Support for Regional Activities
Environment Australia, March 1998
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About this document
The $1.5 billion Natural Heritage Trust marks an unprecedented investment in the natural environment by an Australian Government. Even so, the task before us is enormous and it is important that we obtain the best possible environmental outcomes from this new injection of capital.
To ensure that all Australians gain from this investment, the Commonwealth Government will give increasing priority to activities that will lead to a long term improvement in the condition of our precious land and water resources, native vegetation and biodiversity.
A key principle in the Natural Heritage Trust is to promote planning and implementation at a scale appropriate to address the underlying environment and natural resource management problems, rather than just managing the symptoms. We believe that this is best achieved by taking a whole landscape approach - integrating the common goals of sustainable agriculture and biodiversity conservation.
In many parts of Australia, the severity and extent of our environment and natural resource management problems, the need to involve everyone affected, the time-frame needed to tackle the problems and the interrelated nature of the solutions, make a regional approach an effective way to address these issues. However, there may be places (particularly in more sparsely populated areas) where a regional approach may not be practical or effective. Accordingly, while all projects for funding under the Trust will be considered on their merits, where a regional approach has been adopted projects given a high priority in a regional strategy or action plan are more likely to receive funding priority.
The Natural Heritage Trust promotes a focus on on-ground actions based on the best available information, the setting of priorities based of identification of the most urgent action, and the designing of activities which will deliver a range of outcomes. It is not encouraging the writing or rewriting of strategies or action plans where they already exist, but it will encourage the development of such plans where they do not exist, or improvements to existing plans where they do not fully integrate sustainable natural resource management and environmental issues, such as integrating biodiversity conservation into land and water management plans.
This paper sets out in general terms what the Commonwealth expects regional strategies should contain. It does not, however, prescribe detail as we believe that, provided national priorities are recognised, this is best negotiated by the community.
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