The ACT’s beautiful lakes, rivers, and wetlands make it a great place to live. These waterways provide recreation spots and are home to native plants and animals. All of this depends on clean and healthy water.

To avoid flooding, urban stormwater systems are designed to collect water that runs off surfaces like roads, roofs, driveways and pavements instead of soaking into the ground. As it moves, stormwater can collect harmful dirt, chemicals and nutrient pollution and carry them to our rivers and lakes.

At high concentrations, nutrients from fallen leaves, grass clippings and fertilisers (including composts and manures) are carried via stormwater drains to our lakes and stimulate the growth of toxic algal blooms. Algal blooms can make the water look green and smell bad; the blooms produce toxins that are harmful to fish, animals and people.

When our rivers and lakes experience algal blooms, they are closed for recreational activity which disrupts the benefits of our waterways for Canberrans and puts the local ecosystem and risk.

Under the Office of Water, the ACT Healthy Waterways Program has been developed to improve the water quality across seven catchments in the ACT. The Program works to:

• build infrastructure like wetlands, ponds and raingardens to filter pollution from stormwater before it reaches our rivers and lakes.
• inform the community and on how we can work together to better care of our waterways by preventing nutrient pollution and chemicals from entering stormwater drains.
• improve our understanding of our waterways through research, monitoring and reporting.
• develop water quality improvement plans with a range of pollution mitigating options to improve the water quality of our lakes.

Keeping our waterways healthy improves the liveability of the ACT, enhancing our wellbeing by conserving and experiencing nature and culture.

The ACT Healthy Waterways Program runs projects around the region to improve the quality of our lakes and rivers, particularly the Murrumbidgee River. The projects provide innovative ways to make sure our water is clean and healthy, and we use our water systems efficiently.

We use community feedback to help decide which projects to prioritise, change or not go ahead with.