Planning from the mountains to the sea: where do freshwater protected areas fit?

1. Planning from the mountains to the sea: where do freshwater protected areas fit? Bob Pressey & Stephanie Januchowski Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University

2. Integrated catchment management … we have a problem • The need for difficult tradeoffs between diverse objectives and values • Freshwater protected areas (in the broadest sense) have distinctive roles in integrated catchment management • Freshwater protected areas are wrapped up in the tradeoff problem

3. Examples from the catchments of the Great Barrier Reef: • Some extensive clearing still permitted • Exemptions for small-scale clearing • Likely cryptic clearing by chemicals • Expansion of urban areas and related infrastructure • Loss of terrestrial species from patches of native vegetation due to isolation, fire, invasives • Soil loss under grazing • Applications of fertilisers, pesticides Defining the problem … 1. Diverse, spatially uncorrelated values (contributions to multiple objectives) 2. The need for incremental investments 3. Ongoing loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services

4. The upshot (1 + 2 + 3) = managers must make hard choices between diverse values • Values that are not protected this year have a risk of being lost or degraded • Choices about what to protect are also choices about what must be lost • These choices involve mixing “apples and oranges” across diverse values

5. Lower floodplain: • Best-practice land uses to reduce pesticides, nutrients • Retention of intact wetlands • Restoration of floodplain forest • Middle reaches with reduced riparian vegetation: • Restoration for riparian and instream biota • Restoration to reduce bank erosion • Fencing to exclude stock • Best-practice land uses • Cleared headwaters: • Restoration to minimize soil loss • Control of sources of aquatic weeds • Best-practice land use for soil loss, • chemicals, nutrients • Forested headwaters: • Retention of forest cover • Management of logging • Management of grazing, fire

6. Conclusions … • Freshwater protection and restoration have several important roles • Tradeoffs between freshwater and other activities, but also between different freshwater activities • Managers need better tools to resolve these tradeoffs: explicit ways of making choices but also ways of understanding the implications of investing in different values in different ways