The unimproved pastoral rangelands cover three quarters of the surface area of Queensland. In 2018 The Royal Society of Queensland launched a Discussion Paper arguing for the payment of stewardship incentives un-linked to the production of commodities in order to cover the cost of producing uncommercial public goods and ecosystem services from the pastoral estate. This benchmark paper, From Red to Green to Black, available online http://www.royalsocietyqld.org/rural-policy-for-queensland/stewardship-of-pastoral-lands/ , led to the forming of a collaboration between the Society, AgForce representing broadacre rural industry and NRM Regions Queensland representing the 12 regional natural resource management groups. The collaboration commenced with a benchmark symposium in July 2019 followed by publication of a Rangelands Declaration in August 2019, monitoring of an interactive Rangelands Discussion Group with some 700 posts, publication of a special issue of the Society’s Proceedings https://www.royalsocietyqld.org/proceedings-127/ then publication online of six significant Research Summaries of current knowledge.
Material generated prior to September 2020 can be accessed via the Society’s Rural Policy webpage https://www.royalsocietyqld.org/rural-policy-for-queensland/ ; subsequently a new Rangelands Queensland web site was established http://rangelandsqld.org.au/ and this accommodates the Research Summaries http://rangelandsqld.org.au/background-reading/ along with a synthesis Issues Paper.
