Land-use Policy in Australia: Assessing Trade-offs Among Agricultural Profitability, Environmental Protection and Social Equity

Abstract

Australia’s land-use policy faces a persistent, increasingly complex challenge: reconciling agriculture’s economic importance with the urgent need to conserve biodiversity and deliver socially equitable outcomes. Agriculture is both the nation’s largest land user, occupying 57.1% of the land, and the largest consumer of national fresh water, 68.3% of it. It is a critical source of domestic food supply, export income and regional livelihoods, while biodiversity decline, habitat fragmentation and ecosystem degradation continue to intensify across many landscapes. As the nation’s dominant land user, agriculture sits at the centre of debates over food production and security, rural livelihoods, environmental decline and competing claims on land use.

This paper argues that trade-offs in Australian land-use policy should be assessed using an integrated framework centred on three interdependent objectives: sustaining food security and farm profitability, protecting environmental assets and advancing social equity. The paper builds on the concept of land as natural capital, emphasising that agricultural productivity and human wellbeing depend on the maintenance of ecological systems rather than their depletion. The Global Farm Metric Framework is used as a practical guide for evaluating land-use decisions through a whole-of-farm and whole-of-landscape lens, incorporating environmental, economic and social indicators rather than privileging single metrics such as agricultural output or short-term profit.

Rather than framing agriculture and biodiversity conservation as opposing goals, the paper proposes a policy approach that treats food production, environmental stewardship and social justice as mutually supportive components of long-term national wellbeing. To better align with land managers’ preferences and enhance policy effectiveness and acceptability, we also advocate using multicriteria decision-making rather than relying solely on gross output value or farm profit. The decisions and trade-offs in agriculture in Australia should be assessed using three sustainability pillars: • Economic: generating profits while ensuring food security, productive capacity and supply stability; • Environmental protection: ecology and biodiversity, soil, water and emissions; • Social equity: regional livelihoods, community participation and fair distribution of costs and benefits.

The proposed sustainability pillars and how they may be measured will be put forward to help policymakers present more balanced arguments about the impact of changes in land-use policy. In this way, the policy outcome concepts can be explained to those affected in more tangible ways.