Managing military training-related environmental disturbance.

Military Training Areas (MTAs) cover at least 2 percent of the Earth's terrestrial surface and occur in all major biomes. These areas are potentially important for biodiversity conservation. The greatest challenge in managing MTAs is balancing the disturbance associated with military training and environmental values. These challenges are unique as no other land use is managed for these types of anthropogenic disturbances in a natural setting. We investigated how military training-related disturbance is best managed on MTAs. Specifically, we explored management options to maximise the amount of military training that can be undertaken on a MTA while minimising the amount of environmental disturbance. MTAs comprise of a number of ranges designed to facilitate different types of military training. We simulated military training-related environmental disturbance at different range usage rates under a typical range rotation use strategy, and compared the results to estimated ecosystem recovery rates from training activities. We found that even at relatively low simulated usage rates, random allocation and random spatial use of training ranges within an MTA resulted in environmental degradation under realistic ecological recovery rates. To avoid large scale environmental degradation, we developed a decision-making tool that details the best method for managing training-related disturbance by determining how training activities can be allocated to training ranges.

Integrating resilience thinking and optimisation for conservation.

Conservation strategies need to be both effective and efficient to be successful. To this end, two bodies of research should be integrated, namely 'resilience thinking' and 'optimisation for conservation,' both of which are highly policy relevant but to date have evolved largely separately. Resilience thinking provides an integrated perspective for analysis, emphasising the potential of nonlinear changes and the interdependency of social and ecological systems. By contrast, optimisation for conservation is an outcome-oriented tool that recognises resource scarcity and the need to make rational and transparent decisions. Here we propose that actively embedding optimisation analyses within a resilience-thinking framework could draw on the complementary strengths of the two bodies of work, thereby promoting cost-effective and enduring conservation outcomes.

Precaution, prediction, proof, and policy assessment.

The challenge of sustainable development--the ultimate goal of precaution-- demands that we shift our focus away from individual environmental problems and toward long-term integration of environmental, social, and economic policy. It also elevates protection of ecosystem processes and biodiversity to the status of significant policy goals. In this article, the author argues for a new use of the precautionary principle, as a means to assess broad policy decisions to target indirect or systemic rather than direct threats to sustainability. He draws on a case study of two Australian policies: the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD), and the National Competition Policy (NCP).1 While the proposals are ambitious and may not be achievable in the near future, nonetheless, it is in the nature of institutional and policy systems that it is difficult to predict when opportunities for policy change will arise. It is crucial to develop and articulate strategies now, to be promoted during brief windows of opportunity for policy change.