activity during the early years of NHT2/National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality if programs and planning practice were to benefit from the insights generated. The major challenge in this context, however, lay in establishing a good working relationship with both the government program managers and investors, and the regional bodies and their stakeholders. Access to these organisations and, more importantly, the perception of legitimacy of the findings, relied heavily on Geoff’s credibility as an experienced, ‘tell it straight’ research leader and as an active, highly respected planner in the business of planning for regional sustainability.

When we started the project back in 2001, ‘bioregional’ was a concept that sounded exciting but something most of us knew little about. Geoff would joke about ‘wheelbarrow loads of plans’ and ‘dust gatherers’—few plans were ever implemented. Five years later, we had travelled to the ‘last frontiers’ of northern Australia, the team had doubled in size, and we were all the wiser about regional planning. Geoff was a strong team leader who taught us a lot about regional planning and working as a team. His in-depth knowledge of planning provided the insights that sharpened our awareness of the issues. Working with Geoff has been an enriching experience.

Clive McAlpine


Lessons for northern Australia Some of the more salient lessons from this suite of work have been:

• the mismatch between policy and program expectations and the realities of delivering integrated NRM planning in savanna regions, in terms of aspirations, the required versus available technical information suitable for planning and investment, and the necessary transaction costs of running these initiatives.

• the paramount importance of ‘doing’ as part of the planning cycle. The suite of evaluation work consistently highlighted the stalling effect of regional planning entities with planning targets consistently being sent back to ‘plan again’ without clear and considered attempts to implement, review and adapt their business. As a result this has lead to the development of later research proposals under the Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility and Tropical Savannas CRC to develop approaches for designing and reviewing cost-effective NRM actions in these north Australian contexts.

Reference Tropical Savannas CRC, Monitoring and evaluation of regional planning arrangements and natural resource management plans to assist development of improved regional planning systems and policies for Australia’s savanna regions, http://savanna.cdu.edu.au/research/projects/healthy_savanna.html.

When Geoff asks you to ‘jump’ the immediate response is ‘how high?’ I recall an urgent request from the NT Government for Geoff and a few members of the Tropical Savannas CRC team to assist with negotiations and expertise needed to finalise the NT regional NRM plan.

Under Geoff’s leadership we re-prioritised and increased our work effort to ensure the job was complete. A relieved Regional Body Board member summed up the response by noting that such applied and timely research has earned Geoff the national reputation of being ‘the planner for northern Australia’.

Cath Robinson

Through and through he was a Geographer, with a fascination with place, with the way land is used, and how people and systems manage land and resources.

He was also a geographer who understood that economics drivesboth the use and conservation of resources. A formidable combination. Geoff would always articulate both the costs and the benefits of management interventions. He also had a sense of history.

Lex Brown

http://savanna.cdu.edu.au/research/projects/healthy_savanna.html


10 Smart targets: setting targets for the Reef Lagoon and Chesapeake Bay

Mary Maher

Reality vs the dream of targets Setting targets for diffuse pollution to protect the Reef Lagoon could have been done in a number of ways. In 2004 this was a significant task in the completion of the Wet Tropics region’s NHT-funded NRM plan. It could be done as a desk-top exercise using guidelines available at a national or State level or by defining a target in response to a trend or symptom of environmental decline. Geoff and his team believed it would be naive to use either of these approaches for the eight river systems of the northern Reef Lagoon catchment. There was quite a history of unsolved issues:

• national and State guidelines were not credible in terms of the extreme conditions found in the Wet Tropics catchments and data was patchy for the pollutants of sediments (TSS), nutrients (P, N) and pesticides across all eight waterways

• there was a long history of landowners questioning the science that pointed the finger at them for the reef’s decline

• cause-effect models for the pollutants in these waterways were not advanced enough, limiting any target setting.

Geoff recognised that all the players shared concerns about the decline of inshore reef and catchment conditions. The time had come to commit to targets and the late Brad Dorrington, CEO of FNQ NRM Ltd and Geoff convened a workshop of key players. If anything other than ‘lip service’ was going to be paid to these final targets, a different approach was needed. The target-setting process had to meet several criteria:

• Primary producers had to be key players. The Wet Tropics region supports agricultural production valued at $754.2 million (1998–99) including crops and livestock products—11.8% of the Queensland total. All have plans to grow their production and expand their area cover. A people-centred approach was needed, with high levels of information sharing underpinning a negotiation process about the targets and the biophysical and the management practices dimension feeding into these.

• Resource condition targets could not be limited to ‘water quality’ metrics. Nor could they be designed from the top (regional) level down to the local (bottom) delivery level. Standardising them across catchments too was a problem. Targets would need to fit the SMART targets model—where specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timed targets are agreed by all key players.

Previous water quality targets in actions plans prepared by Great Barrier Marine Park Authority and others had not been taken up. Talks had reached a stalemate!

The water quality debate had matured—from ‘erosion is natural’ and ‘fish need nutrients’ to questioning what a workable monitoring system looks like and what’s the risk that targets become mandatory?

High noon—the workshop The May 2004 workshop was the culmination of a number of steps, including a survey of the eight catchments about what landowners believed was needed to improve water quality, and circulation of a brief background paper to focus the debate. Workshop presentations set the scene:

• Jon Brodie, the reef’s leading water quality scientist, said that while many waterways of the Wet Tropics are in good condition, six out of the eight river systems (75%) pose medium to high risk to the reef.

• Angela Arthington indicated that the Wet Tropics supports 42% of all freshwater fish in Australia and this diversity is of national significance. Water quality decline is seriously impacting on these values.

• George Rayment warned that even with decisive action, some sources of pollution would take several decades to eliminate (e.g. persistent pesticides). There is an estimated 30 years’ supply of excess nitrogen stored in agricultural soils as a result of fertilising practices.

Recent experiences by Brian Roberts in water quality improvement planning in Douglas Shire highlighted the role that adoption of best management practices within key primary production industries can play in water quality. The workshop itself was designed around a set of ‘straw man’ proposals for the targets. These became the focus of information sharing and target testing.

Nigel Weston and Geoff, Cairns, 2004

This workshop broke the back of a problem the scientific and policy-making fraternity in the reef catchments had been grappling with for years. It had already tried and failed with the GBR Water Quality Action Plan. It could so easily have gone wrong, but Geoff got all those people together in that one room at that one time. In fact, the adaptive management thing was something he’d been banging on about for years. The other thing about that workshop that stands out for me was the meeting of great minds—those of Geoff and ‘the father of Landcare’ Brian Roberts.

Nigel Weston


The results—factoring in the views of all sectors Participants were very guarded about targets and their achievability. However, in response to the strong press for catchment-specific targets, the Douglas experience and the weaknesses in the data and modelling, a major breakthrough occurred. In response to a proposal from Geoff, strong preference emerged from all parties that the targets, particularly for sediments and nutrients, were to be derived from modelling the anticipated changes in each pollutant’s trends delivered through a targeted adoption rate for best management practices (BMP). This condition target would be best calculated by catchment. It was acknowledged this may not be calculated overnight so an alternative approach gained support. It involved setting a ‘best bet’ target by catchment of say a 5% per annum decline in discharged pollutant on current levels, measured over the medium to long term. Annual review of this target would be informed by adoption rates of best management practices.

The solution

• Set the resource condition targets for water quality out of an estimated rate of uptake of best management practices in certain industries

• Calculate targets by the impact of that uptake on halting or reversing the resource condition trend

• Then learn and review

• Then adopt a progressive 5% improvement rate.

Chesapeake Bay visit Geoff McDonald, John Bennett, Tim Wrigley, Paul Sgarbossa

Geoff’s vision for SMART targets led to our diverse ‘group of four’ visiting the Chesapeake Bay area to see how they were approaching water quality management. With Bill Dennison and Jane Thomas, we met, discussed and socialised with farmers, fishermen, scientists, economists, regulators and program leaders for the Chesapeake Bay program. Their experiences with nutrient management programs, enthused and informed all of us. Geoff was particularly excited with the opportunity to talk to Jeff Sweeney about his team’s work on ‘Cost Effective Strategies for the Bay’. On our return, Geoff used this example to do and advocate for more Queensland work in this area to ensure least cost abatement of pollutant loads. We remember Geoff saying at the end of the trip: the trip exceeded his expectations.

Other Chesapeake memories

The science was good, but even better was:

• Halloween at Bill Dennison’s house with the great American tradition of beer, trick and treat, dress ups and a barbie in Bill’s backyard.

• Then a marvellous autumn day at one of America’s famous battlegrounds—Gettysburg—where we tracked the fortunes of rival armies over those three days way back in 1863.

• Then, not to miss a moment, we joined a school group of eager scientists on a restored ‘skipjack’ on Chesapeake Bay. These skipjacks hoisted high by billowing sails, once trawled one of the world’s most bountiful oyster fields, are now almost a bygone relic as a result of the collapse of the oyster fishery.

• Then, as only Aussie sport-loving fans can do, we attended the Saturday afternoon Intervarsity Navy vs New Orleans gridiron match at the 40,000 capacity Navy stadium in Annapolis in brilliant sunshine. After the match was soft-shell crabs and buffalo chicken wings with Middleton’s Ale, Pilsner Uquell and Blue Moon Lager as accompaniments.

Links and references Douglas Shire Council (DSC) (2007). Douglas Shire Council’s Water Quality Improvement Plan: http://www.dsc.qld.gov.au/Files/Draft_WQIP_Executive_Summary.pdf. FNQ Ltd (2007). FNQ NRM Plan and its Water Quality targets: http://www.fnqnrm.com.au/images/stories/publications/sustaining_wet_tropics/ partC7. McDonald GT and Roberts B (2006), ‘SMART Targets for Great Barrier Reef Catchments’, Australian Journal of Environmental Management, 13, 2, 95–107.

That day, Macca (Geoff) and I sat with Miles Furnas from AIMS. A significant part of the way forward was recognising that the 1850s loss rates for P, N, and sediments from the GBR catchments that many referred to, were not a realistic target to aim for. A more realistic and workable strategy was working with loss rates that could be achieved at circa 2004; this was a target that people could understand and accept, particularly for those from the farming and grazing community. These circa 2004 targets directly related to on-farm BMP adoption, thus making the SMART target program a sensible and functional process going forward working with landholders.

Tim Wrigley

The water quality debate had matured from ‘erosion is natural’ and ‘fish need nutrients’ to questioning what a workable monitoring system would look like and what’s the risk that targets become mandatory.

Mark O’Donohue

http://www.dsc.qld.gov.au/Files/Draft_WQIP_Executive_Summary.pdf

http://www.fnqnrm.com.au/images/stories/publications/sustaining_wet_tropics/


11 Future of the cane lands at Nambour—thinking outside the square

Ben Harman and Leonie Pearson

What was the impetus? Following the closure of the Nambour sugar mill in 2003, local cane growers faced an uncertain future due to relatively small farm sizes and the limited range of known viable alternative crops. As urban development on most cane lands is prohibited under the SEQ Regional Plan, a range of strategic alternatives were needed to stimulate debate and inform future planning and management.

Project The aim of the project was to provide an objective assessment of rural land use options in cane landscapes using an ecosystem services framework. Partner organisations included CSIRO, SEQ Catchments and the Sunshine Coast Reference Group.

The project built on a substantial body of work undertaken in the region—for example, Burgess and Ellis (2006), DPIF (2004) and Maroochy Shire Council’s planning scheme, Biodiversity Strategy and Cane Futures Project.

A framework for evaluating environmental services based on work by CSIRO and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment allowed identification of the cane landscapes’ natural assets and evaluation of the ecosystem services they provide. These were linked spatially to five major soil types.

Based on land suitability for agriculture and current (or potential future) ecosystem services, the project examined the costs/benefits of a range of different crops, including cane, 280 alternative crops and farm forestry. For most farms, the potential economic returns from any broad-acre crop were constrained by their small size (median 60 ha).

A five-to-ten-year Rural Future Scenario was devised for four land uses, based on predicted economic drivers, and the actions of government, industry and landowners. Potential land use included continued cane production, other agriculture, residential subdivision and ‘green’ land use such as recreation, water purification and wildlife habitat. A Rural Precinct Planning Framework was recommended that coordinated planning and management at a landscape level,

including the provision of guidance, funding and development assessment for innovative rural and ‘green’ land use.

The framework developed for the Sunshine Coast has since been tested at Rocky Point, near Beenleigh. The results will be published in July 2007.

The task that Geoff took on was indeed a difficult one—planning for a rural future for the cane lands after the Moreton Mill closed and the growers were left feeling disenfranchised. No other agency or researcher was brave enough to tackle this complex planning exercise with the deep cultural issues, high environmental values of the floodplain and the huge pressure for development on the coast. It was quite magical to watch Geoff work through this, taking everyone with him on this transitional journey to appreciating the value of what we have in a different light.

Susie Chapman

All involved developed a deep respect for Geoff as he genuinely listened, leaving them with a feeling of being acknowledged and understood. Through this trust he was able to engage them in a new way of looking at their landscape. He has continued his involvement with the Sunshine Coast cane lands beyond the life of the project, assisting the Sunshine Coast Canelands Action group to develop a whole-of-area plan that takes the findings of the study forward into the treacherous but realistic waters beyond the ‘rural production only’ scenario.

Susie Chapman

Watercourses Pacific Ocean Assigned Cane Land Railway

Town names Roads Highway

Legend

Geoff’s perceptive attitude towards the town planning fraternity has earned him widespread respect and adulation … in his applied research, particularly in tackling difficult current planning issues. Of note, is his lead work on the future use of the Sunshine Coast Canelands … where he and others confronted one of the most difficult planning problems facing all levels of government, developers and the community at large.

John Brannock


Ecosystem services thinking The project outcomes sit within current planning arrangements and have stimulated debate among policy makers, planners and local stakeholders to a range of the possible futures, while developing and using an ecosystem services framework that documents exactly what natural assets exist and the ecological functions the cane landscapes provide. The process has alerted cane growers to a range of future options, and provided them with the hope and incentives to actively explore some of these through research projects.

This was one of first times ecosystems services have been used as a framework to assess future scenarios. Additionally, the project worked at a landscape level that was identified by regional planners as the critical scale at which management needed to occur.

References Burgess J and Ellis R (2006), Soil and landscape attributes of the Maroochy River catchment. Department Natural Resources, Mines and Water, Land Resources Bulletin Series, Brisbane. CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems. Available at: http://www.cse.csiro.au/about/index.htm. Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries (DPIF), (2004), Making decisions in times of change: Moreton canegrowers. Thinking outside the square. Nambour. McDonald G, Park S, Antony G, Thorburn P, Dawson S, Harman B (2006), Future Use of Sunshine Coast Cane Landscapes. A Report to SEQ Catchments. CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Brisbane. Available at: http://www.cse.csiro.au/publications/2006/FutureUseSunshineCoastCaneLands.pdf [10 July 2007]. Maroochy Shire Council (2000), Maroochy Plan 2000. Nambour. Maroochy Shire Council (2003), Towards a rural future for the cane lands in Maroochy Shire. Draft Vision and Action Plan. Nambour, Maroochy Shire Council. Maroochy Shire Council (2005), Maroochy Shire Biodiversity Strategy. Draft. Prepared by Morgan Thomas, Ecotone Environmental Services, Jim Tait, Econcern and Paul Summers Planning Strategies. Nambour.

Geoff’s knowledge of the Sunshine Coast region, his experience in planning for transitional landscapes, and his ability to synthesise information were all critical to this project. His passion to stimulate debate on viable, sustainable rural futures for the region was supported by his skills as a facilitator and his ability toget people to think outside the square.

Leonie Pearson and Ben Harman

This report … I believe in time will be a seminal work in land use planning within Queensland over the last 30 years.

John Brannock

http://www.cse.csiro.au/about/index.htm

http://www.cse.csiro.au/publications/2006/FutureUseSunshineCoastCaneLands.pdf


12 Beyond EIA—to environmental planning and design

Lex Brown

Going beyond EIA Environmental impact assessment (EIA) developed globally as an almost universal, and one of the most important, overt means by which environmental and social issues were taken into account in development activities. EIA procedures began in Australia in the early 1980s and rapidly became legislative requirements in most jurisdictions, and were sometimes, but not always, linked to planning processes and approvals. They have shown remarkable longevity as a tool of environmental management.

The significance of EIA was that it involved many new players in planning processes: specialists such as ecologists and anthropologists; community and non-government organisations; and many others. It spurred the development of predictive and evaluative models for different dimensions of the environment, and skills in environmental impact mitigation and monitoring. It stimulated the environmental education of many engineers, planners, proponents and decision makers. Fewer silly projects got off the drawing board—having to ‘jump through the EIA hoop’ contributed to more forethought for environmental consequences of development activities and hence to some initial greening of the boardrooms. EIA stimulated private, public, and professional organisations to develop their own in-house environmental policies, guidelines, principles, ethics, and mission statements. Overall, it acted as the vanguard for institutional and corporate mainstreaming of action in the environmental area—well before notions of sustainability supplanted it in this role.

But Geoff McDonald and colleagues saw limitations and pitfalls in the narrow focus of much EIA practice—in its exclusive focus on individual projects, on only impact identification and mitigation, and in its procedural single-mindedness. While arguing that project-based EIA would continue to have an important role, it needed to be but one part of an overall strategy for integrated environmental management—going ‘beyond EIA’ to environmental planning and design.

EIA to environmental planning It was largely the failure of urban and regional planning, infrastructure planning and natural resources management to give adequate attention to environmental quality, conservation and resource exploitation issues that created the need for EIA in the first place. Environmental planners came along relatively late in the day to incorporate environmental factors into local and regional plans and to attempt to create some integration of these with the mass of resource management legislation. Planning agencies were often depicted as pro-development, leaving the environmental agencies to advance environmental concerns. Interagency conflict was common because the environmental considerations had been separated out.

Advances in understanding the relationship between environment and development had provided appropriate frameworks for modernising planning system objectives and the plans themselves. Environmental resource goals and environmental sink goals, and the protection of biodiversity needed to be integral components of planning, and needed to absorb many of the approaches developed in EIA to address those matters that cannot be addressed on a project-by-project basis.

Geoff was passionate about incorporating these principles of sustainability directly into planning activities of all types and at all levels—in comprehensive plans, in zoning schemes, in subdivision control and in regional and national plans. EIA without environmental planning was a highly constrained and inadequate activity.

EIA and project design Geoff and colleagues were also concerned that EIA played largely a passive role—requiring only the preparation of advice to decision makers, and that this passive role was encouraged by its legal and administrative requirements. EIA largely stays aloof from direct involvement in the environmental design and management of projects, tending to operate in a vacuum of analysis and evaluation of environmental information. The


essential limitation was that EIA had to be done rather than anything being done by it.

They pushed for an active role for EIA, linking assessments fully with project planning and design, and suggested tools to do this. Environmental scientists would need to expand their predictive and evaluative tools to make them suitable for application by designers during the early stages of project development. Their view, quite simply, was that it was not how good an EIA we can do that mattered, but whether we can design a project right the first time.

Lessons Through our experience of EIA we understand how a development (be that project or policy) alters the biophysical and social systems in which it will be located. We largely know how to be rigorous in prediction and evaluation of these alterations. We have learnt how to involve the public and ensure transparency for investigations and decisions, and to employ best practice to ensure that mitigation of adverse consequences is designed into developments. But while EIA has helped us get these concepts and techniques right, we have been fixated, and increasingly constrained, by the blunt tool of the ‘EIA system’ and the ‘EIA industry’, applying basically the same formulae irrespective of the scale of the development, the decisions that have to be made, and the sophistication of the planning system of which EIA is but one component.

Environmental assessment is a planning activity and has been essential to fill gaps caused by failures in the planning system. It will need to continue to function in this role for the foreseeable future. But because EIA is a degraded form of planning, of institutionalised incrementalism, it can have only a minor role in managing broad development outcomes and environmental change. As Geoff argued, ‘It is timely to consider how we can move beyond EIA as a standalone activity’. It was timely in the early 1990s. It is even more so a decade and a half on.

Geoff’s tireless work in the field of environmental impact assessment lead him to become a joint leader of the Environmental Impact Assessment—a short course for planners for the Queensland Department of Housing Local Government and Planning and the Department of Environment and Heritage, which was presented to practitioners in both Brisbane and Cairns in the early 1990s … he actively participated in many town planning forums and legal conferences to advance the cause of EIA as a valuable decision-making tool in environmental assessment.

John Brannock


13 International and integrated

Lex Brown

Background The need for environmental planning did not stop at Australia’s borders, though in the 1980s, developing nations and cities placed little priority on environmental issues in the quest for development. Where environment was considered it was largely in terms of conservation reserves and point-source control of industrial pollution through poorly enforced pollution control laws. Project-based EIA had found its way, remarkably rapidly, and remarkably unchanged in format or approach, from the United States to countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia, though human and institutional capacities for the preparation, assessment and implementation of these was highly constrained. Notions of integration of resource management, planning and development activities with economic and environmental assessments were largely unheard of. While government environmental agencies were starting to expand in many neighbouring countries, the practice of environmental planning, and appropriate tertiary training, were largely non-existent.

Geoff and associates at Prince of Songkla University

It was against this background that Geoff McDonald and colleagues became involved in exporting the ideas and training in which they were involved in Australia. In particular they focused on the need for integrative approaches across a range of disciplines and fields of development, and for the proactive consideration of environment and resource management in all planning activities. Their international involvement took several forms, well beyond normal academic activities of publication and exchange, to include short courses for government officials and practitioners and concentrated capacity building of overseas universities. Their work was supported by a range of international agencies.

The activities The titles of various international short courses capture the flavour of these activities and their evolution over nearly two decades.

• International Training Course on Land Use Planning sponsored by the Australian Development Assistance Bureau (now AusAID), 1978.

• Courses on Environmental Impact Assessment, University of Indonesia, Jakarta, funded by the Australian Universities International Development Program, 1982 and 1984.

• Environmental Assessment for Development Planning, with 37 participants from 17 countries, most from the Pacific Basin and South-East Asia. AIDAB funded at Griffith University, 1988.

• Integrated Environmental Planning and Management, a lecture course for the World Bank/UNDP DESC Program, 1988.

• Integrated Environmental Planning and Management, training course for the Office of the National Environment Board, Thailand, Haad Kaew, Songkla, 1991.

• Training Course on Environmental Management in Small and Medium Sized Cities for the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Science and the World Health Organisation. Qingdao, China, 1991.

• Workshop on Integrated Environmental Planning and Management, at the Conference on the Role of Association of Southeast Asian Institutions of Higher Learning in Promoting Preservation of the Environment, Airlangga University, Indonesia, 1991.

• Environmental Management Training courses for the United Nations Development Programme in 1993 in each of Malaysia, China, Iran and New York.

• International Training Courses in Environmental Assessment for Planning and Management with Prince of Songkla University funded by Royal Thai Government, 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999.

• International Workshop on Environmental Assessment for Development Planning, Hat Yai, Thailand, with Prince of Songkla University. Funded by AusAID and UNESCO Unitwin Program, 1995.

• Integrating Development and Environment: Broadening the Tools of Environmental Assessment funded by the UNDP for 30 participants from 9 African countries. Cape Town, 1995

Geoff not only played a crucial role in Australia, he took his expertise and enthusiasm overseas. His first major foray into South-East Asia was in the early 1980s when [we] commenced teaching environmental impact assessment to postgraduate students at … the University of Indonesia.

Tor Hundloe


The outcomes Many of the participants in these courses have moved into senior positions in governments, NGOs and universities (one as Minister for Environment in the Philippines!), and while not directly measurable, Australian ideas and experience in environmental planning have been influential, one trusts, in many places.

Geoff at Songkla University circa 1990s

Geoff McDonald and colleagues undertook long-term capacity building, initially at the University of Indonesia, but particularly at Prince of Songkla University in Southern Thailand—advising staff on their research and teaching, acting as thesis advisors, academic programs and administration, and selecting lecturers for overseas PhD study. The strength of the now Faculty of Environmental Management there is testimony to extensive commitment throughout the 1990s. A significant challenge was always the building of bridges between the disciplinary divides that dominate in universities everywhere, and which is inimical to tertiary environmental training.

Geoff McDonald has been a good friend of Prince of Songkla University in Thailand. He had, since 1989, served as a consultant, under the Australian International Development Aid Bureau (AIDAB) project, in establishing the Faculty of Environmental Management. Thereafter he, with a team and colleagues from Griffith University, had nurtured this Faculty for several years until it became fully fledged. The Faculty of Environmental Management at PSU has grown into the key body that produces hundreds of graduates and researches, as well as working well with communities in empowering them in protecting the environment.

During those years he has done much more than his official AIDAB assignment. Together we succeeded in establishing the UNESCO-UNITWIN project at Prince of Songkla University, launching a series of International Training Courses, and more. Prince of Songkla University proudly presented Geoff with an Honorary Doctoral Degree in 1999.

We have been honoured to have known him through those many years. He was a sincere, considerate and selfless person, always willing to help other people well beyond his commitments. We remember him spending hour after hour working tirelessly whenever others sought his help. Geoff had an incredible talent of making us feel enthusiastic, confident and hopeful. Many times when our staff and students thought they would never succeed, he would push them to achievement. He always encouraged us to strive for the highest standard in our work. Thank you, Geoff for our time together and for letting us be a part of your life.

Friends at Prince of Songkla University, Thailand:Chatchai Ratanachai, Weerapant Musigasarn,

Boonsom Siribumrungsukha, Rapeepun Suwannatachoteand many more


14 Educator and mentor

Ann Peterson

Education, training and mentoring are core elements in Geoff McDonald’s enduring contribution to environmental planning. This

contribution is best identified by those who were engaged in Geoff’s classes, were advised as research students, or were teaching and administrative colleagues and planning professionals.

Geoff excelled as a student, where at the Armidale High School he achieved honours in geography and topped the state. John Holmes (former colleague) recalls Geoff’s early student days at the University of New England:

Towards the end of his third undergraduate year, Geoff expressed strong doubts about continuing on to honours. I think I can claim the credit for persuading him to do so, while also supervising an outstanding thesis on the variables influencing the adoption of a critical innovation, namely the introduction and management of improved pastures in the Walcha district. More credit is due to the student than the supervisor for the high quality of this thesis. Geoff’s research directions were firmly set.

Geoff’s outstanding honours performance in 1966 resulted in a scholarship to the University of Toronto, where he completed his masters (1968) and doctoral degrees (1972). He then returned to Australia and took up a lecturing position in the Department of Geography at the University of Queensland (UQ) in 1972. John Holmes recalls:

By rare good fortune we were able to attract Geoff McDonald and Andris Auliciems, by chance both Australian postgraduate students at Toronto and both to play pivotal roles in transforming a rather tired, underperforming department into a vibrant teaching and research unit. Both Geoff and Andy were in high demand in the academic job market. It was a rare stroke of fortune to be able to recruit both, and I have been ever grateful for the roles they played in strengthening the department.

Geoff remained at UQ for about five years, before moving to Griffith University (1977 to 1994) and then returning to UQ in 1995, as Professor and Head of the newly merged Department of Geographical Sciences and Planning. John Holmes cites from a report written in 1975:

Geoff McDonald has become an indispensable member of our lecturing staff, where he has admirably fulfilled the role as lecturer, researcher, guide and mentor to students and junior staff, as well as being a stimulus to us all.

Informing, mentoring and challenging, Malaysia 1993

Geoff’s signature courses included environmental impact assessment, environmental planning, geographic information systems and land use analysis and planning. His early teaching also brought a focus to environmental/resource economics. Rabel Burdge (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) recalls this connection:

Geoff McDonald is a master at combining economics with the planning process. He has almost a sixth sense about how a planning alternative will impact the economy in a region. Best of all, he is able to communicate his observations to a lay audience that actually can be understood. His semester as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning was the first time our students thought about the economic and environmental consequences of alternative solutions.

The education of practising planners was seen by Geoff as crucial to achieving on-ground sustainable outcomes for the environment and Geoff was instrumental in forging strong and enduring links with the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) and in collaboratively developing curricula that ensured the accreditation of planning courses at UQ and Griffith University. Chris Buckley (former President, Queensland Division of PIA) recalls Geoff’s leadership role:

In our professional lives, we all strive to make a contribution, to even make a difference, and sometimes, by example, we show others what can be achieved. In our busy lives, there are very few individuals who rise above the pack and genuinely lead the way. Intellectually, professionally, and (most notably) humbly, Geoff McDonald has been a leader in environmental planning in Queensland for 20 years. He has certainly risen above the pack. It can be said without question that he has made a significant contribution to planning education and to the links between the profession and academia; that he has made a difference to the Queensland community and to many individuals; and is a leader in every sense of the word. His contribution to PIA is remembered very fondly by those of us who had the pleasure of his good company (and good sense) on the Divisional Committee all those years ago.

John Brannock recognises Geoff’s contribution to the planning profession and education of planners:

Geoff McDonald epitomises professionalism and integrity in the town planning fraternity and he has achieved this distinction by his ability to deal with the difficult transition between academia and the real world. Geoff has been able to transcend this boundary effectively through his acute understanding of the issues, his scientific analysis and comprehension of the administrative and political dynamic within which his research is undertaken … Geoff understood the nexus between statutory planning and environmental planning whilst strongly encouraging the town planning hierarchy to consider different methodologies in dealing with the major policy issues … he worked tirelessly towards creating a greater understanding of the broader town planning framework within various disciplines and this can be best seen through his 1984 article ‘Multi-Disciplinary Planning’ in the Journal of Environmental Education, where he advocated the team of experts approach towards solving mainstream planning problems.


A continuing focus for Geoff, both in teaching and research, has been that of rural planning in Australia. Daryl Low Choy (former undergraduate and PhD student and now colleague) recalls that Geoff introduced one of the first rural planning courses (‘Rural Land Use Studies’) into a university curriculum at UQ in 1973:

Up until then we had had a very conventional undergraduate geographical sciences course … Geoff introduced us to the world of applied geography and planning and a range of new ideas, concepts and overseas initiatives—it was very exciting times … Geoff was a strong advocate for sustainable agricultural enterprises and for the exercise of careful stewardship of the environment, particularly the management of the non-urban landscape based on a robust analytical approach. His first course included a number of field trips that can be characterised as educational, thought provoking, relevant to his lectures, novel, and fun to go on (on one trip we were each given a bale of hay—turned out it was for sleeping on!).

His courses were highly inspirational and relevant to the times—they set many, including myself, along a path that would strongly influence the direction of our professional careers.

Geoff, flat out in the field!

In 1990 Geoff also became the first Australasian editor of the new publication Progress in Rural Policy and Planning and Daryl Low Choy highlight’s Geoff’s important role in advocating

the virtues of rural planning and seeking ways to critically analyse the contemporary challenges of the non-urban environment … He was forever the optimist looking for opportunities to make the case for sound planning approaches.

Strong links were also forged in the late 1990s to enhance the environmental education of students in the mining industry. Geoff developed external, flexible delivery courses jointly administered by the Geography Department and Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation at UQ. These courses and the focus that Geoff provided remain intact and have a global student enrolment. This linking of theory to practice was central to Geoff’s approach.

Geoff’s contribution to both teaching and research at the Griffith School of Environment was significant. As several contributors noted, rather than a discipline-based focus, teaching was across disciplines, requiring interaction with people of different training and backgrounds. Roy Rickson comments:

I will always recall Geoff’s support, advice and friendship during this period. He stood up for his discipline, as we all did and still do, but we learned through colleagues like Geoff that we could, in fact, have it both ways … We could be successful in our disciplines while learning and integrating concepts from other fields into our teaching and research. What I remember, perhaps, more than anything else of those times was the fun that we had. All the talking, competing, debating, sometimes arguing, would almost always end in laughter and, if on a Friday, a meeting at one of the pubs after 4.00 pm. Geoff was an integral part of all of that, our personal, professional and institutional histories … He is a valued friend and colleague.

Geoff with AES faculty in late 1970s—Errol Stock, Lex Brown, and Athol Chase

Geoff later became the first Director of the Institute of Applied Social Research at Griffith University and Tor Hundloe writes:

Much of the practical environmental research work that changed Queensland forever was undertaken by Geoff, his colleagues, and research staff attached to the institute.

Stefan Hajkowicz (former PhD student and colleague) comments:

One saying Geoff was fond of and used in many of our meetings was ‘There’s nothing as practical as a good theory’. This has also become a beacon guiding my research. Geoff had a very pragmatic perspective on solving problems and using theory to get the solution (not the other way around). I believe this solution-focused perspective fuelled the success of Geoff’s work in many NRM planning problems. But it wasn’t just practical. The benefits have been expressed through Geoff’s substantial contributions to the planning literature/profession. As he unravelled problems he sculpted new theories and ideas.

… the main thing I take from Geoff is a philosophy of being solution focused, and not just doing theory for theory’s sake. Research can improve the way we use natural resources and thereby the quality of our lives. By staying problem focused we learn new things about the world and build on existing theory. That’s how knowledge moves forward. I want to continue Geoff’s philosophy of solution-oriented research in my own career.

John Abbot (current PhD student) also recalls:

As an educator he has an interactive, conversational and probing style. I have enjoyed many late afternoon discussions with Geoff—talking about understanding uncertainties, taking risks, adaptive management, engaging stakeholders, sustainability and resilience and all the other words that describe good planning in a complex, changing environment. And we would always come back to some example of planning in Queensland and how it could


be done better. As a theorist, Geoff is firmly grounded in the application to practice.

Tor Hundloe similarly believes,

Geoff is a practical man with an excellent theoretical background, something quite uncommon.

As a class room teacher, Geoff’s style has always been friendly, engaging and inclusive. He stimulates the senses with images and real-life examples and never steps back from voicing controversial opinions.

Geoff was also generous in the time he devoted to teaching and working with his colleagues. Teaching never took second place, as it was a means to reach and enthuse students. He viewed students as active researchers, learning the tools of the trade, there to be challenged and stimulated. Geoff also had an ability, within his classes, to reach a diversity of students, including those with varying skill levels and background experience. He could pitch the message so that all understood it, but also ensured that it challenged the more gifted.

John Holmes reflects on Geoff’s overall contribution:

Geoff … has gained the respect and confidence of students and staff. He has a keen eye for noting weaknesses and inadequacies in our academic program and has readily assisted in overcoming these weaknesses. Indeed, he excels as a team worker, a quality that is of particular importance in any department. It is particularly so in a small department where faculty members are called upon to fulfil a large number of exacting roles.

Geoff’s students over the years tell the story of his contribution to environmental education and planning. Ann Peterson (former student and colleague) comments:

I was in Geoff’s first class at UQ in 1972—the course was Spatial Analysis. It is still easy to remember Geoff’s enthusiasm and the love of his craft. It was not surprising that 1973 had the biggest ever enrolment in geography honours at UQ. Geoff played no small part in raising the profile of research and in providing much needed encouragement to students to ‘have a go’. Almost all graduates from that year entered life-long professions in the field of geographical research and education. Geoff was the turning point for many.

Education for Geoff is not just a matter of telling or giving students information. His approach is to encourage students to think and reflect about issues, particularly real-life problems, to take students into the field, to enable them to see for themselves, and to question. This process of education about the issues, and within the environment itself, is an important vehicle for enabling students to reassess taken-for-granted attitudes and values and to holistically arrive at realistic and innovative solutions.

Greg Hill (former student, and now Vice Chancellor, Sunshine Coast University) recalls meeting Geoff in the mid-1970s:

… After five years as a primary school teacher I’d decided to give uni a go at UQ. At the time I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence or a vision of careers outside the school classroom. Geoff changed that, as he has done for countless others. He supervised my honours year and sparked an interest in me in what was to become the GIS field. He encouraged me to experiment with the primitive, computer-based mapping technology of the time, think it

was SYMAP, to model kangaroo habitats and habitat change. And that was it, hooked on research and universities—I’ve never escaped!

Selecting a PhD supervisor was easy for Daryl Low Choy:

There was really only one choice … His patience and guidance can never be repaid. Geoff was the perfect mentor.

Sally Driml (former student and now professional colleague) writes:

Geoff’s contribution to the field of teaching has been to develop environmental professionals who have good technical expertise and an intelligent approach to their work. Geoff’s enquiring approach to ‘why’ things are as they are, and ‘how’ they can be made better, helps students develop their own critical thinking. Geoff’s respectful approach to students as individuals in turn earns him a great deal of respect.

Susanne Cooper (Senior environmental planner, SKM) recalls Geoff’s open-door policy with students:

It was in the late 1980s. I was doing a MSc in Environmental Science externally at UNE, and was keen to do some research on the use of ‘exclusion rules’ in natural resource management. An obscure topic to be sure, but it took my fancy and it was suggested that I talk to a certain Geoff McDonald, who may have some ideas. So off I went and met Geoff for the first time at Griffith Uni. We had a good chat, and I went away with plenty of ideas and possibilities.

How typical of Geoff! Taking the time to talk to a student (not even at his university) on a topic that was a bit obscure and off the mainstream. Always helpful, ready to offer advice with a kindly but realistic air, and quick to acknowledge a job well done. His role as a mentor to students and practising professionals alike was legendary.

Sarah Norman (former student and Team Leader—Transportation, London Borough of Hackney) writes:

I had the privilege of being a student in Geoff’s planning and natural resource management classes during the mid-1990s. Geoff was definitely before his time and always open to discussion. We were never constrained, deliberating issues such as overfishing, mining, Local Agenda 21 and the need to conserve, even love, crocodiles as a natural resource. He would not only tolerate what surely were the most inane comments and questions, he also guided us towards an open appreciation of systems and the sustainable management of natural resources. I am forever grateful for his appreciative enquiry style of teaching, which moulded my career and thinking. I hope to pass on the sustainable development message he passed to us.

Geoff’s own research performance is well known and documented, demonstrating ‘exceptional ability in research design and method’ (John Holmes). This research skill has been ‘a source of strength in advising honours and graduate students on their research proposals’ (John Homes). (Refer to Appendix A, which lists Geoff’s PhD students and their research topics.) However, more than this Geoff has eased the pain experienced by many PhD students, acting as a compassionate mentor when the times have been tough. John Abbott (a current PhD student) recalls the self-doubts:

When I commenced my PhD, I remember telling someone that Geoff McDonald was my main supervisor. ‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘Geoff will get you through’. I was a bit


puzzled at the time, thinking, I’m going to get through this myself. Over time I have come to understand what she meant.

Geoff’s enthusiasm, generosity and balance has kept me going on many occasions—with a few well-chosen words in an email or a stimulating supervision session. He has also opened doors to key ideas and to relevant people. Most importantly, he had confidence in me when I did not have it in myself … I’m not through the PhD yet, but I know that Geoff will get me through.

Tiffany Morrison (former PhD student and colleague) recalls that Geoff’s contribution to postgraduate research supervision …

… has also been as much about mentoring as it has about teaching students the substantive aspects of environmental planning. Geoff has a knack for bringing people together, and also setting them off on the perfect developmental path: students with other like-minded students, researchers with other like-minded researchers, staff and students, students and places, and so forth. His ability to bring people (and places) together and his passion for on-ground planning have stimulated many new collaborations and research projects …

Geoff’s passion for planning, for practice, and for bringing people together has inspired many a planning research student. Many of us also appreciate him as a gentle bushie who loves a social gathering, whether it is a riotous stakeholder meeting or quiet drinks at the club. His legacy, in the minds, careers, and ethics of his former students, lives on.

‘Lead actors’ are the people who influence people’s lives. They are ‘the ones that make the story and give it purpose and pizzazz’. Alan Dale (former PhD student and colleague) continues:

… As far as my life is concerned, Geoff stands out as a lead actor.

It was with great fortune that I fell into my PhD work with Geoff as lead supervisor. I had started working with MCGowan’s International, an agricultural consulting company involved in development aid work. They wanted me to develop up computer-assisted land use planning tools, and they took me in on the condition that I started my PhD in this field. One of the first jobs we took on was using tools like LUPLAN to assist with redevelopment plans for the Woorabinda and Cherbourg Aboriginal Deed of Grant in Trust Areas. With Geoff’s systemic view of the world, we could soon see there were much bigger planning problems facing these communities than could be solved with the rational application of a computer-based decision-support tool. With Geoff’s support we changed tack mid stream, brought anthropologist Athol Chase in as co-supervisor and my career as one of the world’s few planning system’s analysts and practitioners began.

Thinking about the institutional systems within which natural resource planning and management occurs is not a common field of research and even more rarely played out in practice. I believe Geoff has been a world beater in this field because he understands the historical development of planning theory, and came, particularly in the early 1990s, to an understanding of the role of bargaining in natural resource governance systems.

This doctoral work got Geoff heavily engaged in Cape York and Indigenous natural resource issues, and at the end of a great trip across Cape York, re-introduced him to a major stint of fresh involvement in the management of the Wet Tropics; my home region.

While we continued to be involved from a work perspective post the PhD, it was significant involvement in the emerging new regional arrangements for natural resource management that brought us back to a regular working relationship. He led a significant review of these emerging arrangements for the State Government and many regional bodies remember with great fondness the massive contributions he made during the plan development process and later in evaluative and benchmarking research.

On a much lighter side, Geoff’s down-to-earth humour and gregarious nature forged many strong working relationships. Greg Hill recalls that Geoff has been known to enjoy ‘a quiet ale and a leisurely chat, especially if a spot can be found overlooking the ocean’. During Stefan Hajkowicz’s PhD Geoff helped to set up a six-month visit to the University of Missouri—Department of Agricultural Economics with Professor Tony Prato:

I remember having Cajun BBQ with Geoff in Kansas City and learning about the American Civil War in Jefferson City—the capital of Missouri. We had a nice time touring the countryside in a little rental car.

Geoff’s administrative team (Christina Jack, Judy Nankiville and Penny Carrick) at UQ recall:

As our Head of Department his dry wit and cheeky sense of humour made him a pleasure to work with. Geoff can say more by raising one eyebrow than most people can say in a thousand words.

Words cannot describe the amount of respect we, as a team, have for him. We thank you for your friendship and support. Our memories are filled with delight and will be everlasting.

Helen McComb (Geoff’s former secretary, Department of Geographical Sciences and Planning) perhaps says it all:

Geoff was a widely respected, very capable and extremely busy Head and the Department grew enormously during his term. I recall the classical music playing softly on the radio in his office, his fantastic wit, lots of laughter, his passion for the game of golf, and a boss who would happily brew me a cup of his great coffee. Like me, he is a cricket fan and during a close match he would slip out of a meeting in his office and quietly ask ‘what’s the score’? Thanks, Geoff, for many good memories.

Geoff with two of his graduating PhD students, Tiffany Morrison and Karen Vella


15 Geoff’s perspective

This section has been compiled by the editing team from a series of notes penned by Geoff during July 2007

The situation The period 1970 to 2005 was one of huge change in the way world governments went about managing natural resources and their environments. Queensland changed more than most because it was so far behind to start with. This short piece outlines the most important drivers for the changes that occurred and how researchers could and did contribute to the improvements.

In his 1959 book Triumph in the Tropics, Sir Raphael Cilento made the point that ‘the story of the self-governing state of Queensland is essentially the record of white man’s triumph over the climate and the taming of the tropics’. People strongly believed this and it was a predominant mindset of development planning. In 1970 environmental planning (EP) as we know it did not exist. Since then EP has been codified and adopted to the extent that now it is mainstream policy at all levels of government.

Communities take for granted the need to look after their natural environment in a way that integrates social and economic development and of the need to protect conservation values, the quality of air and water and for improving the amenity values of the built environment for the long term. They did not in 1970 but since then there have been massive changes in attitudes about resources and environment; and about the need to do something about emerging evidence of over-exploitation. This transition from a totally human dominated view of the world to one that recognises environmental constraints is not over yet.

Key factors influencing Queensland attitudes towards far-sighted sustainable development are a strange mix of resource dependency (even for more recent ‘industries’ like tourism and retirement migration), dominance of private sector interests over the public interest and rural physiocratic views while at the same time incorporating a degree of rural socialism, xenophobia and parochialism and extremely limited history of civic planning other than for resource extraction.

One of the main roles of planning researchers in this period was to draw attention to the deteriorating state of the environment, the need to take action and drawing on global experiences promising means of achieving change.

The controversial and highly politicised nature of many of the needed changes facing planners made their role ambivalent. On the one hand they are morally bound to maintain their commitment to objective and verifiable science while on the other they have a social responsibility to draw attention to issues and solutions that may assist communities achieve sustainable development. Researchers spread out along a spectrum between these not necessarily incompatible positions. My experience suggests that planning research can be most effective if it focuses on ‘putting good information in the hands of decision makers’. Also research that is done in conjunction with partisan interests will have the best chance

of having a voice even if it does risk breaking the impartiality principle.

People like (Sir) Jo Bjelke-Petersen personify the attitudes through the 1970 to 1980 period, although it must be remembered that as soon as the gerrymander disappeared so did his government. His main henchman Russ Hinze, the then minister responsible for town planning and a range of other portfolios, said: ‘If developers have any problems because of the rules and regulations holding up worthwhile projects, they should promptly bring it to my attention. If changes to the laws are needed so that development can proceed as smoothly as possible, then changes will be made.’

The consequences and responses Environmental impact assessment (EIA), promoted by the US NEPA in 1969, became the early flagship of environmental planning in the United States and very soon after in Australia. Legislation and policies soon emerged in all jurisdictions. Colleagues at Griffith University also embraced this relatively simple tool as a focus for reviewing proposals of all kinds from the hard infrastructure to less tangible plans and policies under the guise of strategic environmental assessment. But it was plain that EIA was far from adequate—Doug Cocks even described it as a degraded from of planning. But EIA remains a central tool of EP and its core technical content of identifying impacts, predicting their magnitude and importance and how they might be mitigated is also core in all types of EP.

It’s hard to believe that until 1980, Section 33 of the Local Government Act (1936) in Queensland was the principal tool for local and regional planning schemes (town plans). The Act authorised but did not require local governments to prepare planning schemes to cover subdivision control, land use and performance standards for uses. The core of the ‘scheme’ was zoning and subdivision control, which are really just statements of use rights and a pre-defined template for guiding decisions on development. Any ‘planning’ such as it occurred was done in revising the zoning scheme from time to time based on opaque logic, or more likely by the judges in determining rezoning appeals. Even so, only about two-thirds of local governments had planning schemes and some were just primitive zoning schemes.

Through the Land Use Committee of the Coordinator-General’s Department, pressure was applied to enable planning to occur—resulting in significant revisions to legislation in 1980, setting out requirements for local Strategic Plans and Development Control Plans. The government subsequently added Section 32.8, allowing local governments to require environmental impact assessments. By the mid-1980s, local governments had sufficient statutory powers and instruments to incorporate environmental constraints into planning schemes if they so wished and to implement land use controls. The biggest problem most of them had was a state government that did not wish to be constrained by any planning schemes and frequently sided with developers in overturning local decisions.


Starting in the early 1990s, the ‘Department’ started reviewing the whole planning machinery driven by concerns about the cumbersome nature of development assessment and approval and by the prescriptive nature of the Act as it was. The outcome was the Integrated Planning Act 1997 with its attendant integrated development assessment process.

The existing statutes can be used to achieve almost any resource management objective. As noted by prominent legal experts—the legislation is so general that it really sets the context for policy rather than policy itself, so it can be enforced in a very arbitrary way. So much so as to forfeit the character of law except in a procedural sense. The Integrated Planning Act is procedurally intricate but leaves defining planning outcomes (including what is ‘sustainable development’) and methods of implementation of planning principles to local governments.

Adding statutory provisions to the IPA in 2004 were essential to provide strength to the land use controls (urban expansion) in the superseded SEQ Growth Management Strategy; and to integrating the development of the infrastructure necessary to service new growth areas. Some local governments on their own were either unable or unwilling to cooperate without the statutory powers ceded to the Office of Urban Management in this IPA legislation—a good local example of the limitations of cooperative regional planning.

The Commonwealth Government was a leading player in environmental planning in the period from 1970 to 2005. Wherever we turned for promising policy support, funding or leadership there was a strong Commonwealth presence—in conservation, especially with respect to the Great Barrier Reef; forests; Landcare and the Natural Heritage Trust; and resources inventory. The Commonwealth effectively used constitutional powers to influence outcomes at Fraser Island, the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics. Undoubtedly Queensland would have been far the poorer in managing its natural resources without the ‘intervention’ of the Commonwealth. It has been and still is a source of political rivalry and bureaucratic confusion and conflict. The state role is diminishing as the Commonwealth seeks to provide nation-wide perspectives on environments, world heritage management, the Natural Heritage Trust, forest management, and the integrated management of the waters of the Murray–Darling Basin.

Synthesis—the role of research The set of legislative acts established to define legal and administrative processes is a weak basis to evaluate the state’s progress as a resource manager. The administration of planning laws is along sectoral lines—and Queensland was the last of the Australian states to have integrated environmental legislation and an Environmental Protection Agency. Even research tended to be partitioned along the same lines.

There is in fact a wide scope for state and local agencies to proceed if they have the will. In retrospect it is difficult to believe just how primitive the tool set for environmental planning was in 1970. It is clear now that not much at all existed at that stage; much work had to be done and opportunities for research still to be identified and explored.

We had to deal with a moving and mirage-like target. Often it is not clear who is responsible for a policy failure—what level of government and which agency within any level. It has been said that ‘much legislation is drafted in terms so general that it merely sets the context for policy rather than policy itself’.

Furthermore, researchers in planning were fairly rare and received limited support from universities and institutions like CSIRO. Planners also had to prove their worth and right to exist—they still do in a world dominated by neo-classical economic thinking and chauvinistic science.

Many issues confront the architects of town planning schemes, including the appeals system; compensation and offsets; and the relationship between town planning and natural resource management. The machinery is there to create good town plans that might create a balance between social, economic and environmental outcomes—making it happen is more complex given the hindrances listed above.

As noted above, civic society and key individuals had a central role in promoting policies and laws and researchers frequently teamed up with such organisations and people to create an information base and pathway for partisan relevance for their research. Notable individuals and civic society more generally were a dominant feature of improved resources and environmental management or the resolution of more localised conflicts over the period. For example, outcomes on Fraser Island were driven by John Sinclair and his FIDO; in the Wet Tropics by Aila Keto, Michael Berwick and CAFNEC; on the Great Barrier Reef by Milo Dunphy. Local conservation groups also played an important role as evidenced on Moreton Island by Don Henry and the MICA; and at Cooloola by Arthur Harrold and the Noosa Parks Association. Our researchers often worked together with these people and these groups to identify and fill key tactical information gaps. While there seemed to us to be a ready supply of biophysical information, essential information on resource decisions, local impacts of development and economic interpretation were much harder to come by.


16 Conclusion—a gentleman and a scholar

Lynne Ferguson, Mary Maher, Ann Peterson, David Pitts and Lex Brown

We wish to offer Geoff McDonald this tribute of an all too brief summary of his work and his influence on regions and communities, in Queensland and other parts of this beautiful world. Geoff’s work over some 40 years saw him build research interests and associated friendships in Australia, Canada and the United States. He started out in the wilds of Kempsey, New South Wales, and finally settled in the wilds of St Lucia, Queensland. In that time his unflagging generosity in offering ideas, energy and time to his colleagues and students on both the professional and personal levels has been extraordinary.

Geoff has never lost his hunger for learning, for new ideas, or his appreciation of a good idea. The idea didn’t always have to be his own. He has been modest though in the construction and achievement of an outstanding body of work that has genuinely produced ‘real world’ benefits on issues of local and global importance. He has maintained a zeal for designing more real and better solutions to problems confronting institutions, communities as well as the environment. In Geoff’s mind these three contexts were of course inseparable.

Other messages from Geoff

• There is rarely a stand-alone solution—it’s mostly about combined efforts

• There is nothing so practical as a good theory

• Environmental management must work with economic imperatives—using good information and tools

• Transitional landscapes with transitional communities—when you think about managing landscapes you have to think about the communities inhabiting them. It’s about adaptive management

Geoff’s qualities are clearly evident in people’s comments here. Everyone spoke to us about Geoff’s unflagging generosity, modest disposition, that he was always one for a good idea, always into real issues global and local … always pushing frontiers, a strategist.

He is a talented middle person in policy and institutional ‘hot spots’. Geoff’s style is a blend of detachment with active engagement, authority with advocacy, observation with action, humour with empathy and he has an ability to use his wealth of experience to tell it straight to those who need to know.

He is acknowledged as a strategist and problem solver of the highest order. His capacity to think ‘big picture’, ‘outside the box’ and ‘joined up’ across different sectors and situations has stimulated Geoff and others to look beyond the quick fix. With the hard issues, he can do the hard yards of the detailed analysis AND use the results to create breakthroughs. Whether endeavouring to fix gaps in the Integrated Planning Act or to arrange a joint academic position in catchment

planning funded by the Engineering and Planning faculties at UQ, Geoff sees solutions in greater integration.

His qualities as a patient strategist may have been reinforced by his golfing prowess: to excel on the greens, one needs to be sharp-eyed, long-sighted, and in total control of the swing. An appreciation of the 19th hole does not go astray. He has always been able to communicate equally well and comfortably with the members of a small rural community group or the high level bureaucrats whose final decisions will affect that community.

He had a way of making panel members open up … He has a reputation for fairness and reason in the conduct of SAP (State Assessment Panel) meetings. (Suzanne Hoverman)

He has had a colourful and exceptional research career and is an acclaimed teacher and mentor. His warm, welcoming and affirming style saw him encouraging people to take their ideas further. This enthusiasm was directed at everyone, and for women with research ideas this made for a change from the usual male-oriented culture of academia.

Geoff’s ability to recognise and foster potential in his students led to his supervision of over 30 PhD students, many of whom have gone on to achieve highly and widely in the public and private sectors.

We raise our glasses to a gentleman and a scholar. Geoff McDonald is a larger-than-life character … his ideas, his involvement in issues and the intellect he brings to solving problems is characteristic of an ‘uncommon man’ as described by Denis Gabor in Inventing the Future, published in 1963. Gabor describes an uncommon man as a person who wants for a better world, enriched by his personal creation.

Convergence and divergence may have been the reality of our relationship, but an appreciation for Geoff as a sound thinker, capable of mixing in the policy debate, and of participating in thorough project work on topics of immediate interest are the more important characteristics of him as a person. He is a good debater, never arguing ad hominum, a good listener, and a good companion with whom to share a glass. And he knew a big issue when he saw it!

Ian McPhail

Geoff on a field trip in Girraween National Park, circa 1974. Photo: Bill Beach


Appendix A PhD students advised by Geoff McDonald

Surname First name Title

Abbott John Understanding and managing uncertainty in metropolitan planning (n progress)

Akbar Roos Modeling the decision making process in land use conversion. Case study: North Bandung Area, Indonesia

Anstey Geoff The choice between rural living and agriculture: implications for land use and subdivision policy

Austria Gener Displacement effect of industrial forest plantations to the native forests of the Philippines

Bantacut T Involving natural resources and environmental considerations in regional land use planning

Clowes

Cockfield Geoffrey John Evaluating a markets-based incentive scheme for farm forestry: a case study

Dale Alan An assessment of planning for government-funded land use development projects in Australian Aboriginal communities

Danoedoro Projo Versatile land-use information for local planning in Indonesia: contents, extraction methods and integration based on moderate- and high-spatial resolution satellite imagery

Davies Adam The devolution of responsibilities to local government: A case study of the Queensland Environmental Protection Act

Day Phil Hijacked inheritance

Dean Julie Environmental organisation achievements: the role of psychosocial processes

Dube Pauline Monitoring human induced change in communal and leasehold rangelands of Botswana

Earle TR Evaluation of policy analysis models using a longitudinal study of land management

Faruque Golam Planning for sustainable development of coastal shrimp culture in the southwestern region of Bangladesh

Hajkowicz Stephan An evaluation of multiple objective decision support of natural resource management. Case studies of environmental project appraisal in Queensland, Australia and farming system evaluation in Missouri in the US

Hundloe TJA The public administration of Australian commercial fisheries: a public policy analysis of efficiency and non-efficiency considerations, with particular reference to the declared management zone of the northern prawn fishery

Koestoer NP

Kusmanadhi

Lane Marcus Public involvement in regional planning: a case study analysis of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, North Queensland, Australia

Lavantucksin Vanida Environment, development & trade: the case of shrimp farming in Thailand

Low Choy Daryl Cooperative planning and management for Regional landscapes

Mills David Assessing the potential contribution of renewable energy to electricity supply in Australia

Misczak Geoff Integrating environmental and economic analysis into strategic planning

Morrison Tiffany Institutional integration in complex environments: pursuing rural sustainability at the regional level in Australia and the U.S.A.

Mula

Newman Ron

Ng Gan Che Environmental and socio-economic dimensions of land settlement: a case study of Felda Schemes in the Jengka Triangle, Malaysia

Pero Lionel Combining theory with practice: governance case study lessons and insights for improving the functioning and decision-making of community-based natural resource management institutions

Pitts David Opportunity shift: development and application of recreation opportunity spectrum concepts in park management

Routley

Saravanan V Subramanian Integrated water resource management: actors and rules negotiating water management in Indian Himalayas


Surname First name Title

Smith Carl Assessing agricultural land management sustainability: development and application of a method to a sugar producing area in North Queensland

Songwathana Kamol Environmental planning and management at the provincial level in Thailand: a case study of prawn farming in Songkla Province

Suarez-Galgo Marcus The environmental dimension in regional development planning: assessment of the Philippines experience

Suroso Djoka Santosa Abi Spatial planning and environmental assessment in Indonesia: a case study of the strategic environmental assessment of the Surabaya Spatial Plan

Temple-Smith David Decision support for ecosystem management in local government

Thomas Evan Theoretically sound approaches to calculating environmental liabilities using balance-sheet models for monitoring local scale environmental accounts (under examination)

Thwaites Robin Pedageomorphic terrain analysis of forestland resources assessment, science and practice (Vol 1 and 2)

Vella Karen Assessing institutional progress towards sustainability

Volk

Williams

Wulf Peter Self-regulatory code of practice and their effectiveness in achieving best environmental management practices within North Queensland’s primary industries (in progress)


Appendix B Key projects on accompanying CD

Regional plans McDonald G, Taylor B, McAlpine C and Vagg A (2005),

‘Evaluating Regional Resource Management Plans’, in Bellamy J (ed.) Regional natural resource management planning: the challenges of evaluation as seen through different lenses. Consortium of Integrated Resource Management, Department of Natural Resources and Mines.

McDonald GT et al (2005), Benchmarking Regional Planning Arrangements for Natural Resource Management 2004/5: Progress, constraints and future directions for regions, Healthy Savanna Planning Systems Project Darwin. Tropical Savannas CRC. Tropical Savannas Management CRC.

McDonald GT, Weston NG et al (2004), Sustaining the Wet Tropics: A Regional Plan for Natural Resource Management 2004–2008. Cairns. FNQNRM Ltd and Rainforest CRC.

McDonald Geoff and Weston Nigel (2004), Sustaining the Wet Tropics: A Regional Plan for Natural Resource Management. Volume 1 Background to the Plan. Cairns CRC for Tropical Rainforest Ecology and Management. 77pp

McDonald Geoff, Wood Danielle and Taylor B (2005), Ideas for Regional Planning in the Northern Territory. Darwin, Tropical Savannas CRC. 126pp (draft)

McDonald GT and Weston N (2003), ‘The Wet Tropics Regional NRM Plan: Sustainable Natural Resource Management in the Wet Tropics’, Queensland Planner, 42, 4,12–15.

McDonald, G (2004) ‘Water Quality Protection in the Australian Great Barrier Reef Catchment: The Role of Regional Natural Resource Management Plans’, Riversymposium Brisbane.

Weston N, McDonald G, Dorrington B and Fenton J (2003), ‘Planning for sustainable natural resource management in the Wet Tropics’, Australian Planning Institute Congress, Adelaide, April 2003.

Targets and priorities McDonald GT and Roberts B (2006), ‘SMART Water Quality

Targets for Great Barrier Reef Catchments’, Australian Journal of Environmental Management, 13, 2, 95–107.

McDonald GT (2005), ‘Adaptive management of diffuse-source pollution in Great Barrier Reef catchments’, Proceedings of the American Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference, Kansas City, October 2005.

Walker D, Morley M, Stewart B, Prosser I, Plummer I, Taylor B, Freudenberger D and McDonald G (2006), Integrating Science into Natural Resource Management through NHT and NAP. A report to the Natural Resource Policies and Programs Committee of ARMCANZ, CSIRO, Land and Water Australia and Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Community-based environmental planning Lane MB and McDonald GT (2005), ‘Community-based

Environmental Planning: Operational Dilemmas, Planning Principles and Possible Remedies’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 48, 5, 709–731.

Lane MB, McDonald GT and Morrison TH (2004), ‘An Agnostic View on Regionalism, Decentralisation and other Silver Bullets: A Response to Thom’, Australian Geographical Studies 42, 3, 398–403.

Lane MB, McDonald GT and Morrison T (2004), ‘Decentralisation and Environmental Management in Australia: a Comment on the Prescriptions of the Wentworth Group.’ Australian Geographical Studies, 42, 103-115.

Taylor B, McDonald G, Heyenga S, Hoverman S, Smith T and Robinson C (2006), Evaluation of Regional Planning Arrangements for Natural Resource Management 2005–6 Benchmark report II. Darwin. Tropical Savannas.

McDonald G, Morrison T and Lane M (2004), ‘Integrating natural resource management systems for better environmental outcomes’, Australian Geographer, 35, 3.

Forest management and tropical rainforests McDonald GT (1991), ‘Planning for the Wet Tropics World

Heritage Area’, Invited paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Royal Australian Planning Institute, Longreach, 16–19 October 1991.

Rural planning McDonald GT (1989), ‘Rural land use planning decisions by

bargaining’, Journal of Rural Studies, 6, 4, 325–335.

McDonald GT, Rickson RE and Neumann R (1987), ‘Saving farmland from whom and for what purpose’, in C Cocklin, B Smit and T Johnston (eds), Demands Upon Rural Lands: Issues and Analytical Approaches, Boulder, Westview Press.

Beyond EIA McDonald GT and Brown AL (1995), ‘Going Beyond EIA:

Environmental Input to Planning and Design’, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 15, 6, 483–495.

McDonald GT and Brown AL (1995), ‘From EIA to environmental design and planning’, Australian Journal of Environmental Management, 2, 65–77.

Brown AL and McDonald GT (1993), ‘Beyond EIA: Improving environmental input to planning and design’, Queensland Planner, 33, 11–17.

Brown AL, Hindmarsh RJ and McDonald GT (1991), ‘Environmental assessment procedures and issues in the Pacific Basin – South East Asia Region’, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 11, 4, 143–156.

Tourism and recreation in national parks McDonald GT (1986), ‘The regional economic impact of

tourism and recreation in national parks’, Environment and Planning B, 13, 349–366.

McDonald GT (1984), ‘The economic impacts of tourism and recreation in National Parks: The Cooloola Case’, Habitat, 12, 4, 14–17.


McDonald GT, Wilks LC, Morison J (1984), The Economic Significance of Cooloola. A Report to the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service. Griffith University, Institute of Applied Social Research, 99pp.

Pitts DJ and McDonald GT (1982), ‘Balancing the scales in open space decision making’’, Planner, 22, 1, 2–7.

Pitts DJ and McDonald GT (1982), Community Attitudes Towards the Possible Development of a Marina on spit at the mouth of the Noosa Rivert, A Report to the Queensland Land Administration Commission and the Noosa Shire Council. Griffith University, Institute of Applied Social Research, 52pp.

Brisbane Conservation Atlas Pitts DJ, McDonald GT and Stock EC (1983), Brisbane

Conservation Atlas. Stage I: Project Design, A Report for the Brisbane City Council. Griffith University, Institute of Applied Social Research, 44pp.

McDonald GT (1983), ‘The Brisbane Conservation Atlas’, Urban and Regional Planning Information Systems 12.

Integrated NRM in the Condamine McDonald GT, Booth J, Boughton WC and Osborn RC (1981), A

Study of the Irrigation Industry in the Upper Condamine Basin, A report for the Condamine River Basin Irrigators Association. Griffith University, Institute of Applied Social Research, 148pp.

McDonald GT (1979), ‘Land use in the Upper Darling Basin’, in RC Osborn, Planning Future in the Upper Darling Basin, Griffith University, Institute of Applied Social Research, March.

a retrospective of environmental planning at uq

Documents

flinders university

university of adelaide

prince of songkla university

australian national

queensland sarah norman

planning john bennett

environmental sustainability

john holmes