Australia has an ambitious agenda for water reform.

Key elements of the National Water Initiative (NWI), the country’s pre-eminent water policy, include water entitlements and planning framework, water markets and trading, integrated management of water for environmental and other public benefit outcomes, knowledge and capacity building, community partnerships and adjustment.

Water Planning is central to the achievement of sustainable water management.

The NWI places a great deal of emphasis on water planning as the core mechanism through which water resource management will be restructured, and sustainable and equitable water allocations achieved. Water planning is seen as ‘an important mechanism to assist governments and the community to determine water management and allocation decisions to meet productive environmental and social objectives’.

This project will improve water planning processes by piloting a suite of collaborative planning tools, leading to improvements in the way water plans are developed and implemented.

Through the pilots, the project will result in the development and dissemination of good practice tools and mechanisms to address current gaps in water planning processes and on-ground implementation of NWI water planning requirements.

Tools and mechanisms will be developed and trialed in parallel with existing jurisdictional water planning processes to ensure they can be adopted and incorporated into individual state and territory water planning frameworks through the development of practical guides, websites, manuals, databases and seminars.

Project benefits

This project will:

· comprehensively identify the current gaps in implementing water planning processes in relation to the requirements of the National Water Initiative

· develop good practice tools and mechanisms to address these gaps in a practical sense across all jurisdictions

· provide important information for the benefit of water planning processes across all jurisdictions, and

· lead to improvements in the way water plans are developed and implemented on the ground.