Urban water management

The Department of Water is responsible for developing strategies and management plans to protect the quantity and quality of water resources, protect infrastructure from flooding, and enhance the living environment for the community.

To provide guidance and baseline data for planning and development, we have embarked on a program to prepare drainage and water management plans to cover the priority urban growth areas between Yanchep and Pinjarra. The plans include:

• catchment specific outcomes, objectives and design criteria
• stormwater and groundwater modelling data and management strategies including storages and flow paths for flood protection
• water quantity and quality targets and strategies to protect environmental assets
• guidelines for water sensitive urban design and water conservation.

Regional water plans are also being prepared to bring together existing statutory water management, drinking water source protection, drainage and floodplain management plans into one planning document based on a catchment management approach.

The regional water plans and drainage and water management plans will support an overarching urban water management framework whereby the Department for Planning, the Western Australian Planning Commission, local government and developers can obtain necessary data from the Department of Water to inform integrated water cycle management and water sensitive urban design.

• Towards a water sensitive city: The urban drainage initiative - Phase 2 provides direction on the department's priorities for better urban water management and for helping Perth and regional centres become water sensitive cities. To find out more about water sensitive cities, go to the New WAter Ways website. New WAter Ways is the water sensitive urban design capacity building program for Western Australian water practitioners. It represents a partnership between the Department of Water, Department of Planning, WA Local Government Association, Perth Region NRM, Water Corporation and the Urban Development Institute of Australia.
• The department's coastal drainage program aims to balance the benefits of drainage for agricultural production and the transition in some areas to urban development, with the need to maintain healthy water bodies. Click here for the Coastal drainage brochure and click here for the Coastal drainage discussion paper.

We provide leadership on managing stormwater as a resource that has important social, environmental and economic values.

This principle is promoted in the Stormwater Management Manual for Western Australia. The stormwater management objectives, principles and framework provided in the manual are summarised here. The Department of Water's approach to stormwater management is discussed in these conference papers.

To provide a guide to the process for addressing stormwater management issues during land development and when improving existing practices, we have published the Decision process for stormwater management in WA.

Our Water and Land Use Coordination Program focuses on the implementation of integrated land and water planning.

We are 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.

We encourage developers and planners to utilise these plans in conjunction with the stormwater management manual to inform greenfield development, urban renewal and other land use planning processes.