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The ANU Institute for Water Futures is offering two $5,000 awards for ANU Masters students undertaking research projects on water management in the Snowy Mountains.

Awardees will conduct research in areas such as history, science and technology studies, sociology, economic history, political science, and other areas of the social sciences and humanities. Each project will be conducted within a program convened by IWF researchers across the Crawford School of Public Policy, School of History, Fenner School of Environment and Society, and Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.

The 2024 Awardees will be invited to engage with a broader applied research program on water management in the Snowy Mountains and the Canberra region. This may include field trips, workshops, and other events attended by Institute for Water Futures researchers and students. 

Apply

Further details and an expression of interest form can be found here.

Please contact the Award Convenor Paul Wyrwoll  with any general questions regarding the Award; kindly include "IWF Snowy Mountains Water Futures Award" in the subject line. You may contact the member of the Award committee in your school/centre regarding potential supervision and topics in advance of submitting your EOI but this is not necessary. Please contact student admissions or program convenors at your school/centre with questions regarding admissions to your degree or units. 

Applications close on 15 March 2024.

Background

The waterways and catchments of the Snowy Mountains have immense cultural, social, environmental, and economic values. In addition to being Ngarigo, Walgalu, Ngunnawal and Wiradjuri Country, these alpine areas and the rivers originating from them have long been meeting places, pathways, and resources for many Aboriginal nations and groups across the south-east of the Australian continent. 

Following European colonisation, the Snowy Mountains became a focal point for economic activities of the settler state, such as mining and livestock farming, that have altered the region’s ecosystems. The 1950s saw construction begin on the Snowy Mountains Scheme – a mega project consisting of 16 major dams, 80 km of aqueducts, and 145 km of interconnected tunnels. Built to divert water from the Snowy and upper Murrumbidgee rivers for inland irrigation, costs have been recovered over subsequent decades through the operation of 9 power stations with a total generating capacity of 4,100 megawatts. 

Today, the Snowy Mountains Scheme is playing an important role in maintaining electricity system reliability as coal plants are retired and variable renewable energy expands rapidly. The value of the Scheme’s storages to deliver irrigation and environmental water to the Murray and lower Murrumbidgee are growing under climate change. But there are trade-offs to manage, and growing demands for environmental and cultural water flows to support a range of downstream values on dammed and diverted rivers. Policy processes are underway at Federal and State/Territory levels to reform the regulation of the Scheme and deliver a range of objectives beyond electricity generation and irrigation water supply.  

To understand potential futures for the Snowy Mountains Scheme, we first need to understand its past and ongoing colonial history. Embedded in the regulation of the Scheme are values, priorities, and ways of understanding water that span the 1901 federation of Australian colonies through to the 1998 Snowy Water Inquiry and the 2018 investment decision for the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydropower project. A critical examination of social and political determinants of decision-making during that period will support future policy reforms to reconcile the Scheme’s infrastructure, and broader alpine water and land management, with Indigenous rights, biodiversity loss, and climate change.