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About the Project

Water Planning Tools: Critical Times  Practical Measures

This project sought to improve the certainty, legitimacy and efficiency of water planning processes across Australia. Through the project, a range of applied knowledge products were developed and trialed for water planning, including good practice tools, decision support systems and mechanisms targeted to address key issues in selected catchments.

Download the Project Overview Brochure

 


Project Rationale

Australia has an ambitious agenda for water reform.

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Key elements of the National Water Initiative (NWI), the country’s pre-eminent water policy, include water entitlements and planning framework, water markets and trading, integrated management of water for environmental and other public benefit outcomes, knowledge and capacity building, community partnerships and adjustment.

Water Planning is central to the achievement of sustainable water management.

The NWI places a great deal of emphasis on water planning as the core mechanism through which water resource management will be restructured, and sustainable and equitable water allocations achieved. Water planning is seen as ‘an important mechanism to assist governments and the community to determine water management and allocation decisions to meet productive environmental and social objectives’.

This project piloted a suite of collaborative planning tools.

Through the pilots, the project resulted in the development and dissemination of good practice tools and mechanisms to address current gaps in water planning processes and on-ground implementation of NWI water planning requirements.

The findings from the pilots will lead to improvements in the way water plans are developed and implemented.

Tools and mechanisms were developed and trialed in parallel with existing jurisdictional water planning processes to ensure they can be adopted and incorporated into individual state and territory water planning frameworks through the development of practical guides, websites, manuals, databases and seminars.

How will it help?

This project:

  • comprehensively identified the current gaps in implementing water planning processes in relation to the requirements of the National Water Initiative
  • developed good practice tools and mechanisms to address these gaps in a practical sense across all jurisdictions
  • provided important information for the benefit of water planning processes across all jurisdictions, and
  • led to improvements in the way water plans are developed and implemented on the ground.

The project will improve water planning effort at two levels:

Nationally - through the development of a tool-kit of good practices to engage industry, Indigenous and rural communities; setting guidelines and benchmarks to monitor and evaluate collaboration in water planning; establishing procedures that integrate Indigenous values into water planning.

Regionally - assisting water agencies to improve water planning approaches; helping to minimise conflicts between parties; providing models and case studies for good collaboration; helping develop stronger long-term relationships between stakeholders.