Fish for the Future

The challenge

The Murray–Darling Basin Plan created a Northern Basin “toolkit” of non‑flow measures to complement water recovery and improve ecological outcomes, particularly for native fish. NSW Fisheries needed a feasibility proposal fora Fish for the Future Integrated Works Program that could secure Commonwealth investment by clearly demonstrating how a coordinated package of works would meet the Basin Plan’s environmental objectives and Northern Basin Review criteria.

Our approach

The proposal framed Fish for the Future as an integrated program of four complementary native fish recovery actions across key northern valleys:

• improving fish passage at priority weirs and regulators in the Barwon–Darling and Border Rivers
• rolling out diversion screens to protect eggs, larvae and juveniles at extraction points
• addressing cold‑water pollution downstream of major storages (e.g. Pindari Dam)
• implementing breeding and translocation for four threatened fish species. The work was structured explicitly against the Northern Basin Toolkit assessment framework, covering Basin Plan objectives, enhanced and high‑value environmental outcomes, ecological risk, spatial and temporal scale of benefits, dis‑benefits, scientific confidence, and MER requirements. Program logic diagrams were developed to show how each action and the combined package would improve fish diversity, distribution, movement and recruitment, and how synergies with other toolkit projects would be realised.

The result

The feasibility proposal set out a $104.6 million integrated works program detailing core actions, locations, indicative costs, and scalability options for additional fish passage, cold‑water pollution mitigation and diversion screening investments. It demonstrated high confidence in long‑term ecological outcomes, strong alignment with Basin‑wide environmental watering strategies, and clear pathways for monitoring, evaluation and reporting. The work provided NSW Fisheries and the Commonwealth with a compelling, systems‑based case for strategically targeting infrastructure and management reforms to restore native fish populations and river health across the Northern Basin. ‍ ‍

Pindari Dam Cold Water Pollution

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