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The cost of disposing domestic food waste (DFW) in open landfills is a significant financial expenditure for most Councils in regional Australia. However, there is little information about the extent that householders value the environmental goods and services that are impacted by DFW disposal. This paper presents non-market valuations for a hypothetical kerbside domestic food waste collection service from a household survey in two local government areas in the Central Queensland region. Choice modelling (CM) and contingent valuation method (CVM) were employed to elicit and estimate willingness to pay (WTP) of the community for a DFW collection service. In the CM exercise, latent class analysis results for the sub-groups supporting an improvement option revealed that the respondents’ utility increased by $4.13 for lifespan expansion of the local landfill. On the contrary, the group had $3.05 and $0.28 utility declines for a fortnightly DFW collection service and an increase in the rate of methane emission from DFW disposal, respectively. For the status quo group, utility increased by $5.05 for a landfill lifespan extension but decreased by $16.26 for potential odour from the collection bins. Under the CVM exercise, a Multilogit estimator model for the overall sample population showed a WTP of $30.42 for the service, with 58% participation rate in the improvement option. This valuation study provides policy insights on the importance of full-cost accounting of environmental goods and services attributes, which is useful information for future implementation of voluntary or mandatory DFW diversion schemes.

Presentation ID 16394

Using economic analysis to prioritise improvements in environmental conditions is particularly difficult when multiple benefits are involved. This includes ‘bundling’ issues in agricultural pollution management, where a change in management action or farming systems generates multiple improvements, such as reductions in more than one pollutant. In this study, we conceptualise and compare two different approaches to analysing cost-effectiveness when varying bundles of benefits are generated for a single project investment. Each approach requires data to be transformed in some way to allow the analysis to proceed. The index approach requires the transformation on the benefits side so that the effects of multiple pollutant changes can be combined into a measure for each project which can then be compared to costs. By comparison, the disaggregation approach requires the transformation on the costs side where costs for each project have to be apportioned across the different pollutants involved. The paper provides novel insights with an application to agricultural water quality improvements into the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, demonstrating that while both approaches are effective in prioritising projects by cost-effectiveness, the disaggregation approach provides more insightful results and values that may be relevant for use as upper value guidelines in future project selection.

An important challenge in managing renewable resources is to understand why owners and managers sometimes make decisions that deplete resources and future earnings, such as when graziers allow pastures and land condition to be degraded. In this paper, we test two potential reasons for unsustainable management practices, myopia and salience, with each explaining why resource managers may exhibit impatience in harvest decisions. Myopia is associated with decision makers placing lower weight on future outcomes than would be implied by their pure time preference. Salience is associated with overweighting of consumption ‘now’, implying inconsistency in time preferences. To test for these effects on renewable resource management, an incentivised, dynamic field experiment was carried out with rangeland grazing enterprise owners in northeastern Australia that related management choices with uncertain rainfall events to both profits and land condition over time. Results demonstrate that respondents exhibiting myopia/salience in their choices tended to achieve lower cumulative scores in the experiment, as well as lower land conditions on their properties as measured with remote sensing data. Our results explain why there may be persistent optimisation failures by resource owners that reduce both profits and environmental outcomes.

This study have investigated the factors which may affect (positively or negatively) exporting HVPACs in Asian countries from CQ. In light of theoretical domain of the factors have been categorized as centripetal (positive/pull) and centrifugal (negative/push) forces. Availability of skilled and unskilled labour forces in the agricultural sector of CQ is one of the centripetal forces which could help the HVPACs to grow to satisfy the international market demand. CQ has the setup of backward and forward linkage industries to promote exporting HVPACs. One of the major advantages of CQ is its location and proximity to the Asian markets which offer a competitive transportation cost to export HVPACs in Asian markets. There are few obstacles as well to promote HVPACs of CQ which could act as centrifugal forces on local economic dynamics. CQ has three regional airports but none of them has the infrastructure or logistics to operate international cargo flight. As a result the local producer have to ship their product to Brisbane for exporting which is time consuming and attract additional costs. In view of stakeholders, CQ needs to improve its irrigation facilities to increase the production of HVPACs. One of the barriers on exporting HVPACs is the labour cost which is comparatively higher than other competitor exporting countries. This study reveal that, in spite of some barrier CQ region has a great potential on exporting HVPACs in Asian markets.

Industrial harbours are a complex interface between environmental, economic and social systems. Trying to manage the social and economic needs of the community while maintaining the integrity of environmental ecosystems is complicated, as is the identification and evaluation of the various factors that underpin the drivers of economic, community and resource condition. An increasingly popular strategy to deal with the identification and evaluation challenges in complex human-environmental systems is to use a report card system which can be used as a summary assessment tool to monitor the health of aquatic ecosystems. The use of environmental report cards has become increasingly common but reporting has principally focused on environmental indicators. It is only very recently that attempts are being made to include social, cultural and economic indicators. There has been limited consensus in the selection of social and economic indicators applied in different aquatic report cards but as recreation is such an important activity, typically some measure of recreation benefit is included. However, there has been no commonality in the measures applied to assess its performance as an economic indicator. This paper is focused on the assessment of recreational benefits as an indicator of economic value in the report card for Gladstone Harbour in Queensland, Australia. It is the first aquatic health report card to include an assessment of the nonmarket value of recreation which makes it a more comprehensive indicator of economic value compared to estimates in other report cards based on measures of employment, participation or expenditure. There have now been three consecutive years of reporting (2014-2016) of the Gladstone Harbour report card, and the results indicate that the recreation index appears to be effectively monitoring changes over time.

Western Australia’s Swan River is a complex asset providing environmental, recreational and commercial benefits. Agencies responsible for its management rely extensively on advice from experts, whose preferences may or may not align with those of the community. Using a choice experiment, we compared public and expert preferences for managing the river’s ecology. Modelling revealed heterogeneity in preferences, including within the experts sampled. Ecologists held similar preferences to the minority of public individuals who exhibited the strongest preferences for protecting river ecology. Planners were more similar to the public majority, whose preferences were moderated by the cost of ecological improvement.