The Investment Framework For Environmental Resource (INFFER) is a tool for planning and prioritizing public investments in natural resources and the environment. It focuses on the achievement of cost effective outcomes and is relevant to projects where the aim is to protect or enhance spatially explicit natural resource assets. It is designed to be comprehensive in its requirements for information and treatment of alternative policy mechanisms, and yet be as simple as possible to use.
INFFER uses a spatially explicit asset based approach to the identification of key environmental features such as native vegetation, river reaches, wetlands and threatened species. Landscape and ecological modeling tools can be integrated with the framework to assist with asset prioritization and to explore the relationships between on-ground management actions, threat reduction and response times. INFFER is being used by 14 regional natural resource management bodies in three Australian states, and has influenced policy makers at state and national levels. The principles underpinning INFFER are broadly applicable in other institutional and bio-physical environments.