AN OVERVIEW OF THE NEW GUIDELINES FOR AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS

The new revised Australian and New Zealand Guidelines for Fresh and Marine Water Quality have progressed significantly from the previous Water Quality Guidelines (ANZECC 1992) and are considered to be very innovative at both the national and international levels. Through the approaches described in this and subsequent companion papers, the application of water quality guidelines to Australian and New Zealand aquatic environments has been vastly improved. The new approaches promote the principles of ecologically sustainable development and should result in more relevant guidelines, thereby providing better and more cost-effective environmental protection. Central to these improvements is the development towards site-specific guidelines and assessments. This is achieved through: • greater emphasis on use of reference sites for deriving guidelines and as benchmarks for monitoring and assessment; • tailoring guidelines for a number of different ecosystem types; • providing guidelines for three different levels of protection; and • incorporating decision-tree frameworks that utilise site-specific information as an option for assessing monitoring data and, eventually after sufficient study and data collection, for deriving site specific guideline values, which may be less conservative. The frameworks have the potential to reduce unnecessary costs associated with meeting the more conservative guideline trigger values.