What’s the problem?
Governments around the world face increasingly difficult decisions about how land should be used. Farmland, forests, conservation areas and carbon storage often compete for the same space, creating tensions between economic development, climate action and biodiversity protection. At the same time, decision-makers need better tools to understand how different land-use choices affect environmental and economic outcomes.
As climate change accelerates and biodiversity loss continues, evaluating the consequences of different land-use scenarios has become increasingly complex. Understanding how to achieve gains for nature, climate and people simultaneously is a major global challenge.
What’s UQ’s innovation?
Professor Eve McDonald-Madden’s research focuses on applying decision science, optimisation and AI-informed analytical approaches to improve environmental decision-making. As part of an international collaboration published in Science, she contributed to the development of a framework that identifies land-use strategies capable of improving biodiversity conservation, climate mitigation and economic value simultaneously.
The framework combines environmental, economic and spatial datasets to create “landscape efficiency frontiers” that illustrate the best achievable combinations of biodiversity protection, climate mitigation and economic outcomes within a country or region. Using advanced computational optimisation methods, the approach evaluates a vast number of potential land-use scenarios to identify opportunities where multiple objectives can be achieved together.
Applied across 146 countries, the framework provides governments, industries and conservation organisations with evidence-based insights to support more informed land-use planning and policy decisions.
What’s the impact?
The research found substantial opportunities to improve environmental and economic outcomes through more strategic land management. Across the countries analysed, the modelling showed the potential to increase climate mitigation by more than 200 billion metric tonnes of CO₂ equivalent or increase net economic value by more than US$350 billion, without reducing performance in other objectives.
The findings challenge the assumption that biodiversity conservation, climate action and economic development must always come at each other’s expense. Instead, the framework provides a practical way to identify opportunities that can support multiple sustainability goals simultaneously.
By turning complex environmental and economic data into actionable intelligence, this approach can help guide land-use planning, conservation investment and climate policy around the world.
UQ lead
- Professor Eve McDonald-Madden
School of the Environment
Affiliate, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science
UQ Project Team
- Dr Matthew Holden, School of Mathematics and Physics
Deputy Director, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science
| AI Research Strength | Environment & Agrifood |
|---|---|
| Industry Portfolio | University of Minnesota Stanford University World Resources Institute World Bank |
| Key Publication | Polasky et al. (2026) Landscape efficiency frontiers for biodiversity, climate mitigation, and net economic value. Science 392(6802):1069–1074 |
Published 15 September 2026