Modeling environmental risk and land management trade-offs in the Great Barrier Reef catchment

We develop a catchment scale modeling framework to identify cost-effective strategies
for joint onsite abatement and offsite mitigation of land-based pollution from
agricultural activities that pose a risk to water quality in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).
An illustrative example of the Barron catchment in north Queensland is used to
demonstrate an approach to specify social planner’'s problem for non-point source
pollution management as a cost minimisation model to meet a specified reduction in
land-based pollution emissions at the receiving waters of GBR. We focus on the
tradeoffs between onsite pollution control and offsite pollution mitigation under a
collective contract for nutrient reduction at a sub-catchment level and discuss
implementation options.