SMART Water Quality Targets for Great Barrier Reef Catchments

Abstract

The Australian and Queensland Governments released the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan (RWQPP) in 2003 with the objective of ‘halting and reversing the decline in water quality entering the (Great Barrier) Reef within 10 years’. One of the Plan's objectives is to reduce the load of pollutants from diffuse sources in the water entering the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). The Plan commits the regional Natural Resource Management bodies to set water quality targets for the GBR catchments' rivers. Just what the targets should be, and how they might be prepared, is not made clear. This article argues for SMART targets, explicitly determined from achievable management practices set within an adaptive approach. The article briefly reviews the theoretical foundations for managing diffuse water pollution and concludes that targeting inputs or land management practices is the best approach. Water quality targets can be derived effectively from defined adoption rates of practices with known impacts on water quality and resultant loads. The article presents a working example of how this can be applied. This approach has potential wider application than in GBR catchments.