Valuing the Contributions of National Earth and Environmental Science Facilities Forum Members: Pilot Impact Assessment

This report presents the results of Lateral Economics’ (LE’s) pilot impact assessment of the National Earth and Environmental Science Facilities Forum (NEESFF). The Forum brings together Australia’s leading earth and environmental science research infrastructure facilities with the aim of ensuring that national investments deliver maximum scientific, economic, and societal value.

This study is only a pilot impact assessment because NEESFF encompasses such a diverse range of organisations that it is impossible to fully capture and assess all its impacts without undertaking a wider and more extensive program of work than scoped out for this project. As part of the project, LE consulted with all NEESFF organisations (see Appendix A), and obtained insights into the benefits offered by each of them. However, it was not possible within the scope of work to undertake quantification of benefits and costs for all organisations. Instead, we focussed on three case studies from three different organisations.

We applied a cost–benefit analysis (CBA) framework to evaluate the contributions of selected facilities. The three case studies were of the:

• Atlas of Living Australia (ALA);
• Australian Plant Phenomics Network (APPN); and the
• Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN).

This allowed for a systematic comparison of the costs of infrastructure provision against the broad range of benefits these facilities generate. These benefits include scientific outputs, support for industry innovation, environmental management improvements, and contributions to national resilience in the face of climate, natural hazard, and resource challenges.

A CBA is essential to evaluate the case for public investment in NEESFF organisations. Individual NEESFF organisations capture excellent metrics around user uptake, science impact through publication tracking systems, and user satisfaction through surveys, but lack the capability to evaluate economic benefits to support their conversations with co-investors, project partners and governments.

We have combined the results of three new case studies of NEESFF organisations with the results of previous studies to estimate an average benefit-cost ratio (BCR) for NEESFF organisations of 6.8 (Table A). Using this average BCR and based on estimated total NEESFF annual public funding of \$235 million, we estimate that total annual NEESFF benefits exceed \$1.5 billion.