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People from across northern Australia gather at a
NAILSMA workshop
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Bringing people together who have a common interest in north
Australian land management issues can be a very important part of
creating sustainable solutions in this area. There may be many
people in northern Australia who are concerned about a common
issue, but because they are scattered in remote communities across
the far north of Queensland the NT and WA it is difficult to built
the critical mass of people that can make a difference. One of the
key achievements of the Tropical Savannas CRC has been to
help…
NAILSMA – an alliance of
Indigenous land and sea managers for north Australia
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The NAILSMA website
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In the late 90s, when Indigenous people across north Australia
wanted to meet to discuss land management issues of common
interest, the Tropical Savannas CRC was a convenient forum as it
was one of the few bodies funding NRM research across the north. In
the early 2000s when Indigenous groups wanted to set up a more
formal alliance of the Land Councils centred around Land
Management, the TS-CRC was used as the vehicle to house this
alliance. The CRC supported the North Australian Land and Sea
Management Alliance (NAILSMA) from 2001 to 2009.
In this time NAILSMA has become an important way that Indigenous
people across northern Australia can coordinate efforts to tackle
natural and cultural resource issues including issues around
Indigenous knowledge. It has also allowed them to secure more
control in the way these issues are dealt with.
Some of the initiatives that NAILSMA has undertaken
include:
- A major NAILSMA project that builds management capacity for
dugongs and marine turtles in Indigenous communities in the
Kimberley, Top End of the Northern Territory, Gulf of Carpentaria,
Cape York and the Torres Strait.
- The NAILSMA enterprise development unit continues to work with
Indigenous people across northern Australia, running marketing
workshops and establishing a Bush Trading stall at the Mindil Beach
markets in Darwin.
- Capacity in Indigenous policy is being built through the
Indigenous Water Policy Group which holds regular workshops and
brings Indigenous representatives together with major state and
territory water agencies to discuss water reform.
- A partnership with Bush Heritage Australia has been established
to support the purchase of ecologically and culturally significant
country, to support conservation management on land already owned
and managed by Indigenous people; and to support the participation
of Indigenous people in the management of Bush Heritage
reserves.
- Study assistance at the certificate, diploma and degree levels
in the area of land and sea management has been taken up by over 60
Indigenous students. Leadership workshops for Indigenous land and
sea managers have also been well-attended. An Indigenous business
development unit focused on opportunities in the area of land and
seas management has been established by NAILSMA.
- A Carbon Abatement Project has been established with $9M of
funding from the Federal Government to assist Indigenous people
extend projects modelled on the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement
(WALFA) Project across northern Australia. The WALFA project is
receiving more than $1M dollars a year from the Energy Company
ConocoPhillips to manage wildfire on the Arnhem Land Plateau in
return for the Greenhouse Gas Emission reductions achieved and in
the process is securing jobs and building fire and business
management skills in Indigenous communities.
NAFM – a forum for north
Australian fire Agencies
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The North Australian Fire Managers Forum, run by the
northern fire agencies, brings together fire managers and
researchers
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Managing the vast largely grass-fuelled bushfires that sweep across
northern Australia in the late dry season requires a different
approach to that used to manage the more intense and smaller
bushfires of southern Australia
. Because of this, northern
fire managers often don’t have access to relevant technical
advice. With this is mind, in the late 1990s fire managers from the
northern bushfire agencies decided to set up a North Australia Fire
Manager’s Forum (NAFM) that would be chaired and hosted by
the Tropical Savannas CRC. The idea of the Forum was to bring
together practitioners from the various bushfire agencies and other
groups from across northern Australia together with fire
researchers from across Australia so that the on-ground
practitioners could pick up useful new research applications, the
researchers could be guided by the needs of the practitioners and
everyone could exchange ideas and experiences.
Since the first NAFM forum in 1998,
there have now been 18 at the time of writing (July 2010) and they
are now a regular and valued fixture in the northern fire year. The
meetings rotate between WA, Qld and the NT and are now chaired by
the hosting fire agency.
