Canberra’s urban lakes provide a range of benefits to the community, environment, and economy. Originally constructed for attenuating upsteam pollutants, these lakes also help with flood control, provde a source of water and offer recreational and social benefits. Understanding the full range of these benefits is crucial to ensuring effective investment in their maintenance and enhancement, particularly given the tradeoffs between different benefits, namely water quality management and recreational and amenity benefits.

The ACT Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate (EPSDD) engaged NCC to develop and deliver a methodology to quantify the values of three key lakes; Lakes Burley Griffin, Tuggerenong and Ginninderra. A key objective of this project was to understand how changes in water quality affects the broader environmental, social, and economic benefits. This multi-phased project involved economic valuation of key benefits, mainly water quality management and community values, using primary data collected as part of the project, as well as secondary data. A critical component was the application of discrete choice modelling to estimate values for the amenity benefit, on-water recreation access, and lakeside facilities of each lake.

The results demonstrated that community values were materially higher than the water quality management benefits from urban lakes. This presented valuable insight for the EPSDD in balancing the level of investment required to reduce pollutants entering the lakes from upstream and the cost-effective nature of the lakes to attentuate pollutants entering downstream waterways. Importantly, the primary values estimated could be readily used in business cases for assessing such investment decisions.