Reform progress
The National Water Initiative requires a number of issues associated with groundwater to be dealt with as key actions. These include:
- improving our knowledge of groundwater-surface water connectivity
- improving the definition of sustainable extraction rates and regimes
- developing better understanding of the relationship between groundwater and important groundwater-dependent ecosystems.
Unless there is a concerted national agenda to deal with current groundwater challenges in a comprehensive and sustained manner, groundwater resources are likely to become over-exploited and potentially put at risk of contamination. This means that flows from groundwater to surface water may decrease or even reverse.
The National Water Commission equally recognises that the sustainable use of groundwater, and its possible augmentation in some instances by managed aquifer recharge, also offers a promising basis for managing water resources as climate gets drier and hotter, and evaporation further affects surface water storage.
The National Water Initiative recognises the connectivity between surface and groundwater resources and requires connected systems to be managed as a single resource.
With the increased use of groundwater across the country and the long-running drought decreasing surface water availability, the need to better manage groundwater and connected resources has become paramount. Improved understanding of groundwater and management of groundwater-surface water interactions is fundamental to this.
Baseline groundwater information
The Australian Water Resources 2005 baseline study identified aquifers throughout the country where water entitlements and/or use exceeded sustainable yield or recharge.
The study reported on groundwater stocks for its 51 selected catchments. It was estimated that in 2004-05 there was approximately 49,200 GL of groundwater recharge nationally. This was 17% of total runoff and recharge. However, of the nation's total water use, groundwater extractions comprised over 30% in 2004-05.
Measuring progress
In its 2009 Biennial Assessment of progress against the National Water Initiative, the National Water Commission reported that groundwater reform generally was progressing, albeit slowly in some areas.
Findings included that:
- Progress continues to be slow in identifying and addressing significant interception of surface and groundwater.
- All jurisdictions have passed legislation or implemented planning processes that recognise the potential for groundwater and surface water connectivity, and all have begun assessments of connectivity, as required under the NWI, although their approaches vary significantly.
- Investments through the National Groundwater Action Plan are improving understanding of system connectivity.
- All jurisdictions have made some progress in developing integrated management arrangements for identified connected systems. However, the continuing slow rollout of water plans, and a failure to adequately address overallocation in some systems, are inhibiting wide adoption of integrated management.
- Unless and until it can be demonstrated otherwise, surface water and groundwater resources should be assumed to be fully connected.
- Substantial progress towards the NWI aim to complete the return of all currently overallocated or overused systems to environmentally sustainable levels by 2010 has not been met. All reviewed water plans that identify overallocated or overused systems included pathways to return those systems to environmentally sustainable levels of extraction, but very few, if any, such systems have been successfully transitioned to within sustainable extraction limits.
- Groundwater systems make up the vast majority of the water systems currently identified by jurisdictions as overallocated, overused, or both.
- Significant progress is being made in the area of water entitlements through legislative reform and the 'unbundling' of water entitlements from land. However, implementation of the NWI water access entitlements framework remains slow in some jurisdictions. How far jurisdictions intend to roll out NWI-consistent water access entitlements, particularly in unregulated groundwater systems, remains unclear.
- Progress in meeting NWI commitments for cost recovery in water planning and management for both surface and groundwater has been very limited. Further advances in this area are needed in Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria and South Australia and nationally to implement consistent approaches.