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Securing Australia’s groundwater future
Professor Craig T. Simmons, Director, National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training, Australia;
and Neil Power, Director, State Research Coordination, Goyder Institute for Water Research, South Australia
T
o many outsiders Australia is a land of surf and sun-
drenched beaches. But venture a short way inland and it
is mostly semi-arid and desert, a land mass where drought
is all too common and water is an extremely valuable commodity.
To prosper in such a parched and unforgiving environment, the
nation has become increasingly reliant on groundwater. From a
largely untapped resource 40 years ago, groundwater is now the life-
blood of communities and key to economic development for large
parts of the country. An estimate widely accepted by scientists and
policymakers is that groundwater now directly supplies more than
30 per cent of the nation’s consumptive use.
Access to such low-cost, good quality water has delivered massive
social and economic benefits, allowing industry and urban and
regional centres to flourish. Without it, agriculture and mining
would struggle, numerous rural towns and cities such as Perth,
Newcastle and Alice Springs would lose their main water source,
and countless dependent ecosystems would perish.
Managing the impact of this rapid increase in extraction and
securing the long-term future of the resource for all users is
highly complex and challenging. It involves many
competing interests – community, industrial and
environmental – as well as federal, state and local
levels of government.
One of the biggest challenges is to manage the
cumulative environmental impact of multiple actions
on the baseflow of rivers, springs, wetlands and other
groundwater-dependent ecosystems. The uncertainty of
climate change and climate variability is adding another
layer of complexity. The concern is that if groundwa-
ter is not properly managed, over-development could
result in the irreversible degradation of aquifers and
affect the reliability of surface water resources. Such a
scenario would have significant economic and environ-
mental ramifications.
Efforts to better understand and manage groundwa-
ter have been the subject of various intergovernmental
initiatives over the past 20 years. These have increasingly
focused on the need for a coordinated, national response.
The most recent initiative – the National Groundwater
Action Plan, which was funded by the Australian
Government through the National Water Commission
– helped explore knowledge gaps through extensive
hydrogeological investigations and assisted in establish-
ing the National Centre for Groundwater Research and
Training (NCGRT) for large-scale capacity building.
While good progress is being made, there is recogni-
tion that Australia still has some way to go to secure
its groundwater future. Recent projects have succeeded
in developing general tools, baseline assessments and
guidelines to improve groundwater management, but
the work started from a relatively low base.
Australia still needs to answer critical questions in
areas such as the scale of groundwater use and its deple-
tion, the impacts on connected surface water resources
and the risk of increased salinity posed by high levels
of extraction. Accurately quantifying total groundwater
use is just one side of the ledger; estimating recharge
is even more challenging. The recharge process can
be extremely long-term, sometimes stretching over
hundreds of thousands of years.
To achieve long-term goals, a new National
Groundwater Strategic Plan is being developed to guide
policy and decision makers over the next 10 years. The
planning process is groundbreaking in that it has sought
input from all key stakeholders, including water manag-
ers, policymakers and researchers across national, state
E
conomic
D
evelopment
and
W
ater
Groundwater use in Australia as a percentage of total water use in
key catchments across the country
Source: Australian Water Resources Council/CSIRO