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Abstract
Biosecurity is the management of risks to the
economy, the environment and the community of
pests and diseases entering, emerging, establishing
or spreading. In Australia, biosecurity services
are delivered by government and industry in
partnership with farmers and the wider community
as a shared responsibility. This is described in a
biosecurity continuum to convey that biosecurity
outcomes cannot be delivered if any element of
the continuum is missing or ineffective. Biodiversity
is both an outcome of and a contributor to
biosecurity actions, for example as a source of
biological control agents and genetic diversity for
host resistance breeding. Biotechnology is a tool
that can help deliver biosecurity outcomes, although
it may also generate biosecurity concerns
unless appropriately managed. Our environment
and the activities it supports can be viewed as a
large and complex ecosystem. Meshing the
biosecurity continuum approach with an ecosystem
concept can help government, industry and
communities to identify priority actions to deliver
trade, food safety and security and biodiversity
outcomes through risk-based analysis and delivery
of biosecurity actions. Valuing the outcomes of
biosecurity actions, particularly in the natural or
built environment where dollar values are not as
clear as they are in commercial production systems,
is difficult and generally a product of
societal values and individual impacts.