Water use alters river flow regimes and for several decades there has been recognition that water resource development can impact ecosystem values. Determining appropriate strategies to protect or restore flow regimes to achieve ecological outcomes is now a focus of water policy and legislation in many parts of the world, including Queensland. However, consideration of existing environmental flow assessment approaches for application in Queensland identified several deficiencies precluding their adoption. Firstly, many ignored the fact that river ecosystems are subjected to many threatening processes as well as flow regime alteration, so ecosystem condition outcomes cannot be achieved by environmental flows alone.  Secondly, many focused on providing flows for particular responses without considering how often they are necessary to sustain values in the long term. Finally, few considered flow requirements at spatial-scales relevant to the desired outcomes, with frequent focus on individual places rather than the regions supporting sustainability. Consequently, the Queensland government developed a risk-based ecohydrological approach which identifies ecosystem values linked to desired ecological outcomes, sensitive to flow alteration and indicators of broader ecosystem requirements. Monitoring and research is undertaken to quantify flow dependencies and ecological modelling are used to model opportunities for relevant ecological responses to flows to occur over a historical flow period. The relative risk from different flow management scenarios can then be evaluated using risk to the values and outcomes at the spatial-scales over which they function.  This overcomes the deficiencies identified above and provides a vital input to water planning decisions.