Water Stewardship Program
Empowering communities in the Sydney Drinking Water Catchment to restore local water cycles, enhance water quality and improve catchment health through collaborative projects and innovative funding.
Capacity building - LEP_23-035_LLC_003
The issue
Sydney drinking water catchment covers 16 thousand square kilometers, 38% of which is agricultural land. Waterways in this catchment, pass through World Heritage natural areas, towns, farmland and small communities. High catchment waterways contain endangered upland swamp and wetland vegetation communities such as Newnes Plateau Shrub Swamps that play important roles in water filtration, fauna habitat and complex flora associations. Historic land use has created erosion and high-water flow threats to the function of these important wetland areas.
The solution
The Mulloon Institute and WaterNSW created the Water Stewardship program, with support from the Ian Potter Foundation, to empower communities to respond to landscape function challenges associated with water cycles. The program aims to drive community collaboration and fund innovative landscape scale projects across the catchment that restore water cycles, enhance water quality, security and catchment health.
The Mulloon Institute contacted Lithgow Oberon Landcare to discuss working with communities that share a waterway who would be interested in the program.
Kerosene Creek, In Hartley Vale, was identified as a community that contains landholders who share creek access and have previously participated in Landcare activities. Once approached the landholders were enthusiastic about becoming demonstration sites for such an innovative program.
The impact
The Water Stewardship program has seen Lithgow Oberon Landcare organising community meetings and workshops while Mulloon Institute staff have delivered a community field day, undertaken site surveys to identify areas of erosion such as incising and head cuts and have completed technical designs for in- stream structures along Kerosene Creek. The proposed works aim to halt active erosion, slow stream flow and sediment movement as well as repair degraded sections of swamp and wetland. The projects have now been approved by WaterNSW and on ground construction is planned for Spring 2026.
These meetings, workshops and design process has seen members of the community engaging with each other around improvements to a shared environmental resource.
Key facts
- Landscape function, including water filtration, habitat and biodiversity, of wetland areas is under threat from historic land use patterns.
- The Water Stewardship program is unique in bringing communities, landowners, technical specialists, government agencies and Landcare together to find and fund solutions that return landscape function.