Project ISP005-2016: Final Report on the Status of the Social, Cultural (Sense of place) and Economic Components for the Gladstone Harbour 2016 Report Card

The Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership is one of the early pioneers to apply socio-economic considerations in an aquatic health report card, particularly in Australia. Report cards have become an increasingly popular tool to measure and record changes in ecosystem health over time. The main objective is to assist in environmental management and decision-making. While the inclusion of bio-physical indicators in aquatic report cards is well-established, the inclusion of social, cultural and economic indicators is less common. The challenge of assessing and reporting socio-economic indicators in a uniform and simplistic manner has limited their inclusion in aquatic health report cards. The initial report card for Gladstone Harbour was piloted in 2014 and incorporated environmental, social, cultural and economic objectives. The aim of this project is to generate report card scores and grades for the Social, Cultural (‘Sense of place’) and Economic components of the Gladstone Healthy Harbour 2016 Report Card. The same methodology as applied in previous years is repeated again for this year. Full details or the methodology applied to assess the scores and grades are outlined in the 2014 (Pascoe et al. 2014) and 2015 (Cannard et al. 2015) report cards and the information is not repeated again in this report. The Gladstone Healthy Harbour Report Card is now in its third year of production and it is possible to start identifying some trends and changes over time. The longitudinal results are allowing the report cards to become an even more meaningful management tool. Further information is available from http://ghhp.org.au/report-cards/2016 .