Freshwater ecosystems

5.8 The Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation (Land and Water Australia)

Given the roles and responsibilities of Australia's three levels of government (discussed above) it is important that research and development be guided and coordinated to: (a) focus available funds on the highest priority issues, and (b) minimise duplication of effort. The with eight jurisdictions developing separate programs, the possibility for wasted effort is obvious.
The Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation (LWRRDC) was established under Commonwealth funding and legislation in 1989. The focus of the LWRRDC relates to the productive and sustainable management of land, water and vegetation resources. According to the latest LWRRDC annual report, the purpose of the organisation "is to utilise the full national research and development capability to help achieve the goal of sustainable management of the natural resources which underpin rural primary industries and regional communities".
It should be noted that the name of the organisation has changed to "Land and Water Australia"; however the old, universally known name is used in this paper to avoid confusion.
The corporation funds a good deal of research focussing on sustainable management of water resources and ecosystems. The two most relevant projects to the issues under discussion in this paper are: (a) the report on protecting rivers of high ecological value (Dunn 2000) (discussed above and below), and (b) the ongoing project developing sustainable management planning systems for Queensland rivers, currently contracted to the Queensland Environment Protection Agency.
This latter project extends Helen Dunn's work, and will hopefully produce model management processes and guidelines, capable of being used under all Australian jurisdictions.
Comprehensive freshwater inventories must include information on ecosystem condition. Edition 17 of LWRRDC's riparian management newsletter Riprap contains several articles summarising recent development in monitoring and evaluation programs relevant to riparian lands and wider river ecosystems.
The LWRRDC website is at http://www.lwrrdc.gov.au . See also the associated website: http://www.rivers.gov.au/ .

5.9 The National Land and Water Resources Audit

Like the LWRRDC, the National Land and Water Resources Audit (NLWRA) was established to provide coordination across Australia's different jurisdictions. The organisation is commonly referred to as "the Audit" in shortened form. The focus of the Audit is on monitoring, information storage and retrieval, and reporting frameworks. Funding is provided under Natural Heritage Trust funds until mid-2002.
The purpose of the Audit is to provide a comprehensive appraisal of Australia's natural resource base. It's outcomes are listed⁸⁴ as:

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  scientific assessments on the status of, and where possible, recent changes in, the nation's land, vegetation and water resources to assist decision-makers in their efforts to achieve ecological sustainability - the assessments are also to serve as a baseline or benchmark for future trend analysis;
  
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  reports on the economic, environmental, and social assessments of land and water resource change (including land cover) and remedial actions;
  
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  integrated nationally compatible data sets to support audit processes, which are suitable for ongoing development and maintenance as a readily accessible national information system; and
  
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  a National Water Resource Assessment to show the extent of both the surface and groundwater resources, quality, supply capacity and use.
  

The Audit has commissioned a variety of studies focussing on different aspects of water sustainability. Importantly, guidelines for the assessment of environmental impacts of water infrastructure proposals have been developed⁸⁵.

Traditional environmental impact studies have not assessed the sustainability (economically or ecologically) of irrigation proposals associated with major dams. In my view, guidelines also need to be developed to guide the assessment of such irrigation infrastructure proposals on which major water proposals depend for their economic viability. I understand that this issue has been considered, but further work in this area is not currently funded.
Among the Audit's current project funding, the Assessment of River Condition (ARC) Project is of particular interest to the issues discussed in this paper. The ARC project aims to deliver a national framework for the assessment or rivers, reporting at a reach scale. The project will develop a nationally comparable system for assessing river condition, make the national data set readily accessible, and identify management priorities for each basin in the intensive landuse zone.
The project builds on the Victorian Index of Stream Condition (ISC) work, as well as the Wild Rivers database of catchment and flow disturbance. The project is being undertaken jointly by the Cooperative Research Centre for Freshwater Ecology and the CSIRO Division of Land and Water.
The project will report an integrated ARC Index, made up of five key indicator groups: hydrology (amended annual flow deviation), water quality, catchment disturbance, physical habitat integrity, and biota. The biota data in the initial work will be limited to AusRivAS macro-invertebrate data, but this framework could be expanded at a later stage. The project is also developing an algorithm for identifying river reaches using a digital elevation model, combined with basic modelling of hydraulic capacity.
This work promises to develop a national database which will be able to deliver some of the necessary information for identifying and selecting representative river reserves. Key questions in such an exercise are: (a) what river types are there in a region, and (b) what are the condition of rivers of each type?
The Audit is also funding a national assessment of water allocation and use in each major drainage basin. This, combined with information on river type and condition, are essential pre-requisites for the strategic infrastructure assessments advocated in this paper as a means of managing the cumulative impacts of incremental water infrastructure development.
Through the development of the ISC and the ARC indices, considerable progress has been made in developing river condition frameworks. The development of comprehensive freshwater ecosystem inventories will need similar indices of both wetland condition and aquifer condition. Further work is needed in these areas.
The Audit website is at http://www.nlwra.gov.au .