As a society, we are faced with mounting challenges that impact on our sense of wellbeing, and optimism for the future. Our busy though ad-hoc approach to managing the challenges of today, leave us with limited headspace to make the big, future leaning decisions that are desperately needed.

The most important decisions we, as a society, need to start making are on behalf of the environment, the one thing our very existence depends on. We need to ask ourselves, is it okay to preside over the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, the ecological Ponzi scheme – where we are all benefiting at the expense of future generations and the environment?

We know it’s not okay, we know we need to do better, and we want to do better but doing better is hard when we don’t have the levers in place to enable a shared responsibilities approach that changes the trajectory we are on.

On the upside, it is not too late, we can change the trajectory we are on! Well-placed individuals and organisations can work better together to establish a cohesive agenda for restoring the ecosystems we depend on, and engage better with the broader community, so they are better placed to embrace, vote and act on meaningful change.

How do we work better together? Collective Impact! – An intentional way of individuals and organisations working together, to identify and act on system changing interventions – The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (Aristotle).

The approach includes establishing an overarching shared purpose, agreeing on key indicators of change and how to measure them, and integrating where appropriate existing/new interventions. Then, as a collective, start measuring and sharing information to track and demonstrate progress towards landscape scale impact.

With support from a Lotterywest grant, we have been trialling the Collective Impact approach with the ‘A collective Impact approach to restoring natural capital in the farming landscape’ project, and it works. For this project, the term ‘farming landscape’ is a catchall that includes farmers, productive land, marginal and degraded land, regional communities, infrastructure, and what is left of the natural environment that resides on & between farms throughout our Southwest.

This project stemmed from the need to address a fundamental challenge to the future of farming in Western Australia; We farm in an ancient landscape with nutrient depleted soils and our farming practices have accelerated the draw-down of the remaining soil nutrients and other natural capital in the landscape. With the business-as-usual approach, the draw-down rate is far greater than what is returned through natural processes, and future generations will not have viable access to the natural capital needed to produce food and fibre.

The project has involved farmers, grower group representatives, landcare leaders, Noongar leaders, NRM organisations and government agencies (DPIRD, DWER & CSIRO). Participants have established a Vision (A healthy, resilient landscape enabling productive land use and stewardship), and a Purpose (As custodians, we collectively drive awareness and action that builds natural and social capital that is valued by all).

Participants at the metro and regional workshops have commented that this approach will help reduce duplication of effort and enable better use of limited funding. They also agreed that collectively, we have solutions, we just need to work better together to create the change that’s needed, and this collective impact approach provides a pathway to doing that.

As a scalable opportunity, learnings from this project can go towards establishing an inclusive and cohesive statewide agenda for ecosystem restoration, an approach that enables cohesion between stakeholders, optimises investment and actions, and generates a positive impact for future generations,
and the environment.

We can’t keep kicking this challenge down the road for the next generation, we can, and we need to establish an inclusive and cohesive Statewide agenda for ecosystem restoration. As a final thought, this depiction by Jonann Mayr is probably a better reflection of what I have been writing about and reminds me of the adage; A picture is worth a thousand words! For more information on the collective impact project, please Google; Perth NRM collective impact.