PODER OBRERO Y COLECTIVISMO EN CATALUNYA Y ARAGÓN

COAG continued to note the imperative of increasing the productivity and efficiency of water use and the health of river and groundwater systems in Australia, and the National Water Initiative (NWI) was agreed to and signed at COAG’s June 2004 meeting. The NWI refreshes the 1994 COAG water reform agenda by establishing actions to increase the productivity and efficiency of water use, sustain rural and urban communities, and to ensure the health of river and groundwater systems.

The NWI aims to achieve this in four ways (COAG, 2003):

1. Improving the security of water access entitlements, including by clear assignment of risks of reductions in future water availability and by returning over-allocated systems to sustainable allocation levels;

2. Ensuring ecosystem health by implementing regimes to protect environmental assets at a whole-of-basin, aquifer or catchment scale;

3. Ensuring that water is put to best use by encouraging the expansion of water markets and trading across and between districts and States (where water systems are physically shared), involving clear rules for trading, robust water accounting arrangements and pricing based on full cost recovery principles; and

4. Encouraging water conservation in our cities, including better use of stormwater and recycled water.

The Natural Resources Management Ministerial Council gained an enhanced role as the body responsible for overseeing implementation of the NWI Agreement and the National Water Commission (NWC) was established in 2005. The NWC is an

independent statutory agency within the Prime Minister's portfolio, which is responsible for driving national water reform and investment. The Commonwealth Government has been providing funding to the NWC, and seven NWC commissioners were appointed. Members of the Commission were selected on the basis of their skills in the areas of ‘audit and evaluation, governance, resource economics, water resource management, freshwater ecology and hydrology’. The NWC has been assigned a comprehensive reporting and coordinating brief and it is likely that its role will expand to provide support to regional catchment authorities as they struggle with a difficult implementation agenda (Connell et al., 2004).

One of the key objectives of the NWI (NWI, 2004) is ‘the recognition of the connectivity between surface and groundwater resources, and for connected systems to be managed as a single resource’ (clause 23). The NWI also stipulates that all States and Territories agree to identify by the end of 2005 situations where close interaction between groundwater aquifers and streamflow exist (this had not been completed to date), and implement by 2008 systems to integrate the accounting of groundwater and surface water use (clause 83). Another key objective is for water allocation in catchments to be managed through integrated catchment management approaches that consider social and economic factors along with the biophysical factors (clause 78). The implementation of the water reform agenda is particularly affecting Australia’s most developed irrigation regions such as the Namoi River catchment. Water reforms have resulted in decreased water entitlements for water users in order to promote resource security and sustainability. However, a broad-scale understanding of the interactions between the groundwater and river systems remains lacking. Consequently, the projected outcomes of reduced water allocations remain unclear and contentious, and the degree to which groundwater extractions undermine the integrity of the Cap is unknown.

One of the targets of the water sharing plans is for the connectivity between groundwater and river systems to be mapped, with the intent of eventually quantifying the impacts of groundwater extraction on river flows in connected aquifer-river systems. Additional targets are for the ecological and cultural water requirements of the catchment to be assessed and met through the required river flow characteristics. Little research has been undertaken in these areas. An understanding of groundwater-river interactions is vital to achieving water sharing plan objectives. And unfortunately most

catchment managers responsible for managing water resources would have little information on where rivers and aquifers are connected, nor the knowledge of how best to advance the management of these resources conjunctively.

3.5 Chapter Summary

This chapter has provided an overview of the Namoi River catchment setting, the use and management of water resources, and the water reform agenda. The implementation of water reforms poses many difficulties for catchment managers, especially in highly developed catchments reliant on surface and groundwater irrigation such as the Namoi River catchment. The implementation of the National Water Initiative will require that the connectivity between surface and groundwater resources is recognised, and that connected systems are managed as a single resource. This will present a significant challenge to water managers. A first step will be to identify connected aquifer-river systems and to clarify management objectives for these river reaches. The following chapter discusses a classification system for describing key types of groundwater-river interactions, and demonstrates the use of some relatively simple methods that were used to characterise the river reaches in the Namoi River catchment.

Chapter 4 Characterisation of Namoi River Reaches

4.1 Introduction

The principles described in Chapter 2 demonstrated the importance of developing a greater understanding of the spatial and temporal interactions taking place between groundwater and river systems. And Chapter 3 highlighted the requirement within the National Water Initiative reform agenda (NWI, 2004) that connected groundwater-river systems are managed as a single resource. An important first step to meet the water reform challenges is for connected groundwater-river systems to be identified, and for the types of interactions occurring between groundwater and river systems to be characterised. This chapter discusses the methods commonly used to assess groundwater-river interactions, outlines a system of classification and discusses a framework implemented in this research to characterise the interactions observed in the Namoi River catchment.