Water use efficiency (WUE) in an agricultural context can be defined as the measure of a cropping system's capacity to convert water into plant biomass, grain or other harvested output. It includes both the use of water stored in the soil and rainfall during the growing season. In simple terms WUE can be said to have increased if farm output per unit of water input increases, or if water use can be decreased while maintaining current production levels. In addition to this objective, WUE research also seeks to enable improvement in other areas of water management, such as reducing the costs of supplying water to the crop and minimising adverse environmental impacts should they exist.

Six CRDC administered individual projects over the 2011 to 2015 were first analysed qualitatively within a logical framework that considered project rationale, objectives, activities/outputs, outcomes, and impacts. Several of the impacts were then valued. Benefits were calculated for a range of time frames up to 30 years from the year of last investment. Past and future cash flows in 2015/16 $ terms were discounted to the year 2015/16 using a discount rate of 5% to estimate investment criteria.

Most the impacts identified were economic in nature, however some social and environmental impacts also were identified. Some of the cluster impacts were valued; the decision not to value certain impacts was due either to a high degree of uncertainty surrounding potential impacts, a shortage of necessary data, or the likely low relative significance of the benefit compared to those that were valued. It is expected the Australian cotton growing industry will be the primary beneficiary of the investment with only minor spill-over benefits to other cropping industries.