Contents
- Funding acknowledgement
- Acknowledgement of Country
- Traditional Owner Foreword
- Introduction
- About the region
- Mackay Whitsunday Isaac Community Action Plan (CAP)
- 10 CAP strategies
- Strategy prioritisation
- Linkages with existing strategic documents
- Next steps
- References
- Appendix 1: Common values, pressures & strategies across GBR strategies docs
- Appendix 2: Community stakeholder engagement
- Appendix 3: Survey responses that workshop participants used to identify strategies
- Appendix 4: Detailed Miradi roadmaps
- Appendix 5: Stakeholder summary
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY
Reef Catchments would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners past and present. We acknowledge their spiritual and cultural connection and their responsibility as Traditional Owners to maintain and care for Country. Reef Catchments recognises the important role Traditional Owners play in natural resource management, in particular the unique connection and understanding they have to Land, Sea and Waters. Traditional knowledge in land, sea and water management practices will direct future pathways in maintaining and enhancing sustainable landscapes (MWI Traditional Owner Strategic Plan 2017-2027).
TRADITIONAL OWNER FOREWORD
As Traditional Owners we have a spiritual and cultural connection to the land and sea – our Country. The management of Country is important, we have been doing it all our lives and our ancestors have before us. We have a spiritual connection to the land, that is where we come from, it is everything out there, it is significant to Aboriginal people. For thousands of years Mother Earth has provided for us, giving us bush tucker, medicine, fresh water, shelter and much more so we have to look after her. You have to see it through our eyes. The sustainability of our environment ensures that our cultural practices are maintained and continued on our Land (including Waters) and Sea Country now and into the future.
The Community Action Plan shows us ways in which we can all come together as a community to change behaviours and manage Country. We need to look after Country for our children and grandchildren, not just ourselves.
“We would like our ideas and deep understanding of Country to be included in planning for the future of the region. This will help us to work together to look after Country and teach all of our children to do the same, so our values, culture, and heritage is protected” (Aunty Carol Pryor, Ngaro Elder).
We encourage the whole community to be involved in the delivery of the Community Action Plan, and work together for positive outcomes.
– Mackay Whitsunday Isaac Traditional Owner Reference Group
INTRODUCTION
The Mackay Whitsunday Isaac Reef Community Action Plan (CAP) documents the community’s collective priorities in relation to protecting the Reef and provides a shared plan, otherwise referred to as roadmaps, for implementing community-scale strategies that will lead to improving Reef values.
The Mackay Whitsunday Isaac region is one of five regions along the Great Barrier Reef to develop a Community Action Plan. This Reef-wide initiative aimed to galvanise communities and increase community action for Reef protection outcomes by developing CAPs. The CAPs improve community engagement in strategically planning, implementing, monitoring and celebrating Reef resilience actions. CAPs bridge the gap in scale, by pulling down strategies and ideas from existing high-level strategic documents, then working with the community to mould these into localised, relevant and community-scale actions.
The CAP has been developed through review of existing NRM and community plans relevant to the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac region, a survey of key community stakeholders, and interactive community workshops held with key community stakeholders in October and November 2020. Within the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac community, the four key areas of interest that emerged from the workshops were:
The community workshops used these areas of interest as a starting point for identifying priority strategies. The community then built ‘roadmaps’ to outline how these strategies would protect Reef values, identifying the actions and associated outcomes that were expected along the way. The CAP draws from this process and previous work outlined in existing documents, to identify several key projects which could feasibly be carried out by community stakeholders and lead to meaningful outcomes for the Reef. These key projects have been developed into a prospectus for potential funders and collaborators.
PLANNING CONTEXT
ABOUT THE REGION
The Traditional Owners of the Land, Sea and Waters of the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac region include the Yuwi, Koinmerburra, Ngaro, Gia, Juru, Barada Barna and Wiri peoples. The region is a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and surrounding islands, drawing visitors from all over the world. Our productive agricultural land comprises sugar cane, cattle grazing and horticulture, which has supported and shaped our economy, culture and heritage since the 19th Century. More recently the surrounding Central Queensland coalfields have influenced our region through the provision of vital infrastructure to support the mining industry, including one of the world’s largest coal terminals at Hay Point. Our region is home to an abundance of iconic species and landscapes, with the Clarke Connors Range providing habitat for many endemic terrestrial species, and the coastline a key habitat for migratory shorebirds and turtles.
In the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac region, the Reef is intrinsically linked with local economy and culture. Our region has a population of more than 152,000 people, but this often swells further with domestic and international tourists, with 248,000 international tourists visiting the region from March 2018 - March 2019 (Tourism & Events Queensland, 2020), and it’s likely that much of this was related to the Great Barrier Reef.
COMMUNITY ACTION PLAN
Vision for the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac Community Action Plan:
The CAP aims to:
- Provide a shared vision and decision framework for coastal, estuarine and marine citizen science and community on ground action
- Build on existing plans and knowledge
- Connect community with decision making processes
- Create strategies and actions for funding and implementation
The values and priorities of the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac community were assessed through a survey of key community stakeholders, and interactive community workshops held with key community stakeholders including the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac Traditional Owner Reference Group (TORG) and Reef Catchment's Youth Ambassador group of 2020-2021.
Derived from the surveys, the top three values within the Great Barrier Reef that are most important to the community personally were:
Other Great Barrier Reef values that ranked highly by the community were predominantly natural and intrinsic values, including coasts, seagrass and whales, turtles and dugongs. Socio-economic ecosystem services that the Reef provides ranked much lower to the community. Therefore, altruism may be an important driver for community action in this region.
Traditional Owners ranked their top values of the Great Barrier Reef slightly differently to the wider community, with mangroves, coming out as the most important value, followed by ‘catchments and estuaries’, ‘whales, turtles and dugongs’, ‘seagrass’ and ‘wetlands’, which were all considered equally as important as each other. Traditional Owners explained that these values were critical to traditional food staples and that maintaining these areas meant maintaining their way of life.
Furthermore, the four key areas of interest that emerged from the community surveys and workshops were:
- Climate change & local carbon footprints
- Litter and waste
- Revegetation
- Water Quality
These values and priorities provided a starting point for the development of the 10 CAP strategies. To read more about the community engagement process and development of the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac CAP, please refer to Appendix 2.
10 CAP STRATEGIES
The Mackay Whitsunday Isaac community have developed 10 strategies as priorities for action. The 10 strategies are captured below along with their implementation status. Of the 10 strategies, 8 are currently seeking funding, and 2 are currently active.
Strategies Seeking Funding
Strategy 1: Working with schools to reduce litter and waste.
Strategy 2: Coordinating citizen science to protect reef communities.
Strategy 3: Increasing soil carbon on grazing properties.
Strategy 4: Traditional Owner led protection of foreshore vegetation and turtles.
Strategy 5: Increasing youth involvement in volunteer groups.
Strategy 6: Expanding water quality monitoring through citizen science in the tourism industry.
Strategy 7: Improving community understanding and involvement in water quality issues.
Strategy 8: Helping individuals to reduce their carbon footprint.
Strategies with Active Projects
Strategy 9: Helping local families, schools, businesses and visitors reduce their carbon footprint by reducing food waste. This strategy has 2 active projects.
Project overview: Whitsunday Regional Council with support from Envirocom are delivering a School Waste Minimisation Program to five schools in the Whitsundays. As a first step, each school participated in a half-day workshop and waste audit. The findings were used to inform the development of a targeted waste management plan, identifying a series of key focus areas and actions for implementation to improve the school's waste management practices. The project goes one-step further, offering participating schools a small grant to assist them in delivering their key initiatives, leading to positive on-ground change.
Project overview: Whitsunday Regional Council are delivering a Waste Stream Analysis in their Local Government Area. The waste stream analysis will determine the composition of material in residential waste and recycling bins to identify current levels of resource loss of organics and recyclable materials. This information will be used to inform both existing and future projects in waste minimisation and assist in prioritising focus areas.
Strategy 10: Expanding multi-stakeholder revegetation events.
Project overview: Sarina Landcare Catchment Management Association (SLCMA) are engaging the community, including youth, volunteers, local residents, and local Councils to undertake coastal rehabilitation activities. The activities such as weed control, revegetation and marine debris collection, are focused on improving the on-ground condition and building resilience at Carmila and Grasstree beaches. This project also provides an opportunity to raise community awareness of the importance of having a healthy, resilient coastal zone.
CAP ROADMAPS
Key stakeholders from the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac community have workshopped the 10 priority CAP strategies into ‘roadmaps’. These roadmaps provide more detail on each strategy and provide actions for their implementation as well as their intended results and the values each roadmap seeks to protect.
STRATEGY PRIORITISATION
Following the development of the ten strategies into roadmaps, a final prioritisation process was undertaken to select the most feasible and high impact community-led strategies for presentation in this CAP and for immediate funding.
The prioritisation process factored in four key criteria:
- Alignment. Strategies were scored according to how many regional plans and strategic documents that the project aligned with.
- Readiness to commence. Strategies were scored according to whether locations, project leads and partners, methodology and funding were known.
- Feasibility. Strategies were scored according to their cost, capacity of the lead to deliver the project and the estimated timeframe for achieving outcomes.
- Impact. Strategies were scored according to how directly pressures would be addressed by the project, the spatial scale of the impact, the potential for ongoing/legacy impacts and the potential for community and Traditional Owner engagement.
The combination of the above scores informed the overall prioritisation of strategies. The three most-highly scored community-led strategies were further developed into a Project Prospectus and are summarised below.
DETAIL:In this strategy council and key local organisations work together to identify a key behaviour relating to food waste and work with a local hero to identify and overcome barriers to behaviour change before the program is rolled out to other families and food waste is reduced in the Whitsundays.
DETAIL: In this strategy local school students work with their tuck shop to swap common plastic items for more sustainable options, while simultaneously establishing their own self-funding scheme through the containers for change program. This strategy would be piloted at one school before it is promoted and rolled out to other schools.
DETAIL:This strategy would enable the region wide coordination of citizen science by establishing a citizen science coordinator. The citizen science coordinator would assist existing regional citizen science groups to address key barriers that would enable an increase in their capacity and therefore participation in citizen science.
Linkages with existing strategic documents
The Great Barrier Reef is facing a plethora of pressures at a range of scales, and there are many existing documents governing and informing the management of the marine park. Historically, existing management plans or action plans have been written at a Reef-wide scale and are therefore often too high-level for community-scale actions. The purpose of the CAP is not to supersede these documents or revisit known knowledge but to work with the community to identify which parts of existing documents are prioritised the highest by the local community, and make a plan for implementing localised, community-scale actions to address these high priorities.
Across the five regions developing CAPs, a synthesis of existing local, regional, state and federal plans was delivered. From these documents a list of common values, pressures and strategies was developed (Appendix 1). Importantly, these documents have also assisted with ranking community priorities.
Some of the key documents at a Great Barrier Reef-wide scale include:
- RIMReP Human Dimensions
- Reef Blueprint: Great Barrier Reef Blueprint for Resilience
- Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan
- Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan
A good alignment has been determined between the CAP and the revised Reef 2050 Plan. The strongest areas of alignment reflect the key objective of CAP “to connect communities and enhance for reef protection outcomes through community engagement in planning, implementing, monitoring, and celebrating reef resilience actions.”
Key documents from a regional scale include:
NEXT STEPS
Reef Catchments is committed to supporting CAP project leaders in the implementation of their CAP projects and will continue to take action to progress the strategies that are still seeking funding. This will involve the development and refinement of project prospectus documents. These will be made available to the community to be used by key stakeholders to secure funding for strategy implementation. Community stakeholders are also encouraged to incorporate the priority strategies in relevant future planning processes.
REFERENCES
Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, Queensland Government., Department of the Environment and Energy, Commonwealth Government. (2016). Reef 2050 Plan: policy guideline for decision makers. Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, Queensland Government.
Reef Catchments. (2014). Natural Resource Management Plan Mackay Whitsunday Isaac 2014 - 2024. Mackay: Reef Catchments.
Tourism & Events Queensland. (2020). International Tourism Snapshot - Year ending March 2020.