The environment is where we all meet; where all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share.
– Lady Bird Johnson
The Driver–Pressure–State–Impact–Response (DPSIR) model used in this report is used almost universally in state of the environment reporting around Australia and in other countries, although in different ways.
The most advanced applications of DPSIR explain how the components of the framework can be considered together to answer questions such as ‘What do changes to biodiversity or air quality mean to our way of life?’ Used in this way, DPSIR can be used to explain the interactions between humans and the environment.
This is important given that the underpinning assumption of most environmental policy, in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Australia, is that we want the relationships between people, the economy and the environment to lead to sustainable use of resources in ways that meet our ethical and moral obligations to other species and maintain a high quality of life for humans. This is borne out in the outcomes of a series of community and expert workshops designed to inform the structure of the 2015 State of the Environment Report.1 These workshops concluded that ACT state of the environment reporting should consider:
- not only what impacts humans have on ecological systems, but also what benefits humans derive from these systems (the concepts of livability and ecosystem services)
- how susceptible coupled socioecological systems might be to shocks, which might mean they could no longer function in ‘desirable’ ways.
This chapter aims to address these considerations by providing indicative and preliminary assessments on:
- livability – a way to assess how attractive the ACT is compared with other places in terms of the perceived quality of life here
- ecosystem services – a way to identify the ways in which the environment provides goods and benefits to people in the ACT, which both support and fulfil our lives
- resilience – a way to consider how well the coupled socioecological systems in the ACT might be able to cope with expected and unexpected pressures and shocks without losing the essential characteristics of those systems.