Monitoring Trends in Biodiversity

The following pages guide you through key pieces of work which we use to measure and report change in biodiversity over time across Victoria.

Net Gain Accounting Update

A key outcome of Victoria’s Biodiversity Strategy is to achieve a Net Gain in the overall extent and condition of habitats across land, aquatic and marine environments by 2037.

The Net Gain Update provides an insight into what activities influence native vegetation cover across Victoria. A summary of results is shown below with a breakdown of major sources of gain and loss provided in the below report.

• As of 2020, most gains come from government programs on public land
• Most losses are as a result of entitled uses, exemptions and insufficient management of threats on private land
  • Entitled uses (e.g. grazing, removal of trees/ fallen logs for personal use), unmanaged threats beyond legislative obligations (e.g. environmental weeds) or clearing that is exempt from requiring a permit (e.g. fences, fire protection).
• Gain and loss consider voluntary actions on private land but was unable to include counterbalance activity on public land this year due to insufficient data quality

We are continuing to undertake a number of actions to combat this current rate of loss. You can see how we are delivering on our commitment to restoring nature here: Implementing Biodiversity 2037.

Overall 2020 position: -6,660 Habitat Hectares/ year    

Habitat Hectares as a metric reflects that we consider not only the area of land cleared or restored, but improvement or degradation in the quality of native vegetation- measured through its ability to function as habitat and contribute to biodiversity.

2020 Net Gain Accounting Qualitative Update (PDF)

2020 Net Gain Accounting Qualitative Update (DOCX)