University of Adelaide media release

Monday 5 February

A group of senior water scientists and economists from around Australia have called for urgent action to save the Murray-Darling Basin in a joint Declaration launched at the University of Adelaide today. 

The Murray-Darling Declaration calls for three steps to fix water reform for the Basin and its communities: 
• Stop all publicly funded water recovery associated with irrigation infrastructure subsidies and grants;
• A publicly available, independent audit of all Basin water recovery and planned water use limitations, including details of environmental water recovered, expenditures and actual environmental outcomes;
• Establish an independent and expert body to monitor, measure and to publicly guide the delivery of the Water Act (2007).

“Despite already spending more than $6 billion dollars in water recovery over the past decade, and with billions more still committed through irrigation on-farm and supply infrastructure, the scientists and economists who have signed this Declaration remain concerned that the proposed social, cultural, economic and environmental outcomes are not being achieved,” says Professor Sarah Wheeler, from the University of Adelaide’s Centre for Global Food and Resources.

Convenor of the Declaration Professor Quentin Grafton, Professor of Economics at the Australian National University, says: “The Declaration is about how to fix what is going wrong in the Basin. This is not about politics or about playing the ‘blame game’. It is about saying water reform is not delivering what it said it would for the Basin, its environment or its people – and saying how we solve it.

“$4 billion has been spent on subsidies for irrigation infrastructure by governments over the past decade yet we do not have adequate measures of what this does to stream flows. Amazingly, despite allocating half a billion dollars in 2007 to upgrade water meters in the Basin, as much as 75% of all surface water diversions in the northern part of the Basin may not be metered. This makes no sense. Taxpayers, the Basin and its people deserve much better.”

Read the full release at: https://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news97822.html