The sign in front of CSIRO's long-time headquarters on Limestone Avenue in Canberra proudly proclaimed "Australian Science, Australia's Future". With the savage cuts to the organisation's public good research, that lofty ambition now appears to be abandoned and trashed.
CSIRO CEO Larry Marshall believes that transferring public funding away from the public good to support widgets and spin-offs will deliver more value towards Australia's future. But does that simplistic assertion stack up under careful analysis?
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| Professor Will Steffen. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen / Fairfax |
We know that public investment in research on average pays off at least five to one in terms of the public good over a decade or so, even discounted to present value. In comparison, a typical angel investment portfolio averages 2.5 times return on capital put into start-ups, and venture capital funds not much better on average, at least over the past 10 years. Of course, someone has to support new businesses, but it is clearly not a good use of public research funding.
In fact, the drastic cuts at CSIRO are part of an alarming worldwide trend towards dismissing or misunderstanding the value of public good research. This misguided trend was given an added boost in Australia by the actions of the Abbott government, the shades of which are playing out through the disruptions at CSIRO at the moment, but has ramifications for us all.
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| Does transferring public funding away from the public good stack up? |
Let's be clear what we mean by "public good" as the term can easily be twisted to suit a variety of purposes.
The public good has a clear formal definition around benefits that are not easily privatised nor readily valued in any market, so that everyone benefits from them but no one feels responsible for them. Issues such as clear air, national parks, public health and a stable climate spring to mind.
In reality there is a grey area, as the benefits that tourism gets from national parks can be privatised to some extent, and private benefits from a new vaccine may nonetheless deliver public outcomes. Often the distinction is as much between short and long-term benefits as much as strictly private and public outcomes.
However, the voting public generally has a pretty good sense of how they get value from public good research. They can see where businesses are really in it for a quid, compared to where researchers are delivering something that helps society and which no company would invest in.
Indeed, such issues were clearly a major part of the mission of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation when it was established over 80 years ago, and remain a firm part of its legislative base. In fact, it has been the public outcry in support of its public good research record that has always protected CSIRO when ideologues have sought to dismantle it in the past.
It is thus particularly dismaying to see what is being dismantled in CSIRO at present. There has been much public outcry about the gutting of climate science in the Oceans and Atmosphere unit, but, much more quietly and controversially, its Land and Water section is slated to lose just as many staff from critical public good areas of research in cities and landscapes. Many of these staff are Canberra-based.
Consider cities. Globally everyone knows cities are crucial, with more than 50 per cent of the human population now urban, growing at a rate that requires the equivalent of a new city of two million people to be built every week for the next 20 years. Australia is on the cusp of this trend with nine out of ten people already living in our cities.
Yet there are profound public good questions to ask about our urbanisation. Cities are currently planning for growth (with all its challenges) that is only half that actually expected in Australia this century: where should the other 20 million people go once the current cities get full? Where will they live and work? How will they travel around the city? Will there be adequate green (living) infrastructure?
Here's another complex challenge. Our capital cities all say they want to halt urban sprawl, yet all of our cities are sprawling as fast as ever: what incentives are need to overcome this seemingly inexorable trend?
Last year, for the first time a conservative government in Australia established an urban portfolio to deal with these sorts of issues nationally (previous Labor governments have established such portfolios, and the conservatives have subsequently abandoned them). Yet in the midst of all of these trends, CSIRO's senior management is dismantling the urban systems capability within the organisation. This does not make sense.
Gutting CSIRO's urban research capacity leaves a gaping hole nationally that universities cannot fill. The complex, system-level challenges of rapid urbanisation create big picture policy questions, needing highly interdisciplinary teams to address them. By their nature, universities are not well equipped to deal with these challenges as they often run on three-year funding cycles and are built around individuals or small research teams. While such research is valuable, it is CSIRO's unique niche to lead the longer-term, highly interdisciplinary, large team research that these "wicked problems" demand.
In fact, university and CSIRO research are complementary, and create an effective national-level research system. Gutting the CSIRO component also reduces the ultimate value of university-based research.
Urbanisation isn't the only complex, long-term research challenge. Consider our landscapes. We all know that Australia has its own remarkable landscapes and biota, its own challenging soils and variable – and now rapidly changing – climate. Managing these issues is not something we can take off the shelf from elsewhere in the world. Indeed, our expertise in dryland agriculture is just one of the examples of where our solutions to our local challenges have given our rural industries an edge, providing advice and investment in drylands around the world.
But it is not just that good landscape management is critical to maintaining returns from agriculture. A healthy Great Barrier Reef and other reserves underpin a significant part of our tourist industry – delivering $1 billion a year just in Victoria. Healthy coastlines mean less damage in extreme weather and storm surges. Healthy waterways mean less need to invest in expensive water treatment infrastructure (for example, New York City spent $1.5bn on catchment protection to save itself at least $6 billion in water treatment). In fact, healthy environments directly support our human health and mental well-being – national parks in Victoria contribute an estimated $200 million a year in avoided healthcare costs alone. On top of all this are the many important benefits to our wellbeing that cannot be easily quantified in a monetary sense.
Understanding our landscapes and the ecosystem services they provide in order to manage them well not only pays dividends directly here in Australia, but it also provides immense comparative advantages for our businesses. Yet once again, CSIRO is disinvesting in the landscape management skills in the organisation. Does this make any sense?
Research on urban systems and on landscape ecosystem services are two key areas of public good research that are being destroyed in CSIRO at present. Yet these are precisely the areas where the interdisciplinary capability to bring together large teams to work on national challenges is the specific leadership role that CSIRO can and has previously played. In fact, while research in CSIRO generally is conservatively estimated to return $5 for every $1 invested, research in Land and Water in particular has been estimated at double this – $10 for every $1 invested – in line with other analyses of similar work. Furthermore, these are also two of the most significant areas in which responses to climate change, both mitigation and adaptation, must play out.
The public can obviously see that these cuts are crazy. Surely these decisions must be reversed. Of course CSIRO management may say that CSIRO cannot do this alone, without active investment in public good research from government. But surely political parties of all persuasions should be interested in making investments of public funds with such assured returns.
*Will Steffen is emeritus professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University.
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