Swamps, or wetlands, are fragile ecosystems and important biophysical sites for habitats, for improving water quality, for flood mediation and nutrient cycling. However, swamps come under enormous pressure and the call to drain swamps is widespread. Moreover, wetlands are among the most threatened of all ecosystems, with wetlands loss over the past 100 years estimated at 70% (Kingsford et al 2016). This paper takes a legal geography approach to consider the efficacy of wetlands protection regimes. Using the Temperate Highland Peat Swamps on Sandstone (THPSS) of the Newnes State Forest (NSW) as a case study this paper will explore the environmental/people decision-making matrix for the protection of these swamps in a contested development/conservation context. Ref: Kingsford, R. T., Basset, A., and Jackson, L. (2016) Wetlands: conservation's poor cousins. Aquatic Conserv: Mar. Freshw. Ecosyst., 26: 892–916.

Land use planning in Australia is primarily the responsibility of local governments, deriving from a state government based statutory framework. Despite these statutory frameworks, in its attempts to remain community centred and geographically flexible, land use planning is governed by a complex framework of regulation, guidelines, and policies that together with formal systems of law including case law, are interpreted by key actors who frame, inform, and enforce the planning system. These key actors include local councils and council officer experts. Council officer experts' decision-making authority can be undermined by elected officials. This has been pertinent in the context of climate change adaptation. This presentation discusses these issues with reference to two New South Wales localities. First, I outline the contrasting climate adaptation policy positions of each local council at the time of the fieldwork. Second, I describe their contrasting approaches to the interpretation of legal obligations. Third, I discuss examples of land use planning and adaptation from each locality. Taken together, this analysis demonstrates the complexities of local level climate change adaptation, and the complications that can arise due to both fears of legal liability and subjective interpretations of formal law.

Land use law excludes the materiality of human relationships with the places that are owned, transformed, used, and alienated as property from the substance of legal decision making (Graham, 2011). This paper will consider how this dominant model of property is reproduced in the context of land use planning. It will examine the work that law does to “bracket” (Blomley, 2014) relationships between people and the material world and to produce and reproduce the legally consequential relationship of ownership in order to facilitate particular types of land use. Further, it will examine how the affective dimensions of human relations with the “more-than-human world” are rendered irrelevant or even inappropriate by legal and cultural practices of property. At the same time, this paper will consider how land use planning processes are one site in which claims about people-place relations routinely fall outside the boundaries of dominant property relations and where the messy complexity and relational of places are made visible, often in contested and contradictory ways. Using examples from Canada and New Zealand, this paper will critically consider the tension between these roles for planning law in order to explore the potential to shift towards ecologically just land use planning law.

This paper reports on a ‘patent landscape’ analysis of patents that refer to Australian plant species for which there is Indigenous Australian knowledge, recently published in Australian Geographer, and presented at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). We have identified several patents of potential new biopiracy concern, from a total of approximately 1300 identified patents relating to these species, of which 150 are for endemic species. The paper discusses bio-geographical trends and shared regional Indigenous knowledge across regions found in the patent landscape. We then critique the way in which actors can gain private property monopolies over biological resources and associated traditional knowledge, in the context of overlapping sovereign rights and Indigenous rights claims. Regulatory gaps exist nationally in the governing of the diverse human–plant bio-geographies in Australia. We note that Indigenous laws and governance have largely been ignored by some of the main actors, and need to be central to any attempts to prevent biopiracy and protect the resources and knowledge.