More than seven billion dollars has been spent trying to increase the amount of water going into the Murray Darling Basin. Now, a new study by the Wentworth group of concerned scientists has found water is not going where it’s needed making further decline likely.
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00:00 So, the Wentworth Group is this independent group of scientists who got together about
00:05 20 years to establish the group.
00:07 And their main aim is to connect scientific research to public policy.
00:11 And they've got a big focus on the Murray-Darling Basin.
00:13 They've done a lot of work on this.
00:15 And they include some of the country's top water scientists and the top policy experts
00:19 on Murray-Darling Basin issues.
00:22 So they looked at these things called environmental water requirements.
00:25 Now these are basically the minimum amounts of water required to sustain environments
00:32 across the river.
00:33 And they were painstakingly generated by state governments over the past 10 years.
00:40 They looked at these minimum requirements to examine whether or not they've been met
00:45 over the last four decades and over the last decade.
00:49 And they found that over the last 40 years, only about a third of these bare minimum requirements
00:54 have been met through the rivers.
00:57 And that over the past 10 years, it's even worse.
00:59 Only a quarter.
01:00 And so they're saying what this means is there is simply not enough water flowing to where
01:04 it needs to go throughout the river system, despite the savings that have been made through
01:10 the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
01:12 Scientists are saying that actually this work provides a very neat solution.
01:16 Because what they've done is the first major analysis of these environmental water requirements,
01:22 these minimum flows and whether they're occurring.
01:24 And they're saying that these minimum flows should actually be treated as extraction rules
01:29 in the river.
01:30 They say that until these minimum flows are met in the rivers, extraction shouldn't be
01:33 allowed.
01:34 In other words, irrigators shouldn't be allowed to take money until these minimum flows are
01:37 met.
01:38 Now irrigator groups are very opposed to this.
01:41 I spoke to the New South Wales Irrigators Council and they said, look, if we did that,
01:46 basically irrigated farming would have to stop across the whole basin.
01:49 The scientists say, look, perhaps we can't meet all of these minimum flow requirements
01:54 anymore but focusing on them in water management would mean that we then are at least with
01:58 open eyes looking at what environments we're giving up on.
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