National Water Account

The National Water Account is an annual publication delivered by the Bureau of Meteorology. It contains standardised information about the management of Australia's water resources.

What is in the National Water Account?

The National Water Account provides information on:

water stores and flows
water rights
water use.

It transparently reports on volumes of water traded, extracted and managed for economic, social, cultural and environmental purposes across Australia.

Why are we doing it?

Through the Water Act 2007, the Bureau of Meteorology (the Bureau) has statutory responsibility for compiling and delivering comprehensive water information across Australia.

The National Water Account provides information that previously was difficult to access or unavailable to general users in a standardised form.

The National Water Account builds upon significant water accounting developments under the National Water Initiative of Australian Government.

What is new?

The National Water Account breaks new ground by taking a national and standards-based approach to water resource reporting. These new standards are currently in exposure draft form as the first Australian Water Accounting Standard (1.83MB).

The Bureau developed a range of new techniques, methods and systems to produce the National Water Account. All of these were piloted during 2009 and the results published in the Pilot National Water Account (7.4 MB).

How will it evolve?

Water accounting is a new concept in water resources management.

Over the next few years, the National Water Account will evolve and improve, increasing in quality and utility as estimation and measurement techniques, and monitoring and reporting systems, improve. User feedback is vital for ongoing development and refinement.

Improving quality and utility
National Water Account roadmap

National Water Account Roadmap

The National Water Account roadmap sets out the steps in the journey towards regular publication of a National Water Account. It focused on development of the Pilot National Water Account in 2009 and then the National Water Account 2010.

The roadmap was informed by discussion and consultation with relevant stakeholders and experts.

Download the National Water Account Roadmap Report (June 2009) (473KB).

Download Report from the National Water Account workshop (December 2008) (477KB).