Westport is obviously a very large program, and it's happening in a place which is important to a lot of Western Australians.
People love it. They want to fish in it. They want to dive in it. They want to enjoy it.
So it's really important that we give them enough information so they can trust the process while we build Western Australia's new container port.
The WAMSI Westport Marine Science Program has been unique in terms of the scale and the scope of the program.
We've had 30 projects, we've had about 150 scientists involved in the program over the last three years plus.
The marine science program has provided new baseline data with which to understand the system better, so that when these new projects come in we can manage the impacts as we go forward.
So we’re working under a Working with Nature principle, and part of that is about understanding that we've got the information we need to make informed, cleverdecisions about the design and around the construction of the port.
We wanted to do independently through WAMSI and the universities and the research organisations, because we thought that that way there would be independent peer review and it could be trusted by the community.
Some of the very early information around benthic habitats, seagrass, reefs and those sort of things allowed us to sort of say, we need to move the container terminal south to avoid the cobble reef, and we needed to move the breakwater south as well to make sure we came off the seagrass meadows.
We've also been able to look at where the shipping channels are and put them through old dredging scars, which were done by industry, and in deep water where seagrass doesn't grow.
So we're not impacting on very much seagrass in the shipping channel areas either.
The other thing we've done is understanding the hydrodynamics and how the currents flow around Cockburn Sound, and what that means for things like snapper spawning.
And that allowed us to say, actually, we'll have an open breakwater which allows the current to pass through the container area.
We've also used the science to design a suite of programs to improve the environment, rather than just minimise its impact.
We've already now used that information to receive funding for seagrass restoration programs, for artificial reef programs, and some of the other coastal management programs we're undertaking right now.
All of that data we've collected, we put into a model that can now help us predict the future under various scenarios.
Cockburn Sound is about to enter into a new decade of growth.
So a really important part of the model is to understand how multiple pressures can be cumulative in the system and put pressure on those sensitive things that we love, like seagrass or iconic species like dolphins and sea lions.
It's super exciting because it means that a broad range of users can use the information at the top of the science program.
So we've now been able to fill that information.
And what we hope is that that means this environmental approval process will be streamlined, it'll be well informed, but also that those regulators can take that information and use it for all the other projects which will come into the future.
We have an aspiration to ensure that Cockburn Sound is operating as well, if not better, than when we found it five years after we start.