Baseline assessment of water resources (Australian Water Resource 2005)
Project details
| Objective: | To provide valuable information on surface and groundwater availability, water use, water quality and river health across the country. |
| Funding: | Up to $3,100,000 plus applicable GST |
| Jurisdiction: | National |
| Commenced: | December 2005 |
| Completed: | October 2007 |
About the project
Funding of $3.1 million was provided to undertake a baseline assessment of Australia's water resources. This assessment provided valuable information on surface and groundwater availability, water use and river and wetland health across the Australia. This assessment was a critical component of the NWI, providing a benchmark against which NWI progress and future water resource assessments under Australian Water Resources Information System (AWRIS) can be measured. The assessment was undertaken for the National Water Commission by the WRON Alliance which is led by Sinclair Knight Merz and includes key water industry experts (including the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Bureau of Rural Sciences, CSIRO, eWater Cooperative Research Centre, and the National Land and Water Resources Audit).
Project benefits
The AWR 2005 was released in two parts. The Level 1 AWR 2005 release (Oct 2006) highlighted the relative lack of understanding of surface water and groundwater interactions across most of Australia and produced a number of high level maps that identified the current status of surface water and groundwater planning, which revealed that despite the interconnection of the two resources, integrated planning and management was an exception rather than the rule in most areas of Australia. The Level 2 AWR 2005 release built upon the Level 1 release and provided a greater understanding of the importance of surface water and groundwater interactions by using a detailed water balance approach for 51 priority water management areas across Australia to provide detailed water availability and water use data for those regions. All reports produced for the AWR 2005 are available on its website.
Progress
The WRON Alliance completed this project in October 2007, providing 16 detailed reports on Australia's water availability, water use, river and wetland health and AWRIS. The key findings of these reports are available in one summary report and brochure on the AWR 2005 website.
AWR 2005 has developed a national framework that can form the basis of national river and wetland health assessments, and has the capacity to bring together results of existing broad-scale assessments conducted at state, territory and basin scale. This framework is known as FARWH - a Framework for the Assessment of River and Wetland Health.
RNWS investments have supported four trials of the FARWH to further its development. These trials are in Queensland, Northern Australia, South West Western Australia and New South Wales.