Water and land use planning

"Water planning should inform and integrate with land use planning. Increasingly, it is intended that water planning should precede land use planning. This will not only provide an important natural resource management context for land planning, but will identify resource opportunities, constraints and incompatible land use activities".

State water plan, Government of Western Australia, 2007

The department's Water and Land Use Coordination Program focuses on the implementation of integrated land and water planning. This is the process by which decision makers coordinate the consideration and implementation of water resource management requirements with other land use planning requirements, at various levels of the land use planning decision making process.

The implementation of integrated land and water planning is based on the principle of total water cycle management. Drinking water, groundwater, stormwater run-off, wastewater, waterway health and water reuse are considered holistically for informed sustainable urban planning and development decisions. This results in water sensitive urban design so that the urban water cycle complements natural hydrological and ecological cycles.

In recent years substantial progress has been achieved in integrating urban water planning and management with land-use planning and development. The department is a partner to Better urban water management (WAPC, DoW, WALGA, DEWHA, 2008). This document identifies a framework for the implementation of integrated land and water planning which adopts the staged hierarchy of the state's strategic and statutory land-use planning decision-making processes. It describes how water resources should be considered at each land use planning stage and identifies actions, investigations and agencies responsible for provision of particular water resource information. Water resource information derived at each planning stage is used to inform the subsequent planning stage. In this way, an appropriate level of consideration is given to the total water cycle at each stage of the planning process from the strategic level down to lot level. There is now broad acceptance that Better urban water management should be implemented as part of new urban design and development.

The department has developed a number of supplementary guidelines and decision support tools to assist land developers and decision makers in the implementation of Better urban water management.