Working with community to identify local opportunities and support community-led change is a core focus of the One Basin CRC’s (CRC) Water Futures project. In a Wilcannia case study, fostering environmental custodianship in the town’s next generation aims to help community respond to waterway health challenges.

The CRC-funded Water Futures project brings together community, industry, and researchers to support action on water security and adaptation in three sites across the Murray–Darling Basin.

Using a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, the project team is working with communities in Berri (South Australia), Wilcannia (New South Wales), and Cabarita/Lake Hawthorn (Victoria) to understand local water issues, and work together to plan, act and reflect on those issues with the aim of driving change.

Led by University of Sydney researchers Associate Professor Margot Rawsthorne and Professor Amanda Howard, the project is supported by the Murray Darling Association, Regional Development Australia, Murraylands & Riverland, and the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA). Together, the team is working with these communities over 18-24 months to provide resources (staff and money); facilitating access to technical expertise; documenting the process; and offering research support as required. More importantly, the actions, and resulting change is driven by communities so sustainable, long-term solutions can continue long after the project finishes.

In a Wilcannia-based case study, the project team has partnered with Wilcannia Central School to foster custodianship of the waterways through school-based citizen science initiatives, after the community identified waterway health and water security as key challenge to address. In Wilcannia, the lower Darling River’s health is considered poor to moderate, with significant issues affecting its ecosystem and hydrology. The water is unsafe to consume, as the river’s physical form has been altered by sedimentation and over extraction, changing its flows significantly. At times, the river experiences little to no flows. 

Working with Year 3-6 pupils, a carp fertiliser making project was undertaken to respond to invasive carp that decimate native fish populations and threaten river health. Pupils were also taught how to conduct water quality testing so they can identify minerals, heavy metals, pesticides, or bacteria impacting waterway health in their town. Partnering with a Barkindji Elder, First Nations custodianship values were integrated into the project and pupil’s education journey. 

The aim of this case study was to empower younger generations to be custodians of the Darling River in their local patch, with First Nations values and knowledges guiding the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind environmental custodianship. The pupils produced a video titled “Wake up Wilcannia” to summarise their learnings and communicate them with broader community members.

“Action research is only part of the puzzle to support change. While the results of fostering custodianship within the next generation may not be seen for decades to come, roots have been laid within community to strengthen capacity to respond to water challenges now and into the future,” project team member Kelsy Burns.

The project team has been in the field for just over 12 months. So far, they’re seeing an increase in communities’ water literacy, both in how water is governed and the health of the environment, an uptake of water quality monitoring and citizen science initiatives, and new relationships form between individuals, institutions, and communities that build collective capacity to drive change.

Find out more about the Water Futures project here via this One Basin webinar.