Freshwater Protected Area Resourcbook

8.3 Key questions

Assuming that each jurisdiction will (at some stage) make funds available to implement existing government commitments, the discussion so far has raised a number of important questions:

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  What approaches are most suitable for classifying a full range of freshwater ecosystems? – including river, wetland, lake, estuarine and aquifer ecosystems?
  
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  What are the data requirements of such approaches, and to what extent is the necessary data available in each State? To what extent can it be made available using existing survey programs?
  
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  Should a consistent approach to classification be adopted across all eight jurisdictions, given the different size and resource base of the jurisdictions? Should a tiered or staged approach be developed which could be applied to delineate finer detail as more comprehensive supporting data becomes available?
  
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  What is the magnitude of the problem? To what extent do existing terrestrial reserves protect representative examples of freshwater ecosystems?
  
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  What principles should be used in reserve identification and selection? To what extent can those developed for terrestrial and marine ecosystems (see section 3.3) be applied to the freshwater scene?
  
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  What management approaches and guidelines are already available (for example the Wild Rivers Project run by the Commonwealth has produced a management guideline document in 1999 which is widely applicable to the management of connected linear reserves);
  
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  How should unique ecosystems be protected? For example a representative approach appears unsuited to the protection of subterranean or mound spring ecosystems where discrete habitats contains endemic species;
  
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  What kinds of protected areas are needed? How many are needed? How large should reserves be? How can issues of scales and connectivity be addressed in selecting and managing reserves and their catchments? How are ecosystems framed, and how do terrestrial links (landscapes) tie to aquatic concerns? Ecosystem fragmentation raises a whole set of issues, as does the integration of biophysical processes within management regimes.
  
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  Are new legislative approaches useful? Can the Victorian Heritage Rivers Act provide a useful model?
  
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  In terms of management approaches outside protected areas, why is there so little effective action being taken to address basic problems? (for example, grazing damage to riparian zones, and the management of the cumulative effects of incremental developments?)
  

The purpose of this resourcebook is not to attempt to find definitive answers to all these questions. However, in some cases this book does seek to identify useful approaches to answer specific questions, while in other cases the book seeks only to identify mechanisms through which such questions can be explored.

9. Conclusions

It is clear that Australian freshwater ecosystems are under increasing threat. Additional information on the conservation status of species and ecosystems is urgently required. In 2003, seven of the Murray Darling Basin’s 26 native fish species were listed by the IUCN as threatened. A study of three aquatic invertebrate families in the southwest of WA (using IUCN criteria) found that 37% were threatened (Sutcliffe 2003). Few similar audits of conservation status are available²⁶⁹. Many threats to freshwaters are pervasive and intractable. Systems of terrestrial reserves have been established, and the largest of these, and those specifically targeted at wetland areas (such as Ramsar sites) undoubtedly protect some representative samples of major freshwater ecosystems. Urgent action is required to expand freshwater protected areas in all jurisdictions except the Australian Capital Territory.
As is the case in terrestrial and marine environments, there are a number of roles that representative freshwater reserves can play. These include (see section 4.3):

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  protection of biodiversity against threatening processes through the establishment of a comprehensive, adequate and representative system of reserves;
  
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  provision for the conservation of special groups of organisms – for example, species with complex habitat requirements, or mobile or migratory species, or species vulnerable to disturbance and which may depend on reservation for their conservation;
  
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  provision for the special needs of rare, threatened or depleted species, and threatened ecological communities;
  
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  provision of biodiversity ‘banks’ to recolonise damaged or degraded environments, whether such degradation has occurred by natural disaster, bad long-term management practices, or by accident;
  
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  provision of scientific reference sites, either for research, or to provide benchmark indicators by which sustainable management may be judged; and
  
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  protection of areas of high conservation value including those containing high species diversity, natural refugia for flora and fauna, and centres of species endemism;
  
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  assistance in the provision of ecosystem services: that is the provision of environments which sustain human life, including clean air and water, fertile soils, food, transport, flood mitigation, and the regulation of global weather patterns; and
  
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  within the constraints of the above, provision for the recreational, aesthetic and cultural need of indigenous and non-indigenous people.
  

However, in spite of international, national and State-level commitments to the establishment of representative systems of freshwater reserves, only Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory have made serious attempts to establish such reserves. Tasmania initiated a program in 2002 designed to protect comprehensive, adequate and representative examples of freshwater ecosystems, both by reservation and by alternative approaches.

The Australian Capital Territory has inherent advantages due to its small size, and the large amount of public land within its jurisdiction, and here some impressive reserves have been created. Victoria led the nation with its 1987 Nature Conservation Strategy, the subsequent Rivers and Streams Investigation by the Land Conservation Council, and the eventual passage of the Heritage Rivers Act 1992. However, the initial vision of the Victorian program has not been realised, and the issue is now in need of urgent review in that State (discussed above and in the appendices).
Australia's remaining five jurisdictions have not moved to implement their commitments. This delay should be seen within the perspective of the need to establish the broader bioregional National Reserves System, which has occupied most Australian nature conservation agencies over the last decade. This has, by necessity, focused attention at the bioregional and landscape level. An implicit assumption appears to have been made that protecting representative terrestrial ecosystems will, by default, protect representative aquatic ecosystems. While this assumption is unlikely to be correct, the result has been that the protection of representative freshwater ecosystems escaped priority attention within the National Reserves System up until the 2004 review.
It is time for this approach to change. Sufficient progress has been made at broad planning levels now to justify turning attention to ecosystems of finer detail within the broad bioregional framework - in particular, rivers, lakes, wetlands and aquifers. Freshwater ecosystems should now be highlighted within the National Reserve System framework. Progress in this direction appears imminent (see discussion in section 6.1.4 above).
No Australian State has met its full Ramsar Convention obligations in relation to the preparation of comprehensive wetland inventories, using the Ramsar definition of ‘wetlands’ (see above). Partial inventories have been established, and these are valuable. They should now be expanded, using nationally agreed classification methods, to encompass all major freshwater ecosystems. These inventories can then be used to identify gaps in the existing reserve system. It is to be expected that the most significant gaps will relate to large lowland rivers, some types of floodplain wetlands, and aquifers with multiple recharge and discharge zones. Classification and assessment methods of potential relevance to the development of comprehensive freshwater inventories are set out in chapter 5 and Appendix 4.
There will be obvious difficulties involved in management issues due to the dependence of freshwater ecosystems on the condition and management of their catchments; however, just because something is difficult does not mean that it cannot be done.
Successful implementation of national and State commitments to freshwater reserve systems rests on two fundamental premises. First, Australia needs to supplement its bioregional planning and management framework with more detailed information applicable to specific small-scale habitats, such as those found in freshwater ecosystems. Second, that in implementing NRM strategic catchment management processes designed to protect freshwater values, it is essential to involve the wider community and all stakeholders early in the process of identifying and selecting areas for reservation.
While there is widespread support for extending the reach of voluntary conservation agreements and other landholder incentive mechanisms to complement on-reserve conservation management, there is a clear need to strengthen the role which regional planning agencies can play in the conservation of biodiversity. The development over the last five years of regional natural resource management agencies, driven in part by bilateral agreements between the Commonwealth and the States (see the discussion above and in the appendices) offers a major opportunity in this regard which may be lost if governments do not support the accelerated development of ecosystem inventories (see Chapter 5).

In regard to assessing the adequacy of existing reserves, and identifying and selecting additional reserves, basic requirements are:

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  a classification of freshwater ecosystem types that can be supported with data which is either available, or foreseeable within existing survey program budgets; and
  
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  targets for the protection of biodiversity pattern and process – this will involve the selection and use of biodiversity measurement surrogates.
  

These are basic requirements. The development of reserve identification, selection and management approaches should begin with the template of the ‘six stages’ set out in s. 3.3.

It is also worth noting the use of percentage targets by the National Forests Policy, and the bilateral Regional Forest Agreements which followed. The RFAs established a reservation target of 15% (of pre-European coverage) for major forest ecosystem types, with threatened ecosystems having higher targets. The use of such targets needs detailed consideration as programs for aquatic reservation develop over the next few years.