Damming northern Australia - a repost from The Conversation

Damming northern Australia: we need to learn hard lessons from the south

Erin O'Donnell, University of Melbourne and Barry Hart, Monash University

The push for development in northern Australia is gathering momentum, with the government recently releasing a draft of its Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to help finance large projects.

The development of northern Australia will crucially depend on harnessing the north’s abundant available water resources. Over the next five years the government will develop plans to manage these water resources.

However we have to get these plans right from the start to ensure the north’s waters are developed sustainably. To do so, we can start by looking south.

Full steam ahead

In June 2015, the federal government released its long-awaited northern Australia White Paper. Among commitments to agriculture in northern Australia, the white paper targets more efficient use of water resources across the north.

Over 60% of Australia’s total surface water runoff occurs north of the Tropic of Capricorn. A 2014 CSIRO review indicates that this could potentially support up to 1.4 million hectares of irrigated land, increasing Australia’s irrigated area by 50%.

Reaching this potential, however, would come at the financial and environmental cost of around 90 new dams and many weirs and other infrastructure.

The white paper promises sustainable development, but the problem is the timeframe. The paper commits, over the next two years, to assessment of the water resources in the initial priority catchments, and within five years, to the development of water resource plans. These plans will include a cap on water use, and a water market to trade water allocations.

But the paper is silent on what we know about northern ecosystems and how water infrastructure might affect them, and makes no allowance for climate change.

Learning from the south

There is much to be learned from the current implementation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which will result in upgrades to existing water plans in Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory.

The past 20 years have seen almost continual reform in Murray-Darling, demonstrating how hard it is to achieve sustainability when water resources are over-used.

Australia is currently spending over A$13 billion to restore the Murray-Darling Basin catchments to something approaching the minimum needed to maintain the ecological health of the system.

Avoiding this will avoid a major overhaul in the future and provide investor confidence.

Managing this risk to wildlife

Northern Australia is home to 301 nationally threatened species, as well as the iconic Great Barrier Reef, already under threat.

In 2004 one of us (Barry) looked at environmental risks of new irrigation schemes then proposed for the north.

He identified four factors for sustainable irrigation, including urgently better understanding the north’s freshwater ecosystems, and developing a risk-based approach to making decisions on infrastructure.

Over the past decade we’ve considerably improved our knowledge of northern ecosystems, for example the Ord river system in Western Australia, Kakadu and the Daly river in Norther Territory, and the Mitchell, Burdekin and other coastal rivers and wetlands in Queensland. Although we know more, this knowledge needs to be synthesised before it can be used for planning.

We still don’t know exactly how irrigation projects might affect these ecosystems. To deal with this we suggest adopting an ecological risk-based approach to planning.

It is trite, but true, that one needs to know the risks before one can set about managing them. Ecological risk assessments assist in identifying the risks, assessing their relative importance, and identifying possible ways to mitigate the risks. This sort of process is a basic component of the requirements for plans being developed as part of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

Dealing with dams

The White Paper clearly sees new on-stream dams as part of increasing water use in northern Australia.

The planning process will set a cap on how much water can be used. But current evidence regarding the impact of dams on river flows shows that this will not be enough.

From the start, plans need to include environmental flow: sufficient water at the appropriate frequency and duration to support ecosystems. As well as a cap, this might mean creating legal rights for water held in the storage for the environment.

One of the intractable problems caused by dams in southern Australia has been seasonal flow inversion. River flows are higher in summer and lower in winter than the ecosystem needs.

In the north, flow inversion may occur with higher flows occurring in the dry season rather than in summer when the bulk of the rainfall occurs.

To avoid this, new water infrastructure in the north could be built off stream. This system is currently used in the Queensland section of the Murray-Darling Basin. But, unless planned for at the outset, these alternatives are extremely difficult to retrofit to an existing system.

Figuring out the sustainable level of water extraction for an aquatic ecosystem depends on considerable technical work (hydrological, ecological and modelling). This technical work needs to be guided by a clear set of objectives for each development, including the value the community (including Indigenous Australians) places on the local ecosystems.

The water market

The Murray-Darling Basin demonstrates that water markets are a highly efficient means for ensuring that the available water resource is effectively used. Additionally, the water market is also an efficient means for recovering water for the environment (although the overall process remains costly), and can also increase efficiency of environmental water management.

But to make the most of the opportunities created by water markets, the environment needs the institutional capacity to enter the market. In the south, the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder owns and manages large volumes of water across the Murray-Darling Basin. At the state level, the Victorian Environmental Water Holder has also proved effective at streamlining decision-making and using the market to manage its holdings.

If environmental water in the north is to be managed efficiently in the context of a future water market, establishing a legal entity with the capacity to hold water, enter contracts and make decisions will be an essential piece of the puzzle.

The White Paper is a bold vision for developing northern Australia. Australia has learned many lessons about sustainable water allocation the hard way, at the cost of a great deal of time, money and ecosystem degradation.

We need to apply these lessons from the south to the north. Failing to adequately invest in new water resource development plans in northern Australia is effectively planning to fail. And we should know better.



Erin O'Donnell, Senior Fellow, Centre for Resources, Energy and Environment Law, University of Melbourne and Barry Hart, Emeritus Professor Water Science, Monash University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Back into the blog!

It's been a long time between posts. 2016 is officially the Year of the Thesis, so I am working hard to finally get my PhD thesis submitted.

To bring you up to date...

In 2013, I attended a workshop to bring together water policy academics and practitioners from the Murray-Darling Basin and the Colorado, to share lessons on sustainable water management. Water policy is often seen as heavily context-specific, but there is always value in a multi-jurisdictional discussion. The underlying issues of water resource management are common, and even when the specific policies and tools differ greatly, there is still value in a discussion that encourages you to re-examine your own assumptions. The outcome of this workshop was a series of blog posts at the Global Water Forum, and they are well worth a read.

In late 2013, Rebecca Nelson and I chaired a national workshop, Mainstreaming Environmental Water Law and Policy, at the University of Melbourne Law School. This workshop brought together academics, policy makers, private consultants and NGOs from across Australia to discuss the emerging issues in environmental water management. The emphasis of this workshop was particularly on how environmental water has moved beyond the triage of drought and into the mainstream of water policy and planning. A full report of the workshop will be placed on the Melbourne University website and I'll link to that then.

Rebecca and I surveyed the attendees at this workshop, and the consistent feedback was that there are not enough of these kinds of opportunities for frank and open discussion between people from different states and sectors. I think academia is best placed to host these kinds of forums, and we should do it much more often.

2015 saw the publication of my first book chapter, co-authored with Dustin Garrick (who recently released his own great book on water resource management in the Murray Darling, Colorado and Columbia Basins), looking at the role of private organisations in environmental watering in Australia and the US. Not to give too much away, but we conclude that a combination of private and public organisations can generate the maximum efficacy, as well as long term legitimacy, for environmental watering.

Most recently, Barry Hart and I published a brief article in The Conversation on the future challenges facing water resource planning in northern Australia. I'll republish that article in full in the next post.

So it's been a busy couple of years, and there's a lot of exciting stuff happening this year - fingers crossed I find time to write about it!

Efficiency, the para-commons, and being a waterist

So it’s now about a month since I met with Professor Bruce Lankford at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, but I think it’s worth touching on some of the interesting ideas that he shared with me. Bruce has just published a book, Resource Efficiency Complexity and the Commons, which examines resource efficiency from the perspective of common pool resources. One of the key questions is: who gets the saving when efficiency gains are made? Who wins, and just as importantly, who loses?

When we make an efficiency saving in water resource use, it means that water that was considered ‘unused’ is converted into useful resources. This includes situations like the irrigation infrastructure projects in Australia, where most of the savings so far have come from improving the delivery infrastructure, so that less water is lost through seepage from delivery channels. But where did those losses go? For the most part, they entered groundwater systems, and in some cases, ended up in rivers or wetlands.

In the western US, ‘unused’ extracted water, may end up being available for other users (via groundwater or returned flows to the river), at which point it may no longer be the property of the original extractor. In some states, and depending on the historical use data, efficiency on the part of the original extractor, by using more of the water that they pump from the river or their groundwater bore, may in fact be viewed as theft from the downstream users.

All water goes somewhere, and approaching these questions from the perspective of a common pool resource highlights the difficulty of efficiency as a solution to water scarcity. Bruce introduces the concept of the ‘paracommons’, which reflects the uncertain nature of the ownership of efficiency savings, and the uncertain nature of the benefits of efficiency.

This is not to say that there aren’t any, of course. But it does require you to engage with the question on a more nuanced scale. Returning to the Australian example of irrigation infrastructure improvements, one of the early elements of this project was to figure out where the leaked water was going: which of the wetlands and aquatic ecosystems was dependent on the system operating in its current form? Some of the high value ecosystems were insulated from the efficiency calculation: the water they depended on was not included in the calculation of the savings, and their water was protected. Further, the saved water was split three ways: one third to irrigators, one third to the city of Melbourne and one third went to the environment. This water has been made available as an entitlement in storage, which means it can be used in a more targeted fashion to deliver environmental outcomes: at the right time, in the right places, at the right flows.

Consumptive water users aren’t the only ones having to consider efficiency. As I discussed in an earlier post, there has been tremendous work to get the environment on the efficiency band wagon too. Bruce came up with one of the earliest statement of principles around environmental efficiency in 2003, and these principles are at work in Australia today, where environmental watering infrastructure is being used to deliver flood events that would otherwise require substantially higher flows (see, for example, my earlier post on the regulator at the Hattah Lakes in Victoria).

After all this, one of the big ideas that Bruce left me with was the idea of being a ‘waterist’. In chapter 7 of his book, he makes the point that when asked to find solutions to complex problems, most of us reach back to our career specialisation. For example, economists tend to reach for markets or pricing solutions, lawyers offer governance or legal solutions, and engineers can focus on the technical and physical aspects of the system. In a world where the interdisciplinarity of complex problems has been well-recognised, it’s important to be able to reach beyond our own preferred modes of thinking and find truly transdisciplinary solutions. Bruce’s suggestion here is to be a waterist: someone who seeks out water users who are already operating at the margins, and who have experience in managing their resources prudently, carefully and sometimes innovatively. By becoming the champion of the users of the resource, solutions can be embedded in what works, and can take advantage of innovations that have already emerged at the margins to deal with scarcity. For Bruce, being a waterist is about reaching beyond our ideological boundaries, investigating systems on the ground and engaging directly with those "least likely to represent themselves... but if engaged with might contribute their experience".

Privatisation, financialisation and neoliberalisation of water

Following on from my discussions with Sarah Hendry in Dundee, I’ve been exploring the idea of privatisation of water resources, and how this is playing out in the UK and around the world.

In London, I met with Dr Kate Bayliss, who has worked extensively on the issues surrounding the privatisation of water utilities, particularly in sub-Saharan African countries. Water has a dual nature: it is a human right, whilst also often being a commercial input, for the production of crops as well as industrial uses. Kate’s work highlights the challenge of retaining a focus on social justice and equity, when water utilities are privatised and operate under commercial principles. She has also recently engaged with the issue of financialization of water, when water utilities and water services are treated as financial products. She told me about a new trend in financial markets: water-related exchange traded funds. Water is an essential service, and exists in a highly specific local context – but these new financial instruments extend the process of commodification into financialization, further separating water from its context.

I went on to met with Dr Jessica Budds of the University of East Anglia. Jessica has been a critic of Chile’s water markets for many years, and one of her most recent papers examines the political ecology of water, and in particular, the relationship of water to power structures in Chile. Her historical analysis of the privatisation and creation of water markets in Chile demonstrates the link between not only the ideology of the powerful, but the way in which the privatisation of water strengthened their position. She also introduced me to the concept of the neoliberalization of nature. The tools that we use to manage our natural environment shape the discourse that we use to describe and engage with it – so the commodification of water can extend the neoliberal ideology to our relationship with nature. 

Jessica gave me a lot of new ideas to get my head around, and a new perspective from which to engage with the way that environmental water management in the context of a water market is changing the way that we perceive of and engage with the natural environment. Of course, political ecology always asks us 'what is the natural environment?', so I'm trying to disentangle the layers around that concept. In many ways, it's not really possible to separate the environment from humanity, as we define the environment as a social construct, as well as physically shaping it through our actions (even where and when we lived in it much more harmoniously than we do now).

Catchment management and conservation covenants

The UK is doing some very interesting things with their catchment management program. After my meeting with Chris Spray in Dundee, I was keen to hear more, so I met with Laurence Smith, head of the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy, at SOAS, University of London, who’s been exploring the response of farmers to NGOs seeking to arrange payment for ecosystem services, and in particular, what sort of legal arrangements they’d be willing to enter into and what sort of payments they would require. This work is feeding directly into the catchment management activities of the West Country Rivers Trust, as well as helping to inform the development of new legal instruments that enable the protection of changed land management practices in perpetuity, in the form of conservation covenants. We have similar legal instruments in Australia, but the current state of property law in the UK requires some substantial legal changes to make these instruments available. 

Laurence also shared some valuable insights into the way that farmers often prefer to work with a non-government organization, rather than the environmental regulator. This tendency is similar to what I’ve observed in the USA, and highlights the importance of separate decision-making roles. When one agency is responsible for regulating activities, it’s very hard for that agency to also explore other opportunities, as people can be unwilling to have open, frank discussions with an agency that has enforcement powers.

One of the fascinating aspects of the catchment management approach being piloted by the UK is that they are actively encouraging a diverse range of local agencies to take a lead role (called the catchment ‘host’ organisation) in the development of catchment management plans. Organizations interested in this role can ‘bid’ for the opportunity to host the plan development. This is a policy that creates space for non-government organizations to get involved, and really encourages the involvement of NGOs in catchment management. I’ll be really interested to see the results of the next round of catchment management planning, and see how the NGOs facilitate (or not!) the development of plans that the local community can embrace. 

Water reform in the UK: abstraction licences on unregulated rivers

London welcomed me with all its traditional charms: it rained. All day. Unceasingly. Coming from south-eastern Australia, I wasn’t entirely sure that such a thing could actually happen, so it had all the delights of novelty.

Fortunately, because as nice as my raincoat is, it’s not really a fashion piece, London then remembered that it was having the warmest, sunniest summer since 2006, and the rest of the week was glorious – golden, warm and lots of other words not usually associated with south-east England.

England and Wales are currently pursuing a range of water resource management reforms. I was lucky enough to meet with Henry Leveson-Gower, Head of Future Water Resource Management Project in DEFRA’s Water Availability and Quality Programme. He and his team are exploring policy options to facilitate water trading, and have been examining ways to unbundle water abstraction licences in England. This is quite similar to the water reform in Australia, where water licences have been separated into a permanent right (in Victorian parlance, a water share), a temporary right (a water allocation), a water use licence (which specifies where and how water can be used, and is attached to the land on which the water will be used) and a delivery share. However, in Australia, we’ve really only been successful at unbundling water licences on regulated systems, where water is held in large storages and called out for use. In England, they are attempting to do this for unregulated river systems, where the water licence gives you the right to extract a share of the available flow. This makes unbundling more complicated, as the location on the river is much more important in determining what the share of that flow will be, and the capacity to determine physical allocations of water (temporary rights) depends on predicting the flows in the river at a given period. I’m going to be very interested to see how they solve some of these problems, and whether any of those solutions might be transferable to Australia’s unregulated systems.

One of the components of the policy reform is using smart water metering technology, so that water meters provide water use data in real time to water managers, and access to water can be linked to real-time stream flow data. Australia has also been exploring the use of such smart meters in some rural catchments, and there’s a real opportunity to share some of these lessons with the UK. For example, in Victoria, Melbourne Water, in partnership with the Victorian State Government, have been piloting the use of smart meters in several of their rural catchments. I’m hoping that we can encourage policy makers everywhere to get better at sharing and learning from these sorts of projects.

Interestingly, there are some environmental charities (such as RSPB) who are purchasing land to restore and protect wetlands. In some cases, this includes a licence to extract water from the river to recreate flooding in the wetland. These environmental groups will also be able to trade their water under the new arrangements, and it will be interesting to see whether more environmental organizations enter this space and become environmental water managers in the UK. 

Murray Cod in the Murrumbidgee

This is a great little video released by the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, showing how environmental flows have been used in the Murrumbidgee River (part of the Murray-Darling Basin) to help support and maintain populations of the Murray Cod, Australia's best-known freshwater fish.

For any international readers that I've introduced to the Murray Cod previously - I wasn't kidding! They really are that big, and they live for up to 80 years. 

Thanks to the Australian River Restoration Centre for the share.