Resilient Landscapes, Resilient Communities

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Proceedings of the 12th Murrumbidgee Landcare Annual Forum, in collaboration with the Upper Murrumbidgee Catchment Coordinating Committee.

17-18 November 2008

Queanbeyan Conference Centre

Resilient Landscapes, Resilient Communities:
The Next Generation of Landcare.
Celebrating community environmental action with two days of field trips, discussion and debate.

Hosted by the Landcare Networks of the upper Murrumbidgee; Upper Murrumbidgee Landcare Committee, Ginninderra Catchment Group, Molonglo Catchment Group, Southern ACT Catchment Group and Yass Area Network.

» Promotional flyer - Tending the Grassroots 14-18 November 2008
» Field trips program - 17 November 2008
» Forum program - 18 November 2008

Proceedings

Tuesday 18 November 2008

9.00 am   Sue Whelan, Deputy Mayor, Queanbeyan City Council.
Acknowledgement of country.
Welcome to Queanbeyan.
9.10 am Sam Archer, Chair, Murrumbidgee Landcare Inc.
Steve Welch, Chair, Upper Murrumbidgee Catchment Coordinating Committee.
Welcome to the Forum.

RESILIENCE

9.30 am Helen Burns, Research Liaison Officer, EH Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation.
Peter Orchard, Manager Pasture Advisory Service, NSW Department for Primary Industries.

Adapting to a changing climate: social, political, economic and environment.

» Adapting to a changing climate PDF [626kb]

What are the key drivers and impediments to resilience – for our communities, landscapes and landcare networks. Investigating the connection between landscape and community resilience.

10.00 am Rohan Nelson, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems.

Resilience: who needs to transform first, science or Landcare?

» Resilience PDF [3.3mb]

Resilience is a big idea, and the Landcare movement has a crucial role to play in defining and implementing it. Landcare can partner with science to make resilience locally relevant, by integrating science with local knowledge and connecting scientists with the community. It is also a vital piece of social capital through which communities and governments can work together on NRM. Resilience is a way of thinking that is useful for identifying how transformative change can complement more gradual adaptation in NRM. Transformation means fundamentally changing the way that we do things. It is becoming an important idea because of the significant but uncertain ongoing changes that we expect in our climate. As a community, we’re much
better at adapting to types of change that we can predict. Resilience helps us to think beyond traditional approaches to risk management toward opportunities to transform the way we manage natural resources.

10.45 am Morning tea

PERI URBAN CHALLENGES

11.00 am Tamara Sysak, University of Melbourne.

Biosecurity Risk and Periurban Landscapes Project in Yass – Summary and preliminary findings.

» Biosecurity risk and periurban landscapes PDF [1.4mb]

The research involves exploring how landowners in the Yass LGA understand biosecurity and how it affects them and the landscape in order to better communicate and manage biosecurity issues. There has been a changing demographic in the Yass region in recent years with new landowners moving into the area onto smaller landholdings focusing on different agricultural production. In order to gain a greater understanding of the issues and concerns in these changing social and production landscapes we undertook in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and landholders in the Yass LGA followed by a mail-out survey. We are in the early stages of data analysis and I will present some of the preliminary findings from this study.

11.40 am Prof Darryl Low Choy, Urban Research Program, Griffith University.

Peri-urbanisation: challenges for natural resource management.

Managing the rapid and unabated growth on the fringes of our metropolitan and urban centres has been a longstanding challenge. Unfortunately, these areas have not attracted the same degree of attention as urban areas, from researchers, policy makers and planners. This research project, Change and Continuity in Peri-urban Australia, aims to help redress this relative lack of attention given to peri-urban regions in Australia. Included in this project is an examination of the implications of changes for future land use and management. The project identified likely future patterns of socio-economic, cultural, natural resource, environmental and land use change.

SNIPPETS

12.20 pm Penny Cooke, School of Education, Charles Sturt University.
Landcare and ‘informal’ environmental education.

Toni McLeish, Grassy Box Woodland, Conservation Management Network.
NRM Networking Partnerships: conference outcomes and strategic futures.

Terry Korodaj, Project Officer, Molonglo Catchment Group
Queanbeyan River Indigenous Plant List.

12.50 pm Lunch

ECONOMICS

1.45 pm Sam Archer, Nuffield Scholar.

Market Based Ecosystem Services: Paying land managers for the ecological goods and services that they historically have provided to society for free.

» Market Based Ecosystem Services PDF [3.9mb]

RESILIENCE

2.30 pm Helen Burns and Peter Orchard.

Case studies in resilience: NSW farming community dynamics.

» Case studies in resilience PDF [652kb]

3.15 pm Afternoon tea

PARTNERSHIPS

3.30 pm Community-government partnerships: a conversation.

Peter Davey, Board member Greening Australia Capital Region and Council member, ACT NRM Council.
John Feint, Executive Officer, ACT NRM Council.
Gary Howling, Principal Conservation Analyst, Great Eastern Ranges Initiative, Department of Environment and Climate Change.

4.30 pm Sam Archer and Steve Welch.
Closing remarks.
4.40 pm Close