Australian Agriculture Assessment 2001
Australian agriculture assessment 2001
National Land and Water Resources Audit, 2001
Meeting Audit objectives
Australian Agriculture Assessment 2001 reports on productivity and practice in agriculture linking landscape scale processes, biomass estimates and fluxes to regional scale soil, nutrient and water movement and resource condition. The report serves as a key input towards more productive and sustainable land and water resource use.
Audit objective 1. Providing a clear understanding of the status of, and changes in, the nation's land, vegetation and water resources and implications for their sustainable use by:
- assessing how and the extent to which agriculture has changed water and nutrient balances;
- assessing nutrient inputs and outputs from agriculture and implications for nutrient management on farm;
- forecasting impacts of soil acidification on agricultural soils and productivity;
- describing key characteristics of Australia's soils that influence production, key soil and landscape processes and soil condition;
- presenting the most comprehensive assessment of water-borne soil erosion and sediment transport ever undertaken for Australia's agricultural catchments and rivers, and highlighting implications on farm and for soil, river and estuary management;
- presenting river nutrient budgets and changes for nitrogen and phosphorus; and
- summarising continuous improvement in Australia's agricultural practices as commodities strive for sustainable natural resource use.
Audit objective 2. Providing an interpretation of the costs and benefits (economic, environmental, and social) of land and water resource change and any remedial actions by:
- providing major biophysical data inputs to the integrated economic assessment of benefits and costs of resource use into the future. This is key information for the Audit's companion report Australians and Natural Resource Management. Together, the Audit reports and Australian Natural Resource Atlas deliver essential input to regional groups as they develop, implement and evaluate regional natural resources management strategies.
Audit objective 3. Developing a national information system of compatible and readily accessible resource data by:
- compiling Australia-wide data on soil resources, covering key soil properties and integrating a large number of separately mapped data sets on soil properties from State and Territory agencies;
- collating information on acidification, nutrient fluxes, soil erosion and sediment and nutrient transport—information products will be made available through the Australian Natural Resources Atlas; a summary of key information is listed in Appendix 1 covering basin level carbon and primary productivity, landscape nutrients, volume and types of water borne soil erosion, and nutrient export to rivers, floodplains, reservoirs and estuaries; and
- ensuring this information and underlying data sets are readily available with all data compiled in standardised databases and are made accessible through the Australian Natural Resources Data Library.
Audit objective 4. Producing national land, vegetation and water—surface and groundwater—assessments as integrated components of the Audit by:
- preparing linked budgets of carbon, water and nutrients at the landscape scale;
- defining pathways and processes for sediments and nutrients to be transported and deposited from diffuse and point sources, through waterways, onto floodplains and reservoirs and ultimately discharged to the coast (principally estuaries); and
- linking these assessments to agricultural practice, to provide an insight into priority management activities for Australia's agricultural industries.
Audit objective 5. Ensuring integration with, and collaboration between, other relevant initiatives by:
- working in partnership with Australia's leading research, industry and resource management agencies to deliver value-added outputs from the Audit's work plan; Audit outputs have exceeded expectations in terms of scope and quality and include innovative and risk-taking partnerships (notably with CSIRO Land & Water and the Australian fertiliser industry);
- providing an assessment of sediment and nutrient transport for Australia's river basins that contain intensive agriculture to serve as a key input to priority setting as part of the National Action Plan on Salinity and Water Quality and the Natural Heritage Trust;
- highlighting the progress of all key agricultural industries in meeting the natural resource challenges;
- working with the Australian horticultural industry to gain a better appreciation of natural resource issues for this industry; and
- piloting, with the Australian Dairy Farmers Federation, the development of industry-specific Natural Resource Management Strategies that build on continuous improvement in practice to meet priority issues.
Audit objective 6. Providing a framework for monitoring Australia's land and water resources in an ongoing and structured way by:
- providing a framework and direction for monitoring, assessment and reporting on Australia's soil resources—this calls for continued development and updating of the Australian Soil Resources Information System;
- demonstrating roles of agribusiness in information collation and assessment—especially soil condition and trends in soil properties; and
- building monitoring systems and techniques that commodity groups and research and development corporations can apply to measure improvement in industry practice.
Australian Agriculture Assessment 2001 has highlighted major areas for investment as essential activities to improve the management of Australia's natural resources.
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