- Queensland Government funding will help provide better tools for landholders and organisations to measure the condition of the environment.
- $770,000 is being provided to Accounting for Nature Limited (Accounting for Nature) to ensure Queensland remains at the forefront of environmental accounting in Australia.
- Key stakeholders to benefit from this support include Queensland's landholders, Natural Resource Management bodies and Traditional Owners.
Queenslanders stand to have a better understanding of the real state of the environment with the Queensland Government's support for Accounting for Nature's environmental accounting framework.
Environmental accounting allows land managers to measure and track the condition of their environmental assets (such as vegetation, water and soil) in response to their land management.
This framework, underpinned by best practice independent science, gives land managers valuable information to support decisions on how to manage their land and lays the foundation to participate in natural capital markets.
Accounting for Nature (AfN), an independent, not-for-profit Australian-based environmental accounting organisation with offices in Brisbane and Sydney, is receiving $770,000 from the Queensland Government to support its environmental accounting work.
This includes:
- AfN's work with the state's Natural Resource Management (NRM) bodies to build their capacity through training to measure and track the environmental condition of their regions
- Development and rollout of a digital platform to make building environmental accounts easier, and
- The engagement of Traditional Owners to explore the role of cultural connection to Country in environmental accounting practices.
NRMs are a major focus of the funding, which aims to build their capacity and understanding of environmental accounting to develop regional-scale environmental accounts.
This will assist NRMs to gain a benchmark understanding of the condition of the environment across their regions, to assist better decision-making for land management practices and guide future investment.
As well as assisting NRM groups with measuring the state and trend of the environmental condition of their regions, regional environmental accounts provide a valuable opportunity to inform Queensland's annual State of Environment reporting.
It will lay the foundation for moving Queensland towards better statewide coverage of environmental accounts.
