Healthy catchments are vital for climate resilience – and effective governance is key. As extreme weather intensifies, integrated catchment management will shape how well our communities and environments withstand a changing climate.
To mark World Water Week (24-28 August 2025) we’re exploring the theme of ‘Water for Climate Action’ with our Catchment Management Specialist Network Co-Chairs, Dr Kelly Hill and Kim Markwell, including the challenges and opportunities in this transforming field of water work.
SAAFE CRC Research Program Manager Dr Kelly Hill said it’s well known now that working together to keep catchments healthy is fundamental to keeping them resilient to the impacts of climate change.
"The work is becoming more about integrated catchment management. A really healthy catchment is more resilient to some of the effects of climate change. If you’re taking into account the environment, biodiversity and ecology of the area around the catchment, then you can better understand impacts,” she said.
"Being mindful of all the elements that make up our catchments really helps us manage some of those climate and extreme events, or what we used to call extreme but now seem more commonplace.”
Alluvium Consulting’s Queensland Regional Manager Kim Markwell agrees, noting that nature-based solutions currently being implemented at various scales and locations are, in a way, a reversal of historically over-engineered environments and spaces, particularly in urban areas.
"We have been very good at altering our catchments in the past to support development, community safety and economic growth. We now know this historic catchment and water management approach has altered the natural water cycle and our resilience to a changing climate, particularly during extremes like droughts and floods,” she said
“Climate change clearly has an impact on these events, but we often make those impacts worse through changes across our catchments. By clearing vegetation and draining our urban environments, water now moves quite differently through catchments, which puts communities and the environment at risk.
“How we manage our catchments, how water moves through catchments, how industry and agriculture is supported, the resilience of our communities, how we supply them with water, how we protect them from floods and extreme heat or bushfire. All of these elements are intrinsically linked.”
Dr Hill and Markwell both said there are some excellent examples of great work in catchment management being done around Australia, including Aboriginal organisations partnering with water utilities to bolster catchment health, and integrated management plans and catchment-scale initiatives being delivered by government, NRM groups and water utilities.
However, one of the biggest hurdles facing implementation and maintenance of catchment health initiatives to mitigate adverse climate impacts is the difficulty with measuring the success of investment, Markwell said.
“Engineered solutions are easy to visualise and you can measure their success. But planting trees is a long-term solution and much harder to measure. It’s also sometimes required on private land. You need collaboration, approval, maintenance, monitoring,” she said.
“Ecological restoration approaches can take decades to reach their full potential, so while we have the plans and modelling tools, we don’t yet have many fully delivered and evaluated examples. Planning is on track, but delivery and investment at scale remain difficult.”
Governance around catchment management appears to be one of the biggest challenges, but also the biggest opportunity moving forward, Dr Hill said.
“Governance is the biggest challenge and opportunity. Catchments now have more stakeholders than ever before. We’re recycling water, integrating urban water and stormwater, and so on,” she said.
“We need many voices. But it can’t just be the organisation with the funding that drives outcomes to meet its KPIs. We need some kind of empowering governance or funding structure to bring everyone together.”
Agreeing on an overall strategy is not usually difficult, Markwell said, it’s the coordinated delivery and ongoing maintenance and monitoring of the actions at a range of scales that proves challenging.
“We need a process that brings together the right people, information, and responsibility, from planning all the way through to delivery and monitoring. And scale is another layer of complexity,” she said.
“There’s a push for local, place-based solutions and meaningful community participation in collaborative decision making, which is important, but we also need a broader strategy that connects all these local efforts into a cohesive whole. That’s really difficult, and I’m not sure we’ve nailed it yet.”
The Catchment Management Specialist Network held a Member Circle during NAIDOC Week 2025 focusing on how the water sector can work better with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peers.
"During the Member Circle, we facilitated a survey about First Nations engagement across different project phases. The response showed that there was stronger involvement and investment in the planning phase, but it often dropped significantly at construction and even more so at maintenance,” Dr Hill said.
“The biggest challenges identified were budget availability, lack of trust, and lack of continued engagement. Often there's money for planning and engagement, but it’s not ongoing, it’s not a true partnership.”
Markwell said that, historically, catchment management was seen as the realm of hydrologists or environmental scientists, but practices must change to incorporate the broad range of perspectives, values, objectives and uses across the catchment.
"Catchment management used to be focused on waterway health and water quality. Now, we’re recognising the broader ecosystem services that catchments support and that all stakeholders are needed to appropriately manage them. From an industry perspective, other disciplines are now also critical in catchment planning to support the environmental scientists and hydrologists, including social scientists, planners and economists,” she said.
“And true collaboration is difficult in practice. It requires relationships. Everyone has different objectives. It’s complex. But everyone has to be involved if we want to build healthy and resilient catchments.”
Dr Hill agrees that we do need all the voices and minds together, recalling a definition of diversity by Malcolm Forbes – that diversity is the art of thinking independently together.
“If we don’t build trust and shared ways of working across cultures and sectors, we’re only ever solving part of the problem,” she said.
“The main question I had coming out of the Member Circle session that I’d like to put to our network members is: how can we gather good experiences, case studies, and trusted ways of working that move us beyond consultation and into genuine, long-term partnerships with First Nations communities – so that cultural values like connection, knowledge and respect are embedded not just in planning, but across the full lifecycle of catchment management?”
Learn more about the AWA Catchment Management Specialist Network here.