Seqwater sources drinking water for the population of South East Queensland from ‘open catchments’. With agricultural land use making up 70% of the 1.8 million hectares of the region’s source water catchments it’s important that we find better ways to work with landholders to protect the future of the region’s drinking water supply.
Seqwater has designed and delivered a unique program for managing risk to water quality posed by highly impacted source water catchments. By engaging with the not-for-profit sector and placing landholders and project officers in the centre of catchment program co-design, Seqwater have created a framework to create an enduring legacy of positive practice change. The Source Protection Partnership Program uses a combination of incentives for agricultural practice change with strategic skills development, codesign, and community awareness. This required a shift away from an asset focussed rural incentive approach to a co-design model at the local scale between groups of priority landholders, landcare groups and Seqwater.
The case study provided in this paper will serve as an example that may be applied to other similar situations where improved landholder and community involvement are key in catalising positive practice change for the benefit of improved waterway and more broadly land health.