Contribution of ‘sustainability’ criteria to social perceptions of land use options

With relatively minor exceptions, the process of land use change is one of intensification and the narrowing of future land use options. This has led to community concern for the gradual irrecoverable loss of values associated with less intensive land uses; in particular, concern for the availability and functional capacity of biodiversity, earth materials, water and air. Concern extends to the functionality of these resources in industrial, amenity and service roles. Such losses, called, inter alia , environmental costs, are never wholly avoidable despite the hopes behind the sustainable development concept. What is realistically possible is conservative development , meaning that land uses with environmental costs exceeding the economic net benefits would be proscribed as options, through the application of extant and emerging social technologies such as land use zoning, environmental standards and environmental impact assessment. This paper presents some general and some more specific ideas about land uses susceptible to proscription under the conservative development criterion. Most major land uses stand to be challenged to a degree, particularly in densely populated areas, regions of economic opportunity and/or in regions recognized as having a high conservation value. Proposals involving a leap in intensification or loss of remnant or old‐established land uses will be more liable to assessment for proscription. Several regions are identified where joint assessment for exclusion across members of a suite of land uses would not be surprising (e.g. the Kimberleys); also some regions and situations where particular land uses stand to be challenged, e.g. irrigated cotton, high country developments and integrated forest harvesting. Rather than list intensification trends at length and predict which challenges to intensification might succeed, this paper discusses the prospects for development of social technologies which evaluate community concerns about the environmental costs of land use intensification. It is suggested that a blending of the existing procedures of the Resource Assessment Commission for regional resource inventory and evaluation and the existing resource allocation procedures of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority would form a highly defensible core for a new generation of option‐defining technologies. The social importance of having a rich suite of social technologies for addressing intensification issues is emphasized.