Integration of Sustainable Land Management - Essay Example

Land Management Student’s Name Institution of Learning Introduction For growth to be experienced in different sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, mining, et cetera, there needs to be sustainability in the natural environment and the ecosystem services and goods provided by this environment. Much focus should be put on monitoring impacts from land issues, species’ loss and habitat’s declination, native vegetation fragmentation as well as water degradation. Therefore, as ecosystem functions and services are appreciated by the community, government, industries, conservation industries among others, a good monitoring on land management is of high value. There is a serious need for implementation of natural resources management integration approach for sustainable outcomes that incorporate land and natural resources use and viability of long term nature. The above may include viability in economy and environmental values maintenance that is understood as “the ecologically sustainable land management.” Therefore, the need to adopt integrated framework management to improve on general management of land and natural resources (ecosystem approach) (Thackway, 2005). A focus by the community management on the programme performance measures and building of scope and scale indicators of natural system changes has been a step forward in land integration. Meanwhile, there has been less focus on the degree measurement of interaction between environment variability and the social systems, what is referred to as the interdependency or interdisciplinary (Bowen & Riley, 2003). Couching ecosystem services within economy theory is a sure way to structured engagement between sciences, practice and people (interdisciplinary) that is necessary for sustainable land management. As a result, ecosystem services research should be integrated into the policies and any policy making processes (Fisher, 2008). To achieve the above integration, there is a need to link three certain frameworks namely, environmental management systems, Eco-regional planning and finally monitoring, evaluation and reporting. The approach integrates and benefits interests of all parties involved ranging from the community, industry and government as a whole (Thackway, 2005). The interdisciplinary projects in land management have both the advantages and disadvantages associated with them. In the Australia societies, ecological functions of their ecosystem are among the fundamentals held against economic, social and environmental maintenance. The requirements were changes in land use management, planning, monitoring, evaluation and reporting. However the steps taken, there were drawbacks to their improvements and understanding of better management (Fisher, 2008). To effectively sustain natural resources, bridging the several gaps in the knowledge on measuring and integrating environmental, economic and social issues are key components in planning processes. Another requirement is a good knowledge in management of impacts on the ecology systems, effective monitoring and evaluation and lastly effective reporting on general environmental performances (Thackway, 2005). The integrated approach in Australia commonly known as Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESM) has key goals about land and its associated natural resources long term viability. Policy makers and land managers are required to adopt the integrated and cross-sectoral strategies implicit to curb the problem of adverse environmental changes and reverse or slow the biological diversity decline. For efficiency and effective land management upgrade, a determination and consideration of the carrying capacity, are a must in the planning and managing of the natural resources, for a healthy ecosystem functioning. Here, focus is put on the three links frameworks for integration mentioned earlier. This ecosystem approach enables integration across different sectors, contains defined feedback mechanisms that are useful in environment management development and gives rise to institutional coordination development. Use of natural ecosystem units for planning and management (bioregional planning): Most managers view ecosystems as being dynamic and frequently responding to human-caused and natural resources influence. They fail to realize that management is also ecosystem based and can thus be planned and delivered reflecting organization and function of ecology systems at different regional levels. Therefore, a good ecosystem management should maintain ecosystem functioning integrity so as to avoid frequent environmental and ecological changes that could be undesirable. The approach aims at maintaining and enhancing environmental services such as vegetation, soil, and water and food quality among others. The system provides a wider management basis as the management unit size can be adjusted according to the problem nature and the operating scales of the ecosystem. It provides a structure for effort cooperation among the government, community and private parties thus enabling a management approach that is interdisciplinary, integrated, sustainable and above all, participatory. The planning finds ground on the understanding of the hierarchical organisation form of the ecosystem, from a broad to fine scale. Planning at this basis ensures that different types and tenure lands within a certain region are complementarily planned and managed. The result is the achievement of a conversation that is of long term nature, production that sustainable and meeting the objectives of the human and social lifestyle (Gadgil, Hemam, & Reddy, 2000). So, bioregional planning integrates the biodiversity conservation with natural resource management to address human expectations and needs. Australia has developed many such mapping systems which have enabled them classify the landscape into land management regions and meaningful planning at different scale ranges. Such are biogeographic regions, land systems and land units extra. Some of the above found use in spatial frameworks for reporting on natural resources condition and status. The Interim Biogeographic Regionalization for Australia (IBRA) is one of the nationally agreed ecosystem-based planning and reporting framework for both regional and continent terrestrial environments. Here, land management agencies have integrated ecosystem mapping systems and hierarchical vegetation at finer levels into IBRA so as to meet the integrated understanding needs on the different land management practices response and ecosystem functions. The National Action Plan for the Natural Heritage and Salinity and Water Quality Trust is another area that is based on jurisdiction (catchment) areas (Thackway, 2005). Of late, new catchment-based regional authorities have and are still finding establishment in most territories and states. In some territories, catchment-based units, administrative and IBRA framework hierarchical Eco-regions operate independent of each other in terms of decision making, administration and planning, while, in others, they recognize each other and thus run dependently, For example, in Victoria. In the United States, regional catchment units and the hierarchical Eco-regions of IBRA link through recognising surrogate, fine-scale homogeneous planning unit. Example for the latter includes soil mapping units, vegetation community and cover units and farm dam watersheds. In the absence of the fine-scale units, it would have been very difficult to find how to develop and aggregate social, economic and environmental sustainability indices and indicators, to inform both national and regional trends in outcome of natural resource management (Thackway, 2005). Environmental Management System is the second framework (EMS). The system finds great support in Australia and state government, as the preferred management system for profitable, competitive production in agriculture, sustainable and management of natural resource on the private lands as well as the public ones. The framework greatly finds application in management of ecologically sustainable agricultural land evaluation. In October, 2002, Australia’s National Framework for Environmental Management Systems in Agriculture was released. It provided guidelines and principles for consistency achievement and EMS adoption across the agricultural sector acceptability. Currently, EMS finds much of applications in the management of natural resources and agricultural sector and under the EMS Natural Pilot Program. EMS aims at developing and assessing EMS value as a tool of management to improving management of natural resources all the way from enterprise to catchment level scale. It played a major role in helping environmental stewardship demonstration among the producers to meeting quality and environmental assurance as some of the market demands. A more important characteristic of EMS is that it is integrative with existing bioregional planning mentioned earlier. Either way, it has accommodation for any management arrangements in existence from individual management units to the whole landscape, as well.A combination of bioregional planning and adaptive management approaches provides a structure that is more effective for detecting and managing natural resources or any human-involved change in environment assets or values in the space (Fisher, 2008). The combination of the two provides the planners and managers with a capacity of working towards improvement of productivity potential and health of the ecosystem as a whole, and maintenance of services provided to the community over the periods (Gadgil, Hemam, & Reddy, 2000). EMS constitutes a range of information that includes policies, standards and legislation that provide for adaptive management processes, the basis for continued environmental performance improvement and achievement of environmental management outcomes that are sustainable. To implement an EMS, such information as catchment and regional planning, mandatory government legislative, regulatory and licencing requirements is very necessary. Others include management standards and targets and industry and other government best management practice procedures, standards and guidelines among others (Fisher, 2008). There is a need to comply to environmental regulations, legislation and any other requirement to which an enterprise or organisation is subscribed. Such are practice codes, management practice guidelines, licenses extra. Reviewing on the enterprise environmental impacts is a good base for setting of environmental management targets and objectives. After setting the requirements, a regular progress is made, monitored and appropriately evaluated aimed at meeting the requirements. On the basis of the respective information, corrective measures are employed within the system to help achieve continued environmental performance improvements, which leads to the third and the last framework (Thackway, 2005). The value of EMS as a natural resource management tool will majorly depend on whether the monitoring and evaluation of the environmental performance will provide sufficient information for adaptive measures to achieving the targeted environmental outcomes. Therefore, for EMS initiatives and framework implementation, performance criteria and indicators development for sustainable production in agriculture and natural resource monitoring is very crucial. A systematic approach is required to monitor, evaluate and report the status and trends in regional natural resource health and ecological assets. The result is the ability to detect and understand any changes to the ecosystem functions, services and goods and also to specific biodiversity elements such as habitats (Gadgil, Hemam, & Reddy, 2000). Unfortunitly, detecting and interpreting advances to changes have been too slow in most fields. However, the advances are well approached for forests through Regional Forest Agreements. The stages are still lagging for woodlands and other non-forested landscapes. Having or doing biophysical resources inventory, as an eco-regional planning process requirement, is an appropriate tool for baseline determination on monitoring, evaluation and reporting framework. Data collected through monitoring gets interpreted against the baseline thus providing useful information to support management decisions and actions. Therefore, monitoring management outcome performance indicators should be able to give relevant information to the interests of both resource managers and public decision makers. It is, therefore, advisable for the managing and planning authorities to clearly define the objectives and expected results of the management as well as the designed actions to achieving them. They then define performance indicators for assets and value maintenance thereafter. However, the natural resource condition national monitoring and reporting protocol are still under development and testing. The forest indicators have already been selected and tested. Information from indicator monitoring process should find great use in improving resource management and policy implementation and informing resource use, management and results. Citing a good example is where Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement performance was assessed using sustainability indicators, and the information gained used in five-year agreement review (Thackway, 2005). In the United States, the indicator articulation has led to the addition of a new variable into the scientific knowledge research of the natural world; the social influence. Finally, human beings inclusion into the natural ecosystem interaction web has siren for a new protocol to study natural systems and for resolving both health and economic problems (Bowen & Riley, 2003). In Australia, the response to rising conflict over practices in forest management and strong public pressure from environmental protection and biodiversity conservation, the Australia’s Regional Forest Agreements was developed. The above was a good example to the ecosystem approach. While the first sited component of ecosystem approach for Tasmanian RFA was the bioregional planning, that continuously developed IBRA for reporting and other purposes. Integration-centered individuals face challenges in understanding the present link between environmental system and the social benefits that are associated with them (Fisher, 2008). The basic decisions required to be made at every point interval is to enhance, maintain at the same level, or to decrease harvesting or outcome efforts from different intervals so as to correct on any negative feedbacks obtained from the last structure (Gadgil, Hemam, & Reddy, 2000). The key drawbacks were due to lack of sufficient information and interactions complexity. There was inadequate understanding on the ecosystem and services provided. Assesment of data for environmental sustainability and sustainable production was also incomplete. The results were restrictions to their ability of measuring the environmental issues that were due to land management practices changes. To sum it up, management of natural resources determines ecosystems’ future health and their productivity capacity and consequently their goods and services provision capacity. Land managers and policy makers should be efficiently responsible for ensuring and maintaining future quantity and quality of the goods and services. Decision makers with inadequate and irrelevant ecosystem goods and services and biodiversity considerations should not be involved in the management of the same (Thackway, 2005). Natural resource managers and planners require appropriate and effective management tools and systems to deal with informed management actions and overcome impediment’s implementation of the same. To provide helpful data and information for decision making, practical and flexible decision support system is of great value. Good decisions need to be made pertaining trade relationships between results of natural resource management, social-economic and the general environmental sustainability. The systems would, therefore, provide past actions reference system and an important basis for informing land managers of any potential trend adverse in the health and services of the ecosystem. Encouragement in developing economic instruments in ways encouraging research into, promotion, sustainability and natural resource practices that are manageable is also essential. Conclusion There is an urgent call for action to integrate other regional frameworks and bioregional, to the implementation of systems leading to adaptive environmental management. The latter should also result into development of management, monitoring and reporting frameworks of the industry based cross-sectoral. Ecoregional mapping units need to be maintained and updated towards improved information, as it is a serious issue affecting performance indicator measurement and management outcomes monitoring. Region numbers or boundaries should be kept constant from one to the next reporting cycle (Thackway, 2005). Natural resource management policy requires further development. Improve linkages between the three frameworks are also required. A high development in monitoring and reporting of environmental performance framework is needed to enable reporting any changes to resource condition with relation to bioregional land planning units. A good and sufficient monitoring framework needs to be designed and implemented. It should be based on set performance indicators benchmark, that is aggregative within and from local to national ecoregional land planning and bioregional reporting units hierarchy such as IBRA. The importance is that such would offer end users of information with substantial savings and information necessary for addressing certain information requirements. Australian government and a few other industry sectors are already working on the latter. Adapting an integrated bioregional management and planning framework as discussed above, would result to all stakeholders being in an influential position to the overall management and planning of landscapes. The result would be attaining individual outcomes or benefits (Thackway, 2005). Works Cited Bowen, R. E., & Riley, C. (2005). Socio-economic indicators and integrated. Boston: The University of Massachusetts. Fisher, B (2008). Ecosystem Services and Economic theory: In b. t. America, Ecological Applications. America: the Ecological Society of America. Hemam, N. S., Gadgil, M., & Reddy, B. M. (n.d.). People, refugia and resilience. In F. Berkes, & C. Folke. (2000). Linking Social And Ecological Systems: Resilience Building Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for. Cambridge university press. Thackway, R. (2005). An Integrated Approach to Ecologically Sustainable Land Management Strategies. Australasian Journal of Environmental management—Volume 12, 66 Read More