Study finds Murray Darling Basin missing out on key environmental flows
More than $7 billion has been spent trying to increase the amount of water going into the Murray Darling basin - in a bid to stop its environmental decline. Now, a new study by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists has found that water is not going where it’s needed, making further decline likely.
Transcript
00:00 So the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists is a group of independent scientists who were
00:05 established about 20 years ago with the aim of connecting science to public policy and
00:10 they have a very strong focus on the Murray-Darling Basin.
00:13 So they decided they should take a look at these things called environmental water requirements
00:18 and basically these are these measures painstakingly developed by state governments that set out
00:25 the bare minimum water requirements, flow requirements that would sustain environments
00:30 around the river.
00:31 So for instance if you think that we need pelicans numbers to survive then we need a
00:36 certain amount of water to flow past certain areas so that they can breed.
00:41 That's what these minimum requirements set out.
00:43 They took a look at these, there are more than a thousand of these requirements across
00:46 the basin but they looked at a sub-sample and they found that over the last four decades
00:52 only a third of these bare minimum requirements have been met and crucially over the past
00:57 decade, single decade, which is the period in which the very expensive $13 billion plan
01:03 has begun to be implemented to save the river, only a quarter of these minimum flow requirements
01:09 have been met.
01:10 So they're saying that for whatever reason things are getting worse in the Murray-Darling
01:16 Basin, not better.
01:17 So is there any way to take these findings and implement a solution?
01:22 So the scientists say there's a very clear way to do that.
01:25 They advocate taking these minimum flow requirements and establishing them as extraction rules
01:30 along the basin, around the rivers.
01:33 So they say that irrigators shouldn't be allowed to take water out of the rivers until these
01:38 minimum flow requirements have been met.
01:41 I spoke to the New South Wales Irrigators Council who are very much not happy with such
01:48 a suggestion.
01:49 They say that if we were to do that and implement all of these minimum flow requirements as
01:53 rules farming would basically have to cease across the entire basin.
01:58 The scientists say, look, if we decide that we don't want all of these minimum flows to
02:03 be met, then we still need to pay close attention to what these rules are, these minimum requirements
02:08 are, because then we can say with our eyes open what environments we're basically trading
02:14 off.
02:15 We're basically saying, fine, we will let these environments decline so that we can
02:18 have that economic benefit.
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