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Western - Natural Resource Management region

Regional summary

The Western catchment region covers 230,000 square kilometres and supports a population of 18,000 people. It is the largest catchment region in New South Wales and includes the Bourke and Brewarrina shires, significant portions of the Cobar, Central Darling and Walgett shires and a substantial unincorporated area. A significant portion of the region covers 20 percent of Australia's largest catchment, the Murray-Darling Basin. Major towns include Broken Hill, Ivanhoe, Cobar, Bourke, Walgett, Brewarrina, Lightning Ridge and Wilcannia.

The region encompasses a series of river systems - Barwon-Darling, Culgoa, Paroo, Warrego, Narran, Bokhara and Birrie rivers - some of which are ephemeral. Water resources flowing into the region have come under increasing pressure through diversion for irrigation in recent decades. Groundwater, particularly from the Great Artesian Basin, is critical to the continuing operations of many enterprises in the Western region as surface water sources are often unreliable.

The Western region is one of the largest and most diverse areas of natural rangelands in Australia. Predominant land uses are:

• sheep, cattle and goat grazing
• irrigated agriculture, including cotton and horticulture
• mining
• tourism
• nature conservation

While the landscape is generally semi-arid, there are important wetlands in the region, including the Narran Lakes Nature Reserve and Lake Pinaroo that are listed under the Ramsar Convention.

Aboriginal people have occupied the Western catchment for forty millennia or more and the region contains many culturally significant sites. The Aboriginal people in the Western region are developing cultural tourism and art enterprises based on this knowledge and heritage.

Priority issues

Key natural resource management issues in the region include:

• surface waters - equitable sharing is needed to meet productive, social and environmental needs. Also, floodplain structures are impacting on floodwaters reaching important wetlands and floodplain grazing country
• groundwater - uncapped bores and open drains have led to a drop in Great Artesian Basin pressure, evaporation and wastage of the resource
• weeds and feral animals pose a significant threat to native vegetation and native flora and fauna
• invasive native scrub poses a significant risk to perennial pastures
• soil erosion and pasture loss - land that has become degraded, either through natural processes or inappropriate management regimes, is unstable, susceptible to further degradation and has lowered production values
• salinity - periods of high salt concentration and overall salt loads have been increasing since settlement

Regional plan

The former Western Catchment Management Board - predecessor to the current Western Catchment Management Authority - prepared an integrated natural resource management (NRM) plan, the blueprint, for what is now the Western region, incorporating social, economic and environmental elements of NRM.

This blueprint is based on a whole-of-catchment approach and sets 10-year catchment condition targets for the priority NRM issues of the region. It outlines the tasks that need to be accomplished to achieve these targets.

This blueprint forms the basis for the development of an Investment Strategy that is used to attract funding from the Australian and state governments, and from other sources, for the specific actions identified in the Investment Strategy.

Through National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality (NAP) and the Trust funding, the Western Catchment Management Authority will provide information and incentives to resource managers to encourage strong community involvement in the region's NRM and foster projects and practical activities that benefit the environment and the community.

Current activities

NRM priority	Activities addressing the priority
Land and Vegetation	incentives for improved land management partnerships with industry to develop Codes of Practice
Development of a conservation industry - marketing the region's environmental services	preliminary identification of plant communities of high conservation value providing a climatic decision support tool to assist landholders better manage grazing pressures
Water and salinity	increased monitoring of water quality and salinity levels to inform public and private land and water management identification of critical and priority wetlands incentives for improved riparian zone management for water quality outcomes riparian health survey to better target investments in conservation of threatened fish and other aquatic species accelerate capping and piping of uncontrolled artesian bores
Biodiversity	identification of critical and priority wetlands protecting plant communities of high value through conservation incentives and voluntary conservation schemes management of perennial grass cover for biodiversity outcomes improving riparian zone management for biodiversity outcomes

Contacts

Further information can be obtained by contacting the Regional Facilitators for New South Wales.