<
https://theconversation.com/murray-darling-water-buybacks-wont-be-enough-if-we-cant-get-water-to-where-its-needed-203142>
"When it was clear the Murray-Darling Basin Plan could not be completed on
time, Federal Water Minister Tanya Plibersek announced a new agreement (without
Victoria) to deliver in full the plan’s aim of restoring the health of this
vast river system.
The new agreement required changes to the Water Act to allow more water for the
environment to be purchased from irrigators (water buybacks). Concerns about
these changes prompted a Senate inquiry.
The report from that inquiry, released on Friday, supports buybacks but also
makes key recommendations to remove “constraints” to water delivery. These are
physical constraints or limits to the movement of water through the river
system. Managers can only deliver so much water before it spills out of the
river onto private land.
The report goes so far as to ask whether constraints should be removed before
more water is recovered. This is a question we have been asking in our
research. And our results suggest the answer is yes.
Currently, we cannot physically deliver all of the water recovered from other
uses for the environment (known as environmental water) to where it’s needed
without flooding private property along the way. And the government is not
prepared to do that."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
