Spotlight on the monitoring program review

"Healthy Land and Water’s successful Report Card is being reinvented so it can deliver beyond its current water focus and encompass a broader ecosystem focus, in line with the priorities outlined in our Natural Resource Management Plan (NRM Plan)."

- Dr Andrew O'Neill, General Manager – Environmental Services

For 20 years, Healthy Land and Water has collected data and released a Report Card on the health of South-East Queensland’s waterways. The Report Card has provided a strong scientific basis for investment, which has resulted in significant improvements to the health of our waterways and Moreton Bay.

As a science-driven and community-focused organisation, Healthy Land and Water is investing to review and update the Report Card, to ensure that it is well positioned to support evidence-based investment and policy decisions to protect the natural assets of South-East Queensland for the next 20 years.

We are working with an international team of scientists to:

• Use techniques such as social network analysis to understand key opportunities to influence decisions.
• Expand the role of the Report Card to include broader natural resource management indicator sets that we are currently updating.
• Develop leading indicators that will enable us to predict and respond to environmental threats as they come.
• Develop system dynamics models to generate realistic future projections. This creates an analytics and management tool that enables us to consider and test various investment strategies, much like a sophisticated computer simulation game. In this way, the system dynamics models can help our partners to start looking at how the grade can be raised.

It is timely and crucial that we build on meeting compliance needs of our members and create the Report Card of the future that will accelerate positive change by impacting behaviour and influencing investment.