Increasingly planners are realising that they need to take account of the way different sectors interact within regions — the dynamic nature of regions. For example, a new railway will have flow on effects on road transport, tourism, mining and many other sectors. New developments will also affect areas like the environment and human health that may be hard to measure in financial terms. Tools that would allow planners to better take account of the dynamic nature of regions would be very useful.

There are two reports (each also has a summary as well) available to download from this page; both are the result of CRC research into developing tools for planners.

1. Report on the Regional Dynamics Scoping Study (separate summary also available)
2. Predicting regional and landscape dynamics in Australian Savannas — Economic Dimensions. (separate summary also available) 

Options for understanding regional dynamics in northern Australia

Mark Stafford Smith, Daniel Walker, Yiheyis Maru, Natalie Stoeckl, Alexander Herr, Joseph Breen and Romy Greiner.

This report emerged from the Tropical Savannas CRC Regional Dynamics Scoping Study in 2002-03. It is available as a full report that can be downloaded as a PDF at right.

This document summarises the full project report. It aims to be a stand-alone resource that can be used as an agenda or background paper for subsequent decision-making. To this end, it draws on the full report to (i) briefly recapitulate the reasons why one might want to consider regions as systems and study their dynamics, and (ii) re-state what features might need particular focus in such a study of savanna (or indeed any ‘outback’) regions; it then (iii) outlines some key research areas that could contribute to this study, and discusses how these might be taken forward.

Predicting regional and landscape dynamics in Australian Savannas —Economic Dimensions

Natalie Stoeckl and Owen Stanley

This document summarises the key findings on choosing or developing economic models for savanna communities that can simulate the effect (on the environment, on regional communities and on the savanna economies) of specific changes or shocks to the system. The study defines the criteria for useful savannas models, and examines promising modelling approaches, outlining positives and negatives.

This reasearch was undertaken by the authors as part of a much larger CRC project, Multiple use in savanna regions , (web link below).