What is the status Australia's Marine Environment -- developing SOE 2016

The State of Environment (SoE) Report for 2011 was written by an independent committee of experts, and was considered to have provided a comprehensive review of the state and trends of the Australian environment at that time.... [ view full abstract ]

The State of Environment (SoE) Report for 2011 was written by an independent committee of experts, and was considered to have provided a comprehensive review of the state and trends of the Australian environment at that time. For the first time in national environmental reporting, SoE 2011 went beyond a descriptive summary of evidence to include graded 'report-card' style assessments of environment condition and trends, pressures and management effectiveness. This approach was seen as essential for raising awareness and supporting more informed environmental management decisions among the public and decision-makers. The approach addressed what was seen as a major failure of earlier SoE reports – the lack of information on past trends and forecasting of future trends.
Much of the information in SoE 2011 was derived from expert opinion collected in workshops engaging a variety of scientific disciplines across Australia, however the workshops were not designed to capture statistical trends or estimates of uncertainty, and interpretation was sometimes challenging. In response to reviewer’s comments, the chapter author, Dr Trevor Ward, noted that: “eventually SoE reporting will have to move beyond use of some available surrogates and crudely measured indicators developed for other purposes… to provide a more informed and specific set of assessments on the state of the marine environment. It would probably be best to start with a small set of measurable national key marine indicators, for which agreement and resources can be secured.”
As part of EPBC Act requirements to provide an update to the SoE every 5 years, efforts on SoE 2016 have begun and will include updating the broadly accepted SoE 2011 delivery with quantitative data. But where to start? Any choice of indicators both reflects our current perceptions of the environment and influences our future knowledge. In this talk, we will present some of the available time series data that could contribute to SoE 2016, describe the longer term marine indicator development – led for Commonwealth waters by the marine blueprint and Essential Environmental Measures Program – and give you the opportunity to identify any informative time series data that we may be overlooking.