Jamie Corfield

08 Nov Jamie Corfield

Dr Jamie Corfield works with the Reef Partnerships and Innovations team within the Office of the Great Barrier Reef: Part of the Department of Environment and Science. His role focuses on urban water management and working with Regional Report Card Partnerships in Great Barrier Reef catchments. Todays talk ties the two together and introduces a new urban stewardship framework assessment tool for rating urban water stewardship and presenting this information in report cards.

A New Urban Water Management Practice and Stewardship Framework

The Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan outlines the need for all sectors, including urban, to transition towards best landuse management practices to improve water quality and build Reef resilience.  Developing and implementing frameworks for evaluating and reporting on management practice for regional and Reef-wide report cards has largely focused on the agricultural sector. Until recently, there was no equivalent for the urban sector.  While a variety of urban sector assessment frameworks have been applied in the Queensland context (e.g. Water Sensitive Cities Index and the Soil Erosion & Sediment Control Internal Management Systems Review Report Template & Action Plan) the focus of those frameworks was either not at an appropriate level of detail and/or their coverage of urban water management practices was too narrow.The Queensland Department of Environment and Science commissioned the design of a new Urban Water Management Practice and Stewardship Framework for report cards. A version of this framework is now available, and will be trialled for the Dry Tropics Partnership regional report card.  The distinguishing features of this new framework are: the coverage of urban management practices relating to developing urban (greenfield), mature urban (brownfield) and point source (sewage treatment plants and networks); recognition of enabling practices for driving stewardship and the inclusion of these as part of the overall assessment; and the scoring of urban water management in a waterway health report card context. While some of the management practices assessed under the framework relate to Queensland legislation, most are relevant to urban water management more globally.  Hence, there is scope for this framework to be adopted more widely.