Developing a Social, Cultural and Economic Report Card for a Regional Industrial Harbour

Abstract

Report cards are increasingly used to provide ongoing snap-shots of progress towards specific ecosystem health goals, particularly in coastal regions where planners need to balance competing demands for coastal resources from a range of industries. While most previous report cards focus on the biophysical components of the system, there is a growing interest in including the social and economic implications of ecosystem management to provide a greater social-ecological system understanding. Such a report card was requested on the Gladstone Harbour area in central Queensland, Australia. Gladstone Harbour adjoins the southern Great Barrier Reef, and is also a major industrial and shipping port. Balancing social, economic and environmental interests is therefore of great concern to the regional managers. While environmental benchmarking procedures are well established within Australia (and elsewhere), a method for assessing social and economic performance of coastal management is generally lacking. The key aim of this study was to develop and pilot a system for the development of a report card relating to appropriate cultural, social and economic objectives. The approach developed uses a range of multicriteria decision analysis methods to assess and combine different qualitative and quantitative measures, including the use of Bayesian Belief Networks to combine the different measures and provide an overall quantitative score for each of the key management objectives. The approach developed is readily transferable for purposes of similar assessments in other regions.

Advances in monitoring the human dimension of natural resource systems: an example from the Great Barrier Reef

“…The Strategic Assessment and Outlook Report also recorded the current conditions and values that describe the community benefits derived from the Reef. Currently, SELTMP data is being used to populate several 'report cards' within the region (Pascoe et al 2016). Report cards are increasingly used to measure and record changes in ecosystem health over time and provide ongoing snap-shots of progress towards specific ecosystem health goals (Pascoe et al 2016).…”

“…Currently, SELTMP data is being used to populate several 'report cards' within the region (Pascoe et al 2016). Report cards are increasingly used to measure and record changes in ecosystem health over time and provide ongoing snap-shots of progress towards specific ecosystem health goals (Pascoe et al 2016). While most report cards focus on the biophysical components of the system, there is a growing interest in including the social and economic implications of ecosystem management to provide a greater socialecological system understanding.…”

Environmental decision‐making using Bayesian networks: creating an environmental report card

“…The port is one of the world's top five coal export ports . The recommended modelling approach for the social, cultural and economic components in the Gladstone Harbour Report Card was also a BN framework . Similar to the hierarchical structure of the environmental component of the Gladstone Harbour Report Card, the economic component consisted of three subcomponents: direct economic footprint, economic stimulus and recreational value.…”

“…Environmental report card indicators are selected to adequately reflect the current environmental health of an area and should be guided by the simple, measurable, achievable, realistic and time‐limited (SMART) principle . They are then recorded and visually represented in a report card to communicate this information to a wide and diverse audience . Some popular statistical approaches for calculating environmental report card indices are principal component analysis, cluster analysis, analysis of variance and factor analysis .…”

“…The ability to visually represent the various elements of the model, to perform diagnostic and predictive modelling, include uncertainty and assist in decision‐making has added to its wide appeal . More recently this modelling framework has been used to develop a regional industrial harbour report card, which integrates social, cultural and economic indicators , and to develop a sustainability scorecard for the dairy industry in Australia, combining the social, economic and environmental sustainability perspectives .…”