Daly River Catchment Conservation Plan

Principles

The following principles have been developed to help guide the development and direction of a Conservation Plan for the Daly River Catchment.

Collaboration to develop and implement the Plan

1. The plan will be developed collaboratively with appropriate consultation and involvement of affected interests.
2. Management should aim to involve collaboration across the region, and address both localised and region-wide threats.

Planning and procedural issues

3. The plan should be consistent with broader national and Northern Territory policies, and other strategies.
4. The plan should complement and interlink with planning processes relating to water use and land clearing.
5. The outcomes of the plan should be measurable, providing indicators that can assess the plan’s performance over time.
6. The plan should include a mix of different conservation initiatives, including the establishment (and management) of new conservation reserves, conservation covenants, environmental offsets and other incentive mechanisms.

Ecological issues

7. The plan should make sure that the natural character of the region is maintained, ensuring that ecological processes are sustained and conservation assets are conserved with no loss of species or ecological communities at a regional scale.
8. The plan should ensure that the catchment’s environmental variation and range of biodiversity is well represented in protected areas and other lands managed primarily for conservation.
9. The plan should consider environmental values of cultural significance.
10. The plan should provide mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions where possible.

Management issues

11. The plan should not aim solely at resolving current issues, but also aim to consider the challenges of the future.
12. All landholders (including Government) should contribute to environmental outcomes and recognise a duty of care for environmental sustainability.
13. Landholders and land managers (including Government agencies) are accountable to their neighbours for the impact of their actions both inside and outside of their boundaries.
14. Land use should be sustainable and commensurate with land capability.
15. The extent and location of land clearing should be managed strategically, using explicit and transparent guidelines and with full consideration of environmental impacts (including hydrological and off-site impacts).
16. Management should be adaptive and precautionary in its approach. Monitoring should be applied at local and regional scales to detect and intercept, where possible, adverse changes - providing sufficient time for adaptive management
    
    

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