In many parts of northern Australia , only a few percent of the regional population are in mainstream employment, yet industry is unable to attract suitable local staff

The CRC’s education and skills development programme will emphasise improved job readiness, carefully matched to local opportunities and needs. To add to orthodox employment, regional and national benefits from skilled stewardship of savanna landscapes will be identified, promoted, and commercialised.

Emerging partnership projects demonstrate that caring for land and sea can be supported as direct and critical contributions to national goals in environmental management and resource security, including biosecurity, as well as supplying offsets.

Opportunity costs of high unemployment in Wadeye, an isolated NT Aboriginal community of over 2000 people, are estimated at $39.8M a year. Extrapolating on a per capita basis to other remote Indigenous populations indicates costs exceeding $700M each year across the savannas. This estimate requires validation, but shows that even incremental improvements in opportunities and capacity (say reaching a 2% improvement in participation rates in the life of the CRC) will generate large benefits ($231M over 20 years).

A key role for the Tropical Savannas Futures CRC will be to identify the full range of employment options, analyse economic and social benefits and develop innovative educational and training frameworks to realise them.