About
WLC20

The 20th World Lake Conference (WLC20) is being held from 21st to 25th July, 2025, in Brisbane, Australia.  The theme of the conference is Lakes as Sentinels for Integrated River Basin Management. This theme reflects how lakes are indicators of the health of their river basins and the urgent need for integrated management strategies to increase the resilience of river basins. The 2022 United Nations resolution on sustainable lake management provides high-level objectives to protect, conserve, restore, and ensure the sustainable use of lakes. We now require the agenda and timelines on which we can meet these objectives.  WLC20 will provide a forum where policymakers, scientists, engineers, citizens and managers can put in place the milestones and planning needed to achieve sustainable lake management.

The 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be held in Brisbane in 2032.  The Games will be used as an opportunity for Queensland and Australia to demonstrate its circular economy, unique ecosystems, and practices for environmental resilience. The field visits in WLC20 will be used to showcase some of the work that is underway for the 2032 Games. While Brisbane is known as a ‘river city’, its water supply is critically dependent on the quantity and quality of water in its reservoirs. Field site visits will explore the integrated river and reservoir basins used for Brisbane’s water supply and the actions that are underway to address water security under the challenges of rapidly growing population and changing climate. Additional choices of field site visits will include (1) Minjerribah/Stradbroke Island with coastal walks and inland lakes, (2) the Gold Coast and whale-watching, and (3) Brisbane River and the city. Additional planning for WLC is well underway and 21 different theme sessions have so far been identified

Australia’s vast area means there are many climatic zones, including the wet and dry tropics, arid interior, subtropics, temperate, alpine and maritime. The aridification of Australia has led to the most lakes being saline, especially those in the interior. For example, Lake Eyre, in the central interior, has an endorheic basin of 1.3 million square kilometres but is dry for much of the time.  The base of the lake is 15 meters below sea level and the lake area can expand to about 10,000 square kilometres following periods of high rainfall in its catchment.

Australia’s population is highly concentrated around the coastline compared with the interior. This creates challenges for water supplies, including provision of clean freshwater for small remote communities in the interior and getting enough water for large state capital cities like Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth during periods of drought. Each of these cities has capacity to augment its surface and groundwater supplies with desalinated water from the ocean, even though most major rivers near the state capital cities have one or more dams or weirs. In Australia, pioneering work has been conducted on establishing guidelines and policies for environmental flow releases to the river system below dams, to ensure representation of the natural geomorphology and fauna and flora associated with the pre-dam state of the river.

Of Australia’s river basins, the Murray-Darling, is the best known, covering an area of about 1 million square kilometres and flowing through the states of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory. The basin faces major water challenges with water allocated for agriculture, potable use, the environment, and cultural flows for First Peoples, at a time when climate change is intensifying, and water yields are diminishing throughout the basin. Increasing sectoral demand for water will be discussed at WLC20, and the lakes, reservoirs, streams, rivers and wetlands of the Murray-Darling Basin will provide an exemplar for how globally we deal with allocations that satisfy increasing sectoral demands for water.

WLC20 will have internationally renowned plenary speakers.  They include Professor Susie Wood (Lincoln University, New Zealand) and Professor Zhengwen Liu (Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences). Professor Wood leads a major research program, which has gained global notoriety, for characterising lake health, assessing the vulnerability of lakes to degradation and climate change, and enhancing lake restoration. Professor Liu has been using shallow lakes as experimental systems to show how they can be restored from a degraded, de-vegetated state into a diverse, clear-water state. Plenaries will be complemented by ordinary and special sessions, workshops and other forums to communicate about lake environments.