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Rivers support many of our businesses and activities and meet many of our lifestyle needs. They provide many aesthetic, cultural, and environmental values. But our rivers, inland and coastal, are at risk. Climate change is not the only threat.

Many significant catchments, river systems and rural landscapes are already degraded, with serious impacts not only on river health but also on our primary and secondary industries, towns, social networks, careers and lives, including the lives of many Indigenous people.

We need to be far more active in protecting and conserving our river systems and, where necessary, in restoring them in targeted ways.

We need to focus on the main game

We must engage in the catchment management and whole-system management of our river basins.

At our peril we continue at all levels of government and society to fail to accord this management principle overwhelming importance in our planning, management and decision making.

No matter which river system, effective and sustainable management requires that each be managed as a whole. Why? Because each river system adapts and responds to external pressures and stimuli quite differently – and because each river system responds to these pressures differently from its constituent parts, such as its water, natural species, vegetation and so on.

Yet we continue to try to manage one part, or attribute, of a river, such as water quality or river flows, in isolation, in an unsuccessful effort to secure river health.

In the absence of a generic ‘quick fix’ we then often try to tackle local symptoms of poor river health by local, non-systemic strategies. Most of these approaches have not led to the desired outcomes for catchment and river health, primarily because they ignore the system interconnections and causal relationships.

Whole-of-government effort

Effective catchment management calls for whole-of-government effort if catchments and river systems are to be sustained.

Because government roles are traditionally highly compartmentalised into water, forestry, the environment, planning, managing the economy and so on, it is crucial that the management efforts of agencies, authorities and local government be concerted towards securing whole-system goals.

It is rare indeed for government to put in place an entity that is responsible for considering the overall needs of a given river system. Most governments are reluctant to create a ‘River Manager’, though the Commonwealth Government has done so in the Murray–Darling system and the NSW Premier has promised to introduce an office for the Hawkesbury–Nepean system.

Such management arrangements are seldom introduced because they would cut across existing responsibilities and powers.

In their absence, effective catchment management demands that government bodies be held accountable in terms of river-health outcomes for the way they exercise power and apply resources. This does require priorities, policies and legislation to be reviewed and changed if the decisions and actions of government bodies are to be refocused on whole systems and their integrated management.

Sustainability a necessary foundation

Sustainability of river systems and their continued good health is a necessary foundation for all economic activity that depends on river water.

Rivers are highly productive assets, so we need to recognise them as economic assets and then work hard to manage and treat them as such.

This requires that we understand their capacity limits, invest in effective management and planning, recognise when the assets are depreciating and invest, when necessary, in their staged rehabilitation.

The management structures we set up must allow government and citizens to hold managers accountable for the assessment of capacity limits as well as the condition and performance of these assets.

Improved water planning needed

Effective catchment management and improved asset management calls for improved water planning.

Water planning needs to be rooted in good science and a good understanding of local cultures and priorities. It must influence and interface with local government, town, economic development and regional planning.

Effective water plans must take account of available water resources; the interactions between surface and groundwater; the interactions between land, vegetation and water; and the overall health of a given river system, as well as potential threats and risks. A central issue is the capacity to meet present and future demands in sustainable ways.

Unfortunately the constraints built into many water plans have led to a focus on the management of water resources in isolation from the rest of the broader system. That renders them less reliable and less useful as instruments to drive integration of water, sewage and energy services or to promote desirable trade-offs between the use and conservation of land, vegetation and water.

Managing for climate change

If water planning is robust, confidence in water entitlements, water markets and water trading will improve, leaving climate change the most challenging variable to manage.

Over recent years both the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) and the National Water Initiative (NWI) have focused on how better to specify water rights, how to facilitate the introduction of efficient water markets and how to remove restrictions on water trade.

Then competitive water markets will progressively allow available water to gravitate towards higher-value uses and trading will establish the market price of water. That price will be influenced by demand, as well as various catchment-based issues, and barriers and restrictions to trade.

The challenge of reducing the impacts of inefficient
regulatory, transactional and social costs on water markets remains. Confidence in these efforts will grow as we become more confident that existing water plans will facilitate long-term, sustainable river health.

In that regard, we should note that the allocation of water to environmental, agricultural and human use through these plans has been based on best available information and may prove to be inappropriate.

While many argue that it would be more economically efficient to allow water for urban supply to be priced according to scarcity, most governments are yet to be persuaded.

Business as usual won’t work

Business as usual will not correct or overcome past over-allocation, poor agricultural practice, poor planning, market shifts, or weak decision-making. Nor will it position government, stakeholders and the community to deal with significant climate change. Bold policies need to be forged and existing law and agreements reshaped to focus on achieving dramatic improvements in water management and how to achieve sustainability for our rivers and their catchments.

There is no room for approaches that diminish political or administrative risk or which countenance inefficient water use. Governments may need to draw on a wider suite of instruments, including incentives, auctions and rural structural adjustment. They will have to work harder to dismantle many traditional structures, institutions and processes that block and slow down essential reforms, and consult widely in so doing. At the same time, they will need to launch more public inquiries and a variety of educative and participative programs to gain greater community confidence in these difficult processes.

Stakeholders will continue to be called on to be realistic about the scale of necessary change and communities to participate in hard decision-making processes leading to outcomes where there are often few real winners.

Acknowledgement: Many of these policy positions and principles were developed and refined through the efforts of the NSW Healthy Rivers Commission, of which I was Commissioner for its span of eight years.

Peter J Crawford AM FTSE has held public and private sector positions and academic posts in Australia, France, Germany and the US. His appointments included chief executive of environmental, water and state development authorities in NSW and SA, and the SA Department of Premier and Cabinet. In recent years he has focused on strategic leadership and effective management and directed change in organisations and government. He has published two books dealing with direction setting and institutional reform in government, The Serious Business of Governing (1996) and Captive of the System (2003).