sydney

At its first meeting since being restructured, the Australian Prime Minister's Science Engineering and Innovation Council has decided its most immediate task is to find solutions for the rising salinity which is adversely affecting the meagre soils supporting the nation's agriculture.

After more than a century of bush clearance, deforestation and irrigation, salinity has become a major threat to income from exports and the quality of the environment. John Stocker, the chief scientist, estimates that salinity now affects about 5 per cent of the land sown to crops or pastures, and contributes 12 per cent of the yield lost to land degradation.

The state of Western Australia is losing 200 hectares from its wheat belt every day and, with salinization increasing and proving difficult to treat or reverse, salt-affected land is expected to increase sevenfold to 20 million hectares by 2050.

The move followed the acceptance of a scheme by Stocker for rationally determining preferences for the national support of research and development, which has been an unrealized goal of successive Australian governments. Stocker defines five criteria, which he calls “structural priorities”, for assessing the public funding of science and technology.

Stocker argues that research programmes should be gauged by their effects on maintaining the national “science base”, developing “applicable knowledge”, promoting “interaction among providers and users” of research, stimulating “innovation in industry”, and improving “awareness” of science and technology.

The council has expanded by absorbing the role of the Australian Science and Technology Council (see Nature 391, 624; 1998). Representatives of science organizations have been augmented with leaders of business and grant-giving bodies, and should provide ministers with “high-level and independent advice”, said prime minister John Howard in a statement.

The council told a working party, led by Stocker, to produce by August an action plan on salinity. “We'll have to demonstrate some agility to do it by then,” Stocker says. His report may become caught in the last weeks of an (as yet undeclared) election campaign, in which Howard and Kim Beazley, the leader of the Labor opposition, are trading blows about tax reform.

Indications that science is unlikely to figure prominently in the election are reinforced by Howard's not capitalizing on the council's positive outcome to make a political point. But Beazley has called for urgent correction of the Coalition's declining taxation incentives for R&D in industry.