Integrating economic values and catchment modelling

Integrated catchment policies are widely used to manage natural resources in Australian catchments.Decision support tools available to aid integrated catchment management are often limited in theirintegration of environmental processes with socio-economic systems. Fully integrated models arerequired to support assessments of the environmental and economic trade-offs of catchmentmanagement changes. A Bayesian Network (BN) model is demonstrated to provide a suitableapproach to integrate environmental modelling with economic valuation. The model incorporateshydrological, ecological and economic models for the George catchment in Tasmania. Informationabout the non-market costs and benefits of environmental changes is elicited using ChoiceExperiments, allowing an assessment of the efficiency of alternative management scenarios.