Collaborative Water Planning in Australia's Tropical North

The Collaborative Water Planning project aims to identify ways to improve community participation in water planning for Australia's tropical north.The two-year research project seeks to show how different water users - including graziers, irrigators, resource managers, scientists, Indigenous communities, catchment managers and others - can learn from each other and contribute to decisions about water sharing.

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A summary report from the first phase of this project

is now available, which provides a review and ‘stock-take’ of water planning in the jurisdictions of Northern Australia. This is based on research undertaken from June 2007 to July 2008, and guided the next phase of the project which is a trial of planning tools in two new water planning processes. In the initial phase, the researchers wanted to find out firstly, what were the factors that supported or hindered community participation in water planning; and secondly, what were community expectations of water planning processes and trade-offs in water allocation.

This information will be used as the basis of the trial of collaborative planning approaches in the second phase of the project, but also provides an important reference point for the pilots in the Water Planning Tools project. The Collaborative Water Planning project is part of TRaCK – the Tropical Rivers and Coastal Knowledge research hub. TRaCK brings together leading tropical river researchers and managers across Australia to focus on the sustainability of rivers and catchment from Cape York to Broome.

Find out more about the project here.