The Discussion Paper From Red to Green to Black unpicks ‘sustainability’ in Queensland’s rangelands – the unimproved land used primarily for grazing sheep and cattle. It proposes a remedy for financial distress and unsustainable landscape management. The paper was a submission to The Royal Society of Queensland and was presented at a forum in Brisbane in May 2018, and this in turn led to the signature “Rangelands Policy Dialogue” event on 1,2 July 2019. The proceedings of that event were web-published on the website of the Society. Many of the papers were peer-reviewed then published as volume 127 of the Proceedings of The Royal Society of Queensland. The forum also produced a Rangelands Declaration.
In 2020 a new website was established: Rangelands Queensland, with the expectation that Rangelands policy analysis would evolve from being an initiative hosted by the Royal Society to a broadly based initiative energised by a new multilateral Rangelands Consultative Council. However, requests by the Society for funding from those bodies with independent funding capability went unheeded, other than a grant of $6000 from NRM Regions Queensland to remunerate authors of some of the research papers now appearing on the Rangelands Queensland website.
In 2021 a series of three webinars was organised by the Royal Societies of Australia: “Stewardship of Country“. Some of the papers from the three RSA webinars have been published as volume 133 (1) of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.
On 13 November 2023 at a meeting in Canberra, the Royal Societies of Australia endorsed a proposal to take the Rangelands Policy analysis national as a Landscape and Seascape Policy Hub. At the date of completing this post (26 Nov. 2023), this initiative also remains unfunded.