The protection of sources of water and catchments is an important method for maintaining water quality; one that can mitigate cost and reliance on downstream water treatment and disinfection. Catchment protection requires risk assessment, but water quality management approaches were not originally developed for natural environments, and ecosystem-based methods (such as the Ecological Risk Assessment methodology), require complex data inputs often unavailable to water utilities.

This paper discusses various water quality risk management techniques and proposes a step-by-step catchment risk assessment methodology that is compatible with the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines.

Remote and regional Australian communities commonly produce potable water by removing salt from brackish groundwater. Existing desalination technologies, such as reverse osmosis (RO) have high electrical energy and technical requirements. Groundwaters often contain high levels of silica (quartz) which, together with the salts, form scale which blocks RO membrane and other components which are expensive to replace. This research examined an alternative desalination process: capacitive deionisation. Laboratory-scale experiments found that single-walled carbon nanotubes were the best material to use for electrodes, that membranes placed before the electrodes increased efficiency of salt removal and decreased energy usage, while silica, which lacks a charge that would bind it to either the positive or negative electrode, did not form scale deposits nor interfere with the desalination process. A full-scale version of this unit was tested onsite in the Northern Territory and described in WaterRA Project 1047.