‘Turning "we are good at measuring ecological outcomes" into evidence of real human behaviour change’
The Situation
MDWWG works with landholders to rehabilitate and manage wetlands across the Murray-Darling catchments. 80% of all wetlands sit on private land, meaning long-term success depends on landholders valuing and contributing to the health of wetlands on their property. MDWWG had a good handle on measuring environmental outcomes, but had no way to show whether their work was actually shifting landholder knowledge, behaviour, and ongoing investment.
What I Did
I supported MDWWG in developing and implementing a measurement framework. This included:
Running the survey across MDWWG's 44 landholders (July–August 2025), despite significant challenges with outdated contact records
Building a financial extrapolation model using known survey responses plus a boxplot-based outlier method to estimate contributions from landholders who did not respond
Costing landholder-contributed water, land management spend, and volunteer time using independently sourced benchmarks
Producing a full impact report, transparent about the limitations of a small sample size, alongside clear recommendations to strengthen next year's data collection
The Outcome
$1,106,869 in landholder contributions to wetland management surfaced, value MDWWG had never been able to report before
100% of surveyed landholders reported increased knowledge of wetland management, and 100% reported increased understanding of the benefits of environmental water
73% believe active wetland management on their property will lead to broader community and environmental benefits
A clear, honest methodology giving MDWWG a stronger dataset to build on in future years.
"We loved your engaging, rigorous, and encouraging approach which breaks down the complex into the understandable. We all feel a lot more confident now in our understanding of how to implement a larger analysis and the benefits this will bring to our work in wetland rehabilitation."
Deborah Nias, former CEO, Murray Darling Wetlands Working Group