Australia’s biodiversity underpins its economy and the communities that depend on it. Economics makes that value visible and something decision-makers can act on.
We help clients value biodiversity, design environmental markets, assess biodiversity offsets, evaluate natural capital and make evidence-based decisions. Our work combines economic modelling, policy analysis, cost-benefit analysis and market design to support decisions that need to withstand regulatory, legal and public scrutiny.
We are regularly asked to step into complex policy and legal debates. We provide the analysis and the data that let governments and businesses assess trade-offs and decide on the evidence. This has included building the methodology behind Australia’s national offset scheme, and designing the market rules, valuations and integrity tests that governments, courts and investors rely on.
Every sector depends on natural systems, yet responsibility for protecting them is spread thinly between governments, landholders, and business. Unlike carbon, which has decades of frameworks and markets behind it, biodiversity markets are still developing.
That makes decision-making harder. Risks differ by region and ecological community, and the trade-offs between conservation, development, and funding are rarely straightforward. We give these decisions structure, using economic tools to weigh trade-offs and model scenarios where the outcome is uncertain.
For more than 20 years we have shown how nature can be valued and financed, and turned contested environmental questions into decisions that hold up to scrutiny.
Our clients face challenges at the intersection of economics, law, and policy, and need clarity on risks they carry and obligations they owe. The questions we answer include:
We advise clients across sectors, including:
We advise on biodiversity offset policy, pricing and methodology design, nature market and biodiversity credit design, and carbon and biodiversity project stacking. We also deliver natural capital and ecosystem valuation, environmental cost-benefit analysis, biosecurity economics, private land conservation incentives, ESG and nature-related disclosure, and environmental policy and program evaluation.
• Designed Australia's Commonwealth Restoration Contributions Calculator, covering offset contributions for around 2,000 protected matters
• Rebuilt offset contribution methodologies across three jurisdictions: Western Australia's Pilbara Environmental Offsets Fund and Part V Fund, and Queensland's Financial Settlement Offset Calculator
• Delivered a probabilistic cost estimate for a 5,000+ hectare program under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, setting out costs at 50%, 75% and 90% confidence so government could test whether long-term funding was adequate
• Advised on methodologies for attributing offset outcomes to multiple environmental obligations, apportioning benefits across species, approvals and time so that no gain is counted twice
• Advised the NSW Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal on the structure and efficiency of the biodiversity credits market, recommending integrity settings and pricing measures to cut transaction costs, which informed IPART's published market monitoring report
• Advised government on the integrity and carbon leakage risks that arise when carbon and biodiversity projects are stacked on the same land, and analysed how Australia's Nature Repair Market interacts with carbon markets and offsets
• Compared nature-based Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) methods for a major agricultural client and modelled ACCU prices to 2050 to test the durability of nature-based premiums
• Valued the ecosystem and social services of Sydney's Western Parkland City for the Western Sydney Planning Partnership
• Built the strategic options business case for Infrastructure NSW that led Infrastructure Australia to designate the city's blue-green infrastructure a national priority initiative
• Evaluated the economic, social and environmental costs and benefits of increasing water availability in the Murrumbidgee River
• Established TNFD-aligned climate and nature risk baselines for major corporate and property portfolios, and designed a state government's ESG reporting framework for bond issuance
• Forecast ACCU prices and nature-based premiums to guide investment decisions by a nature-focused fund
• Created the framework the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust uses to measure and report the socio-economic benefits of private land conservation, now published by the BCT
• Designed incentive structures rewarding private landholders for conserving biodiversity in multiple states, and assessed how conservation payments compete with alternative land uses
• Analysed the market, regional employment and fiscal effects of a transition away from native forest harvesting for WWF-Australia, and quantified the emissions consequences in our published work with Prof Andrew Macintosh, which found that ceasing logging in southern NSW would cut net emissions by 0.95 million tonnes CO₂-e a year
| • Prepared the business cases for the NSW Satellite Imagery Hub and Wildlife Drone Hub, and an investment strategy to map all 110 listed threatened ecological communities in NSW • Estimated for the Invasive Species Council that feral deer cost Tasmania's Midlands and eastern regions more than $53 million a year, and close to $1.4 billion over 30 years without stronger action • Applied cost-benefit analysis to feral horse control in Kosciuszko National Park and the case for maintaining the NSW Border Fence |
Biodiversity questions rarely sit inside one discipline. The economics depends on ecological judgements about what a site can recover, and on legal judgements about what a regulator will accept. We build teams around the question. We partner with:
Together, these perspectives mean our recommendations hold up when a regulator or a court tests them.
Our biodiversity work sits within our broader environmental economics practice, and we regularly connect it with related areas, including:
We publish our analysis so it can be tested. Read our most recent case studies and articles below.
Biodiversity sits outside traditional markets, so its value is easily overlooked when decisions get made. Economics puts a number on what ecosystems provide and on what their loss costs, which lets nature be weighed against the financial and social factors already in the decision rather than treated as a separate consideration.
Offsets and nature markets only function if the settings behind them are sound. Economics determines whether contributions and prices are sufficient to deliver the outcome, whether gains are genuinely additional, and whether a scheme can meet its obligations over the decades an offset must last. Get the settings wrong and the market either fails to attract participants or delivers less than it promises.
Contested decisions usually turn on disputed evidence and long time horizons. Economic analysis makes the trade-offs explicit and the assumptions visible, so a decision can be defended on its reasoning rather than asserted. It also gives parties who disagree a common evidence base to argue from, which narrows the dispute to the points that genuinely matter.
We are independent economists, not market participants. We do not develop projects, issue credits or hold positions in the markets we assess, so our findings are not shaped by a commercial interest in the outcome. We also build teams around the question rather than the discipline, bringing in ecologists, lawyers and technical specialists where the economics depends on their judgement.
Governments and regulators designing offset and nature market policy, mining, energy and infrastructure proponents managing offset liabilities across Commonwealth and state approvals, investors and corporates on nature-related risk and disclosure, courts and legal teams on the integrity of carbon and biodiversity credits, and NGOs, conservation organisations and landholders on funding biodiversity outcomes.
Cost-benefit analysis, probabilistic cost estimation, market design and pricing, non-market valuation, natural capital accounting, environmental policy and program evaluation, and business cases. We work across the full question, from establishing what an environmental outcome is worth, through to what it will cost to deliver and who should pay for it.
If you are making decisions about biodiversity offsets, natural capital valuation, nature markets or environmental policy, our environmental economics team can help you test the evidence, understand the trade-offs and design options that stand up to scrutiny.
