Regional report cards within the Great Barrier Reef catchment

The Regional Report Card Partnerships produce regional report cards annually to monitor and report various social, economic and environmental conditions. There are five partnerships in the Great Barrier Reef region:

Wet Tropics Waterways
Healthy Waters Partnership - Dry Tropics
Mackay–Whitsunday–Isaac Healthy Rivers to Reef Partnership
Fitzroy River Health Partnership
Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership

Each partnership is a collaboration of organisations, including the Australian and Queensland Governments, local governments, industry, ports, conservation groups, science, tourism, Indigenous, and community groups.

What report cards measure

As part of their monitoring programs, the partnerships measure and assess environmental catchment conditions and the ecological function of waters within and adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef. The report cards:

provide an understanding of current water quality and ecosystem health conditions in these regions
provide trends over time
help inform the development of local management actions to improve waterway health.

Regional Report Card Partnerships use fine-scale data to report on the ecological condition of regional freshwater, estuarine, inshore marine habitats and offshore reefs.

While many common indicators are monitored across all regions, some indicators are unique to particular regions, reflecting locally important issues and the initial rationale for forming those partnerships. For more information on the range of indicators monitored by different Regional Report Card Partnerships, please refer to the Report Card Explainer.

Regional report cards also include social, economic and cultural indicators.

The Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership report card previously included voluntary performance reports on the level of management practice associated with industry, ports, heavy and fishing industries in their region. However, this has not been the case since 2019.

Urban Water Stewardship Framework

The Queensland Government developed a new means of benchmarking urban water management practice, the Urban Water Stewardship Framework. Since 2020/21, this framework has been implemented biennially in all reef report card regions except Fitzroy Partnership for River Health.

Urban Water Stewardship Framework results have been published for individual report card regions (see the report card partnership websites) and for combined regions. The Queensland and Australin Governments use these results to inform investment strategies for improving urban water management in the Great Barrier Reef catchment.

Management response programs

While Regional Report Card Partnerships rarely develop and oversee their management response programs, partner organisations often do so as part of their environmental stewardship. The partnerships all produce stewardship reports, which include case studies of their actions. See the report card partnership websites for their respective stewardship reports and annual report cards.