The National Water Account

Through the Commonwealth Water Act (2007), the Bureau of Meteorology has statutory responsibility for compiling and delivering comprehensive water information across Australia. This includes publication of an annual National Water Account (NWA).

As the competition for water resources increases, it is more important than ever to fully account for how water is shared between the economy, critical human needs and the environment. The NWA will provide information that has previously been difficult to access or unavailable to general users in a standardised form.

The NWA's guiding principle of transparency, both in process and reporting, aims to build confidence in and understanding about the information published on volumes of water traded, extracted for use and recovered and managed for economic, public and environmental purposes.

The information presented in the NWA will be:

• publicly available
• comprehensive, covering all managed water systems
• nationally consistent and comparable
• timely and useful to governments, the water sector, industry and the general community
• produced and delivered through a transparent process.

The NWA will provide a national picture of water resources management for the past year by answering the following questions:

• How much water was available in different parts of the system (i.e. storage, groundwater, river flow)?
• What entitlements existed?
• What water management plans applied that governed access?
• How much water was allocated as available for use?
• How much of the total water entitlement was traded and between which locations?
• How much water was taken for use?
• How much water was made available to the environment?

The NWA will complement the Australian Bureau of Statistics Water Account Australia publication which accounts of water supply and use in the economy and together these accounts will inform water resources planning, water market activity, investment and environmental management decisions, as well as research and discussion within governments and the general community.

As outlined in the NWA Roadmap, this year, the Bureau of Meteorology is working closely with lead water agencies in each State and Territory, as well as other Australian Government agencies and peak water industry bodies, in the conduct of a Methods Pilot for the NWA. Outputs from the Methods Pilot will be published in December 2009 and the knowledge gained will guide development and production of the first NWA, due for publication in late 2010.

The NWA will evolve and improve over time, beyond production of the first NWA in 2010. Improvements are expected in accuracy, as estimation and measurement techniques, and monitoring and reporting systems improve, and resolution, as capacity increases.

View NWA information sheet (PDF)