The federal government has put regional planning at the heart of its strategy to halt Australia's alarming environmental decline.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek says a suite of regional plans covering the country, and developed in partnership with the states and territories, will form the "third arm" of Labor's rescue and restoration plan.
They will augment the promised overhaul of environmental protection laws and the work of the new national Environmental Protection Agency.
"Currently, most Commonwealth environmental approval decisions are done on a project-by-project basis," the minister has told the national Landcare conference in Sydney.
"But these individual decisions don't take into account the cumulative impact of human activity.
"If we only assess each of these applications on its own, rather than looking at their impact on a living region, with all its organic connections and relationships, you might think that everything is going to be fine. But that ignores the combined pressure (of) overlapping changes."
She said the failings of the existing approach meant authorities do not know when a species is reaching a breaking point or falling below a critical mass.
"It's not usually the first proposal that's the problem ... it's the 10th proposal or the 15th. That's how we end up with a State of the Environment Report that tells us ... it's bad and getting worse."
The report, released last month, said the overall condition of the environment was poor and deteriorating in the face of climate change and other threats, with more and more species threatened in poorly managed landscapes failed by existing laws.
Ms Plibersek said the government would not throw out the vast amount of regional planning work that has already taken place, and would work with the states, territories and other stakeholders to improve and build on it.
"What is clearly and unequivocally new is that these regional plans will be used by the Commonwealth to underpin and improve ... environmental protection, to help us better understand the cumulative impact of individual projects," she said.
"I'll be talking to my fellow environment ministers shortly about how we can make these regional plans strong and useful, and help us avoid duplication.
"They are not directly a part of our environmental laws but without them our laws can't deliver the standards we expect."
The minister wants work on the plans to be well underway by the time by the time the government passes reformed environmental protection laws next year.
Former CSIRO research director Dr Ian Cresswell, a chief author of the State of the Environment report, welcomed the government approach, saying the lack of co-ordination between various tiers of government has been a problem.
"That comes across throughout the report as being ineffective and actually stifling some of the work that needs to happen," he told the conference.
