Water Policy

Guiding principles for conjunctive water management in Australia

A national workshop May 2004 bought together water experts, managers and users from around Australia to identify strategic directions for realising the opportunities and addressing the issues associated with the conjunctive water management (Fullagar, 2004). The following guiding principles were defined during this workshop:

  1. Where physically connected, surface water (including overland flows) and groundwater should be managed as one resource.
    All surface water and groundwater stores rely (either directly or indirectly) on rainfall for recharge. Identification of new storages within a connected system does not automatically increase the net sustainable yield of that system.
  2. Water management regimes should assume connectivity between surface water (including overland flows) and groundwater unless proven otherwise.
    The Precautionary Principle should apply to protect against potential impacts of surface water-groundwater interactions. For example, a single combined sustainable yield should be used as the basis for the net allocation of surface water and surrounding groundwater resources until:
    1. it can be proven they are disconnected; or
    2. management regimes for those storages are developed to take advantage of respective storage efficiencies and time lags between surface and groundwater flows.
  3. Water users (groundwater and surface water) should be treated equally.
    It is not appropriate to assume a blanket hierarchy between surface water and groundwater licences. Pricing, security, capping, licensing, metering, and defining reliability should be consistent for all water users.
  4. Jurisdictional boundaries should not prevent management actions.
    Discontinuity in government institutional arrangements between (and within) jurisdictions should not be an excuse for failing to identify and address issues associated with connected systems, or for not progressing opportunities associated with conjunctive water management.

References

Fullagar I, 2004. Rivers and Aquifers: Towards conjunctive water management [PDF 1MB]. Workshop Proceedings, Adelaide 6-7 May, 2004. Bureau of Rural Sciences.