Review of the decision-making framework for allocating water during extreme water shortages

Posted on 17 Jan 2021
Updated on 17 Jan 2021
2-minute read

Supporting the NSW Government in deciding how water from the Murray- Darling system should be allocated during extreme water shortages.

ISF reviewed the NSW Department of Industry's decision-making framework for allocating water in the Murray- Darling system during extreme water shortages. We developed and applied principles for effective decision-making, drawing from various other approaches applied in our previous collaborations developing such frameworks with industry decision-makers.

ISF made specific considerations for this decision-making framework process, outlined the proposed structure of the framework in discrete steps, and finally made recommendations for further improvements to the decision-making process. These included considerations for:

the critical timing of the decisions and therefore the need for flexibility in the framework
the criteria to be used for firstly ranking the critical demands, and secondly for prioritising the options (and packages of options)
quantifying the critical demands to be considered in the decision process
collaboration across agencies.

ISF provided a proposed structure and steps to describe the key components of the decision-making the process for allocating water during extreme water shortages.