Natural resources management is a multi-faceted discipline. It requires knowledge of the type, quantity and location of our existing natural resources, and information about how these resources are being utilized and impacted upon by human and other natural processes, whether these impacts are bene®cial or detrimental and, ®nally, whether the impacts are reversible or have a permanent eect. Decision-makers need not only the snapshot view, but also a means to assess impact over time as land use and land-use practice change.
This paper examines a methodology established to examine natural resource usage and the impacts of such usage in an integrated and repeatable fashion. Its heart is in ecological economics ± a discipline which, among other things, seeks to combine economic and ecological models. The methodology was trialled initially by using it to estimate the rates of sheet and rill erosion in New South Wales, using the State-wide Resource Information and Accounting System (SRIAS), and loss hazard is estimated in physical and economic terms. The system facilitates the examination of costs to society and individuals of changes in land use and land-use practice.
New estimates for the parameters of the universal soil loss equation (USLE) are derived and then mapped for the state of New South Wales. The approach is at a much ®ner scale than has previously been attempted. When the map of hazard of soil loss is compared with earlier maps, the physical hazard is signi®cantly higher in the north of the state.
Translation of the physical data into an economic perspective adds a new dimension to the information available to decision makers. Organization of data in this manner oers a signi®cant opportunity to improve the cost-eectiveness of resource management. The paper reveals that failure to account for economic as well as physical rates of land degradation is likely to result in inappropriate decisions.