4 Recommendations
The BBB hosts a cohort of land managers with a diversity of motivations, property characteristics, practices and engagement experience. Efforts to reduce sediment will focus on improved grazing management practices and restoration of gullies. The LDC should offer a suite of complementary incentives that engage the full spectrum of land managers – engaging the previously unengaged, accelerating adoption of improved practices and supporting the trial and development of new practices such as the remediation of major gully systems. Many of the incentive mechanisms reviewed as part of this report are not able to be implemented as part of the LDC, because of constraints in time, scale and authority. The LDC project also provides an opportunity to support the development of future incentive programs in the medium to longer term.
With this in mind, recommendations are presented in two groups:
1. Actions that can be implemented as part of the LDC project to a. Manage for big gullies; and b. Facilitate improved ongoing land management.
2. Actions that the LDC project can undertake to influence future incentive opportunities.
The following sections propose, describe and justify a set of recommendations arising from this work.
4.1 Recommendations for the LDC project to manage big gullies
4.1.1 Recommendation 1: Develop a‘ gully calculator’
The current grants approach is mostly based on a cost-sharing ratio for eligible practices which assume fixed proportions of public and private net benefits( although gully remediation works may cover full costs up to a cap). In reality, both the benefits and the costs will be highly variable between landholders and properties. As more major gully restoration projects are implemented and evaluated, incentives for gully remediation should become more discriminating, based upon the potential public benefits. Development of a transparent metric to estimate sediment load reduction for individual projects through development of a‘ gully calculator’ would provide a more robust way to award projects based on assessment of benefits / cost. Given that the LDC project is already characterising gullies in the BBB and trialling remediation methods, the development of a tool that allows site-based estimates of sediment benefits is feasible and would be a significant legacy of this project. Investment in a gully calculator has the potential to improve the impact of investments in gully remediation both within and beyond the LDC project, under current and potential future incentive systems. This should build on existing work in this area.
It is recommended that the gully calculator would incorporate:
� Factors of connectivity, dependencies( if applicable depending upon the site) with grazing management and time-lags between actions and outcomes;
42 | Landholders driving change: Exploring new incentives