Over time humankind has degraded the freshwater environment. Now it is time to do something

• News & Highlights

1 Allowing rivers to flow more naturally

Water management for power generation, flood risk reduction, or to store and deliver water for agricultural, industrial or domestic uses, changes the quantity, timing and variability of flows and levels.

This contributes substantially to loss of freshwater biodiversity.

Maintaining or restoring ecologically important attributes of hydrological regimes improves biodiversity outcomes.

The science and practice of environmental flow assessment enables identification and quantification of these attributes.

 
Environmental flows have already been incorporated into policies in many places and examples of environmental flow implementation from a range of contexts have been documented.