Integrating Water and Catchment Planning

Citation

Land & Water Australia. 2009. Integrating Water and Catchment Planning . [Online] (Updated April 7th, 2009)
Available at: http://lwa.gov.au/node/3082 [Accessed Thursday 18th of March 2010 07:13:19 AM ].

In most jurisdictions across Australia, developing water sharing plans is a key activity.

However, the programs and processes for developing catchment plans like:

Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) plans and targets
Natural Resource Management plans
Catchment Action Plans (CAP)
Regional/Local Environment Plans

and those for preparing the Water Sharing Plans required under the National Water Initiative, seem to be run quite separately, often over different time periods, and not always by the same groups.

As a result, a Water Sharing Plan may not, for example, take account of changes in climate or land use, or catchment targets for sediment and nutrient loads to estuaries.

The National Water Commission believes there is a need for much closer linking between Integrated Catchment Management activities and water planning. Through reference to “real life” case studies, this project seeks to identify opportunities for integration between these two planning processes.

More information

Please contact Ken Moore

Outcomes

Project outputs sought by the National Water Commission and Land & Water Australia are those that will provide guidance to others about how to integrate Integrated Catchment Managment/Natural Resource Management and Water Sharing plans. These may include:

a statement of the benefits of integrating water planning into the broader goals of Integrated Catchment Management, and of the problems that can arise from not doing so
a description of different approaches to achieve this integration, and examples of what an Integrated Catchment Action Plans or Water Sharing Plan might look like
discussion of the appropriate spatial scale for integration of plans, region, catchment, state and temporal scale, 5 or 10 years, taking account of climate change scenarios
a list of key steps in the process of developing and then implementing an integrated plan, with critical success or failure points
examples of the tools, methods and protocols that might be used in the integration process. These might include tools for multi-criteria analysis, for evaluation, for engagement, for negotiation of agreed outcomes, etc.
commentary about which processes and tools might be most appropriate in particular circumstances
a fully-documented case study of integration, covering the starting situation, processes and tools used, what worked and what didn’t, outputs and outcomes achieved

Currently discussions are underway with NSW and Tasmania.