The Onkaparinga Catchment Water Management Board is responsible for 920 square kilometres of land covering 2,000 kilometres of streams to the south and east of Adelaide. This land comprises urban centres, horticulture and viticulture, cropping and grazing, wetland and remnant native habitat uses. Many of the mainly private, and increasingly small properties, support remnant native vegetation, habitat, and watercourses of high conservation significance.
Collectively these land and water uses have widespread impacts on biodiversity and water quality in the Onkaparinga Catchment. Key threats include land clearing and habitat removal, livestock grazing, agricultural activities, farm dams, pest plant and animal invasion and diversion of water for metropolitan supplies. Past approaches to management could not ensure the sustainability of biophysical values.
The board was spending up to $800,000 a year funding private, on-ground works in NRM through its Watercourse Management Assistance Program (WMAP). However, prioritisation of funding applications under WMAP was not systematic, comprehensive, transparent or defensible.
A conservation tender approach, called Catchment Care (CC), was developed. The principal aim of CC was to increase the cost-effectiveness of the board’s expenditure on works on private land. To promote better environmental outcomes it was decided to make funds available for all actions, including actions considered to be duty of care actions.
As part of the design process, a wide range of possible bids were tested in a market simulation exercise to assess likely outcomes and to reveal any unintended bias in the selection criteria. This process resulted in changes to the assessment framework, and highlighted additional information needs important to the selection process. It also informed the board’s broader environmental and management priorities.
The CC project used a risk analysis framework to rank and select bids. Risk analysis enabled the selection of bids that proposed actions with the greatest benefit at priority sites. Proposed management actions included stock exclusion, non-engineered structures, revegetation, dam modification and weed eradication. The CC ranked bids were based on the following factors:
- the risk of the site
- the level of threat reduction proposed by land manager actions
- the area of the actions
- the price of the bid.
This information was combined to evaluate, compare, rank and select bids for funding.
As with all MBIs, the design of the CC involved making pragmatic, but well informed, tradeoffs between assessment accuracy, resources required for on-ground assessments and the selection methodology.
The process of implementing CC comprised six steps.
- Catchment Care promotion. Expressions of interest were called. Interested land managers received an information pack and a site visit was arranged. The program was advertised broadly as well as directly targeting over 200 eligible land managers. Eligible land managers who submitted an expression of interest were assisted with further information and guides about the program and the bidding process. Technical information was also provided about specific aspects of proposed landholder actions and indicative costs of different actions.
- Site visit and assessment. Site visits by a field officer were arranged with interested land managers to assess and score environmental values and identify any threats to the proposed sites. The site visits also provided a key opportunity to exchange information on priorities, technical advice and actions. The site assessment methodology used a specialist tool to interpret and score environmental values and threats, providing a basis for the risk analysis and site prioritisation.
- Site Action Plan (SAP) development. Land managers interested in proceeding with the program developed a SAP summarising proposed actions, submitted as part of their bid. After a site visit, the field officer recommended appropriate actions, weighing the desired actions of the landholder against the most appropriate NRM actions for the site. By discussing these options with land managers, greater involvement was achieved, reducing the risk of under-conformance. land managers accepted or rejected actions and documented the proposed actions in the SAP with the nominated bid price. The SAP also included significant other information relating to inputs (e.g. material and time), the bid site and financial aspects of the bid.
- Bid submission. Land managers submitted the SAP as a bid for CC funds within six weeks. The tender for CC comprised two key elements: a first price sealed bid in a discriminative price auction to increase the cost-effectiveness of the program, and a reserve to avoid funding inflated bids.
- Bid assessment. Environmental benefit scores for each bid were calculated using the risk analysis framework developed during the design process.
- Bid selection and contracting. Bids were ranked based on their environmental benefits per dollar of funding. The most cost-effective bids were selected for funding. Successful land managers were contracted to perform the proposed actions over three years using staged payment schedules including payments for up-front capital costs and payments contingent on performance of agreed management actions.
A total of 52 expressions of interest were received, 42 site assessments made and 29 bids submitted. Seventeen projects, totalling $150,000 were funded. An assessment of the program revealed the following key lessons:
- the CC project benefited from a large number of hobby farmers who had a preference for promoting good environmental outcomes with low implementation costs
- the auction process paid significantly more for some bids than the previous WMAP grant process because these bids were below the set reserve for the CC but above the amount funded under WMAP
- moving from a devolved grants program to tender program incurred costs of around $100,000 moving to tenders may not be worthwhile for projects with small budgets
- an analysis of the CC’s cost-effectiveness compared to the WMAP estimated that the CC was between 23% and 34% more cost effective than WMAP, but with some uncertainty.
The Onkaparinga Catchment Water Management Board is responsible for 920 square kilometres of land covering 2,000 kilometres of streams to the south and east of Adelaide. This land comprises urban centres, horticulture and viticulture, cropping and grazing, wetland and remnant native habitat uses. Many of the mainly private, and increasingly small properties, support remnant native vegetation, habitat, and watercourses of high conservation significance.
Collectively these land and water uses have widespread impacts on biodiversity and water quality in the Onkaparinga Catchment. Key threats include land clearing and habitat removal, livestock grazing, agricultural activities, farm dams, pest plant and animal invasion and diversion of water for metropolitan supplies. Past approaches to management could not ensure the sustainability of biophysical values.
The board was spending up to $800,000 a year funding private, on-ground works in NRM through its Watercourse Management Assistance Program (WMAP). However, prioritisation of funding applications under WMAP was not systematic, comprehensive, transparent or defensible.
A conservation tender approach, called Catchment Care (CC), was developed. The principal aim of CC was to increase the cost-effectiveness of the board’s expenditure on works on private land. To promote better environmental outcomes it was decided to make funds available for all actions, including actions considered to be duty of care actions.
As part of the design process, a wide range of possible bids were tested in a market simulation exercise to assess likely outcomes and to reveal any unintended bias in the selection criteria. This process resulted in changes to the assessment framework, and highlighted additional information needs important to the selection process. It also informed the board’s broader environmental and management priorities.
The CC project used a risk analysis framework to rank and select bids. Risk analysis enabled the selection of bids that proposed actions with the greatest benefit at priority sites. Proposed management actions included stock exclusion, non-engineered structures, revegetation, dam modification and weed eradication. The CC ranked bids were based on the following factors:
- the risk of the site
- the level of threat reduction proposed by land manager actions
- the area of the actions
- the price of the bid.
This information was combined to evaluate, compare, rank and select bids for funding.
As with all MBIs, the design of the CC involved making pragmatic, but well informed, tradeoffs between assessment accuracy, resources required for on-ground assessments and the selection methodology.
The process of implementing CC comprised six steps.
- Catchment Care promotion. Expressions of interest were called. Interested land managers received an information pack and a site visit was arranged. The program was advertised broadly as well as directly targeting over 200 eligible land managers. Eligible land managers who submitted an expression of interest were assisted with further information and guides about the program and the bidding process. Technical information was also provided about specific aspects of proposed landholder actions and indicative costs of different actions.
- Site visit and assessment. Site visits by a field officer were arranged with interested land managers to assess and score environmental values and identify any threats to the proposed sites. The site visits also provided a key opportunity to exchange information on priorities, technical advice and actions. The site assessment methodology used a specialist tool to interpret and score environmental values and threats, providing a basis for the risk analysis and site prioritisation.
- Site Action Plan (SAP) development. Land managers interested in proceeding with the program developed a SAP summarising proposed actions, submitted as part of their bid. After a site visit, the field officer recommended appropriate actions, weighing the desired actions of the landholder against the most appropriate NRM actions for the site. By discussing these options with land managers, greater involvement was achieved, reducing the risk of under-conformance. land managers accepted or rejected actions and documented the proposed actions in the SAP with the nominated bid price. The SAP also included significant other information relating to inputs (e.g. material and time), the bid site and financial aspects of the bid.
- Bid submission. Land managers submitted the SAP as a bid for CC funds within six weeks. The tender for CC comprised two key elements: a first price sealed bid in a discriminative price auction to increase the cost-effectiveness of the program, and a reserve to avoid funding inflated bids.
- Bid assessment. Environmental benefit scores for each bid were calculated using the risk analysis framework developed during the design process.
- Bid selection and contracting. Bids were ranked based on their environmental benefits per dollar of funding. The most cost-effective bids were selected for funding. Successful land managers were contracted to perform the proposed actions over three years using staged payment schedules including payments for up-front capital costs and payments contingent on performance of agreed management actions.
A total of 52 expressions of interest were received, 42 site assessments made and 29 bids submitted. Seventeen projects, totalling $150,000 were funded. An assessment of the program revealed the following key lessons:
- the CC project benefited from a large number of hobby farmers who had a preference for promoting good environmental outcomes with low implementation costs
- the auction process paid significantly more for some bids than the previous WMAP grant process because these bids were below the set reserve for the CC but above the amount funded under WMAP
- moving from a devolved grants program to tender program incurred costs of around $100,000 moving to tenders may not be worthwhile for projects with small budgets
- an analysis of the CC’s cost-effectiveness compared to the WMAP estimated that the CC was between 23% and 34% more cost effective than WMAP, but with some uncertainty.