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National water planning report makes a splash
A University of the Sunshine Coast academic has co-authored a comprehensive report into Australia’s water planning practices which already has sent more than a few ripples across the country.
USC Regional and Urban Planning lecturer Claudia Baldwin and two researchers from New South Wales, Mark Hamstead and Vanessa O’Keefe, produced the report after winning a competitive tender from the National Water Commission last year.
After eight months of compiling case studies and interviewing water planners and users across all States, the trio produced a 528-page report entitled “Water Planning Processes and Lessons Learned”.
This was published as the NWC’s “Waterlines Series – Occasional paper No 6” in April.
Ms Baldwin said the report, which highlights some of the best water management practices across Australia, had already prompted the NWC to take action.
“The NWC, as a result of our report, is funding a project that will involve applying some of the good practices of three particular new water planning processes around the country,” she said.
“The NWC also is allocating millions of dollars for funding new post-graduate courses in water planning, establishing best practice guidelines for water planning, doing training with local water planners and establishing an evaluation system for continuing improvement.
“This is going to have a huge impact on water planning in Australia.”
Ms Baldwin said she and her co-authors had sought to determine how far Australia had progressed since water planning first commenced more than a decade ago.
“The National Water Commission wanted to know where we have got to at this point, what are we doing well and what are some of the lessons that we have learnt,” she said.
Ms Baldwin said she was particularly interested in how conflicts in relation to water use were resolved, as this was the focus of her PhD thesis.
“There’s only a limited amount of water to go around, so how do you share it?” she said. “There’s always going to be people who aren’t going to get their own way.”
The NWC website says the Waterlines paper had been published to “highlight lessons learned by individual State and Territories in the interests of sharing these experiences more widely to advance water planning in Australia”.
“The Commission will run a series of seminars nationwide to share these findings and is making targeted investments to support improved water planning processes across Australia,” the NWC said.
— Terry Walsh