Water planning
Water planning is at the heart of water reform in Australia.
Effective water planning is fundamental to the National Water Initiative (NWI) and is the best way for determining how we share valuable water resources among competing uses.
Water sharing plans will help provide certainty for consumers and environmental water users, giving them resource security and allowing them to plan to protect ecological assets.
Importantly, effective planning provides all water users with an evidence-based, participatory and transparent process.
The Commission's position statement on water planning in Australia sets out priority actions to assist governments in meeting commitments under the NWI and to build community confidence in water planning processes.
National Water Commission planning activities
To support more effective and nationally consistent water planning, the Commission released a Waterlines report Water planning in Australia: Lessons learned to draw together key lessons learned about water planning by individual states and territories.
A nationwide seminar series has extended the findings of the report to water planners from each state and territory, and another related project is developing practical water planning tools for use Australia-wide.
An increasingly important planning consideration is the interception of significant volumes of surface and/or groundwater by land-use activities.
The Commission is funding a $3.53 million interception work program to identify and quantify water used by activities that have the potential to intercept significant volumes of surface and/or ground water. This information will help establish water use thresholds to trigger the use of water access entitlements.
The CSIRO Sustainable Yield Project - a robust, basin-wide estimate of the future availability of water resources, taking into account climate change and other risk - will provide a much better basis for informing the development of new sustainable diversion limits for the surface and groundwater systems of the Murray-Darling Basin.