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‘Acid Mud’ in the Lower Lakes

Catalyst on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation have a series of videos available for download of interviews of scientists who describe the problems of acid sulphate soils and low flows in the Coorong and Lower Lakes. In one of the videos, Mike Young from the University of Adelaide, proposes a different water sharing model for the River Murray that would give the environment a larger share of the water in the system at low flows.

Send a message to Penny Wong and let her know that we need a new system of water management that better protects these important assets.

Written by Paul Dalby

Failed State

A previous blog on “Future of Birds in the Coorong” generated some interesting discussion between scientists, someone living upstream, and a resident of the Lower Lakes. It got me thinking about the fundamental problem of the management of the River Murray.

Imagine that Kevin Rudd announced that rather than report his budget in terms of how much income he receives and how much he spends, and rather than setting a target for surpluses, he is going to change the way he manages the budget. Instead of reporting how much is left and whether the budget balanced, he is simply going to report how much each of his departments is going to receive and report on how well they spent their money. He wasn’t going to be all that fussed about measuring how much each department spends, but is going to give rough estimates instead. He is going to disband the Reserve Bank, and the states and the Commonwealth governments will get together regularly to set monetary policy.

Now imagine that times get tough. The economy slows down and there is much less money available in the Australian economy. Kevin’s response will be to start borrowing heavily from overseas to keep cash flowing into his departments. After all, they are doing a good job, and people expect to continue to receive their services and handouts. Pretty soon, credit starts drying up, so departments don’t have the cashflow they need to maintain their spending, so they have to start cutting back. There is no Reserve Bank to dry up the supply of credit, but because of the angst and political heat for the governments of Australia, they continue to borrow wherever they can. Eventually, there is almost no credit available anywhere in the world. Cash reserves are drying up, so Kevin announces that South Australia will receive no further funding. Any money that is generated in the economy will be spent in Queensland, NSW and Victoria first, and South Australia will have to wait until the economy improves much more before it receives Commonwealth funding again.

Of course, if this was the economy, Kevin Rudd would have been removed from office through a popular revolt, an election or a dismissal well before the final horrible scenario. And if it really did get as bad as I described, the IMF and World Bank would declare a failed state and jump in with offers of financial assistance, as long as we changed our wicked ways.

In the Murray Darling System, there is no balanced budget. We are not measuring how much water is being taken out along the river. We do not measure how much water flows into South Australia. We have been borrowing heavily from our storages to maintain our current activities despite the current drought, and despite the fact that we were not leaving enough water in the system to maintain the health of wetlands and the Coorong BEOFRE the drought started. We have run the storages down to nearly empty. When there are flows upstream, the current Murray Darling Agreement says that upstream states can use it all up to a point where they have sufficient and only then is South Australia able to share in the flows. This despite the fact that the Coorong is on its last legs, the Lower Lakes are below sea level and at risk of developing acid sulphate soils, and Adelaide being 18 months away from being unable to drink water from the River Murray if there are no further flows.

If this were the economy, we would be a failed state. In fact, the states of Australia have failed, and badly. The Murray Darling Basin Agreement doesn’t work effectively and needs to be replaced with a new system that does four things:

1. Budget flows from the mouth backwards. That is, just like Kevin Rudd is setting a target for budget surpluses of 1.5% of GDP, flows of water out of the Mouth of the River should be budgeted for first, before any other use from the River.

2. Water inflows and water use should be measured along the length of the Murray Darling system, including tributaries, groundwater flows and farm dams. Measuring only some of the budget is the same as not having a budget

3. There must be an independent arbiter that sets the amount of water that can be taken from the River every year, just like we have a Reserve Bank. Like the Reserve Bank, the independent authority should be truly independent, and not have its decisions modified by a frightened government that doesn’t like the consequences of the decision. This is unlike Penny Wong’s current proposal, which gives the Commonwealth Government the ability to change the decision of the new “independent” Murray Darling Basin Authority if it disagrees with the decision.

4. Establishes real consequences for over-extracting water from the Basin. Currently, there is no punishment for any state over-extracting water from their system. This sets a perverse incentive to do the wrong thing. There must be painful financial disincentives for individual states to “steal” water from their counterparts. National Competition Policy sets such measures for economic matters, and the principles should be extended to managing a shared water resource.

These ideas were informed and stimulated by Peter Cullen and Mike Young. Some of their talks can be downloaded from:

Written by Paul Dalby, 2 May 2008

Rural internet stats

This article in the Australian on 17 April 2008 reports on a study that found that in rural Australia there has been a 28.5per cent growth in the number of households connected to the internet since 2001. Access to computers and the internet in rural centres had almost caught up to the city, with 63.5per cent having internet access compared with 66.1per cent in urban areas.

Farmers are starting to use the internet for communicating with each others and those who support them. The recent South Australia No Till Farmers Association conference was recorded and is available as podcasts from http://www.santfa.com.au/events.htm. There is more to come. Watch this space!

Written by Paul Dalby 17 April 2008

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Future of Birds in the Coorong

Dan Rogers from the University of Adelaide spoke at the CLLAMMecology Science Briefing, held on Friday April 4, 2008, at the Goolwa Steam Exchange Brewery, in Goolwa, South Australia. Listen to the podcast (4.8MB).

Dan presents recent results of his research on birds in the northern and southern lagoon of the Coorong estuary in South Australia. This habitat is a Ramsar listed wetland, which is under considerable threat due to a reduction in water flow from the River Murray that used to maintain an open mouth from the estuary to the ocean.

He presents disturbing results on the crash in bird populations as a result of increasing salinity in the southern lagoon in particular. He also presents research on what makes a good habitat for birds. He argues that we need to manage the Coorong for the key fish species (such as hardyheads) and invertebrates that birds feed on.

CLLAMM ecology is developing tools to help managers decide how best to design management options to maintain the birds, fish and other organisms in the Coorong. The research is funded by CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country and is a collaboration between CSIRO, the University of Adelaide, FlLinders University and SARDI.

See also the blog on David Paton’s talk on the “Death of the Coorong

Written by Paul Dalby

Youtube and the Age of Reason?

I started this blog-site as an experiment. My friend Mike Seyfang kept telling me that the new technologies emerging in blogging, podcasting, you-tube and other forms of social networking were going to turn the world upside down. My experiment has been a very modest exercise, but it has definitely demonstrated the power of this new medium of social networking.

I was therefore very interested in the recent blog on the Breakthrough blog, which summarised an article by Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry from the Personal Democracy Forum, an online magazine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics.

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2008/03/youtubes_political_revolution.shtml

The article argues that the internet is changing the possibility of political debate. The dominance of television has reduced political debate largely to sound bites. To quote the article: “In the 1968 presidential election, the average amount of time given to a sound bite from presidential candidate on the network news shows was 43 seconds…. By 2004 … 10.3 seconds”.

Barack Obama has embraced new media technologies and is turning this model upside down. He is giving lengthy, substantive speeches, and putting them all on YouTube and then encouraging his supporters to spread them around. The following figures are direct quotes from the Breakthrough blog:

So far, Obama’s videos have been viewed more than 33 million times on YouTube.com — and that’s not counting partial views, since YouTube only reports a full viewing as a “view.” His campaign has uploaded more than 800 video clips, and adds several more a day.

The average number of views for these top ten is currently more than 1.1 million (nearly double the average from a month ago!)

The average length of these ten videos is 13.3 minutes.

There have been nearly 3.9 million views of the longest of Obama’s most popular videos, his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race in America.

Alan Milburn (former British health secretary) was quoted in the Weekend Australian (22nd March 200 8) that those political parties in the UK who hand over power to the people will be successful in the 21st Century. He argues that in the 19th Century state power quite rightly grew to “guarantee clean water, safe streets and legal rights”, but in the second half of the 20th Century, state power began to wind back and power was handed to corporations and non-government or semi-autonomous institutions. Alan argues that we will evolve this process further in the 21st Century. New technologies such as the internet and universal education means that representative democracy from the past can evolve into a more participatory democracy. Modern challenges such as the environment, he argues, cannot be solved by government alone, and I would add, perhaps not by markets alone. Alan writes, “the modern state should not just enable. It should empower people…”. I would argue that Barrack Obama has read this mood change and by using social networks (including on the internet) is creating the huge support base he has in the US.

When I’m talking to my neighbours, colleagues and family, they all want to be part of the solution to the current water crisis. They
despise water restrictions with a gutteral hatred, because it disempowers them. They have all sorts of crazy, weird schemes for
saving the Murray and are furious “the government” hasn’t done more to provide water for the environment. They want to be informed and be
able to think through what the best solutions might be. They fill halls and lecture theatres to listen to Peter Cullen and Mike Young and
download postcasts and read blogs of David Paton and Minister Maywald.

Yesterday I got a call from a friend of a friend. He heard that the Minister for Water Security in South Australia and Professor Mike Young, a leading spokesman of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, were giving a talk at the University of Adelaide. They had actually given the speech the night before (in a display of great generosity to a small group of passionate students), so he had missed out. I was able to direct the gentleman to a couple of podcasts of speeches given by the Minister and Mike Young on this blog, which he was quite excited about. These podcasts gave him access to ideas who would otherwise not get so easily.

The podcasts of speeches on my blog don’t get Obama-levels of downloads, but they are popular, and continue to be downloaded long after the event. Perhaps these new forms of media offer the exciting possibility of more substantial political debate on important, but complex matters like water management, climate change and environmental management. Perhaps this could lead to greater interest and engagement by the public in political debates. And perhaps those politicians, academics and government agencies that encourage people to participate in discussions and put their ideas and messages out through growing social networks as well as television, radio and newspaper, will garner the greatest influence.

Written by Paul Dalby, 28 March 2008

David Pannell on investing in environmental management and restoration

Professor David Pannell, a Federation Fellow from the University of Western Australia, recently gave an impressive presentation at the Living Laboratories Workshop on “Integrated landscape science and management forum“, supported by ICE WaRM and DWLBC.

He described a simple tool for helping regional decision makers in Australia decide on where to focus their investment to get the greatest benefit per dollar invested. He has designed the tool to help regional councils to trade off the hard nosed decisions needed to get good environmental outcomes (in Australia, we call it “natural resource management outcomes”) and the expectations of the local community. It is a formal, structured way to understand the integrated outcomes of investments.

The framework he uses is called the Salinity Investment Framework, which is based on the understanding of a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, but which uses a simple, paper-based tool to decide on priorities. The decision framework develops practical and economically feasible options that trades-off private benefit and public benefit from any particular investment. It provides advice on what action regional decision makers could take to get the best outcomes from their investment using simple rules-of-thumb based on integrated scientific analysis.

When applied with a regional authority in Victoria, Australia, the investors in that region were able significantly increase the focus of their investment, which was now based on an integrated understanding of the likely impact and benefits of the investment for the environment, the local economy and social outcomes. The authority decided to reduce the number of projects and increase their scale, which should deliver significant improvements in investment outcomes.

David proposed four essential elements for deciding where to invest in environmental management and restoration, without which, the investment outcomes will be no different than investing randomly:

1. Relative value of environmental assets

2. Threat and impact and level of urgency

3. Technical feasibility of reducing impact

4. Adoptability ofdesign practices

There was the usual call that all scientists always repeat which is to shift policy in “natural resource management” in Australia to be focussed on measuring outcomes rather than inputs (with real data and analysis, not just “performance stories” as a proxy).

David Pannell’s website

Written by Paul Dalby, 23 March 2008

Tools for sharing information

Following on from a previous blog on making use of Enviromental Technologies, a small group of interested people got together on 6th March 2008 to “show and tell” their technologies. Most of these resources are listed below with appropriate links.

Some of the presentations are available fore download from http://www.livinglaboratories.com.au/page.php?pId=278

Synthesising new organisms to save the world

Craig Venter recently gave an extraordinary presentation on the synthesis of new organisms that produce biofuels directly from CO2. Given that he thinks he is perhaps 18 months away of producing the first organism, this is pretty exciting stuff.

Paul Dalby from In Fusion Consulting

So long Peter

“So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish” was the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route in the fourth book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series written by Douglas Adams. Yesterday Peter Cullen departed Planet Earth, having spent his life better understanding how our rivers and aquatic organisms function and tirelessly informing, cajoling, pleading and influencing us all to sensibly manage our precious rivers and water resources. Peter was a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, a Commissioner on the National Water Commission, a Professor at the University of Canberra and a Thinker In Residence here in my home state of South Australia. He was awarded the 2001 Prime Minister’s Prize for Environmentalist of the Year and in 2004 was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2004 for services to freshwater ecology. He did all of this despite ill-health over many years.

Many scientists I know are passionate about helping to change the world and to make it a better place. Peter was one of the few who was able to successfully make it happen at a national scale. He did this by using devastating logic, but without any sarcasm or arrogance. He carefully constructed his arguments in simple language so that everyone could understand them. He did not try to sound clever, nor did he attack individuals. He was always polite and respectful, giving him the key to the doors of power where he was listened to. He had a wry sense of humour which helped soften the often troubling messages he gave out on the difficulties we face in over-coming past inadequacies and present challenges in managing water in Australia.

Peter has helped set a framework for us to manage our water in a way that will sustain us now and in the future. His ideas are imbued in the National Water Initiative, a blue-print for managing water in this country, as well as in the numerous talks and papers he presented as a member of the Wentworth Group. It is now up to us to implement these principles with speed and purpose.

Late last year, Peter came to Adelaide to give the Shultz Oration, where he spoke about water scarcity and futures for South Australia (see blog). I helped organise the podcasting for this event with Michelle Freeman. While I was running back and forwards organising equipment, I saw Peter stuck at a lift, which was not moving because a fire alarm had gone off in the building. It was a hot day, he was not in the best of health and he had been waiting outside in a wheelchair. I called a security guard from the University and we found an alternative route for him to get to the lecture theatre. It was quite a drama and Peter was pretty flustered by the time we made it to the auditorium. He then gave a flawless, inspiring lecture to raptuous acclaim. At the end of the event when I was packing up, he came over to me to thank me for helping him out and knighted me a Knight of the Order of the Wentworth Group on the spot. The whole experience summed up his professionalism, kindness, generosity and humour.

You will be missed Peter. So long. And thanks.

Paul Dalby

Interview of Mike Young: A Future-proofed Basin

I interviewed Mike Young, the Professor of Water Economics and Management at the University of Adelaide on 11 March about his recent discussion paper titled “A future-proofed Basin: A new water management regime for the Murray-Darling Basin“.

The Murray-Darling Basin in Australia is over one million square kilometres in area, and provides water to the majority (70%) of Australia’s irrigated agriculture (1.4 million hectares). It’s management is complicated because the Basin extends over five states and one territory. Until recently, the Basin was managed under a joint agreement - called the Murray Darling Basin Agreement. 41 per cent of Australia’s gross value of agricultural production (1992) is produced in this region. It is also an important water supply for many rural towns, and the capital city of the state of South Australia - Adelaide, the city I live in. The two main tributaries are the Darling River in the north and the Murray River in the south.

The Rivers of the Murray Darling Basin are under terrible stress. The largest state in the Basin, NSW, has taken more than its share of water that all the states agreed to (called “The Cap”). All states do not meter all water use, and more water is extracted from the river systems than is agreed under the Cap. Since irrigation began in the Basin in the 1800’s, salinity has been a problem, as water that moves into the groundwater collects salt and then flows back into the River. The response to this increased salt load into the River has been to build salt interception schemes along the rivers which intercept salty groundwater before it reaches the rivers. Nevertheless, the river floodplain has become increasingly salinised, killing trees and wetlands. The River has been under significant stress of reduced flows and salinity for some time. In the year 2000, a series of drought years created a major crisis for the River. All of the storage dams along the river are now at low levels. The River stopped flowing at its mouth, putting the Ramsar listed Coorong estuary in mortal danger. In 2008, the large Lower Lakes at the bottom of the river are drying up, and only a series of barrages stops the sea water backflowing into these freshwater lakes and back up the river. Irrigators do not have access to secure supplies of water, and are under huge financial stress or have left the land, leaving orchards and other crops to die. Wetlands have dried up and the floodplain of the lower reaches of the river are white with salt. The Coorong estuary has almost completely changed character, from an estuarine environment to a hypersaline system of low diversity. Some birds species are at imminent risk of extinction in this region.

The original Murray Darling Agreement has collapsed, and the management of the River is now undertaken through a series of management meetings, which must seem like crisis meetings, by a group of senior bureaucrats called the “Senior Officials Group”. Every month the news gets worse as the drought continues. The Lower Lakes of the Murray River are so dry, they are now at risk of developing acid sulphate soils. If the drought continues, the salinity of the River will continue to increase more rapidly. The security of water to the city of Adelaide, with a population of over one million people, is at risk.

If this is a harbinger of climate change, then the Basin cannot continue to be managed as it was in the past. The results of this management system is system collapse in dry periods.

In my interview with Mike Young, he proposes a new model for managing the Basin. He argues for a different management system that is much more resilient to long periods of drought, for which there is a higher risk under climate change. The essence of the changes are:

1. Replace the current entitlement and allocation regime with a robust one that can be confidently explained as one that will work no matter what the climate scenarios in the future

2. Implement the resultant change in a just a fair manner.

I am not going to repeat the article that Mike wrote. He is much better than I at presenting his arguments. I would encourage you to read his full article (link above) and listen to the podcast.

Written by Paul Dalby. For more information - http://www.litfuse.com.au

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