Skip Navigation

 
 

Lake Eyre Basin Agreement

You are here: Home > Projects and Activities
Community members, Government officers and scientists discussing the future of the Basin

Community members, Government officers and scientists discussing the future of the Basin

Current Projects and Activities

Lake Eyre Basin Rivers Assessment

The Lake Eyre Basin (LEB) Rivers Assessment is a monitoring program designed to assess the condition of watercourses and catchments within the LEB 'Agreement Area'. The LEB Agreement requires the assessment to be completed as soon as possible after the commencement of the Agreement, and thereafter every ten years.

To enable this formal reporting every ten years, information needs to be collected routinely in the intervening years. The assessment is essential to give us a picture how well we are using and managing the natural resources of the Basin.

Both high and low flows in the Basin have important ecological functions, and overall flow patterns, rather than just individual floods, are important to maintain the ecology of the Basin.

Methodologies for assessing rivers and catchments elsewhere in Australia and the world have limited application to the ephemeral rivers of a large, internal basin spanning multiple jurisdictions such as the LEB. In this regard, the Rivers Assessment is the first of its kind in the world, and designing a monitoring and assessment program for this purpose is a major challenge.

Lake Eyre Basin Social and Economic Review Project

This project is a study of the people, communities, cultures and economies of the Lake Eyre Basin. Its aim is to develop tools for improving sustainable natural resources management at local levels within a large, complex, multi-jurisdictional system.

In the Lake Eyre Basin, as in other regions of natural resource utilisation, optimum natural resource management is aimed at obtaining the best possible balance of environmental, social and economic outcomes. This requires gathering information about the people and communities who rely on and interact with natural resources, as well as information about the natural resources themselves.

This project will provide this information. Running in parallel with the Lake Eyre Basin Rivers Assessment, this complementary project addresses a corresponding need for improved knowledge of the social and economic conditions and processes in the Basin, greatly strengthening the foundation for future policies and strategies that optimise social/economic and environmental outcomes.

The project has four components:

  1. Regional profiles. Collation and presentation of existing information on the people, communities and economies of the Basin, including Indigenous people
  2. People and institutions. Governments and the community have already invested in many different 'institutions', or ways of working together, to manage natural resources in the Lake Eyre Basin. The project will assess which of these have worked well, which have not, and describe the characteristics of the arrangements that are most likely to have good outcomes for natural resource management in the Basin.
  3. Key Case Studies of general characteristics or specific institutions that contribute most to caring for the Basin's resources. This will include detailed analysis to understand the reasons for their success, and transferring this knowledge to existing arrangements in the Basin.
  4. Future monitoring. The project will set out how best to monitor the critical social, cultural and economic attributes of institutions in the Basin, in order to continue adapting our institutions of natural resource management according to social and community change.

See a summary brochure of the LEB Social and Economic Review project.