Dear Patrick,

My interest in this is from a sustainability practitioner perspective who stays closely interested in the academic thinking.

From a pure academic viewpoint, putting together valuation systems turns up solutions that, all too often, end up simply as intellectual exercises. The reality is that such NRM valuations are necessary as a direct consequence of anthropogenic degradation of ecosystems, which is driven by the decisions and inaction of businesses and political institutions. So any solutions must make reference to ow these business and political institutions are likely to respond.

For any NRM valuation to have any real world impact, it has to be designed with the end users in mind. This means engagement with enlightened businesses as well as national and international political institutions who are looking for ways to internalise externalities so that the true value of decisions is understood and accounted for. Perhaps the biggest challenge here is that the positive economic, social and ecological benefits of effective natural resource management are typically several generations of senior business and political management leadership off, whereas the benefits of continuing the BAU approach, which realises the pure and immediate financial value of continuing abuse and exploitation of natural resource systems, produces a return within the current or next generation of management. This is a simple and crude perspective, but the reality is that much real-world decision making is likely to be of this nature.

Unless and until a valuation system is available that allows for these differing timeframes to be reconciled, I fear that much of the debate will continue to be rhetorical as there will be no practical way, short of international binding regulation with effective enforcement (and how likely is that?), to persuade sufficient business and political interests to adopt a more integrated approach to accounting for natural capital in business and financial planning processes.

Thanks Andrew. BAU = business as usual; I assume. My context is from within water management committees, for setting rules for delivery or - in an even shorter time frame - interpreting these rules for operational delivery. But if I understand you correctly 3 commonalities in our NRM contexts remain. 1. the audience is focussed on their BAU; 2. they are not particularly interested in the values, language and knowledge of more research/academic science, particulalry within a decision-making context and 3. in the end they can defend their process to their peers.

Dear Patrick,

Effectively, yes.

Your specific context may be shorter term than I was envisaging in my reply, but the longer term issues of water availability probably still have a part to play for you.

Unless and until NRM benefits are phrased in the language of business and enshrined in the right governance frameworks, Rome will continue to burn. My key point is that any system to value natural resources and ecosystem services must have a practical foundation for how the information and understanding it may generate should be applicable.

The amount and extent to which the science is incorporated into decision-making, policy-formulation, uptake into the practices of the people, incorporation into processes that improve the livelihoods of society can also be one way to measure it (in my view). However, researchers must package the peer-reviewed work in different forms to target different types and levels of stakeholders in order to facilitate the process of uptake (e.g. extension briefs, policy-briefs, etc.)

I absolutely agree with Isaac. In addition, I would stress that this is a two way street, and while scientists need to make the science more accessible to natural resource management audiences, these audiences should also continue to actively seek to be exposed to primary literature and recent advances via continuing education, conference participation, citizen science, new hires with strong science background, and so forth. Primary literature will always be ahead of secondary dissemination materials, and the quality of these secondary dissemination materials can probably be dramatically improved if scientists and managers work together on them.

In fisheries, there has been a well established approach to deal with the considerable uncertainty facing managers and identifying which areas of science (and data collection) result in greatest long run benefits. The management strategy evaluation (MSE) approach involves developing a series of models with different assumptions (or levels of data accuracy), with management decisions made in the basis of the best "believed" reality. The impacts of these management decisions on the fishery given the alternative realities help determine which areas if uncertainty are most important to decrease. It also helps to identify policies that are most resilient to uncertainty. There are numerous fisheries MSE papers out there if you want to have a look (check google scholar).

Thanks Isaac & Martin, and Sean on MSE (http://www.cmar.csiro.au/research/mse/). All makes sense. In terms of the question I posed, the extent of uptake can only be sensibly reported on, and measured by the decision-makers. Usually decision-makers move from one action/decision to the next. The process of recording what information they receive and how they use it, is often hard to track. One issue is that decision-makers might not want to be pinned down by having their point of view recorded, because it can be held against them (minutes go on the public record). Even if they do want to record such decision making, how they used various types of information (technical and otherwise) would be hard to track. Moreover, in the final decision(s), you would find that often technical considerations are balanced by various stakeholder positions, and could also be affected by how the decision-making process operates (e.g. consensus might operate, but only 50% of votes come from people with a technical focus). MSE looks like it has codified the decision-making, and so maybe not an issue in that context, but there are many NRM contexts.

To measure the value of science in NRM decision making, you would have to look at the role that the science has played in developing solutions to NRM management issues. Too often the science just provides background info that help determine boundaries for decisions, but often these boundaries are based on a broad understanding. Approaches like MSE are important, but i think the science needs to move beyond just monitoring and evaluating the impacts of decisions. It needs to be actively involved in being part of the solutions. To do this science needs to collaborate across multiple disciplines: ecologists, hydrologists, water engineers, land managers, economists etc etc all need to work together. At the moment this isn't really happening in Australia, rather there's a tug of war between disciplines over impact vs outcome. Environmental flows is a good example of this at the moment. Overall we need the science to be engaged with in the short term, including during operational phases, as well as providing long-term monitoring. So to try and answer the question: to measure the value of science, don't we first need to define the objectives of science and the role it plays in a NRM issue? The more specific the science objectives are defined/outlined for an issue, the more specific the science can be, and it's value may be easier to measure then. Hopefully this approach would result in science being more collaborative with other disciplines as well.