State of the Environment 2011 (SoE 2011)

State of the Environment 2011 Committee. Australia state of the environment 2011.
Independent report to the Australian Government Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities.
Canberra: DSEWPaC, 2011.

5 Land

6 Risks to the land environment

Risks to the land environment reflect the conjunction of historical, contemporary and expected pressures in particular regions and locations. Some of these risks are a consequence of the now low resilience of soils and vegetation in those parts of Australia that have been longest and most intensively settled and used. Others reflect pressures that are difficult to manage on a landscape scale, such as fire and invasive species.⁴⁷ Climate change is expected to exacerbate many of the risks to the land environment.²⁹ Some of the risks relate to the possibility of inadequate investment and lack of capacity to manage the land environment adequately (see Section 4). The risks identified in Assessment summary 5.9 emerge from those that have been identified in assessments and reviews over the past decade (notably Assessment of Australia’s terrestrial biodiversity,⁴⁶ Bastin et al.,⁴¹ Burgman et al.,⁴⁷ and Cleugh et al.²⁹).

At a glance

The predicted impacts of climate change pose major risks to the values of the land environment. These include changes in vegetation communities and the impacts of invasive species.

Acidification and loss of soil carbon are major risks to our agricultural production systems, and climate change is a major risk to agricultural and forestry production systems.

Inadequate investment in monitoring and adaptive management, a lack of capacity for good management, and major land contamination events represent possible major risks to the land environment.

Assessment summary 5.9—Current and emerging risks to the land environment
	Catastrophic	Major	Moderate	Minor	Insignificant
Almost certain		Profound changes in vegetation communities due to higher temperatures, changed rainfall patterns, and more extreme weather events associated with climate change Invasive species, including new introductions and distributions	Further vegetation fragmentation by urban development Changes in coastal vegetation communities due to sea level rise associated with climate change Loss of good agricultural land to urban sprawl		Not considered
Likely		Decrease of soil carbon stores due to drying climate and acidification Widespread acidification of agricultural lands Changes to agricultural and forestry production systems associated with climate change	Altered fire regimes associated with climate and land management changes Hillslope erosion continuing at current rates or increasing due to intensification of storm events due to climate change		Not considered
Possible		Major land contamination event with direct impacts on humans or food-supply chains Inadequate investment in monitoring and adaptive management, and a lack of capacity for good management in each of the Indigenous, private and public estates	Plant population and species loss due to ecological factors (e.g. loss of pollinators) and demographic factors (loss of effective population size) Widespread dryland salinity in southern Queensland following average to wet seasons Return to 1940s rates of wind erosion if drying continues in the south due to climate change	Contamination of native vegetation populations by genetically modified organisms from production populations	Not considered
Unlikely					Not considered
Rare	Not considered	Not considered	Not considered	Not considered	Not considered

Not considered

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Newman, Western Australia. Photo by Christian Fletcher