Blueprint to Repair Australia’s Landscapes

The Wentworth Group, together with experts from academia, government and business, has developed a Blueprint to Repair Australia’s Landscapes. The Blueprint describes a suite of 24 practical actions and investments, across five key environmental asset groups, to repair Australia’s degraded landscapes.

The objective of the Blueprint is to put forward the national case and articulate a practical vision for repairing Australia’s landscapes and, in doing so, prepare for the unprecedented climatic pressures ahead.

The Blueprint is effectively an evidence-based prospectus laying out a 30-year action plan and identifying public and private investment opportunities that would repair much of Australia’s degraded landscapes and set Australia on a nature positive trajectory.

The Blueprint is the most comprehensive assessment of its kind and demonstrates that it’s possible to repair Australia’s degraded landscapes – our soils, inland waters, native vegetation, threatened species and coastal environments – while boosting economic productivity and sequestering carbon in landscapes.

It builds on the enormous effort to date at the government, business and community level and shows how repair actions can be undertaken in a way that increases agricultural productivity on prime farmland, supports jobs and businesses in regional areas, helps Australia achieve its biodiversity and climate goals and increases the resilience of ecosystems to extreme events and climate change.

The Blueprint is presented in three parts:

The Blueprint Synthesis Report summarises the case for a 30-year investment in a healthy, productive & resilient Australia.
The Blueprint Technical Review identifies objectives across soils, inland waters, native vegetation, threatened species and coastal environments, the repair actions required, the estimated investment for repair and the many benefits of doing so.
The Investment Spreadsheet contains the data and algorithms that form the basis of the investment estimates. This spreadsheet is available under a Creative Commons Open Access licence.

The Blueprint shows that repairing Australia’s landscapes is not only urgent and essential, it is achievable and affordable and in the national interest.