Storylines describing alternate futures are helping WaterNSW prepare today to protect Sydney’s drinking water decades into the future, even under unprecedented conditions.
Scenarios developed collaboratively by WaterNSW and UTS’s Institute for Sustainable Futures (UTS-ISF) have been shortlisted for an R&D Excellence Award at the 2025 NSW Water Awards. This award recognises outstanding innovations in the water sector.
“We are delighted some of our many important research projects have been recognised in this way,” WaterNSW Executive Manager, Strategy & Performance, Fiona Smith, said. “Our work has been shortlisted in two categories – the R&D Excellence Award and the Organisational Excellence Award.
“Last year, our ground-breaking research on the upland swamps won the R&D Excellence category at the NSW Water Awards, and we hope to go back to back this year.
“The Catchment Futures project’s collaborative approach, which integrated expertise from diverse disciplines, has positioned the project as a best practice example of how research can directly inform policy and management decisions in the water sector,” Smith said.
WaterNSW Strategic Research and Innovation Manager Ann-Marie Rohlfs led the project, partnering with Associate Professor Simon Fane, UTS-ISF Research Director, and Ebony Heslop, UTS-ISF Research Principal.
“Water is an essential resource facing an uncertain future,” Rohlfs said. “Megatrends such as climate and land use change will impact the catchments that provide drinking water for more than 5 million people in Greater Sydney. Drinking water catchments across Australia face similar impacts.
“We developed alternate future scenarios of what Greater Sydney’s drinking water catchments could look like in 2040 and 2060.
“The multidisciplinary project team brought together WaterNSW’s catchment science, planning and management practitioners with ISF’s advanced future thinking and spatial modelling expertise.
“These narrative exercises of science-based imagination were translated into future land use projections using a spatial model built from 30 years of historical catchment land use transitions.
“Whilst the scenarios are not expected to eventuate exactly as described, they are useful tools for considering previously unexperienced conditions in an increasingly uncertain future,” Ann-Marie said.
Catchment Futures is one of two WaterNSW research projects the Australian Water Association shortlisted for its 2025 NSW Water Awards. Winners will be announced on 14 March in Sydney at the NSW Heads of Water Gala Dinner and Awards.
WaterNSW has also been shortlisted for the Organisational Excellence Award for its Peel River re-snagging biodiversity offsets project that fostered collaboration with First Nations communities in the Tamworth region.
At the 2024 awards, WaterNSW and the UNSW Water Research Laboratory won the R&D Excellence Award for Upland Peat Swamps of the Woronora Plateau – Hydrological Monitoring and Water Balance Modelling.
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