Oral Presentation Freshwater Sciences 2023

Deliberative planning tools to build catchment resilience (#375)

Stuart E Bunn 1 , David Hamilton 1
  1. Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

Our catchments are no longer resilient to extreme weather events and there is a growing recognition of the need to invest in ‘nature positive’ remediation projects as a cost-effective long-term management approach to reduce erosion and flood risk. While we understand the causal processes of river and catchment degradation and what kinds of on-ground management actions are effective, a key challenge remains to move beyond the current incremental ‘project by project’ approach and develop coordinated, catchment-scale plans so that investment can be optimized to achieve multiple benefits for the least cost. The Building Catchment Resilience (BCR) Project (https://www.catchmentresilience.org/) has addressed this challenge through the development of a deliberative decision support tool that can be used to explore options for optimal on-ground investment to reduce catchment erosion and associated pollutants, minimize flood risk and capture other benefits (e.g. carbon sequestration). This has been coupled with an innovative digital interface to enable realistic visual representations to facilitate discussion and build confidence with investors and the local community. This presentation will provide the background to the project and an overview of the development of the modelling and visualization tools.