Assessing environmental regulatory arrangements for aquaculture
Assessing environmental regulatory arrangements for aquaculture
Commission research paper
This paper was released on 10 February 2004. The paper reviews existing planning and environmental regulatory arrangements for aquaculture in Australia. It reveals significant differences in the way that aquaculture is regulated and administered across states.
The regulations and their jurisdictional differences have implications for both the management of aquaculture and the efficiency of resource allocation.
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Assessing Environmental Regulatory Arrangements for Aquaculture (ZIP 663.4 KB)The aquaculture industry is diverse and each sector has different potential environmental impacts of varying degrees of significance.
Aquaculture production is subject to an unnecessarily complex array of legislation and agencies — covering marine and coastal management, environmental management, land use planning, land tenure, and quarantine and translocation.
State aquaculture and/or fisheries legislation have multiple objectives and these are not always clearly defined. The objectives may overlap or conflict, and there is often a lack of guidance as to the relative weights to be placed on each objective.
State government departments primarily responsible for aquaculture regulatory arrangements often have potentially conflicting functions of policy development, implementation of regulation, industry promotion and development, and research.
New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia have made limited progress with marine aquaculture planning. This may constrain marine aquaculture, or result in ad hoc approvals for individual sites, and conflicts over resource use.
In most jurisdictions, there are complex approval processes. Obtaining required approvals can take significant time. There would appear to be scope to rationalise the number of approvals, coordinate approval processes, and incorporate statutory timeframes for assessing approvals.
Increased efficiency and effectiveness of regulatory arrangements for aquaculture could be obtained from greater use of environmental risk assessment based on species, production system, management practices, site location and the condition of the environment.
There is potential for greater use of innovative policy instruments to complement (or in some cases replace) existing regulatory and administrative controls. For example, auctions could be used to allocate leases of public land or water, and tradeable permits could be used to manage pollution discharges.
