To support more effective and nationally consistent water planning, the National Water Commission issued a Waterlines report - Water allocation planning in Australia - practices and lessons learned - to draw together key lessons learned about water planning by individual states and territories.

Based on the findings from this report, the National Water Commission funded the Water Planning Tools project to trial a series of planning tools nationally to test potential solutions to the challenges identified in the water planning report.

It was envisaged that the project would use the findings from these trials to improve water planning processes, leading to improvements in the way water plans are developed and implemented.

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 National Water Initiative (NWI) water planning requirements. This includes this website.

Tools and mechanisms will be 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 (e.g. practical guides, websites, manuals, databases and seminars).

The Water Planning Tools project had four key objectives:

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

The project was conducted by a team of researchers from a range of universities and science organisations in Australia. More information about the team is available here. The project was overseen originally by Land & Water Australia, and later by the National Water Commission.

We had a range of measures in place to ensure research quality. Firstly, all participants were able to review the project findings and make comments and recomendations where they reached different conclusions from the research team. Secondly, a project steering and oversight committee was put in place to review the research. This was made up of representatives from state water planning agencies and industry representatives. Thirdly, all project materials were reviewed for quality purposes by the National Water Commission.

The project forms part of the National Water Commission's investment through a program called Raising National Water Standards.This $250 million program offers support for projects that are improving Australia's national capacity to measure, monitor and manage our water resources. More than 175 Raising National Water Standards projects have been funded under a range of themes, including water accounting and emerging water markets, water planning and management, knowledge and capacity building, water-dependent ecosystems and integrated urban water management.