National Interest

It was smiles all 'round at this week's COAG meeting, with a $3.7 billion deal to save the Murray-Darling river system announced amid much fanfare. But critics are outraged, arguing the decision to delay lifting a ceiling on the amount of water to be returned to the basin amounts to an environmental death sentence for the river as the Coorong and the Murray's lower lakes turn to acid. So, how could anyone argue that Australia's water management system is a model for other countries to follow?

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Peter Mares: Thursday's COAG meeting ended with congratulations all round, the Prime Minister and Premiers happily slapping each other on the back to celebrate their $3.7 billion deal to save the Murray River.

But to crucial observers the progress was hardly cause for celebration. Victoria fended off an attempt to lift a cap on trading more than 4 per cent of water out of any particular region - fended it off at least for a few years, which makes an immediate large scale buy-back of water rights from irrigators impossible.

Meanwhile the Coorong is dying and the Murray's lower lakes are turning to acid.

So, when our next guest told me that Australia's system for managing the Murray River could provide a model for the rest of the world to follow, I wasn't sure whether that was a message of hope or of despair.

Dr Colin Chartres is the Director-General of the International Water Management Institute, a research centre based in Sri Lanka that focuses on the links between water, food and the environment.

Colin Chartres is also an Australian. He was formerly chief science advisor to Australia's National Water Commission. So, he knows a thing or two about the plight of Murray.

Colin Chartres, welcome to The National Interest.

Colin Chartres: Thank you very much.

Peter Mares: Now, I should point out to listeners that you're currently travelling in the UK, but I know you have seen news reports of the outcome of Thursday's COAG meeting and the deal on the Murray and you're obviously familiar with the water debate here in Australia. Were the premiers and the prime minister right to celebrate, in your view?

Colin Chartres: I think so, yes. And I think with respect to your comment, it's a hopeful message that Australia will be able to lead the world in this kind of area, so I think it's a very pleasing step in the right direction. These issues are really intractable, they're really difficult to solve, there are so many players involved in it, farmers, environmentalists, water users, so these things just take time for everyone to adjust and come to terms with what really is driven by the fact that it's raining less and there's less water.

Peter Mares: What do you see as the key outcome from that COAG meeting? Is it the fact that we now have established an independent commission to manage the Murray?

Colin Chartres: Well, in my view we have the Murray-Darling Basin Commission which served us pretty well for a large number of years. But it was designed and developed at a time when we were still allocating water - we thought water resources were plentiful. And now we've hit the crunch, as it were, in the sense that there just isn't enough water, there's probably been too much water allocated in the past and the model we have with the Commission, whilst it worked very well, it really did represent individual... The Commissioners represented individual states and so therefore there was always state versus state trying to play off against each other and do the best for their state when, as we know, water is no respecter of state boundaries. So, we do now need a means of governance which looks at the entire basin and does that from a sort of a multi-partisan point of view, rather than the view of just one state.

Peter Mares: Experts agree that the Murray is over-allocated and that water licences were given out in a different era - an era, as you say, of higher rainfall, one before global warming was so apparent. And that regime, that era of higher rainfall, may never return. Now, that means to save the river the government has to buy back water for the environment; yet this agreement doesn't seem to move us very much closer to getting serious water back to the river.

Colin Chartres: Yes, I'm not fully au fait with all the details from what I've seen so far. But I think the broad progression is that the agreement will help with the increasing of water use efficiency in a number of areas and that's vital. If we can double or increase production off the existing area we are saving water and that water then can go back to the environment. So, that is a critical step in the right direction. Also, the funding which has been dedicated to fixing up the real leaky spots in canals and the system-wide improvements which will stop leakage will also be very, very important to recover water which can then go back into an environmental pool.

Peter Mares: But these things will take several years. I mean, you don't turn ditches into pipelines overnight; you don't upgrade farm irrigation systems overnight. That's a slow process. And in the meantime - as I said in my introduction - the Coorong is dying, the lower lakes are turning to acid. There is a very strong argument that we need a rapid injection of water. Do we have to say 'well, that will be the cost? The Coorong and the lower lakes - that will be the environmental cost of a longer-term fix'?

Colin Chartres: I daresay it could be. What we just don't know is what's going to happen literally in two weeks' time, weatherwise. I mean, we could get a much wetter period starting again, but that doesn't seem to have been the case over the last five, six, or seven years. So, I guess we've got to plan for the worst. And in some cases I fear that we will lose some sort of highly iconic sites because there simply isn't enough water in the system. So, that's the bottom line. So, really we need to prioritise about which areas we want to save, how we're going to save them, who is going to pay, what are the trade-offs to do that and all these things come at a cost to individuals, to the environment, to the states involved. So, it's a really difficult issue and question and there is no sort of magic answer; we can't click our fingers and do something overnight to solve some of these problems.

Peter Mares: Well, I guess we should take the advice of former Prime Minister John Howard and all pray for rain - even non-believers like me! - and just hope that it comes. Now, before I turn to the global situation which I want to do, there's one more question here I have about improving irrigation efficiency. Now, we've had Dr Mike Young, a member of the Wentworth Group [of Concerned Scientists], a water economist, on this program many times, and one of the points he makes is that you don't always save a lot of water by irrigation efficiency. Because in the old days if your irrigation was inefficient, then a lot of the water ran back into the river anyway, or else went down into aquifers and replenished groundwater supplies. So, if you make your irrigation much more targeted in fact you're still taking away irrigation water, river water, environment water.

Colin Chartres: Yes, well, Mike is largely right on that issue. But in some cases when water goes back into... leaks into groundwater, it becomes salinised because the groundwater is saline and it can't be used again. In other cases, when it runs off fields back into the river, it also is somewhat more salty - although not always. So, that does cause a problem. But I think if we think about some issues of efficiency where we can move from gravity-fed irrigation, where the water just runs down furrows to drip and sprinkler systems, which are more efficient, we can make big savings. But the critical thing is that those savings then have to be captured and returned to the environment, rather than used for expanding irrigation. So, there are some ways of doing this, but we won't save quite as much, probably, as we think, because of Mike's arguments, which are correct.

Peter Mares: Well, if I can get you to take off Australian hat and put back on your hat as director general of the International Water Management Institute, you argue that getting a proper management system in place for the Murray is a matter of global significance. Now, why is that? It seems like a very local issue to us.

Colin Chartres: It's because Australia is, in many ways, providing some leadership here about how we need to change the governance of many river systems. If we look at Africa, for example, virtually all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa share water resources - i.e., the big rivers run between countries. So, we need to have models in which we can organise and govern water which allow for these trans-boundary issues. As some commentators have made the point, they say that the next wars will be fought over water. I'm a little bit more confident that that won't happen because of the fact that we have these models of water governance. For example, the Murray-Darling Basin was to some extent a model for the Mekong River Commission, which is trying to better manage the water in the Mekong between Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. But in that case, China and Myanmar are also countries which are in the Mekong catchment and they're not yet in the Commission and they need to be brought in to manage the thing.

So, the critical thing is: we need these models. Yes, Australia's not done things perfectly, but its experience is highly valued. For what it's facing now in terms of climate change or climate variability is something that is also going to happen and is happening in other countries. I've just been in Central Asia in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and there we're seeing enormous, or very large numbers of glaciers melting and disappearing, and the flow regimes into the rivers which drain northwards and go into what's left of the Aral Sea are becoming lower and lower and there are very large numbers of people in that region which depend on irrigation. And again, it's an issue where several countries are sharing the water resources. So again, this issue of looking at what are the appropriate policies that can be used, what are the appropriate means of improving efficiency of irrigation...

Peter Mares: And it's only going to get... These issues are only going to intensify, aren't they?, because as you point out in some articles you've written, the world population, the global population is currently six billion, likely to reach 8.5 billion. We're going to need to produce more food and you can't produce food without water.

Colin Chartres: Absolutely. If we bear in mind that we eat a diet which consists of somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 calories a day, depending on how active we are, and that each of those calories requires 1 litre of water, that means that each of us are consuming between 2,000 and 3,000 litres of water in that food, in terms of the water used to produce it. And when you multiply that by the 2-1/2-billion extra people expected on the planet, that really is going to be a very, very big ask indeed in terms of providing enough water both in rain-fed areas and in the irrigation areas to produce that increased amount of food.

Peter Mares: It's a pretty scary scenario.

Colin Chartres: Yes. It's also exacerbated by dietary change. As people have got a little bit better off in many developing countries, particularly China and India, they're changing their diets and they're moving over to a higher protein diet, eating less cereals. And we know that it takes a lot more water to produce a kilogram of beef, particularly if it's grain-fed beef, than it takes to produce a kilogram of beans or a kilogram of rice, or wheat, etc.

Peter Mares: Sounds like an argument for vegetarianism...

Colin Chartres: It is. I think we all need to be thinking about how much water we're consuming in terms of the food we eat. But then again, there are ways and means of dealing with this. Some countries are still going to be wet and they are going to be able to produce significant amounts of food and that food can be traded into countries which are dry. And in that context we call that the trading of virtual water, where the wet countries produce and the dry countries keep their water for other essentials, for domestic and industrial and urban purposes.

Peter Mares: Well, Colin Chartres, thank you very much for joining me in the National Interest.

Colin Chartres: Thank you, Peter. It's been a pleasure.

Peter Mares: Dr Colin Chartres is the Director-General of the International Water Management Institute, a research centre based in Sri Lanka, although he joined me from London. And he was formerly Chief Science Adviser to Australia's National Water Commission.

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Guests

Dr Colin Chartres
Director General, International Water Management Institute

Further Information

International Water Management Institute

Presenter

Peter Mares

Producer

James Panichi

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