The 18 ‘indicator’ assets are:

• Lower Balonne River Floodplain System
• Narran Lakes
• Lower Goulburn River Floodplain
• Gwydir Wetlands
• Booligal Wetlands
• Great Cumbung Swamp
• Lachlan Swamp
• Lower Darling River System
• Macquarie Marshes
• Barmah-Millewa Forest
• The Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth,
• Riverland – Chowilla Floodplain (including Lindsay, Mulcra and Wallpolla Islands)
• Edward-Wakool River System
• Gunbower-Koondrook-Pericoota Forest
• Hattah Lakes
• Lower Murrumbidgee River Floodplain
• Mid Murrumbidgee River Wetlands
• Wimmera River Terminal Wetlands

This is good, IF the Murray-Darling Basin Plan has as its target – regular flows out the end of the Murray Mouth so that the Mouth remains open most of the time, which will also ensure that the most biologically important wetlands in the Murray Darling system – the Coorong and Lower Lakes – are kept healthy. If the Authority accepts that the  Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth are “indicator” assets, the only way the Plan can be seen as a success is if flows out of the Mouth are re-established. The only way this can be achieved is through a major reduction in extractions.

Written by Paul Dalby on 16 April 2010

The idea of a community driven plan for the River is a good one.

Alastair and I would love your thoughts.

“I attended the Murray-Darling Basin Authority meeting at Goolwa on Feb 2^nd and it was a total and utter waste of time. Scheduled to last for only two hours, it wasted the first forty five minutes on total trivia – nothing of substance was produced. I left.

The crisis that is the MDB needs action now. The River Murray is rapidly dying from its mouth upwards and twenty of the Basin’s twenty three rivers are listed as being in poor or very poor health. The time for endless consultation, discussion, review and debate is long gone. There is a wartime-like urgency for the MDBA to show leadership and take immediate action to address the long term causes of this crisis – gross over extraction of the Basin’s water, colossal losses associated with 13,000 kms of open channels, outdated, inefficient irrigation practices and dysfunctional/ non existent metering.

But the MDBA does nothing; its priorities are all wrong. It ignores these urgent causes and instead busies itself with trivial ‘community’ meetings that have all the urgency and relevance of a senior citizen’s tea party. It hides behind an endless, comatose bureaucratic process and puts its faith in a ‘Basin Plan’, a de facto code for continuing delay. A convenient escape clause that allows the authority to continue to avoid the hard decisions that are decades overdue. As a distraction, it puts forward obscure projects that address obscure problems and the Rudd government throws vast amounts of money at them, hoping they will go away. But they don’t and large portions of this money disappear into the black hole of bureaucracy, leaving little for the rivers.

The cold reality facing the Basin Plan is that it will be subjected to the same labyrinthine bureaucratic process and years will pass before actual results appear along our rivers, likely to be as late as 2014. These are critical years that our rivers cannot afford to lose.

And the reason for this appalling 40 yr paralysis?

Political parties operate entirely through a prism of self-interest. The Rudd government is paranoid that the solutions required will prove so unpopular they will be unelectable for a decade. So they put their narrow interests first, and nothing is done.

And the answer?

The communities of the Basin must bypass the politicians and bureaucrats and seize the initiative. They must become leaders and visionaries and take control of the Basin’s problems, leaving the politicians follow in their wake.

To do this they must produce a simple plan of action that can be adopted Basin-wide. When it has sufficient support, it should be taken to Canberra. If both major parties approved, the longstanding political paralysis and odium that has prevented progress for 40 years would be removed. Politicians would be relieved from the onerous task of finding solutions to the Basin’s problems. And the communities, the people who know the most about the rivers, would be free to forge ahead with their own remedies.”

Written by Alastair Wood, 8 February 2010

In July 2007, I posted a link to presentations by Professor David Paton at the University of Adelaide on the “Death of the Coorong“.  David Paton, the leading expert on the Coorong, described the horrible decline of birds, plants, fish and invertebrates in the Coorong system, as a result of years of man-made and natural drought conditions. It should be noted that 90% of waterbirds in the Murray Darling Basin used to live in the Lower Lakes and Coorong. David Paton said the result of continued inaction is likely to be the extinction of some species in the Coorong, and perhaps the compete extinction of the Fairy Tern globally. His student, Dan Rogers presented research on waterbirds in the Coorong in November 2007.  Dan argued for an integrated management system to support policy decisions on managing the Coorong.

In May 2008, I pointed to a series of videos available for download from Catalyst describing 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. In March 2008, I had interviewed Mike Young on the challenges facing the River Murray system and he proposed two key steps to create a “Future-proofed Murray Darling Basin“

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.

This has not happened yet, and given the pace of reform nationally, is unlikely to happen for some time yet, if at all. This is a complex problem, and it is difficult to trade off the needs of different users of water in the River system, especially when you are not always sure who really needs what water and when.

In a piece of positive news, a recent study by scientists on the Coorong have identified an important number – 300GL. This is the amount of water that needs to flow out at the end of the Murray River to maintain the health of the River. This number is based on an impressive, interdisciplinary and integrated research program called CLLAMMecology, but it gives a simple piece of advice to government. You need 300GL of water flowing out the bottom of the River to maintain the health of the Coorong. The Coorong is a Ramsar wetland, and government has a responsibility to the global community to protect this habitat which supports bird populations that migrate to countries across the northern hemisphere. I suspect 300GL of water out of the bottom of the system will deliver a whole range of other environmental benefits upstream as well. 300GL would be 2% of diversions in an ‘average’ year, and 5% of diversions in years more typical of the last five. Setting such a target would meet Mike Young’s principle of  “entitlement and allocation regime…that can be confidently explained ….that will work no matter what the climate scenarios in the future “.

You can download podcasts and videos from the CLLAMMecology study presentations here.

You can register for the Litfuse feed on your i-tunes or mp3 player: http://feeds.litfuse.com.au/litfuse

Written by Paul Dalby on 22 July 2009

I recently gave an interview to the media outlet “Global Atlanta” on a visit to the United States I made for ICE WaRM. In the interview I talked about how Australia has learned from hard lessons as a result of rapid shifts in climatic conditions, probably as a result of global warming. There are some excellent lessons to be learned for other countries who are at risk from drying and warming – the southern states of the United States of America in particular.

The full article is available at: http://www.globalatlanta.com/article/17131/

Written by Paul Dalby on 3 February 2009

Written by Lauren on 20th August 2008