Establishing a standard approach

Product Information

Until this project was initiated there was no generally accepted version of an Australian framework of terms and definitions for water use efficiency. As a result, people used different measures for water use efficiency e.g. one person could measure crop water use to describe water use efficiency while another could use irrigation water use. While the answers were correct as far as the particular measures are concerned, there was no way of actually comparing them because they were calculated using different base criteria.

With pressure on Australia’s irrigation industry, both agricultural and urban, to use water more efficiently, defining and agreeing on ways of evaluating and monitoring irrigation systems so that the performance of different crops and regions can be compared is crucial. To do this it is first necessary to agree on a framework of terms and definitions for water use efficiency. This project took the results of a workshop held in 1999 to develop a framework of terms and definitions for water use efficiency and consulted stakeholders in the irrigation industry around Australia to produce agreement on them.