Communication
Communication should be a component of any water management strategy. Table 1 attempts to map the current status of awareness of connectivity across the community, highlighting the need for improving communication (Fullagar, 2004). Education and extension should develop a shared understanding of the issues, knowledge gaps, knowledge requirements, and potential opportunities of conjunctive water management.
| Local | Science | Agencies | Indigenous |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mine the resource, its infinite | Incomplete process understanding | We have enough problems with surface water | Unknown, though potentially very valuable |
| Disconnected from overstressed rivers | Need to connect surface water and groundwater models | Hard to understand and connections to surface unclear | |
| Escape from regulation & strife | Need more data | Coming onto horizon as they start to understand environmental flows - especially base flows | |
| Control my own future with pumps | Need more research | River channel or floodplain as recharge needs to be understood | |
| Not impacting neighbours or the rivers | Critical problems being ignored | ||
| Drives regional catchment bodies |
This involves:
- improving community awareness and understanding of general connectivity principles and issues;
- explaining the impacts of groundwater use on surface water flows including identifying risks to security of water supply and any trade-offs;
- outlining the planning process including why water management planning is necessary, including the objectives, process, planning structure and timeframes;
- establishing clear rules of community and government engagement within the planning context;
- raising awareness of the tools available to assess groundwater-surface water interaction;
- providing education of the capabilities and limitations of predictive models that are used in decision making;
- encouraging the integration of groundwater and surface water research groups at universities and other scientific agencies;
- fostering communication between modellers, water managers and users and taking a multi-disciplinary approach in the development of appropriate conceptual and numerical models; and
- communicating the opportunities and limitations of engineering technologies particularly on the use of aquifers as water storages (Fullagar, 2004).