River and wetland health

River and wetland health is one of three headline parameters that are reported by AWR 2005 as follows:

1) What is the current condition of our water resources?

2) What are the key environmental assets for each system?

3) What are the water requirements of our key environmental assets and ecosystems?

Each question is intended to assist with monitoring and reporting on the National Water Initiative (NWI) objectives that directly relate to river and wetland health, namely:

• Objective (iii)statutory provision for environmental and other public benefit outcomes, and improved environmental management objectives
• Objective (iv)complete the return of all currently overallocated or overused systems to environmentally sustainable levels of extraction

This document represents the first level of the process and is mainly concerned with the second question.

Australia's rivers and wetlands have important cultural and environmental values
Image by Colin Chartres

Environmental assets that have legislative protection based on their naturalness are seen as an important first step in providing an inventory of the resource base (addressing clause 25 (x) of the NWI). In addition, the 1994 Council of Australian Government (CoAG) agreement on water reform outlined that environmental water provision issues needed to be addressed by the best available scientific methods and information. Thus, the status of environmental water provisions that have been determined by each jurisdiction since 1994 have been reported (beginning to address clauses 4145 and 7879 of the NWI).

There are also several national policies related to the questions above, and the states and territories have signed or endorsed them (see Beavis, S 2005, Engineers Australia, 29th Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium 21-23 February pp 18). These include:

• The National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD), 1992
• Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment, 1992
• National Water Quality Management Strategy, 1992
• National Principles for Provision of Water for Ecosystems, 1996
• National Strategy for Conservation of Australia 's Biological Diversity, 1996
• the Environmental Protection of Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999

AWR 2005 has developed a national framework that can form the basis of national river and wetland health assessments, and has the capacity to bring together results of existing broad-scale assessments conducted at state, territory and basin scale.

Related links

River and wetland health is discussed in more detail in the following sections:

• National framework for the assessment of river and wetland health
• Identifying protected high-conservation water assets
• Protected wetlands, rivers and river catchments
• Protected terrestrial areas
• Environmental water provisions

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