This is Oswin Roberts Reserve (ORR) on Phillip Island (Millowl).
Oswin Roberts Reserve on Phillip Island (Millowl).
It is one of few remnant woodlands left on the Island and is managed by Phillip Island Nature Parks. Many people understand the intrinsic value of conserving landscapes like this for wildlife preservation, biological diversity, and for the enjoyment of people. But for those who are skeptical of those management objectives, there is a very real financial value to places like this, and it’s not in terms of timber production, grazing value or other conventional industry practices. It is biodiversity and carbon storage.
In Victoria, if you remove native vegetation you are required to ‘offset’ that vegetation to compensate for the loss in biodiversity value (Native Vegetation Regulations 2017). There is a complicated process for calculating those offsets and there is even a trading system in place for offset ‘credits’ where people with abundant bushland can sell the credits to those who need to remove native vegetation. Therefore, biodiversity has a very real value in this context and it can be estimated. Previous credit trades are recorded by the State Government (DEECA, formerly DELWP) so we can look these up for our area. These are not theoretical, they are actual trade prices. Doing a back of the envelope calculation we can estimate that to remove a hectare of vegetation in ORR it would cost about $122,936 in offsets (0.895 general habitat units, minimum strategic biodiversity score 0.789, Port Phillip and Westernport CMA, June 2018 to present, values over $1M excluded). This is without considering species specific offsets or large trees that are also a component of these regulations and would add additional value to this estimate.
But this is just biodiversity. Does it have any other value? Well, yes. I’m glad I asked myself that …
This woodland stores a lot of carbon. Not as much as the wet forests in other parts of the state, but let's say 50 tonnes per hectare (for comparison, many forests in Victoria store somewhere around 150 tonnes per hectare, with the Mountain Ash forests in the central highlands storing about 1,867 tonnes per hectare) (Valuing Victoria’s Parks, 2015). Let’s ballpark this and say that ORR is about 185 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e). Using a market value of $15 per tonne of CO2-e, that is a further $2,775 per hectare based on carbon pricing.
Let’s say ORR is about 100 hectares in size (it is close to that). This places the overall (back of the envelope, extremely rough, food for thought) value from those two elements of that woodland at over $12.5M. That is, if the full 100 hectares of native vegetation was removed, we would be losing at least that amount of ecosystem value based on today's estimation of those two measures. There are many other measures of the value of natural systems too, these are just those that are at the forefront of conservation in Victoria at the moment. So next time you are in a 100 hectare patch of woodland, imagine yourself walking through a $12.5M mansion, because that’s what it is.