National Water Planning Report Card
A new interactive web resource has been launched by the National Water Commission to help people easily access information on the status of water planning across Australia.
This online web application, based on the inaugural report National Water Planning Report Card 2011, provides a summary of the status of water plans across Australia, including the quality of existing water plans, their implementation, and areas for future improvement.
Releasing the report, Commission Chair Ms Chloe Munro explained, ‘Good water planning is the roadmap for how we share water resources and is critical to build confidence about these often difficult community decisions. The full benefits of water planning cannot be achieved without effective monitoring and transparent reporting.’
This new web resource is intended to promote better practice in water planning and encourage informed national discussion. It does so by allowing people to interrogate the information in the Report Card at a range of levels.
Users can explore and compare key elements of water planning at national, state and local levels – across 157 water plan areas. ‘Clickable’ jurisdictional maps show locations of water plan areas, allowing users to drill down to local plans.
A comprehensive search tool, allows the user to search by keyword, and filter plans by:
- state or territory
- groundwater or surface water
- whether the plan is in the Murray-Darling Basin
- year the plan was completed
- any of the twelve assessment criteria.
Up to four assessments can be compared via the search results, displaying the assessment criteria for the selected plans side by side.
Table of contents
- Executive Summary
- Introduction
- New South Wales
- Victoria
- Queensland
- South Australia
- Western Australia
- Tasmania
- Australian Capital Territory
- Northern Territory
- Appendix – National water planning report card framework
- Advanced search
Additional information and qualifications
More information on assessment criteria is available in appendix 1 of the Report Card.
The number of plans assessed for each jurisdiction included all plans that had commenced as at 30 June 2011, as well as any relevant draft plans that were available for assessment. Information on the status of these plans was considered up until 30 September 2011. For example, between July and September, a number of suspended plans in New South Wales recommenced and some draft plans became operational, and these are included in this Report Card assessment.
Maps in this document have been generated from data provided by state and territory governments and Geoscience Australia. The National Water Commission has made all reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of this data but does not guarantee that the publication is without errors or omissions.