Daintree National Park, Queensland, Australia.

Measuring benefits from conservation projects in the wet tropics world heritage rainforest

This project developed a new index to enable natural resource managers to measure the benefits arising from conservation projects conducted in the Wet Tropics rainforest region of North Queensland.

• 5 June 2006 | Updated 14 October 2011

• Project summary
• Outcomes for industry
• Outcomes for research

Project summary

Allocating public funds for environmental programs requires that investment decisions are transparent and analytically sound.

This project developed an index to measure the benefits arising from conservation projects in the Wet Tropics region of North Queensland.

The Environmental Benefits Index (EBI) is designed for use in competitive tendering systems for environmental contracts. It can measure many different attributes simultaneously and so in a competitive tendering system it came be used to identify the best purchasing strategies for conservation contracts

This approach could be applied in other regions.

Outcomes for industry

Regional natural resource management groups within the North Queensland region now have a framework for constructing an environmental benefits index.

Outcomes for research

The Environmental Benefits Index (EBI) is based on multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT).  This new research provides theory to assist development of internally consistent indices of environmental performance that are needed for utility measurement.

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