The Queensland state government in Australia on Wednesday said it will fund better uptake of Accounting for Nature’s environmental accounting framework to provide stakeholders with better tools to measure the environment.
The Department of Environment and Science will provide A$770,000 ($494,000) in funding to Accounting for Nature, which has developed a framework for measuring the biophysical condition of environmental assets.
Through the funding, the government expects key stakeholders such as landholders, Natural Resource Management (NRM) bodies, and Traditional Owners will be better placed to build capacity to measure and track the environmental conditions of their regions.
A digital platform for simplifying environmental accounts will be rolled out, and Traditional Owners will be engaged to explore the role of cultural connection to Country – the land – in environmental accounting practices, a statement from the government said.
“We recognise the importance of building capacity in environmental accounting practices to measure and monitor outcomes in the state of nature,” said Gillian Mayne, director of the Natural Capital Program at the Department of Environment and Science.
“These practices will help put Queensland in a valuable position to prepare for emerging biodiversity market opportunities.”
Australia’s federal government is in the process of establishing a national voluntary biodiversity credit scheme, known as the nature repair market, though at the moment it is unclear whether it will be able to secure sufficient support to get scheme through both houses of parliament.
NRMs are a particular focus of the funding, with the government eager to make sure they gain a benchmark understanding of the condition of the environment across their regions in order to assist better decision-making for land management practices and guide future investment, the statement said.
One such group, terrain NRM, is already in the process of creating its own biodiversity credit – the cassowary credit – in order to increase investments into habitat restoration in the tropical rainforests of Queensland.
“Accounting for Nature provides an environmental accounting framework to better inform investment, policy and management decisions in natural capital, including carbon co-benefits, green bonds, environmental offsets, and impact investments,” Accounting for Nature CEO Adrian Ward said.
“Our ethos is to ‘make nature count’, so while the tools and services we can provide assist the environmental sector directly, the outcomes that flow from enhanced environmental data provide much wider benefit,” he added.
“Policymakers dealing with decisions and future considerations about infrastructure planning, for example, can find accurate environmental data to guide those decisions, from housing developments to road and social infrastructure, to renewable energy infrastructure.”
The Accounting for Nature framework is supporting NaturePlus credits, a biodiversity credit announced last year by project developers TerraCarbon, though no credits have been issued yet under that scheme.
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