Securing the future of the Gippsland Lakes

Estuaries provide us with a suite of resources, benefits and services providing critical habitat in parallel with sites for public infrastructure. They are among the most productive environments on Earth.

Australia possesses a wide variety of estuarine types exhibiting a wide range of physico-chemical conditions, some are less than a square kilometre in area. Each faces compound threats to their ecological condition assets through poor catchment management. Human settlements are frequently located on estuaries as they provide transport access, food and other resources for development. Evidence of poorly regulated development is manifest in historical instances of fish kills due to reduced freshwater flows and unregulated pesticide use highlighting the longstanding challenges in balancing public and private interests in estuarine management. Sydney Harbour, for example, continues to grapple with the consequences of industrial pollution, impacting commercial fishing. As climate change intensifies, these challenges will multiply, endangering significant estuaries like the Gippsland Lakes.

The Gippsland Lakes comprise the largest estuarine lagoon system on the Australian continent and the largest coastal wetland complex in southeastern Australia, encompassing linked and isolated lagoons, swamps, active and abandoned river and tidal channels within the Gippsland Basin. The Lakes are 1 of 12 wetland systems in Victoria currently listed under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an international agreement for the conservation of wetlands. The Lakes have been listed as a Ramsar site since 1982, covering over 600 km². Once the entire terrestrial catchment area is taken into consideration, the area of concern takes in 20,000 km².

A comprehensive natural capital accounting programme should be undertaken for the Gippsland Lakes to facilitate improved future decision-making and consistent monitoring of both conditions and outcomes over time. The Australian Government has undertaken such assessments of the Murray-Darling Basin and other regional ecosystems in recent years.¹

Roundtable on the future of the Gippsland Lakes

In May 2023 The Royal Society of Victoria convened a roundtable discussion of scholars and catchment managers to consider the Victorian Government’s review of the Gippsland Lakes Ramsar Site Management Plan over the course of 2023–2024. The roundtable presenters and participants reviewed a range of concerns, and provided an evidence base in support of these concerns with the intention of conveying these for consideration of informed actions by decision makers. This resulted in the compilation of a presentation program, a series of abstracts (provided as Attachment A in the report ‘Securing the Future of the Gippsland Lakes’) with further papers commissioned and presented in this collection of papers of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria in 2024.