Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A State of the Environment (SoE) Report is an important management tool which aims to provide the community and Council with information on the condition of the environment in the local area to assist in decision-making. Since 2007, 17 local Councils of the Greater Central West Region of NSW (Australia) have joined to produce Regional SoE Reports as part of Council reporting requirements. Recent changes to NSW legislation mean that Councils are no longer required to produce SoE Reports each year, but only once every four years, in the year of the Council election (which will next be in 2016). …

An important part of conservation practice is the empirical evaluation of program and policy impacts. Understanding why conservation programs succeed or fail is essential for designing cost-effective initiatives and for improving the livelihoods of natural resource users. The evidence we seek can be generated with modern impact evaluation designs. Such designs measure causal effects of specific interventions by comparing outcomes with the interventions to outcomes in credible counterfactual scenarios. Good designs also identify the conditions under which the causal effect arises. Despite a critical need for empirical evidence, conservation science has been slow to adopt these impact evaluation designs. We …