Planning at the basin level enables the interconnections and interdependencies between the different elements of the water resources base and between the water sector and other sectors to be made explicit.
Australia’s most well-known basin management experience is the development of the Murray-Darling River Basin Plan. The Basin Plan provides a coordinated approach cross the Murray-Darling Basin’s five sub-national jurisdictions. Cooperation and coordination between central and state governments was critical to the success of the plan and its ongoing implementation. The Basin Plan is a major step forward in Australia that is aimed at balancing environmental, social and economic considerations by limiting water use to environmentally sustainable levels.
Do you have these challenges?
- Trying to decide which basin institutional arrangement is the most appropriate
- Problems with sediment and/or salt management
- Trying to implement IWRM at the basin scale
- Are you developing scenarios for different basin development pathways
- Interested in improving/strengthening cooperation over shared water resources across international or state boundaries
- Allocating water to different users and uses
- Integrating surface and groundwater management
- Understanding impacts of climate change
- Developing basin plans
Want to learn more about…
- Basin planning
- Modelling platforms to support basin water management
- Appropriate legal and policy frameworks
- Governance arrangements
- Upstream – downstream cooperation
- IWRM
- Stakeholder engagement
- Deliberative governance
- Mapping water-related assets and resources
- Hydropower
- Dams
- Sediment management
- Water-food-energy nexus
- Pollution – water quality guidelines
- Climate change
- Implementation – regulation and enforcement
- Source-to-sea
- Sustainable water use
- Water for the environment
- Water infrastructure (connecting urban, peri-urban and rural)
- Basic human needs
- Basin visioning and scenario planning
- Adaptive management
- River health – environmental reporting
- Extractive industries
- Managed aquifer recharge
- Transboundary water management
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Further resources
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- Murray-Darling Basin Authority | Water management 101 factsheets
- ICIMOD | Revisiting Key Questions Regarding Upstream-Downstream Linkages of Land and Water Management in the Hindu Kush Himalaya Region (2018)
- ICIMOD | Multiscale Integrated River Basin Management from a Hindu Kush Himalayan Perspective: Resource Book
- Mekong River Commission | Basin Reports