Water policy and management is determined by National and State legislation, and frameworks, guidelines and policies that sit underneath the legislation. In many areas, legislation and policies are expressed on the ground through groundwater management plans, which set rules for water use within more than 250 groundwater management areas across Australia. Groundwater legislation and management has lagged surface water management, …

Groundwater supplies almost one third of all water used for irrigation in Australia, but increasing future demand and climate change are likely to put groundwater systems under increasing pressure. NCGRT researchers have expertise in estimation of sustainable yields of groundwater systems and estimating recharge beneath both dryland and irrigated agriculture. We are working with industry to examine the potential for …

NCGRT researchers are actively engaged in a diverse range of groundwater contamination studies. This includes work on groundwater salinity and its effect on usability of water resources; on geogenic contaminants such as arsenic and fluoride, which may be elevated due to natural geochemical interactions between groundwater and rock formations; on mining impacts on water quality, including acrid mine generation and …