Northern Australia Irrigation Futures

Providing new knowledge, tools, and processes to support debate
and decision making regarding irrigation in northern Australia

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Case studies - Overview

NAIF established 3 case study areas across northern Australia as part of its research effort

• The lower Burdekin catchment
• The Katherine-Douglas-Daly catchment
• The Ord catchment

The Lower Burdekin, Katherine-Douglas-Daly and Ord were established as case studies to help ground the research, enable direct feedback and testing of ideas and frameworks being developed, and help ensure the practicality, suitability and likelihood of adoption of these frameworks and other research outputs.

Each case study provided different perspectives and issues of relevance to irrigation in northern Australia, and involved specific activities that were developed and agreed with the relevant state/territory representative on the NAIF Steering Committee. They provided rich learnings and enabled a much better appreciation of the opportunities and challenges that face irrigation across northern Australia, as discussed by Petheram et al. (2008)

Reference:

Petheram, C., Tickell, S., O’Gara, F., Bristow, K.L., Smith, A. and P. Jolly. 2008. Analysis of the Lower Burdekin, Ord and Katherine-Douglas-Daly Irrigation Areas: Implications to future design and management of tropical irrigation. CSIRO Land and Water Science Report No. 19/08, CRC for Irrigation Futures Technical Report No. 05/08. 101 pp.

 “It was a fundamental underpinning of the project to have the three key example areas across northern Australia (lower Burdekin, Katherine-Douglas-Daly and the Ord). The advantage of having concentrated effort in those three areas has been the involvement from the three communities and the stakeholders has been enormous” Kevin Devlin, Sunwater and NAIF SC Member.