Joe Flynn and Paul Dalby presented to the ICT Council on Opportunities for ICT in Natural Resource Management on 3rd June 2008.

Written by Paul Dalby

Catalyst on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation have a series of videos available for download of interviews of scientists who describe 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.

Send a message to Penny Wong and let her know that we need a new system of water management that better protects these important assets.

Written by Paul Dalby

A previous blog on “Future of Birds in the Coorong” generated some interesting discussion between scientists, someone living upstream, and a resident of the Lower Lakes. It got me thinking about the fundamental problem of the management of the River Murray.

Imagine that Kevin Rudd announced that rather than report his budget in terms of how much income he receives and how much he spends, and rather than setting a target for surpluses, he is going to change the way he manages the budget. Instead of reporting how much is left and whether the budget balanced, he is simply going to report how much each of his departments is going to receive and report on how well they spent their money. He wasn’t going to be all that fussed about measuring how much each department spends, but is going to give rough estimates instead. He is going to disband the Reserve Bank, and the states and the Commonwealth governments will get together regularly to set monetary policy.

Now imagine that times get tough. The economy slows down and there is much less money available in the Australian economy. Kevin’s response will be to start borrowing heavily from overseas to keep cash flowing into his departments. After all, they are doing a good job, and people expect to continue to receive their services and handouts. Pretty soon, credit starts drying up, so departments don’t have the cashflow they need to maintain their spending, so they have to start cutting back. There is no Reserve Bank to dry up the supply of credit, but because of the angst and political heat for the governments of Australia, they continue to borrow wherever they can. Eventually, there is almost no credit available anywhere in the world. Cash reserves are drying up, so Kevin announces that South Australia will receive no further funding. Any money that is generated in the economy will be spent in Queensland, NSW and Victoria first, and South Australia will have to wait until the economy improves much more before it receives Commonwealth funding again.

Of course, if this was the economy, Kevin Rudd would have been removed from office through a popular revolt, an election or a dismissal well before the final horrible scenario. And if it really did get as bad as I described, the IMF and World Bank would declare a failed state and jump in with offers of financial assistance, as long as we changed our wicked ways.

In the Murray Darling System, there is no balanced budget. We are not measuring how much water is being taken out along the river. We do not measure how much water flows into South Australia. We have been borrowing heavily from our storages to maintain our current activities despite the current drought, and despite the fact that we were not leaving enough water in the system to maintain the health of wetlands and the Coorong BEOFRE the drought started. We have run the storages down to nearly empty. When there are flows upstream, the current Murray Darling Agreement says that upstream states can use it all up to a point where they have sufficient and only then is South Australia able to share in the flows. This despite the fact that the Coorong is on its last legs, the Lower Lakes are below sea level and at risk of developing acid sulphate soils, and Adelaide being 18 months away from being unable to drink water from the River Murray if there are no further flows.

If this were the economy, we would be a failed state. In fact, the states of Australia have failed, and badly. The Murray Darling Basin Agreement doesn’t work effectively and needs to be replaced with a new system that does four things:

1. Budget flows from the mouth backwards. That is, just like Kevin Rudd is setting a target for budget surpluses of 1.5% of GDP, flows of water out of the Mouth of the River should be budgeted for first, before any other use from the River.

2. Water inflows and water use should be measured along the length of the Murray Darling system, including tributaries, groundwater flows and farm dams. Measuring only some of the budget is the same as not having a budget

3. There must be an independent arbiter that sets the amount of water that can be taken from the River every year, just like we have a Reserve Bank. Like the Reserve Bank, the independent authority should be truly independent, and not have its decisions modified by a frightened government that doesn’t like the consequences of the decision. This is unlike Penny Wong’s current proposal, which gives the Commonwealth Government the ability to change the decision of the new “independent” Murray Darling Basin Authority if it disagrees with the decision.

4. Establishes real consequences for over-extracting water from the Basin. Currently, there is no punishment for any state over-extracting water from their system. This sets a perverse incentive to do the wrong thing. There must be painful financial disincentives for individual states to “steal” water from their counterparts. National Competition Policy sets such measures for economic matters, and the principles should be extended to managing a shared water resource.

These ideas were informed and stimulated by Peter Cullen and Mike Young. Some of their talks can be downloaded from:

• Peter Cullen at the Schultz Oration
• Mike Young and Jim McColl: Speeding up the Water Reform Process
• Mike Young: Pricing your Water
• Mike Young: A Water-Proofed Basin

Written by Paul Dalby, 2 May 2008

This article in the Australian on 17 April 2008 reports on a study that found that in rural Australia there has been a 28.5per cent growth in the number of households connected to the internet since 2001. Access to computers and the internet in rural centres had almost caught up to the city, with 63.5per cent having internet access compared with 66.1per cent in urban areas.

Farmers are starting to use the internet for communicating with each others and those who support them. The recent South Australia No Till Farmers Association conference was recorded and is available as podcasts from http://www.santfa.com.au/events.htm. There is more to come. Watch this space!

Written by Paul Dalby 17 April 2008

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Dan Rogers from the University of Adelaide spoke at the CLLAMMecology Science Briefing, held on Friday April 4, 2008, at the Goolwa Steam Exchange Brewery, in Goolwa, South Australia. Listen to the podcast (4.8MB).

Dan presents recent results of his research on birds in the northern and southern lagoon of the Coorong estuary in South Australia. This habitat is a Ramsar listed wetland, which is under considerable threat due to a reduction in water flow from the River Murray that used to maintain an open mouth from the estuary to the ocean.

He presents disturbing results on the crash in bird populations as a result of increasing salinity in the southern lagoon in particular. He also presents research on what makes a good habitat for birds. He argues that we need to manage the Coorong for the key fish species (such as hardyheads) and invertebrates that birds feed on.

CLLAMM ecology is developing tools to help managers decide how best to design management options to maintain the birds, fish and other organisms in the Coorong. The research is funded by CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country and is a collaboration between CSIRO, the University of Adelaide, FlLinders University and SARDI.

See also the blog on David Paton’s talk on the “Death of the Coorong“

Written by Paul Dalby

I started this blog-site as an experiment. My friend Mike Seyfang kept telling me that the new technologies emerging in blogging, podcasting, you-tube and other forms of social networking were going to turn the world upside down. My experiment has been a very modest exercise, but it has definitely demonstrated the power of this new medium of social networking.

I was therefore very interested in the recent blog on the Breakthrough blog, which summarised an article by Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry from the Personal Democracy Forum, an online magazine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics.

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2008/03/youtubes_political_revolution.shtml

The article argues that the internet is changing the possibility of political debate. The dominance of television has reduced political debate largely to sound bites. To quote the article: “In the 1968 presidential election, the average amount of time given to a sound bite from presidential candidate on the network news shows was 43 seconds…. By 2004 … 10.3 seconds”.

Barack Obama has embraced new media technologies and is turning this model upside down. He is giving lengthy, substantive speeches, and putting them all on YouTube and then encouraging his supporters to spread them around. The following figures are direct quotes from the Breakthrough blog:

So far, Obama’s videos have been viewed more than 33 million times on YouTube.com — and that’s not counting partial views, since YouTube only reports a full viewing as a “view.” His campaign has uploaded more than 800 video clips, and adds several more a day.

The average number of views for these top ten is currently more than 1.1 million (nearly double the average from a month ago!)

The average length of these ten videos is 13.3 minutes.

There have been nearly 3.9 million views of the longest of Obama’s most popular videos, his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race in America.

Alan Milburn (former British health secretary) was quoted in the Weekend Australian (22nd March 200 that those political parties in the UK who hand over power to the people will be successful in the 21st Century. He argues that in the 19th Century state power quite rightly grew to “guarantee clean water, safe streets and legal rights”, but in the second half of the 20th Century, state power began to wind back and power was handed to corporations and non-government or semi-autonomous institutions. Alan argues that we will evolve this process further in the 21st Century. New technologies such as the internet and universal education means that representative democracy from the past can evolve into a more participatory democracy. Modern challenges such as the environment, he argues, cannot be solved by government alone, and I would add, perhaps not by markets alone. Alan writes, “the modern state should not just enable. It should empower people…”. I would argue that Barrack Obama has read this mood change and by using social networks (including on the internet) is creating the huge support base he has in the US.

When I’m talking to my neighbours, colleagues and family, they all want to be part of the solution to the current water crisis. They
despise water restrictions with a gutteral hatred, because it disempowers them. They have all sorts of crazy, weird schemes for
saving the Murray and are furious “the government” hasn’t done more to provide water for the environment. They want to be informed and be
able to think through what the best solutions might be. They fill halls and lecture theatres to listen to Peter Cullen and Mike Young and
download postcasts and read blogs of David Paton and Minister Maywald.

Yesterday I got a call from a friend of a friend. He heard that the Minister for Water Security in South Australia and Professor Mike Young, a leading spokesman of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, were giving a talk at the University of Adelaide. They had actually given the speech the night before (in a display of great generosity to a small group of passionate students), so he had missed out. I was able to direct the gentleman to a couple of podcasts of speeches given by the Minister and Mike Young on this blog, which he was quite excited about. These podcasts gave him access to ideas who would otherwise not get so easily.

• Minister Karlene Maywald on the Future of the River Murray
• Mike Young and Jim McColl: Speeding up the Water Reform Process
• Mike Young: Pricing your Water
• Mike Young: A Water-Proofed Basin

The podcasts of speeches on my blog don’t get Obama-levels of downloads, but they are popular, and continue to be downloaded long after the event. Perhaps these new forms of media offer the exciting possibility of more substantial political debate on important, but complex matters like water management, climate change and environmental management. Perhaps this could lead to greater interest and engagement by the public in political debates. And perhaps those politicians, academics and government agencies that encourage people to participate in discussions and put their ideas and messages out through growing social networks as well as television, radio and newspaper, will garner the greatest influence.

Written by Paul Dalby, 28 March 2008

Professor David Pannell, a Federation Fellow from the University of Western Australia, recently gave an impressive presentation at the Living Laboratories Workshop on “Integrated landscape science and management forum“, supported by ICE WaRM and DWLBC.

He described a simple tool for helping regional decision makers in Australia decide on where to focus their investment to get the greatest benefit per dollar invested. He has designed the tool to help regional councils to trade off the hard nosed decisions needed to get good environmental outcomes (in Australia, we call it “natural resource management outcomes”) and the expectations of the local community. It is a formal, structured way to understand the integrated outcomes of investments.

The framework he uses is called the Salinity Investment Framework, which is based on the understanding of a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, but which uses a simple, paper-based tool to decide on priorities. The decision framework develops practical and economically feasible options that trades-off private benefit and public benefit from any particular investment. It provides advice on what action regional decision makers could take to get the best outcomes from their investment using simple rules-of-thumb based on integrated scientific analysis.

When applied with a regional authority in Victoria, Australia, the investors in that region were able significantly increase the focus of their investment, which was now based on an integrated understanding of the likely impact and benefits of the investment for the environment, the local economy and social outcomes. The authority decided to reduce the number of projects and increase their scale, which should deliver significant improvements in investment outcomes.

David proposed four essential elements for deciding where to invest in environmental management and restoration, without which, the investment outcomes will be no different than investing randomly:

1. Relative value of environmental assets

2. Threat and impact and level of urgency

3. Technical feasibility of reducing impact

4. Adoptability ofdesign practices

There was the usual call that all scientists always repeat which is to shift policy in “natural resource management” in Australia to be focussed on measuring outcomes rather than inputs (with real data and analysis, not just “performance stories” as a proxy).

David Pannell’s website

Written by Paul Dalby, 23 March 2008

Following on from a previous blog on making use of Enviromental Technologies, a small group of interested people got together on 6th March 2008 to “show and tell” their technologies. Most of these resources are listed below with appropriate links.

• Database of research publications for NRM Boards (Paul Dalby, In Fusion)
• Lower Murray Landscape Futures - Google Earth presentation of data (Paul Dalby, In Fusion)
• Victorian Resources Online
• NRM Toolbar (Terry Leeson, education.au)
• Scootle online database (Terry Leeson, education.au)
• Nature Maps (Ian Malcolm and Geoff West from DEH)
• e-nrims (Geoff Yoemans from DWLBC)
• Landscape Mapping Institute (Greg Brown, Vermont University)
• Mt Hood Study (Greg Brown, Vermont University)
• Clickers: Turning point technologies (Greg Brown, Vermont University) or try ebay
• hd.gov - a clearing house for all government agencies for their data and methodologies

Some of the presentations are available fore download from http://www.livinglaboratories.com.au/page.php?pId=278

Craig Venter recently gave an extraordinary presentation on the synthesis of new organisms that produce biofuels directly from CO2. Given that he thinks he is perhaps 18 months away of producing the first organism, this is pretty exciting stuff.

Paul Dalby from In Fusion Consulting

“So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish” was the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route in the fourth book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series written by Douglas Adams. Yesterday Peter Cullen departed Planet Earth, having spent his life better understanding how our rivers and aquatic organisms function and tirelessly informing, cajoling, pleading and influencing us all to sensibly manage our precious rivers and water resources. Peter was a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, a Commissioner on the National Water Commission, a Professor at the University of Canberra and a Thinker In Residence here in my home state of South Australia. He was awarded the 2001 Prime Minister’s Prize for Environmentalist of the Year and in 2004 was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2004 for services to freshwater ecology. He did all of this despite ill-health over many years.

Many scientists I know are passionate about helping to change the world and to make it a better place. Peter was one of the few who was able to successfully make it happen at a national scale. He did this by using devastating logic, but without any sarcasm or arrogance. He carefully constructed his arguments in simple language so that everyone could understand them. He did not try to sound clever, nor did he attack individuals. He was always polite and respectful, giving him the key to the doors of power where he was listened to. He had a wry sense of humour which helped soften the often troubling messages he gave out on the difficulties we face in over-coming past inadequacies and present challenges in managing water in Australia.

Peter has helped set a framework for us to manage our water in a way that will sustain us now and in the future. His ideas are imbued in the National Water Initiative, a blue-print for managing water in this country, as well as in the numerous talks and papers he presented as a member of the Wentworth Group. It is now up to us to implement these principles with speed and purpose.

Late last year, Peter came to Adelaide to give the Shultz Oration, where he spoke about water scarcity and futures for South Australia (see blog). I helped organise the podcasting for this event with Michelle Freeman. While I was running back and forwards organising equipment, I saw Peter stuck at a lift, which was not moving because a fire alarm had gone off in the building. It was a hot day, he was not in the best of health and he had been waiting outside in a wheelchair. I called a security guard from the University and we found an alternative route for him to get to the lecture theatre. It was quite a drama and Peter was pretty flustered by the time we made it to the auditorium. He then gave a flawless, inspiring lecture to raptuous acclaim. At the end of the event when I was packing up, he came over to me to thank me for helping him out and knighted me a Knight of the Order of the Wentworth Group on the spot. The whole experience summed up his professionalism, kindness, generosity and humour.

You will be missed Peter. So long. And thanks.

Paul Dalby

I interviewed Mike Young, the Professor of Water Economics and Management at the University of Adelaide on 11 March about his recent discussion paper titled “A future-proofed Basin: A new water management regime for the Murray-Darling Basin“.

The Murray-Darling Basin in Australia is over one million square kilometres in area, and provides water to the majority (70%) of Australia’s irrigated agriculture (1.4 million hectares). It’s management is complicated because the Basin extends over five states and one territory. Until recently, the Basin was managed under a joint agreement - called the Murray Darling Basin Agreement. 41 per cent of Australia’s gross value of agricultural production (1992) is produced in this region. It is also an important water supply for many rural towns, and the capital city of the state of South Australia - Adelaide, the city I live in. The two main tributaries are the Darling River in the north and the Murray River in the south.

The Rivers of the Murray Darling Basin are under terrible stress. The largest state in the Basin, NSW, has taken more than its share of water that all the states agreed to (called “The Cap”). All states do not meter all water use, and more water is extracted from the river systems than is agreed under the Cap. Since irrigation began in the Basin in the 1800’s, salinity has been a problem, as water that moves into the groundwater collects salt and then flows back into the River. The response to this increased salt load into the River has been to build salt interception schemes along the rivers which intercept salty groundwater before it reaches the rivers. Nevertheless, the river floodplain has become increasingly salinised, killing trees and wetlands. The River has been under significant stress of reduced flows and salinity for some time. In the year 2000, a series of drought years created a major crisis for the River. All of the storage dams along the river are now at low levels. The River stopped flowing at its mouth, putting the Ramsar listed Coorong estuary in mortal danger. In 2008, the large Lower Lakes at the bottom of the river are drying up, and only a series of barrages stops the sea water backflowing into these freshwater lakes and back up the river. Irrigators do not have access to secure supplies of water, and are under huge financial stress or have left the land, leaving orchards and other crops to die. Wetlands have dried up and the floodplain of the lower reaches of the river are white with salt. The Coorong estuary has almost completely changed character, from an estuarine environment to a hypersaline system of low diversity. Some birds species are at imminent risk of extinction in this region.

The original Murray Darling Agreement has collapsed, and the management of the River is now undertaken through a series of management meetings, which must seem like crisis meetings, by a group of senior bureaucrats called the “Senior Officials Group”. Every month the news gets worse as the drought continues. The Lower Lakes of the Murray River are so dry, they are now at risk of developing acid sulphate soils. If the drought continues, the salinity of the River will continue to increase more rapidly. The security of water to the city of Adelaide, with a population of over one million people, is at risk.

If this is a harbinger of climate change, then the Basin cannot continue to be managed as it was in the past. The results of this management system is system collapse in dry periods.

In my interview with Mike Young, he proposes a new model for managing the Basin. He argues for a different management system that is much more resilient to long periods of drought, for which there is a higher risk under climate change. The essence of the changes are:

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.

I am not going to repeat the article that Mike wrote. He is much better than I at presenting his arguments. I would encourage you to read his full article (link above) and listen to the podcast.

Written by Paul Dalby. For more information - http://www.litfuse.com.au

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A recent presentation by Peter Toome from Adcon Telemetry Australia at the Living Laboratories Workshop on Emerging Technologies in Environmental Monitoring highlighted to me the rapid increase in interest and capability in using the magic of the internet to distribute, collect, display and analyse environmental data.

Other examples include:

• Sahul-time - is a Monash University research project that presents an interactive model of the Australia/PNG continent over the last 100,000 years. A control panel allows a user to quickly move back and forwards through time. As you do, the coastline changes, showing how we were once linked to Papua New Guinea. Scientists are adding links to their archaeological data, so that now a user can find what archaeological data exists at various timescales in Australia’s history
• nrmSPACE has been developed by the South East Natural Resource Management Board as a tool for environmenal managers in this region of South Australia. It includes a database of research publications, an online collaborative space and most impressively, an interactive map that links a user to environmental datasets relevant to the region.
• Jim Rowe from SRA Information Technology also gave a presentation at the Living Laboratories workshop on Emerging Technologies in Environmental Monitoring. His presentation demonstrated how data could be collected and displayed on a GIS interface in real time. SRA won the Telstra Business of the Year award in 2007. Well done Jim!
• Mike Seyfang recently drew my attention to a new innovation by education.au Ltd Australia called openDSM, a lightweight fast search protocol across multiple distributed education repositories (digital libraries, cultural image libraries, metadata repositories, learning object repositories).
• Chris Raymond is a member of the Landscape Values Institute. He and his colleagues have developed a tool for collecting and collating information on what the community values in an environment, which is being used to help make decisions on where to invest resources in environmental management.  For more information on this, you can read their draft report (pdf 3.6MB) on this tool.

These new tools offer an exciting possibility for environmental managers to be much better informed about how to invest their resources in managing our environment and natural resources. Yet Australia is in danger of being a leading “primary producer” of environmental data (attribution to Alan Cooper, University of Adelaide), but with little or no value added to the data. As a country, we need to quickly adopt these new internet-based tools for distributing, displaying, analysing and collecting data. In particular, government agencies who are custodians of large environmental datasets need to release this information freely on the internet and allow environmental managers, academics, other agencies and entrepreneurs to add value.

I recommend watching the presentation by Howard Rheingold on www.ted.com where he talks about collaboration. His central thesis is that wealth in human culture has been developed by complex forms of collaboration; in the form of surplus protein in hunter gatherer societies who collaborated to hunt mega-fauna, through to current day capitalism which is based on a common adherence to collective rules and shared risk (insurance, shareholders). His argues that humans have a natural instinct to work cooperatively in groups.

In the fiercely competitive business world, companies are setting up institutional arrangements to encourage cooperation and “open sourcing” information, as and by doing so, enriching themselves. In fact this has created a whole new economy. In the NGO world, ThinkCycle has been established - a website where NGOs put up design problems for people to help solve.

In Australia’s NRM world, how can we capture this innate property of human beings? In fact, the origins of NRM begin in Landcare, a grass-roots movement that began when farmers and conservations agreed to cooperate to attract resources and energy into rehabilitating degraded resources back in the late 1980s. Perhaps this world has become overly driven by bureaucracy and political interference. The world of blogging, information sharing, collective problem solving and social networking that has revolutionised other industries such as the media, medicine, banking and commerce, could also revolutionise the way we collectively go about managing our natural resources. It could help link science directly to farmers, conservationists to investors and communities to each other. Of course it is not the whole answer, but given the way these tools have effected other sectors of society, there is no reason it could not do the same for NRM.

 Anne, you might be interested in the blog and podcast of Peter Cullen at the Schultz Oration late last year

In response to Leighton and Kerry, I think we should be able to pay more for water if we want to water our lawns. If the price of water was higher, entrepreneurs would find ways of recycling, re-using and finding new water sources to meet the demand. For more discussion on this point, see:

Discussion with Mike Young (and other comments)

Peter Cullen at the Shultz Oration

For those of you who follow the LitFuse site, you would know that I helped run a “Bootcamp” on web2.0 technologies on Friday. As part of the Bootcamp, the participants are learning how to blog and respond to other blogs.

We have started a conversation about the future of farming in southern Australia given the likely climate shifts as a result of global warming. Mike Seyfang has pointed to these blogs here. (Note that I saw Mike’s blog-post come up in my Google Reader today)

I would like to refer the participants, especially in response to Michael’s blog, to the Lower Murray Landscape Futures project that investigated the impact of global warming on the landscape, economics and social impact in the lower murray region of Australia. You can click on the podcast link to listen to the key scientists talking about the project, or you can download the Executive Summary from the Publications page. If you really want to geek out, try installing Google Earth and looking at the different scenarios overlaid over an image of the region.

To summarise what the project found, climate change may in fact offer better economic opportunities for farmers in this region, assuming Australia adopts a carbon trading scheme which will make biomass fuels and biomass energy economic to produce. However, there may need to be some restoration of native habitat on land that will have a lower economic value and greater ecological value under the different climate change scenarios.

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Podcast from Lit Fuse - 19th December 2007. For more information subscribe to our podcasts at http://feeds.litfuse.com.au/litfuse

For more information on the Droplet Series, visit http://www.myoung.net.au/water/

I interviewed Professor Mike Young on his latest “Droplet”, Pricing your water - is there a smart way to do it? In this Droplet co-authored with Jim McColl from CSIRO, they propose a pricing model for urban water which varies depending on supply. Currently, there are many different pricing models for water in Australia. The majority are based on an “inclining block” model (this is not something you would find at Stonehenge, but is a system where the price of water increases in steps, the more you use). About half include a fixed charge. When water supplies are not enough to meet demand, water utilities reduce demand by imposing restrictions on water use. See the water restrictions I am living under in my home town of Adelaide.

Mike and Jim argue that a better pricing model would be to remove the fixed charge, and charge more for water when supply is lower (such as in the current drought) and less when water is more abundant. Equity issues could be addressed by providing people with low incomes a rebate on their water bill, or other government assistance. In their view, such a system would achieve a match between supply and demand, ensures an equitable access to water and would encourage greater innovation and investment in more water supply.

Peter Cullen gave an inspiring talk which has been podcast by Flinders University.

He presented the Schultz Oration supported by the Flinders Research Centre for Coastal and Catchment Environments, exploring water scarcity and futures for South Australia, held 16 November 2007.

Some thoughts from from Peter’s talk:

• We have run the storages nearly dry in the Murray Darling System. Salinity in River Murray is getting higher. This may mean that we may not be able to withdraw water for the city of Adelaide in 2008 or 2009, even though there is some water left in the River
• People upstream from South Australia are not necessarily wasting water. Most cotton and rice growers have not been irrigating for three years
• We are facing a hotter, drier climate and less water, unprecedented since European settlement
• The Murray Darling system has been over-allocated for the last 10-20 years
• We have a blue-print for coping with the over-allocation of water in the Murray Darling Basin, called the National Water Initiative
• In the recent biennial assessment of the progress against the National Water Initiative, South Australia was given a reasonably good score card, but is lagging in dealing with over-allocation of groundwater resources and creating an independent water regulator
• Many irrigators of perennial crops in the Murray Darling Basin will watch their crops die this year
• South Australian’s use over 400 litres per person per day, one of the highest rates in Australia
• The cost of water for all users is likely to increase

Peter’s analysis? Everybody believes that their need for water is the most important. It’s time to take action on these issues for the good of the resources, not just noisy interest groups. “Here, here” says I. Some actions could include:

• A single, simple, common registry of water entitlements across the Murray Darling Basin
• Creation of a single, independent water regulator in South Australia
• Adelaide creates a wider range of water supplies (such as desalination, recycling) to cope with greater uncertainty of supply
• Fast track the current water planning for Adelaide and the Mount Lofty Ranges
• Adelaide could do more in improving demand management of water during the current drought
• The $10B to fix the Murray Darling Basin could be used to transition the rural communities to cope with the new climate of less water, with greater variability of rainfall (less perennial crops, less dairy farms, shifting horticulture to more appropriate areas in the landscape, buy water out of the system) rather than fixing infrastructure that supports an agriculture of last century
• Let’s get used to less water and make the most of what we have

Peter and I had a bit of fun before and after the presentation, and he knighted me Knight of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists that Peter is a member of. Thanks Peter!

Paul Dalby

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The South Australian Murray Darling Basin Natural Resources Management (SAMDB NRM) Board hosted a Regional Science Forum on 29 November 2007 to showcase research undertaken in the region to staff from the Board, scientists, Board members and community members.

The event was co-sponsored by the SAMDB NRM Board and the Centre for Natural Resource Science.

The common themes of the day were for investors in environmental and natural resources management to form strong partnerships between researchers and planners/policy makers, to invest in long term monitoring and to focus investment where it is likely to achieve greatest outcomes for the environment, economy and community.

Photos of the event are tagged ’samdbrsf’.

Podcasts are available for each of the speakers by subscribing to http://feeds.litfuse.com.au/litfuse in i-Tunes or equivalent, or by clicking on the individual blogs below and downloading the mp3 files one by one:

• David Wotton (SAMDB NRM Board), Welcome and introduction
• Lynette Crocker, Welcome to Country
• Wayne Meyer (University of Adelaide), The place, role and future of NRM: reflections on South Australia’s progress relative to other world experience
• Stephanie Williams (DWLBC), Natural Resource Management Research Alliance
• Qifeng Ye (SARDI), Influences of salinity and water quality on the recruitment dynamics of fishes in the Lower River Murray
• Dan Rogers (University of Adelaide), Coorong Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth Ecology: Aquatic birds of the Coorong; spatial and temporal patterns
• Kate Holland (CSIRO), Response of the River Murray floodplain to flooding and groundwater management
• Stuart Pillman (DEH), Biological survey
• David Paton (University of Adelaide), Fire impacts in Ngarkat
• Brian Deegan (University of Adelaide), Coorong Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth Ecology: Productivity and tropho-dynamics of the Coorong Lagoons,
• Russell Crosbie (CSIRO), Surface Water - Groundwater interactions in River Murray wetlands and implications for water quality and ecology
• Mark Lethbridge (Flinders University), Identifying high value areas for revegetation
• Damian Pearce (DWLBC), River Murray Forest Project
• Mardi van der Wielen (SAMDB NRM Board), Identify ecological responses to environmental flows in the EMLR
• Tapas Biswas (SARDI), Salinity impact on Lower Murray horticulture Stage 3: Application and knowledge transfer of DEP15 outcomes
• Rob Stevens (SARDI), Managing horticultural production under a more saline environment
• Brett Bryan (CSIRO), Lower Murray Landscape Futures
• Ross Ballard (SARDI), Mallee dryland grazing systems - Lucerne and new perennial legumes
• Mike Bennell (DWLBC), Development of multi-product biomass industries for South Australia
• Holger Maier (University of Adelaide), Sensitivity analysis of models used to predict the effects of policy decisions on salinity levels in the River Murray
• Peter Hayman (SARDI), Understanding and managing the impact of seasonal variability on the South Australian Murray Darling Basin economy, ecology and social structures
• Jeff Connor (CSIRO), Assessment of Market Based Instruments in SAMDB NRM region
• Anne Morgan (O’Connor NRM), Assessment of biodiversity auctions

This blog was written by Paul Dalby

The podcast of Wayne Meyer’s (University of Adelaide) presentation “The place, role and future of NRM: reflections on South Australia’s progress relative to other world experience”.

SAMDB NRM Board’s Regional Science Forum on 29 November 2007 co-sponsored by the SAMDB NRM Board and the Centre for Natural Resource Science.

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The podcast of Lynette Crocker’s Welcome to Country