The National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia’s Biological Diversity, the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development and the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 all provide overarching objectives for the conservation and management of biodiversity. However, the range of historical impacts on biodiversity and the need for on-going sustainable use of natural resources, mean that it is neither feasible nor necessary for these objectives to be met at every locality or continually in particular localities. Many biodiversity values are common and widespread, and many are relatively robust and can recover from a range of impacts. It is therefore appropriate to express the intent of the objectives in practical goals that can provide scaled reference points against which to plan and measure the overall effectiveness of on-ground management actions. Each goal can be linked to performance indicators within all bioregions.

The goals for biodiversity management are to ensure that within Victoria:

• there is a reversal, across the entire landscape, of the long-term decline in the extent and quality of native vegetation, leading to a net gain with the first target being no net loss by the year 2000;
• the ecological processes and the biodiversity dependent upon terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments are maintained and, where necessary, restored;
• the present diversity of species and ecological communities and their viability is maintained or improved across each bioregion;
• there is no further preventable decline in the viability of any rare species or of any rare ecological community;
• there is an increase in the viability of threatened species and in the extent and quality of threatened ecological communities.

Attributes that define the condition of natural vegetation, or any ecological community, include the proportion of species remaining of the original complement and the persistence of the structural complexity of the vegetation. Removing components of habitat on land or in water eliminates a proportion of the biodiversity, and, as ecosystems are linked decreases the naturalness, to varying degrees, of entire ecosystems.

If that habitat is not irretrievably damaged, then the condition of an ecological community can be gradually restored following appropriate management intervention. The viability of species and communities is influenced by a range of attributes, including their ecological characteristics, quality, abundance, extent of occurrence, genetic diversity, broad distribution (which promotes risk spreading against chance events), linkages between other populations, and tolerance to various impacts in space and time.

‘Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act’ 1988 Objectives

The flora and fauna conservation and management objectives are:

• to guarantee that all taxa of Victoria’s flora and fauna other than the taxa listed in Schedule 1 can survive, flourish and retain their potential for evolutionary development in the wild;
• to conserve Victoria’s communities of flora and fauna;
• to manage potentially threatening processes;
• to ensure that any use of flora or fauna by humans is sustainable;
• to ensure that the genetic diversity of flora and fauna is maintained;
• to provide programs:
  • of community education in the conservation of flora and fauna;
  • that encourage cooperative management of flora and fauna through, amongst other things, the entering into of land management cooperative agreements under the Conservation, Forests and Lands Act 1987;
  • that assist and give incentives to people, including landholders, to enable flora and fauna to be conserved;
• to encourage the conserving of flora and fauna through cooperative community endeavours.