Land and Water Australia's Contribution to Australia

Land & Water Australia addresses the challenges of managing Australia’s land and water resources through an integrated portfolio of research investments focused on productivity growth balanced with sustainability.

Working in partnerships with industry, universities and CSIRO, Land & Water Australia (LWA) has been quietly making our food production systems safer and more environmentally friendly since 1990. 

Land & Water Australia’s achievements include:

• the first work that identified the risk of endocrine disrupting chemicals in Australian waterways
• the AUSRIVAS system for measuring river health
• a wetting front detector to save irrigation water
• revealing a huge gap in our water accounts caused by double counting
• uncovering the myriad ways Australia farmers are adapting to our notoriously variable climate
• developing innovative incentives for farmers undertaking conservation works
• ‘controlled traffic’ farming systems to improve soil productivity and health
• identifying of the role of phosphorus, nitrogen and other factors in the development of blue-green algae in the Murray-Darling
• fundamental new research on Australia’s tropical river systems
• being the first to fund a high-profile project on eco-system services, which has gone on to become the framework for natural resource management and science in Australia and is of growing importance internationally
• working closely with the cotton industry to eliminate pesticide contamination of waterways
• working with the wool, meat and grains industries to develop more-sustainable mixed farming systems, research that won a Banksia Environmental Award last year
• developing, through the dryland salinity program, the model for collaboration of states and other agencies to address the major landscape challenge of dryland salinity. This program, which began in 1993, continues to inform management of Australian landscapes and reduce costs to agriculture.
• leading multi-partner programs to manage climate variability and Australia’s northern rivers, improve irrigation systems, and develop Australia’s national Climate Change Research Strategy for Primary Industries.
• through post-graduate scholarships, LWA has supported research training for more than 100 of the country’s brightest young environmental scientists.

Land & Water Australia is one of 15 Rural Research and Development Corporations established by the then Minister for Agriculture, John Kerin, in the Hawke government, but is the only one focussed on public good sustainability research. For 19 years LWA has been equipping Australia’s farmers with the best available science and technology to manage our soil, water and vegetation. 

Over the past 10 years, LWA has managed to more than double the $13 million a year it gets from the Government. This has been achieved through partnerships with the wool, meat, cotton, dairy and other industries to build the biggest applied environmental research portfolio in Australia. The relevance of LWA’s research and its strong focus on managing knowledge for adoption is highlighted by the return Australia receives on its investment in LWA: using conservative assumptions, an independent study in 2006 by consultants Agtrans found that LWA had delivered $4.80 in direct economic benefits for each government dollar invested, equating to an Internal Rate of Return (IRR) exceeding 24%. 

Land & Water Australia’s suite of programs has been addressing productivity growth balanced with sustainable land and water management. Managing Climate Variability, Weeds Research and Knowledge Exchange and the National Program for Sustainable Irrigation place equal emphasis on sustainable resource use and improved productivity. As well as the National Program for Sustainable Irrigation and Managing Climate Variability, three additional programs focus on water availability, allocation and use, Environmental Water Allocation, Tropical Rivers and Coastal Knowledge and Social and Institutional Research. The National Climate Change Research Strategy for Primary Industries (CCRSPI) is taking national leadership in adapting Australian farmers to climate change, while the Native Vegetation and Biodiversity program is the longest running national program with a focus on landscape and regional scale approaches to managing our native vegetation. All of these programs are supported by the Innovation program that invests in innovative research and training across the entire portfolio, and the Social and Institutional Research Program that invests in better approaches to social and institutional management of land and water resources.

Australia’s system of joint government and industry investment in rural innovation (totalling about $500 million per year) has been envied throughout the OECD since it was introduced in the late 1980s. It is a uniquely Australian solution to the market failure inherent in a sector made up about 130,000 individual farm businesses that lack the economy of scale to support their own research. A recent Productivity Commission report suggested that if there is a flaw in the model, it is that Australia is not investing enough in public good R&D. The report identified Land & Water Australia’s portfolio of significant public good research as an area where there are “strong grounds for large public subsidies [to] remain because that research is unlikely to take place in their absence.” 

Land & Water Australia’s operations will cease on 30 June 2009. This will involve the cancellation of a large number of contracts with university-based and other researchers across Australia, closing down many partly completed research projects.

Citation

Land & Water Australia. 2009. Land and Water Australia's Contribution to Australia. [Online] (Updated October 14th, 2009)
Available at: http://lwa.gov.au/node/3710 [Accessed Tuesday 12th of March 2013 01:34:54 PM ].