Property owners from central-western Queensland have taken part in a conservation auction game to trial options for establishment of vegetation corridors.

Dummy properties were developed and allocated to participants, who used their regional knowledge to design corridors and identify payments required for conservation agreements.

Associate Professor John Rolfe and Dr Jill Windle from Central Queensland University’s Centre for Environmental Management have recently submitted a draft final report for the project to the Commonwealth and State governments.

They noted the potential for voluntary incentive programs to form linkage vegetation zones across a region, and said results could help governments address issues of landscape fragmentation and biodiversity at the farm level. The Central Queensland University researchers said a number of competitive tender scenarios were played out with the help of the specially designed game.

Dr Rolfe said an individual bid model was found to be practical in designing corridors in conjunction with multiple bidding rounds.

“After an initial round of (individual) bids, participants are shown the location of other bids (including those of neighbours) in the area,” he said.

“Because bids will only be successful if they form part of a viable corridor, participants have clear incentives to change or add to their bid designs so that corridors line up at property boundaries.

“In this way there are incentives for individual behaviours that lead to group outcomes. Other key advantages of the individual bid model are that they allow a large number of potential corridors to be identified, thus enhancing the competitive process, and there is more competitive pressure on individual participants, leading to more cost-efficient bids.”.

Dr Rolfe said potential disadvantages included possible difficulty in encouraging participation and higher transaction and administration costs that may be associated with multiple auction rounds.

“Low participation rates are a key issue to be addressed in a corridor design,” he said.

“The experimental workshop game developed for this project has key benefits in showing landholders, regional body staff, agency staff and other stakeholders how an environmental auction works in a hands-on manner.

“The workshop results also help to identify the key factors that drive landholder bids, and allow the potential supply of environmental services to be modelled.”.

The provisional findings of the research project ‘Establishing East-West Corridors in the Southern Desert Uplands’ have been published by the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency and CQU.

The project is funded by a partnership of the Commonwealth and State governments through the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. Partners include the Desert Uplands Buildup and Development Strategy Committee, the Queensland EPA, CQU and CSIRO.