Speaker

Keith Bradby OAM - Chief Executive Officer at Gondwana Link

Achieving Quality Restoration at Scale - lessons from south-western Australia

What the world needs now, apart from ‘love, sweet love’, is transformative land-use change across its many damaged landscapes. The sad reality is that few places can demonstrate improving trends in overall ecological health, wildlife persistence or the capacity of land to continue supporting our need for food and fabric.

Current downhill trends can only be expected to accelerate as global warming bites deeper. As in so many places, those of us working across the Gondwana Link landscape are trying to reverse that downhill trend, and hope we have learnt some key elements of success, and what to avoid, along the way.

It’s a big list, ranging from organisational arrangements and learning from First Nations culture through to the where, what and how of undertaking restoration plantings on the ground. Key characteristics include being ambitious, tenacious, focused, empathetic and flexible, as well as getting on with doing the obvious.

Keith is a long-time advocate for the ecological values of south-western Australia and the strength of grass roots work. As a community based activist in the early 1980s he helped halt the clearing of some 3 million hectares of public land for marginal agriculture and as a concerned local was involved with establishing some of Australia’s earliest landcare groups and Australia’s first activated Biosphere Reserve program. 
Read more about Keith here.

Direct seeding 100-120 species at 20-25ha per day

Three years after direct seeding