Australians are willing to pay up to 50 times what they currently do for Indigenous people to manage their traditional land in northern Australia, researchers have found.

Researchers performed a nationwide survey of the types of environmental management that people would be willing to pay for and how much they would pay.

“We had nearly 1000 respondents and 70% said they would be willing to contribute to a conservation fund that pays Indigenous people to carry out conservation activities,” the lead researcher said.

She said Indigenous people owned and managed more than 20% of the Australian continent, three times the size of Spain, and much of it was relatively unchanged savanna or arid land.