Dealing with salinity in Wheatbelt Valleys - Department of Water

• The distribution, storage and movement of
surface and ground water in the catchment has
changed following land clearing, and this
threatens all land uses.
• Catchment water use, storage, loss and
distribution must be altered to protect farm and
nature conservation values.
• Apart from prohibitively expensive engineering
solutions, recovery of the Lake is dependent, in
the long term, on recovery of the whole
catchment. Actions likely to achieve sustainable
agriculture in the catchment are mostly
consistent with recovery of the Lake. Thus the
two goals are generally congruent. However, it
should be noted that some catchment
landholders would consider catchment solutions
that may endanger the Lake.
Despite general agreement on these points,
differences in values and beliefs between catchment
stakeholders sometimes result in tensions and
disagreements. Also, even within the agreed
framework of the three points above, there is not
always unanimity on the actions required for
recovery, or their priority. While this sometimes
creates tension amongst land managers, including
those from government agencies, the unifying
suppositions are sufficiently strong for effective
integration and positive action to occur.
Goals have been written for the Lake (Toolibin Lake
Recovery Team and Technical Advisory Group,
1994) and catchment (Lake Toolibin Catchment
Group, 1990). The former group is predominantly
driven by Government agencies, the Catchment
Committee by farmers. However, the groups have
interlocking memberships, and this system has
worked well.
Goals listed (page (v)) in the recovery plan for the
Lake are:
• To conserve Toolibin Lake and its associated
wildlife as a freshwater habitat.
• To improve land use decision making and
practice within the Toolibin Catchment so that
land management: is sustainable, productive and
profitable in the long term (over 100 years);
reduces the current area of degraded land; and
favours conservation of local wildlife.
• To demonstrate that, within a large catchment,
it is possible to stabilise hydrological trends
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Wallace
which if unchecked threaten land, water and
biodiversity resources.
• To demonstrate to other land managers in
Australia methods of protecting their
biodiversity, land, and water resources.
• To develop mechanisms which lead to
community ownership of Western Australia’s
natural resources including management
problems and their solution.
While the recovery of the Lake is of major
importance, the value of work at Toolibin as a case
study upon which to develop and test catchment
solutions for controlling salinity elsewhere is also a
major goal of works on the Lake and catchment.
Among the goals developed by the Catchment
Group are:
• Establishment of effective drainage of farmland
that will not adversely affect the reserve or Lake.
• To increase awareness by developing the Lake
and catchment as a model.
• To control groundwater rise.
• To rehabilitate the reserve’s vegetation and
improve the water quality of Toolibin Lake.
• Willing participation from landholders,
Government and corporate sector.
• Preservation of existing vegetation and
revegetation of degraded areas.
• To control surface water.
• To establish sustainable land management
techniques.
MANAGEMENT ACTIONS
Because I Chair the Recovery Team, I will mainly
describe management actions from the perspective
of that group. This section is divided into two parts.
Firstly, a description of the management actions
currently being implemented, and secondly, the
relationship of these to a set of guiding principles for
integrated management developed at a workshop in
February 1996 (outputs from this workshop were
not published).