Managing for resilience of the Great Barrier Reef: Socio-economic influences

MTSRF Synthesis Report

Compiled by Johanna Johnson¹ and Katherine Martin²

¹ C2O Consultants, Townsville
² Consultant to RRRC

ISBN 978-1-921359-68-2
Published July 2011

MTSRF Theme 5 - Enhancing Delivery

Executive Summary

Effective management and strategic investment in water quality improvement in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has been identified as critical to enhancing reef resilience in the face of climate change. Climate change has been recognised as one of the greatest threats to the GBR, and managing for resilience may mitigate some of the short-term risks, giving natural communities time to adapt to a changing environment. Understanding how to increase the uptake of land management practices, which aim to improve water quality, is the key to achieving this goal. In addition, changes to the GBR ecosystem will have implications for reef-dependent communities and industries, and understanding social resilience to future change will be important to support these communities.

MTSRF-funded research has provided insight into how strategies to improve water quality and enhance ecosystem resilience can be most effectively implemented, and increased understanding of how GBR communities are likely to be affected by changes to the GBR ecosystem. In addition, the complex interactions between different social scales and how they respond to change have been examined. Collectively, this new information has been used by MTSRF researchers to develop models that can deal with the complex nature of these relationships to predict how communities might respond to incentives and disincentives to change land management practices, and where effort should be placed to achieve the best resilience outcomes for the GBR.

MTSRF-funded research also identified social resilience indicators at the community and catchment scale that are specific to the GBR region, and can inform management actions and monitoring of social responses. At the whole of GBR catchment scale, a greater understanding of social adaptive capacity and the way different factors affect the likelihood of social adaptation also provides information for determining the most appropriate management actions.

While many questions still remain unanswered, findings to date can provide significant direction and tools for managers and policy-makers to prioritise and target effort, in particular to change land-holder perceptions and practices, and provide strategies to adopt new practices that facilitate progress towards meeting water quality targets. This knowledge supports effective implementation of land management practices aimed at improving GBR water quality, an important strategy for enhancing resilience of the GBR to future change (see the companion report 'Water quality and climate change: Managing for resilience' by Johnson and Martin 2011).