Final Report on the Status of the Social, Cultural (Sense of place) and Economic Components for the Gladstone Harbour 2018 Report Card

Field: Environmental Science (Physical Sciences)

The Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership is one of the early pioneers to apply socio-economic considerations in an aquatic health report card, particularly in Australia. Report cards have become an increasingly popular tool to measure and record changes in ecosystem health over time. The main objective is to assist in environmental management and decision-making. While the inclusion of bio-physical indicators in aquatic report cards is well-established, the inclusion of social, cultural and economic indicators is less common. The challenge of assessing and reporting socio-economic indicators in a uniform and simplistic manner has limited their inclusion in aquatic health report cards. The initial report card for Gladstone Harbour was piloted in 2014 and incorporated environmental, social, cultural and economic objectives. The aim of this project is to generate report card scores and grades for the Social, Cultural (‘Sense of place’) and Economic components of the Gladstone Healthy Harbour 2016 Report Card. The same methodology as applied in previous years is repeated again for this year. Full details or the methodology applied to assess the scores and grades are outlined in the 2014 (Pascoe et al. 2014)and 2015 (Cannard et al. 2015) report cards and the information is not repeated again in this report. The Gladstone Healthy Harbour Report Card is now in its third year of production and it is possible to start identifying some trends and changes over time. The longitudinal results are allowing the report cards to become an even more meaningful management tool. \nAssessment and analysis\nThe Gladstone Healthy Harbour Report Card comprises five levels of assessment. In this report, the results (scores and grades) are presented for the Social, Cultural (Sense of place) and Economic components (2nd level) along with their constituent indicator groups (3rd level), indicators (4th level) and measures (5th level). Scores are classified into five (A-E) grades. Baseline data, used to calculate the scores for the indicator measures, is collected from both primary and secondary sources. Primary data are collected in an annual community questionnaire survey of 401 respondents and secondary data are obtained from a range of regularly updated, publically available sources. In order to establish the relationship between the measures, indicators and indicator groups, a system of weights (derived in 2014) is applied. Each element is weighted to reflect its relative importance as a management objective. To aggregate the scores for the measures into indicator scores,indicator groups and components, a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) is used. This model is able to provide a probability of an outcome rather than to produce a deterministic outcome. From the conditional probability distributions, a mean (expected) outcome and confidence interval can be determined. The numerical score is based on the weighted average of the A-E values in the distribution of outcomes. A separate BBN is developed for each component. Full methods are described in Pascoe et al. (2014).For the first time, this year there is an automated process of data analysis to estimate the scores and grades for the report card. The transition from manual to automated data analysis has revealed some anomalies in 2015 data sets and data analysis. Where applicable these have been noted in the report and details are outlined in the recommendations (Appendix E). The most notable of these relates to the Commercial fishing indicator and concerns are identified with the results for both 2015 and 2016.