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Media release
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Expert Reaction
These comments have been collated by the Science Media Centre to provide a variety of expert perspectives on this issue. Feel free to use these quotes in your stories. Views expressed are the personal opinions of the experts named. They do not represent the views of the SMC or any other organisation unless specifically stated.
Professor Richard Kingsford is Director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science, UNSW Sydney and member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists
This report provides the official commentary on the poor state of the recovery of water under the Basin Plan. While this remains a difficult challenge, this report reflects a lack of political and agency will to recover environmental water.
Clearly, there is currently limited opportunity in the time frame to realise the 450GL per year water recovery target, underlined by the fact that water recovery for the original target of 2750 GL per year still remains to be achieved.
In the meantime, we have experienced fish kills and many of our major wetland systems continue to degrade, despite the values of recent flooding. First Nations peoples, river communities and many that rely on healthy rivers have borne the costs.
This problem is compounded by the increasing effects of climate change reducing water availability, theft of water, and policy and practices such as floodplain harvesting and increased dams which are reducing the overall amount of water for healthy rivers.
Constraints’ projects have been bogged down in issues related to individuals and their potential to benefit from payments for environmental flow flooding. Many of these areas are part of the floodplain and flood naturally.
The major efficiency projects are increasingly exposed for their inadequacy, simply resulting in the movement of environmental water from one part of the basin to the other at significant cost.
One of the most critical aspects which is not covered in this report is the information on actual water recovery.
There is a real need to independently audit how much water has actually been recovered for the environment, while accounting for water that would have flowed back into the environment through seepage and return flows.
Dr David Adamson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics and Public Policy at The University of Adelaide.
It is of no surprise that the 450 GL will not be achieved with the efficiency program. Despite all publications, government inquiry submissions, and public debate, highlighting that the efficiency program:
- was incapable of returning sufficient water;
- higher cost than the buy-back;
- efficiency is a double edge sword that reduces the flexibility needed to adapt to a changing climate;
- had the capacity to increase farm debt; and
- locked new irrigators out of the market.
It was a political decision to spend over $7 billion on efficiency when all evidence highlighted that if they wanted rural growth, that the money was better spent elsewhere. The continual embrace of the zombie that is water efficiency stalks this and other countries, and when engineering solutions dominate in the face of reason, it will continue to plague society. The ongoing failure to understand how the water returned to the environment benefits all of society, including irrigators both now and into the future is a tragedy.
