Managing the Murray Darling Basin
The Murray Darling Basin is a huge area of land beyond the heights of the Great Daring Range from Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia and is vital to the communities in this catchment area consisting of many creeks and rivers that flow into the main rivers of the Murray and the Darling that takes up about 15% of the Australian land mass. There was a significant flood in 1956 as seen in this clip of this flood and this is a reminder of what the rivers can do and yet today it is often struggling to flow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOHbCj38eWo
There have been many suggestions of what to do to manage this river system and yet there is a declining river where unless excellent ways to bring in good management for this river system is discovered and put into place very soon the river will become almost impossible to bring it back into a healthy state in our lifetime. There has been many political plans and programs adopted with results that have not delivered the water security the river needs. This is the era of ALP being in charge of establishing a Murray Darling Plan and here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wumfo3AJ57c
To understand the system, we need to understand the people who live within the system and each group along the river has different issues and not all of the issues are considered are considered with their due weight. How does one evaluate the true weight for each demand upon the system. See this link to understand the people and the needs of the system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18MM0MbIkkA
Here is one of the documentaries done on the river https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrcy3fNBcwk
Part of the plan to manage the system is to manage the amount of water extracted from the river system and here are some links that address some of these issues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsdGZZSaUXw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR0GLDiPxUs
Some other issues which it is hard to find a lot of evidence on is the effect of the mining industry has on the water of the Murray Darling Basin. Mining uses a lot of water, and the Coal Seam Gas extraction can also bring to the system huge challenges. Until we consider that water is a valuable resource that needs to be protected and that water is not to be wasted. While we may need to control the flow somewhat it seems that we ought to stop blocking the river with on river dams and commence creating off river dams. The benefit of the off-river dam is that they can be located in better chosen places than a on the river blocking or restricting the river’s flow. Such dams ought to dug deep so as to limit the evaporation from these storage areas and the river can continue to run as only the excessive flow will be extracted and the environmental flow will continue to deliver greater health to the river.
I am certain many have the capacity to contribute to this policy development so that we have the best policy we can get so we will bring back the best of the river basin we possibly can. Please send your contributions to my email at: ad***@c4*.com
