A new partnership, which aims to drive large-scale nature restoration in Southeast Queensland, has been launched.
The collaboration, which unites government, private sector, industry and community partners will drive investment into landscape-scale nature restoration.
Named ENVESTOR South-East Queensland, the initiative is a pioneering and disruptive approach to environmental restoration for the region, bringing together a diverse range of stakeholders to take action on priority areas including degraded creeks and waterways, forest habitat and agricultural land.
Julie McLellan is the CEO at Healthy Land & Water, the regional NRM organisation for Southeast Queensland. She said the model is designed to tackle many issues.
“SEQ is a biodiversity hotspot that needs renewed investment in nature to build its resilience to climate threats while supporting a growing population,” Julie said.
“From protecting koalas against bushfire threat, to reducing flood risk from disaster-scale flooding events that are damaging thousands of homes every few years, and if not addressed will render large areas of SEQ uninsurable.”
The new program recognises that additional investment is needed if SEQ is to realise opportunities through the repair, restoration and regeneration of SEQ’s land, forests and waterways.
“Put simply, stemming the decline of our environment – including growing threats to our biodiversity, increasing fire and flood risk and the potential loss of our food security – is going to take billions not millions,” Julie said.
“The only way to get there is to think much bigger, and getting to landscape-scale takes landscape-scale funding and partnerships.”
As the world rapidly moves towards innovative financing systems that provide a return on investment for nature restoration and repair – including through the Australian Government’s new Nature Repair Market – ENVestor is poised to attract investors in Australia and internationally looking for impact and long-term returns.
ENVestor has already garnered strong multi-sectoral support.
“We are already seeing keen interest from Federal, State, and local government, water and power utilities, corporates, scientists, academics, community groups, First Nations representatives, the insurance industry, nature markets specialists, among many others,” Julie said.
Pilot projects being designed under the program are directly tackling solutions to climate change, flooding, pollution and biodiversity loss via a model of attracting investment in a way that could pave the way for nationwide or even global uptake.
According to Landscape Finance Lab, a body which has helped incubate and finance sustainable landscape programs around the world, what’s being done in South East Queensland in terms of scale and integration is breaking the mould.
“This approach is modelled on successful landscape-scale efforts around the world which are helping restore nature, drive investment, create jobs and livelihoods, and build resilience,” says Landscape Finance Lab’s founder, Paul Chatterton.
The launch of ENVestor follows on the heels of the recent report of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists which found Australia’s environment is on a depressing path – with an estimated $7.3bn a year needed to stem the decline in Australia’s ecosystems – still, far less than the $33 billion a year Australians spend on their pets.
Julie said that in addition to calls to work towards a proactive government funding increase by 10-fold to at least 1% of GDP (which equates to $4b in SEQ alone), to achieve real outcomes we need to increase investment from private and other sources.
“That’s why we are bringing partners together to set up a vehicle to build up to the scale of funding needed and deploy it to the areas it is most needed,” Julie said.
Find out more at the ENVestor website.