National Workshop for Water Planners

The Water Planning Tools team hosted an open-space workshop with water planners from around the country in the last week of July, in an attempt to both review our project findings with water agencies and to allow water planners across Australia to identify and discuss key issues in their practice. The proceedings from this workshop are available for download.

The workshop also sought to create an opportunity for planners to jointly identify emerging challenges in water planning. This forms part of what we see as the process of continual improvement in water planning in Australia, to address the critical issues limiting national water reform.

To meet these objectives, the workshop used a hybrid open space format. Three topics were chosen that best described the focus of the WPT pilots and the trial of tools. For open sessions, all participants were encouraged to nominate their three most burning issues for water planning.

Issues discussed in the open space sessions included:

• Pathways to addressing groundwater over-allocation
  
• Over-allocation and the achievement of sustainable limits in water allocation
  
• Participatory Indigenous engagement presentation
• Monitoring and evaluation
• Interception and the hidden users of water
• Dealing with water resources in a drying climate
• Environmental water and its management
• Surfacing social values in water planning
• Securing ongoing funding for delivery of environmental water
• Setting water plan objectives
• Defining cultural water
• Managing trade-off decisions in water allocation

Identifying Future Challenges

The workshop concluded with the identification of future challenges facing the discipline and practice of water planning in Australia. Among these, planners noted:

• The need for integrated planning. This is not a new concept but has not been effectively implemented.
• The quality of tools for socio-economic assessment. We have good tools for identifying social values and issues - how do we take that information and incorporate it into the planning process? How do we use that information to make hard management decisions?
• Moving from a growth to a contraction framework for water planning. Sustainable contraction needs to be planned. How are we going to manage contraction in certain areas?
• Climate change. How should we consider it and what scenario to use in planning frameworks. We need to clarify the scope of the role of water planners in communicating what this means.
• Interception as the hidden water 'user'. Forestry interception and stock and domestic issues are not handled well yet. With stock and domestic, there is some confusion over management of the water they take and how this can be coordinated to get some consistency on how it is managed.
• The need for clarifying the difference between rights and entitlements. Some things we think of as rights are not really rights - we just confer that meaning. There is a greater need for consistent communication about what this means for users.
• Jurisductional inconsistency. In particular, the NWC should help with consistency in how to address issues around stock & domestic use.
• Building robust water data management systems.
• A call for improved legislation regarding indigenous rights to water across most jurisidictions.
• The politics of the mining industry and water.
• How to combine adaptive management with investment security and investment decisions - they are in tension with one another.