First forum meetings held
The first round of forum meetings was held in July 2021 and saw about 1,000 comments collected from the more than 100 virtual participants across all 6 sessions. Since then the forums have had a strong focus on condition monitoring and sought to understand how the MDBA can improve monitoring with stronger guidance from Basin communities.
Participants included landholders, scientists, First Nations, community leaders, and those with a general passion for their local waterways.
Some of the key messages to emerge across all 6 forum groups included:
the importance of a connected Basin system
knowledge sharing across all levels of the community
the importance of a healthy river to a healthy community.
The word cloud here shows a quick snapshot of the most frequent words written by participants across all forum groups during their meetings.
Feedback was analysed and the information and insights collected, to develop a range of monitoring indicators to help give a better signal of the social, cultural, economic, and environmental health of the Basin.
These community-led indicators formed a key foundation of the Basin Condition Monitoring Program (BCMP). Running through to December 2025, this program consists of 15 projects across 5 themes: Cultural, Economic, Environmental, Hydrology and Social.
The next forum meetings are being planned for August 2023 and will focus on the Roadmap to the 2026 Basin Plan Review, as part of MDBA's ongoing commitment to listen, learn and make decisions based on what we've heard, in conjuction with the best available knowledge and evidence during the Review process.
