A comment on allocating regulated river water for the Ord River, Western Australia

Abstract

The National Principles for the Provision of Water for Ecosystems provide the opportunity to consider ecological water requirements as part of a broader water resource allocation process in Australia (ARMCANZ & ANZECC 1996). These first principles signal a major paradigm shift from the purely consumptive or extractive approach to Australian water resources management that prevailed not all that long ago. Included in these is the premise that scientific assessments of ecological water requirements are to be undertaken so that water resource managers and decision makers can prescribe the hydrologic regime(s) to either sustain or restore to some level, the ecological processes of flow-dependent ecosystems in regulated rivers (Arthington & Zalucki 1998). These ecological water requirements are then used to determine the provision or allocation, which is the downstream flow that will actually be released after consideration of other social and economic water requirements.