Resilient Catchments: Place-Based Planning

Over the last 15 years there has been a lot of investment in reef water quality projects but as the impacts of climate change are becoming more evident, it’s good to see that a broader view of catchment planning is being incorporated into new funding programs.

The future health of the Great Barrier Reef is a major concern for our region but it’s not the only concern. As the threats from climate change and biodiversity loss are becoming evident, it makes sense to use reef investment more strategically to solve multiple issues in our catchments.

There are a number of catchments in the Wet Tropics where several reef water quality projects are running independently of each other with little coordination and no overall landscape planning. They may be making good progress in reducing sediment and nutrient runoff, but they are focused on addressing spot issues in isolation of the broader catchment. In other words, it’s like sticking Band-Aids on sores without taking a holistic view of the whole body to consider if its suffering from a chronic health problem.

We need to return to holistic catchment planning and management so we can tackle multiple problems within the broader landscape.

The effectiveness of place-based planning was demonstrated in our delivery of the Wet Tropics Major Integrated Project – a reef water quality program funded by the Queensland Government’s Reef water Quality Program in 2017-2021 that combined local knowledge and science after extensive community engagement across the Tully and Johnstone River catchments. This project included a local scale water monitoring program, trials of water treatment systems from bioreactors to vegetated drains, on-farm demonstration sites and educational community events. It piloted new catchment-scale solutions to drive the next wave of change and it garnered unprecedented landholder engagement while also bringing industry and community on board.

Since then, Terrain NRM has implemented this approach on several other projects including the Mossman Integrated Project and Upper Johnstone Integrated Project, which were funded by the Queensland Government’s Natural Resource Investment Program. Both projects tackled erosion problems with engineering works and, in the case of the Upper Johnstone project, through grazing management practice change as well.