David J. Pannell

University of Western Australia | UWA · UWA School of Agriculture and Environment

In 2023, the Australian Government issued ∼250,000 soil carbon credits following a measurement period characterised by high rainfall (Decile 10). The inferred soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration rates during this period, ranging from ∼2 to 8 t C ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹, significantly exceed rates reported in Australian scientific studies (∼0.1 to 1.2 t C ha⁻...

Increasing the area of drought‐tolerant native vegetation in urban parks is a potential strategy to adapt to growing water scarcity under climate change. With a case study in Perth, Australia, we undertake benefit–cost analyses to understand the potential impacts of modifying urban park landscape designs away from conventions dominated by watered g...

Food safety is an issue of growing concern in many developing countries. Threats to food safety in Vietnam include contamination with toxic chemicals, microbiological hazards and adulterated food. To determine Vietnamese consumers' willingness to pay for food safety of pork and vegetables, a discrete choice experiment was employed in the cities of...

Rangelands, covering half of the global land area, are critically degraded by unsustainable use and climate change. Despite their extensive presence, global assessments of rangeland condition and sustainability are limited. Here we introduce a novel analytical approach that combines satellite big data and statistical modeling to quantify the likeli...

Adapting to changes in water availability is becoming an increasingly important environmental management objective in many regions around the world. One way for cities to conserve water is to enhance drought-resistant vegetation cover. This revegetation practice can take place on many types of land, including road-side verges (also known as nature...

Australia’s plan to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 relies heavily on carbon credits. These credits are awarded to projects that avoid the release of greenhouse gases or remove and “sequester” (store) carbon so it’s no longer warming the atmosphere. Farmers can be awarded credits for increasing soil carbon content. The federal gov...

Increasing native vegetation cover on verges, which are underutilized urban lands, can help build resilient cities under urban densification and climate change. As these areas are sizeable, many cities have programs aimed at encouraging ecologically beneficial landscape designs on verges, which are publicly owned but privately managed lands located...

Policymakers must make management decisions despite incomplete knowledge and conflicting model projections. Little guidance exists for the rapid, representative, and unbiased collection of policy-relevant scientific input from independent modeling teams. Integrating approaches from decision analysis, expert judgment, and model aggregation, we conve...

Acacia plantations are a significant forestry resource in Viet Nam, with the majority of the area under smallholder ownership, typically with 1–5 ha per household. Currently most acacias are grown in short rotations and sold for export as woodchips. Short rotation plantations suit smallholder farmers as they can receive a return relatively quickly...

The primary causes of biodiversity decline worldwide are the destruction, alteration, and fragmentation of habitat resulting from human economic activities such as agriculture or property development. In regions with highly cleared and fragmented landscapes, biodiversity conservation efforts typically involve the restoration of native habitat and r...

In Western‐democratic countries, it is widely accepted that affected communities should be involved in natural resource planning and decisions. This is especially so when the well‐being of diverse communities is directly involved, and where alternative future options are being considered. Although there is an agreement that ‘values’ and ‘well‐being...

Acacia auriculiformis represents an opportunity for farmers in Gunungkidul, Java, Indonesia, to grow trees for high quality sawlog products on shorter (6–8 year) cycles than traditional solid wood species such as teak that traditionally take 20–30 years. Farmers in Gunungkidul have grown acacias for several decades, but traditional management pract...

While the imminent extinction of many species is predicted, prevention is expensive, and decision-makers often have to prioritise funding. In democracies, it can be argued that conservation using public funds should be influenced by the values placed on threatened species by the public, and that community views should also affect the conservation m...

Climate change is forcing cities to reassess their water management practices, particularly for water-intensive applications like park irrigation. If water scarcity requires governments to deviate from current park management norms and allocate less water towards parks, it is essential that park managers design spaces that maintain community wellbe...

Transdisciplinary research (TDR) can help generate solutions to environmental challenges and enhance the uptake of research outputs, thus contributing to advance sustainability in social-ecological systems. Our aim is to support investment decisions in TDR; more specifically, to help funders, researchers, and research users to decide when and why i...

Traditional centralized water-management systems have tended to fall short in delivering environmental and amenity benefits in urban areas. Water-sensitive urban design (WSUD) projects have been proposed as an alternative due to their ability to generate multiple benefits, including improving water quality, water supply, aesthetics, urban cooling,...

Participatory scenario planning (PSP) has mainly concerned scenario development and outreach, with less emphasis on scenario assessment. However, eliciting stakeholder responses to scenarios, focusing on subjective wellbeing, can increase the legitimacy, relevance, and applicability of PSP. We developed a PSP exercise with a multi-stakeholder, cros...

Given proposed expansion of developments in northern Australia and current tensions among stakeholders, there is a need to develop new planning approaches that support multiple uses of land and water, while maintaining environmental and cultural values. This project aimed to demonstrate how to operationalise multi-objective catchment planning suppo...

Sugarcane farmers have several options to manage their energy costs of irrigation. One option these farmers are yet to widely adopt is solar photovoltaic (PV) systems for energy generation. The objective of the study was to understand the potential rate and peak level of adoption by Australian sugarcane irrigators of solar PV energy systems for wat...

Given the proposed expansion of developments in northern Australia and current tensions among different interest groups, there is a need to develop new planning approaches that support multiple uses of land and water, while maintaining environmental and cultural values. Our project aimed to demonstrate how to operationalise multi-objective catchmen...

CONTEXT Scholars have argued that empirical studies of adoption in agriculture should consider adoption as a dynamic process rather than a binary choice, but many empirical studies continue to be based on cross-sectional surveys in which adoption is treated binarily. In general, surveys put more emphasis on investigating adoption drivers (i.e. inde...

A large number of Australia’s plants are in danger of extinction. Plant translocations have become increasingly important in threatened flora conservation programs. They can, however, be costly and there are trade-offs inherent in deciding which conservation actions to invest in. Here we develop a decision-support process to rapidly identify when t...

Soil acidification due to crop removal and the use of acidifying fertilisers reduce land productivity in many agricultural systems worldwide. The most common remedy is to apply lime to the soil surface. An alternative approach is to incorporate lime into the sub‐soil. This is a more expensive option, but it substantially reduces the time required t...

Models can provide a structured way to think about adoption and provide a method to investigate the impacts of different factors in the adoption process. With at least 70 years of research in the adoption of agricultural innovations, there has been a proliferation of adoption models, both conceptual and numerical. This diversity has resulted in a l...

Context Since COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) was first identified in the human population, it has had immediate and significant effects on peoples' health and the worldwide economy. In the absence of a vaccine, control of the virus involved limiting its spread through restrictions in the movement of people, goods and services. This has led to unprecedented...

Policymakers make decisions about COVID-19 management in the face of considerable uncertainty. We convened multiple modeling teams to evaluate reopening strategies for a mid-sized county in the United States, in a novel process designed to fully express scientific uncertainty while reducing linguistic uncertainty and cognitive biases. For the scena...

The responses of policy makers, individuals and businesses to COVID‐19 contrast with typical responses to environmental issues. In most countries, governments have been willing to act decisively to implement costly restrictions on work and personal life, to a degree that has never been observed for an environmental issue. A number of possible lesso...

This chapter discusses the many ways that science, technology, and innovation (STI) can bolster the global agenda of the United Nations (UN) toward meeting the sustainable development goals (SDGs). It shows how STI applications can make multiple contributions to the achievement of SDGs. It is particularly important for developing countries to harne...

The final chapter reviews contributions from throughout this book, drawing out common themes, differences, and key lessons. Previous studies indicate the potential role of science, technology, and innovation (STI) in tackling global challenges, yet in many developing countries, little attention is paid to harnessing STI in addressing these problems...

In 2015, the United Nations General assembly adopted a set of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), including goals to further reduce poverty, hunger and inequality and to improve education, health, cities, economic wellbeing, environmental conditions and access to water and energy. Science, technology and innovation (STI) will play critical rol...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has triggered efforts by multiple modeling groups to forecast disease trajectory, assess interventions, and improve understanding of the pathogen. Such models can often differ substantially in their projections and recommendations, reflecting different policy assumptions and objectives, as well as sc...

Western Australia's Swan River is a complex asset providing environmental, recreational and commercial benefits. Agencies responsible for its management rely extensively on advice from experts, whose preferences may or may not align with those of the community. Using a choice experiment, we compared public and expert preferences for managing the ri...

Research on the adoption of new practices and new behaviors in agriculture continues to grow and evolve, and its relevance to policy remains high. This special issue presents 10 papers that provide overviews of important aspects of the recent adoption literature, or identify gaps and opportunities in the literature. Adoption research has been innov...

This paper provides a selective overview of the linkages and complementary topics in behavioral economics and agricultural adoption literatures. The goal of the paper is to identify likely directions for future research at the intersection of behavioral economics and agricultural adoption. This research agenda has potential for providing valuable i...

Much of agricultural and agri‐environmental policy is concerned with influencing the behavior of farmers in adopting new practices. An ability to understand and predict adoption of practices is useful for agricultural policy in several ways, including assessing additionality, selecting policy mechanisms, targeting policy to practices, farmer types...

Restoring degraded landscapes for conservation purposes can involve transaction costs to acquire the land in the first place. Zunyi and colleagues propose a framework for prioritizing uncontested lands that can provide ecosystem services without those costs.

Many agricultural soils are naturally acidic, and agricultural production can acidify soil through processes such as nitrogen (N) fixation by legumes and application of N fertiliser. This means that decisions about mitigation of soil acidity (e.g. through application of lime), crop rotation and N fertiliser application are interdependent. This pape...

Competition for land resources is intense, with growing demand for food and resources to support humanity. Despite this, global agricultural area has significantly declined over the past two decades due to socio–political trends, market changes and environmental degradation. Although expensive, restoring degraded lands that are no longer contested...

Soil acidity is a major limiting factor for crop production in many farming systems worldwide. Lime application is the most common practice to mitigate soil acidity. There are complex economic interactions between application of lime and nitrogen fertilizer, with the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the use of these inputs adding further co...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an increasingly popular, but debated, management strategy to conserve marine biodiversity and ensure sustainable human use of the oceans. Economic studies can contribute to the debate about MPAs as a management option by evaluating their benefits and costs to society. In this paper, we outline how to evaluate the e...

In various countries, offset policies allow economic developments to proceed on condition that proponents undertake agreed actions that offset the resulting losses of environmental values. Although ecological and environmental benefits are the main concern of a conservation agency when assessing an offset proposal, it is also important to be aware...

Agricultural research on climate change generally follows two themes: (i) impact and adaptation or (ii) mitigation and emissions. Despite both being simultaneously relevant to future agricultural systems, the two are usually studied separately. By contrast, this study jointly compares the potential impacts of climate change and the effects of mitig...

Prioritising investments to minimise or mitigate natural hazards such as wildfires and storms is of increasing importance to hazard managers. Prioritisation of this type can be strengthened by considering benefit and cost impacts. To evaluate benefits and costs, managers require an understanding of both the tangible economic benefits and costs of m...

In Australian sugarcane production, 90% of irrigation pumps are connected to the national electricity grid. In regional Queensland, where irrigated sugarcane is grown, both the retailer and distribution network service providers are government owned and highly regulated. This study investigates options for on-farm embedded generation from a range o...

Clustered robust meta-regression analysis is applied to 109 willingness to pay (WTP) estimates for threatened species from 47 stated-preference studies in 19 countries. Our study updates previous meta-analyses on the topic and tests the effect of important variables not previously considered-species' threat status, use of coloured photographs of sp...

Globally, the area of agricultural land is shrinking in part due to environmental degradation. Acquisition and restoration of degraded lands no longer used for agriculture may present a major conservation opportunity with minimal social and political opposition. The ability to efficiently and accurately identify these lands from regional to global...

Determining how best to manage an infectious disease outbreak may be hindered by both epidemiological uncertainty (i.e. about epidemiological processes) and operational uncertainty (i.e. about the effectiveness of candidate interventions). However, these two uncertainties are rarely addressed concurrently in epidemic studies. We present an approach...

Maintaining mammal populations on havens – whether they are naturally occurring or translocated – has helped to prevent further mammal extinctions, and consolidated protection for other species. These havens fall under the management of many organisations, ranging from local councils, community groups and small private organisations to large non-go...

Many Australian mammal species are highly susceptible to predation by introduced cats and foxes. At least 34 Australian endemic mammal species have been made extinct since 1788, about 10% of Australia's terrestrial fauna, and predation by cats and foxes was a major contribution to most of those extinctions. Maintaining mammal populations on havens...

Poor river health creates ecological problems, poses a public health risk and becomes a nuisance to the residents. Making decisions about management actions to restore ecosystem health, for example through reduction of nutrients runoff, requires information about the value of the healthy ecosystem, and in particular the value of water quality. Impo...

Prescribed burning is used in Australia as a tool to manage fire risk and protect assets. A key challenge is deciding how to arrange the burns to generate the highest benefits to society. Studies have shown that prescribed burning in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) can reduce the risk of house loss due to wildfires, but the costs and benefits of...

There is growing recognition that coastal water quality is interdependent with agricultural management in coastal catchments. Economic-incentive-based instruments can be used to internalize the negative externalities from coastal water pollution. Bio-physical and socio-economic heterogeneity across farms is expected to be an important factor in exp...

Agriculture stands on the cusp of a digital revolution, and the same technologies that created the Internet and are transforming medicine are now being applied in our farms and on our fields. Overall, this digital agricultural revolution is being driven by the low cost of collecting data on everything from soil conditions to animal health and crop...

Soil acidification due to crop removal and the use of acidifying fertilizers reduces land productivity across agricultural systems worldwide. The standard remedy is to periodically apply lime to the soil surface which, over a number of years, is assimilated into the soil profile and raises soil pH. However, an alternative approach is to incorporate...

Environmental and conservation scientists are increasingly being asked to justify their work in terms of benefits to society. This article describes economic theory for conceptualizing the benefits from environmental research, and provides a framework for estimating those benefits. In particular we discuss the evaluation of environmental science th...

Shark-diving tourism provides important economic benefits to the Maldives. We examine the link between shark conservation actions and economic returns from diving tourism. A combined travel cost and contingent behaviour approach is used to estimate the dive trip demand under different management scenarios. Our results show that increasing shark pop...

The primary causes of biodiversity decline worldwide are habitat destruction, alteration and fragmentation resulting from human economic activities such as agriculture or property development. Public- and private-sector organizations allocate considerable resources to slow down biodiversity decline by developing conservation networks that preserve...

Context: Many Australian mammal species are highly susceptible to predation by introduced domestic cats (Felis catus) and European red foxes (Vulpes vulpes). These predators have caused many extinctions and have driven large distributional and population declines for many more species. The serendipitous occurrence of, and deliberate translocations...

Accurate assessment of the cost of carbon sequestration is important for the development of mitigation policies globally. Given that sequestration in soils or vegetation is a lengthy process, such assessment requires financial discounting and making realistic assumptions about changes over time in the rate of sequestration, the price of carbon, and...

There is much existing knowledge about the factors that influence adoption of new practices in agriculture but few attempts have been made to construct predictive quantitative models of adoption for use by those planning agricultural research, development, extension and policy. ADOPT (Adoption and Diffusion Outcome Prediction Tool) is the result of...

Shark-diving is part of a rapidly growing industry focused on marine wildlife tourism. Our study aimed to provide an estimate of the economic value of shark-diving tourism across Australia by comprehensively surveying the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), grey nurse shark (Carcharias taurus), and reef shark (mostl...

Over-fishing is a global problem that damages the marine environment and compromises the long-term sustainability of fisheries. This damage can be mitigated by restricting catch or other activities which can occur in marine areas. However, such management is only effective when restrictions are enforced to ensure compliance. We expect fishers to he...

The primary causes of biodiversity decline worldwide are habitat destruction, alteration and fragmentation resulting from human economic activities such as agriculture or property development. Public-and private-sector organizations allocate considerable resources to slow down biodiversity decline by developing conservation networks that preserve r...

There are many examples of decision support tools used to analyse information with the intention of assisting conservation managers and policy makers in their decision making. We used structured interviews to collect information on seven case studies from Australia and New Zealand to identify the factors that led to the use (or non-use) of decision...