What does Restore the Bay mean for me and my community?

If you haven’t already engaged with Restore the Bay, you might want to consider joining one of our upcoming workshops. If you have joined one already, will you help us in our last sprint on 21 June??

Why should I get involved in this program?

You might feel that this program is slow to begin and can’t see the outcomes clearly for your group or interests. That’s hardly surprising as there is a lot that has never been done before. The chances are, you’ve never experienced a methdology like this. That’s not surprising either. There are very few people in the world who know how to create long-term, positive and self-sustaining conservation outcomes … we happen to have them in our community and Restore the Bay is your chance to immerse yourself in a new approach.

If you care about the Bay or are part of any group trying to protect your values, we cannot stress strongly enough, your participation in this program is essential to your own campaigns.

Our methodology is summed up in the following introduction from a recent workshop.

What has never been done before?

Setting the groundwork takes time. To identify effective nature-based actions that will create sustainable and measurable outcomes:

• We have to measure our cultural connection with the Bay’s ecosystems (which has never been done);

• By creating conversations among our community about the values we all share (which has never been done);

• Place this information into a decision tool that can identify the optimal range of actions to benefit the majority of values (which has never been done);

• To create a Community Stewardship Plan that is both ecological viable and socially prioritised (which has never been done).

Cultural Ecosystem Services

There are a set of ecosystem services called ‘cultural services’. In essence, this is how we ‘feel’ about our connection to nature. It’s fast being realised these services are perhaps the most important of all but have been entirely ignored up until now. Restore the Bay is important because we are among the first in the world, to apply this in a practical sense, to an urban setting (mostly this has been done on a less sophisticated level, and usually in less developed countries).

The success of this program depends on you, as it’s your knowledge that matters, not ours.

You have the chance to be involved in a truly ground-breaking initiative that few in the world currently know how to do. Our team have the know how but we are only facilitators.

Measuring cultural services

Instead of measuring the direct value of our environment e.g. number of trees, dollar value of fish caught, amount spent on visitation, we measure the more important ways our lives connect to those components, via the services they provide. Let’s take penguins as an example. We’re used to measuring employment and tourism value. But it’s not the amount of money made by the Penguin Parade that makes them most important. The cultural services are flow through almost every aspect of our daily lives and has never been measured. Without this, we make poor decisions about our environment.

Guess what? This critical information cannot be obtained without you! This is what we are gathering in the early stages of this program.

Community not citizen science

After we finalise the gathering of our shared knowledge, we have the basis for the decision tool.

This is set to become the most powerful decision tool ever created for Port Phillip Bay and it will be 100% community owned!

This isn’t the end of the process. We have to link this to the ecosystem side of the model (more on that later). There will also be substantial gaps identified that need to be addressed. This is where community science comes in. This isn’t the same as citizen science. Citizen science is often gathered to assist with a question posed by someone else. Community science is about collecting evidence needed to enable our community to make its own decisions, to protect our economic future and the Bay’s environment. This is Stage 3 of the program.

This is a progress statement for the program as of end of May 2025.

Where to next?

Once we have a working decision tool, we’re at the exciting stage. This is where we will be reaching out for ideas about what actions to take. Our job is to then use the tool to feed these actions in as scenarios and test which combinations create the best outcomes for all of us. There is then a process to follow to find out how these might be achieved … that is for another post.

As you might gather by now, our program team is working for you. We are facilitating an outcome, not making decisions for you. There are few (if any) examples of community co-design in communities such as ours because most decisions are made institutionally, without considering how your values are affected.

How will it be used?

The state of Victoria is moving towards community co-designed decision-making for our coastal environment. There is a fancy policy word for this … it’s called ‘marine spatial planning’ and you can read about our government’s intentions for that here.

What this really means is that we’re trying to transform our economy to be more nature-centred. That is, to find ways of taking actions that restore the natural processes that support our economic prosperity. It’s all linked to cost-of-living and economic resilience. But to create these outcomes means taking a very different approach to what we’re used to.

The final stage of Restore the Bay will be to write a Community Stewardship Plan and present this to the government, so it may feed into the next evolution of the Port Phillip Bay Environmental Management Plan.