Victoria's Northern Region Sustainable Water Strategy

In early December 2009, the Victorian Minister for Water released the Northern Region Sustainable Water Strategy. The driving objective behind this 50 year strategic water plan is to improve the allocations from northern Victoria’s reserve water system to safeguard the delivery of water to towns and agriculture even in times of drought.

The Northern Region Sustainable Water Strategy contains 52 actions and 17 policies to manage the consequences of prolonged drought and climate change in northern Victoria. The Strategy is the result of 18 months’ consultation in northern Victoria, punctuated by the release of first the Discussion Paper, and then the Draft Strategy which allowed local communities, individuals and organisations to comment on proposed ways to manage or guide water use. The Strategy seeks to promotes key agricultural, environmental and urban values through a range of mechanisms outlined in the water plan, including:

recognising and protecting existing water entitlements to provide greater certainty;
specifying where and when environmental water is required, and clear objectives for its use;
registering all new domestic and stock dams in rural residential areas and monitoring growth in all domestic and stock use;
promoting sustainable use of water by developing guidelines for reasonable domestic and stock use;
enhancing markets, carryover and reserve policies to increase the ability of people to manage their own risk;
using consumptive and environmental water more efficiently to get greater benefits from less water; and
delivering benefits from public investment in irrigation modernisation, on-farm programs, river and wetland health programs and environmental water purchase programs.

Technical Assessments & Background Reports

The development of the Northern Region Sustainable Water Strategy was based on 13 technical studies commissioned and 18 reports released over the course of the planning process, and made publicly available with the release of the draft Strategy in October 2008. Each of these titles is available for download from the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment's water website: Our Water, Our Future.

The Strategic Water Plan

The publication of the finalised plan has included a number of innovations in the delivery format to increase the accessibility of the plan, including: