been added. It recognises that some, possibly many, gully remediation practices are likely to be well beyond what landholders can afford to maintain. These are likely to include some of the larger alluvial and hillslope gullies where major earthworks are required. If it can be foreseen that the responsibility of maintaining benefits is unlikely to occur( e. g. the landholder is unwilling sign a binding agreement to do so) then providing incentives to landholders may not be a sound investment of public money. There are situations where it might have to be accepted that the problem is too difficult( in which case the recommended action is to accept the sediment loss and impacts on the GBR as technically unfeasible and / or cost prohibitive), conduct more research and development to reduce costs sufficiently so that landholder incentives could be considered or consider a different innovative conservation financing mechanism( perhaps funded by private investors, superannuation funds or philanthropic sources. Such a mechanism would need to be agreed to by the landholder and require assigning binding agreements and property rights to the investor).
A. 3
Findings
There are very large variations in the benefits( in terms of sediment load reduction) of practice change associated with managing hillslope erosion, hillslope gully erosion, alluvial gully erosion and streambank erosion. Costs are also highly variable and site specific. Given this, improvements to the direct financial incentives approach being offered to landholders by LDC currently( based on set unit rates and public: private cost shares) could be improved. We recommend that financial incentives are offered to landholders based on an assessment of benefits and costs where the following factors can be demonstrated as relevant to any of the four erosion categories:
Benefits: �
�
Costs:
A threshold level of public benefits( reduced sediment erosion) needs to be agreed. This threshold could be agreed by technical experts using available knowledge.
Site assessment( regardless of the erosion type) is essential and the sediment reduction benefits are estimated( for gullies or streambanks through technical expert assessment 4 and for hillslope erosion using Paddock to Reef)
� Benefits need to include consideration of: o Time period that the incentive is to be paid( can be variable) o Time-lags( some benefits occur more quickly than others)
o Whether there are dependencies between grazing management and public benefits or not( if dependencies then grazing management needs to be of at least minimum acceptable standard before incentives would be offered)
o Connectivity( e. g. if gullies are directly connected to waterways of importance from the perspective of GBR impacts)
The cost components only need to consider the public costs but do need to include:
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