Information Needs for Environmental-Flow Allocation: A Case Study from the Lachlan River, New South Wales, Australia

There is growing recognition at the global scale of the need to reverse, or at least mitigate, the damaging impacts of river regulation and overextraction of water. In New South Wales, the introduction of environmental flows, consolidated in the Water Management Act 2000, is taking place in the context of changing institutional structures, in particular the growth of adaptive management, integrated ecosystem-based perspectives, and increased community participation in the decision-making process. These developments presuppose that the information needs of river managers are understood. This article provides a classification of information needs for decision-making on environmental-flow allocations in New South Wales and then applies this classification to a case study of information use by a river-management committee on the Lachlan River. The discussion argues for the development of “adaptive information” to meet the challenge of integrating differing forms of information in striving to address the new demands of adaptive management.

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