Bloomberg Green - Matthew Campbell | Photographs Adam Ferguson
Scorched by climate change and drained by industrial farms, the country’s most important river system is nearing collapse.
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Rob McBride walks along the Darling River. Photographer: Adam Ferguson for Bloomberg Green
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The
early afternoon sun was pounding the parched soil, and Gus Whyte was
pulling on his dust-caked cowboy boots to take me for a drive. We’d just
finished lunch—cured ham, a loaf of bread I’d bought on the trip up,
chutney pickled by Whyte’s wife, Kelly—at his house in Anabranch South,
which isn’t a town but rather a fuzzy cartographic notion in the far
west of New South Wales, a seven-hour drive from Melbourne and half as
far again from Sydney. I’d been grateful, as I pulled off the blacktop
of the Silver City Highway to cover the last 10 miles or so, that I’d
rented the biggest 4x4 Hertz could give me. I was on a dirt road,
technically, but the dirt was mostly sand, punctuated with rocks the
size of small livestock and marked only by the faintest of tire tracks.
We
climbed into Whyte’s pickup, and I reached instinctively over my
shoulder. “Don’t worry about seat belts,” he said, amiably but firmly.
“I know it’s a habit.” His Jack Russell terrier, Molly, balanced herself
on his lap as he drove.
Why Is Australia Drying Up? Source: Bloomberg
Whyte,
who has reddish-brown hair, sheltered his ruddy, sun-weathered face
beneath a battered bush hat. He raises livestock, mostly sheep and some
cattle, on nearly 80,000 acres. Normally he’d run about 7,500 sheep, but
he was down to 2,000.
There wasn’t enough water for more.
“I can’t remember it being this dry,” he said. “It’s disheartening to
see a landscape like this. You hate it. This is where I was born and
grew up, and it means the world to me.”
He
kept driving, rattling off statistics about rainfall (down) and
temperatures (up). Every so often he’d stop and get out to check on one
of the storage tanks dotting the property, which held what little water
he had. After a while we pulled onto the crest of a small hill, and
Whyte pointed out Yelta Lake, a kidney-shaped landmark that’s colored,
on maps, in a reassuringly cool blue. In real life it was the same dun
color as everything else. “It hasn’t had any water in it since 2014,” he
said.
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The Whytes run an almost 80,000-acre operation near Wentworth, New South Wales Photographer: Adam Ferguson for Bloomberg Green
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This
area, the Murray-Darling Basin, is supposed to be Australia’s
agricultural heartland. It’s named for two of the continent’s most
important rivers, which converge at the border of New South Wales and
Victoria before flowing west and south to the sea. Three million people
drink from the system every day, and locals like to boast that another
40 million rely on it for food—Australia’s population of 25 million plus
many more across Asia.
The
region has also long been at the vanguard of the Australian economy.
Along the Darling, 19th century settlers made and lost fortunes from
wool, one of the continent’s first global export commodities. The town
of Broken Hill, near the basin’s western boundary, was a cradle of
Australia’s labor movement and its all-important mining industry,
lending its initials to what’s now the world’s largest miner, BHP Group.
Today
the Murray-Darling is at the leading edge of something very different:
a series of crises that could soon envelop river systems in Africa,
South Asia, and the American West, as temperatures rise and economies
compete for strained supplies. The area has spent most of the past
several years in a drought so savage that it completely dried out
sections of the Darling for months at a time. In some areas residents
rely on boxed water from the supermarket. Unable to afford water,
farmers have resorted to pulling out once-profitable crops and pumping
illegally from depleted stocks.
The Murray-Darling Basin
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Data: Natural Earth, Geoscience Australia
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The
basin’s weather has always been marked by extremes, but scientists say
what’s happening now is utterly different: an historic shift driven by
man-made climate change, with less-predictable rainfall reducing the
amount of water flowing into the system and higher temperatures rapidly
evaporating what does arrive. Australia’s hottest and driest year on
record was 2019, and 9 of its 10 hottest have occurred since 2005—a
significant reason the continent was ravaged earlier this year by some
of the worst wildfires in its history. Although the Murray-Darling
received welcome rain in recent weeks, long-term predictions indicate
that, as the planet warms, the basin’s droughts will only grow longer
and more severe.
That
would be an environmental and economic disaster, caused in no small
part by the fossil fuels Australia, the world’s second-biggest coal
exporter, produced itself. The country also has some of the highest
per-capita carbon emissions on the planet, and its last Prime Minister,
Malcolm Turnbull, was ousted by his own party after trying to pass more
ambitious emissions targets. His replacement, Scott Morrison, once
brandished a lump of coal on the floor of Parliament to demonstrate his
support for the stuff.
The
situation in the Murray-Darling has become one of the bitterest
subjects in Australian society, pitting family farmers, agribusiness
tycoons, community activists, scientists, and politicians against one
another in a cycle of mutual recrimination. The core of the problem,
many say, is the reluctance of political leaders to address what’s
happening to the climate, let alone to have an honest conversation about
how citizens should use water as a result. And if Australia—rich,
democratic, and with fewer people to supply than some Asian
megacities—can’t manage this challenge, there may not be much hope for
anyone else.
As
we ranged around Whyte’s property, he spotted a few dozen sheep
migrating slowly across the plain. One, an older ewe, had fallen away
from the rest and lay prone in the dirt as the group ambled away. Whyte
stopped the truck and walked over, helping her up and nudging her toward
the others. She seemed all right as she shuffled off, but Whyte doubted
she’d last much longer. “When it’s dry like this,” he said, “death’s in
the air.”
I
visited the Murray-Darling in late February, the tail end of summer,
landing in Mildura, a midsize town that serves as the region’s
commercial center. From the air it was easy to see how settlement had
followed the water’s path. A narrow band of verdant farms flanked the
Murray, dotted with groups of houses. Virtually all these patches of
green had straight, sharp borders where the irrigation systems ended.
Beyond them the land was pancake-flat and beige to burnt orange.
Although
the basin is rugged by almost any standard, it has been profoundly
shaped by human activity. The Murray’s first weir—a low dam that
regulates the flow of water—was built in 1922, the initial piece of a
dense network of locks, dams, and pumping systems. The goal of all this
engineering was, essentially, to smooth out the natural variations in
the rivers’ flows, keeping more water upstream for farming and storing
the excess. The result was a bounty that today accounts for more than a
third of Australia’s food supply, with agricultural production worth
A$22 billion ($14.4 billion) a year.
The
area’s administrative infrastructure is equally complex. The
Murray-Darling includes four states—New South Wales, Queensland, South
Australia, and Victoria—that all influence its management and sometimes
disagree angrily. In theory, overarching decisions are made by the
Murray-Darling Basin Authority, a federal body charged in 2008 with
answering two basic questions: What, or whom, should a river be for? And
how can it be managed to achieve the desired ends?
The
plan the MDBA is implementing has several key components. One of the
most important is to treat water as a commercial good, allocated to the
highest bidder. The trading system that carries this out evolved from
previous, less formal arrangements to become arguably the world’s most
sophisticated water market, complete with options and forward contracts.
Its defining feature is the separation of use and ownership; asset
managers and hedge funds take positions in Australian water, betting
they can profit by selling it on to farmers or industrial operations
that need it.
The
MDBA also seeks to reduce overall withdrawals by setting aside
“environmental water,” which is then protected from human use and
channeled to recharge wetlands and fish habitats. But environmentalists
and scientists have argued that the authority’s environmental targets
are much too modest—and therefore too generous to big water users—to
keep the Murray-Darling healthy, and that it didn’t take sufficient
account of climate change in projecting how much water would be
available.
“Every
ecological indicator you can think of has been in decline” in the
basin, including fish stocks and the health of bird habitats, Maryanne
Slattery, a water consultant in Canberra, told me. “Socially and
economically it’s in major decline as well.” She blames the trend in
part on the trading system, which has allowed deep-pocketed farmers of a
few lucrative, water-intensive products—above all, nuts and cotton—to
accumulate water at the expense of other agriculture. “On the current
trajectory we’ll be growing just these two crops,” she said. “I would
just urge every other country not to follow what Australia’s done.” (The
MDBA’s chief executive, Phillip Glyde, said in an interview that the
agency has proceeded “based on the best science we could find” and will
adjust its usage assessments as research evolves. “You don’t turn around
100 years of overallocation overnight,” he said.)
“Markets are good at allocating scarce resources to the most profitable
use. Making sure that towns have water is not the most profitable use
of water”
The
most obvious signal that something unprecedented was occurring in the
Murray-Darling came near the Menindee Lakes, which share their name with
a small town a short distance from their shores. The lakes are natural
features, but they were extensively altered in the 1950s to serve as
reservoirs—absorbing water from upstream, sequestering it, and supplying
farms and towns down the Darling as needed. When full, they hold 1,731
gigaliters, more than three times the volume of Sydney Harbour, across
50 square kilometers (about 19 square miles) of surface area.
As
important as the lakes are, most Australians had barely heard of
Menindee until December 2018, when residents began finding scads of dead
cod, perch, and other fish floating belly up in a part of the Darling
normally fed by the lakes. The culprit was a phenomenon called thermal
stratification, which followed from a chain of environmental calamities.
First, a lack of flowing water, extremely hot weather, and intense
sunlight had created ideal conditions for algae to thrive. Then, when
the algae died, they sank to the bottom and were consumed by microbes
that also drastically reduced the quantity of oxygen available at depth.
When the weather suddenly cooled—from a searing 49C (120F) to 23C
during one fish kill event—the top layer of water sank, mixing with
lower layers and reducing the overall oxygen levels too low for
survival. The December 2018 event killed tens of thousands of fish,
according to the Australian Academy of Science. Two more the following month eliminated millions.
A
little more than a year later, water and its absence were Menindee’s
central preoccupations. Outside the Maidens Hotel bar—the town has no
stoplights but two pubs—a hand-painted sign thanked patrons for donating
water. The fluid that comes out of the taps, drawn partly from what
remains in the Darling, is sometimes pungent and brown, and residents
avoid drinking it.
Then
there are the lakes themselves. They were mostly empty by the time the
fish started dying, thanks to scant rainfall and withdrawals for
irrigation. When I visited, they were vast, scrubby plains, roamed by
scattered livestock that kept close to the patches of liquid that
remained. It was as if some deity had parted the waters and forgotten to
release them back.
About
45 kilometers (28 miles) south of town, I met a farmer who’s become,
for better or worse, the face of the Menindee area’s problems. Rob
McBride is the owner of Tolarno Station, a sprawling ranch that dates to
the early years of European settlement. He divides his time between
Adelaide and the spacious Tolarno homestead, a whitewashed, slightly
ramshackle pile so perfectly evocative of colonial Australia that it
could illustrate a children’s picture book. Overnight visitors, McBride
told me with complete seriousness, sometimes make the acquaintance of
the house’s longest-tenured resident, a French-speaking ghost named
Christine.
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McBride. Photographer: Adam Ferguson for Bloomberg Green
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McBride
is well over 6 feet tall, with thinning gray hair and lanky limbs. He
came to prominence during the fish kills when his daughter, Kate, filmed
him and another local standing up to their knees in the stagnant
Darling, holding giant cod—stiff, bloated, and very much dead. McBride
called it “a man-made disaster.” The video got millions of views online
and media coverage across the country. He became a local celebrity, an
advocate for what he portrays as a community failed by decision-makers
at all levels of government and business. “It’s become a travesty,
what’s actually happening in our river system,” McBride told me in the
homestead’s dining room. At one end of the table stood a detailed model
of the Rodney, a paddle steamer that once plied the river a few meters
from the front door. “I’ve never seen this country look worse.”
Endurance
in the face of volatile conditions has long been celebrated in rural
Australia. My Country, an early 20th century poem by Dorothea Mackellar
that’s widely taught in schools, reads, in part, “I love a sunburnt
country / A land of sweeping plains / Of ragged mountain ranges, / Of
droughts and flooding rains.” McBride is convinced the time for stoicism
has passed. Temperatures in the basin have been consistently above the
long-term average since the 1990s, while rainfall has declined. Those
changes, which most scientists who’ve studied the issue say will only
become more pronounced, are scrambling old assumptions about water use.
In
particular, McBride said, industrial farming needs to be restrained.
“Australia’s bringing in vast amounts of almonds and cotton because
that’s about profit,” he complained. “Overextraction of water is
creating an absolute disaster. … We’re at the precipice now. Literally
within the next five years you could have the whole Murray-Darling Basin
system collapse.”
If
that happens, he fears, the family farms that have defined the region
for generations will disappear, along with most of the wildlife, as
whatever water remains is siphoned up for one or two export crops. In
his scenario, all manner of citrus orchards, vineyards, and dairy farms
would no longer be viable, depriving the country of an agricultural
fortress that ensures access to “the best-quality food in the world”—an
asset whose value has been underscored by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Unless we protect our rivers and our lake system, we will have less for
our children,” he said. “Who’s going to feed Australia?”
At
times, McBride gets carried away. In our interview he claimed that
people profiting from the current state of affairs were conspiring with
the media to suppress stories about the drought, and at one point he
attributed the actions of pro-agribusiness figures to a “1933 brownshirt
mentality.” But it was hard to argue with his contention that a
slow-motion disaster is unfolding. After our interview we walked down to
the river. It was almost entirely dry, a banked ditch shaped like a
skateboard halfpipe, with just a few disconnected, greenish pools of
liquid. You could wander far without getting your feet wet. A
long-forgotten fishing net lay in the sand near a half-dozen freshwater
mussels the size of small fists, their shells bleached white by the sun.
About
a three-hour drive from Tolarno, by a hairpin bend in the Murray just
upstream from a town called Euston, there’s a small, windowless building
clad in corrugated green metal. From its lower level, thick buried
pipes extend to the riverbank, a stone’s throw away. There are no people
inside, only four industrial pumps that roar away for 18 hours a day
during irrigation season, pulling as much as 330 liters (87 gallons) of
water from the river each second.
The
pump building is probably the single most important structure at the
Bunargool orchard, which is operated by Select Harvests, a
Melbourne-based company that grows almonds in several locations around
the Murray-Darling Basin. Until relatively recently, almonds were a
niche product in Australia, their exports a tiny fraction of traditional
staples such as beef and wheat. Then came surging demand from India and
China, along with the rise of plant-based diets in more developed
economies. In 2006 almond orchards accounted for a little more than
17,500 hectares of land; in 2018 they covered more than 45,000 hectares,
sustaining annual exports in excess of A$500 million.
Rising
sales have let almond growers afford sufficient water rights in
Australia’s trading market to keep their operations thriving even as
other farms run dry. To advocates, this demonstrates the system’s
efficiency and its assurance that water is used for the highest economic
return. To critics, it shows how the market distorts agriculture and
punishes those without the capital and expertise to navigate its
complexities.
Select
Harvests’ managing director, Paul Thompson, had agreed to show me
around Bunargool, so we headed out in his 4x4. Few people were around.
Although almonds’ closest cousins include peaches and
nectarines—technically they’re seeds—they don’t require the delicate
handling orchard fruit does, so their growth and harvest is highly
mechanized. What they do need is water, and lots of it: more than 6.4
liters per almond, according to a
2018 study of growing conditions
in California. Partway into the orchard we passed a storage pool,
surrounded by an earthen embankment, that looked about the size of a
hockey rink. “That’s a day’s water,” Thompson said.
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A shaker truck reaps almonds at Select Harvests near Robinvale, Victoria. Photographer: Adam Ferguson for Bloomberg Green
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It
was harvest time, and things were looking good. As we traveled down a
row of neatly planted trees, each watered by a drip-feed from a small
irrigation pipe, Thompson pointed out one that had partly split, leaving
a large bough on the ground. “Crop so big it broke a branch,” he said
approvingly. We soon caught up to a canary-yellow vehicle called a
Shockwave, which had an operator’s cab on one side and a
ferocious-looking clamp on the other. At each tree the driver stopped to
secure the grips to the base of the trunk. He then activated the clamp,
shaking the trunk from side to side with remarkable violence. Almonds
rained down, kicking up little clouds of red dust as they hit the
ground.
Later
they’d be gathered for shelling, sorting, and packaging at Select
Harvests’ local plant. Some would go out intact, others as paste, in
huge plastic drums for use in almond butter or almond milk. The
operation is spotless, high-tech, and, as Thompson is eager to point
out, designed to avoid waste. Among other measures, the company burns
almond hulls in an on-site co-generation facility, producing electricity
it can sell into the grid. (This is preferable to having the hulls
combust spontaneously, as they’re liable to do when left in large
piles—one of the reasons the factory has its own fire trucks.)
At
the plant office, which had the look of an accounting firm trying to
seem hip, Ben Brown, the general manager for horticulture, gave me an
overview of Select Harvests’ efforts to increase yields. It’s using an
Israeli-designed analytics platform, Phytech, to measure orchard
conditions, attaching sensors to individual trees to help determine
water and other requirements. Another system draws on high-resolution
photos of the tree canopy to identify areas of stress that might not be
visible on the ground. The goal is efficiency, getting more almonds out
of every unit of input. Water is, of course, the most important.
Including ancillary costs such as electricity to run pumps, it accounts
for more than 50% of expenses, Brown told me.
A drought “means the more efficient farmers survive and the less efficient farmers don’t, and that’s not a bad thing”
Even
at maximum productivity, there’s no question that, as they continue to
expand, Select Harvests and other almond growers will need more and more
water, leaving less for everything else. The company’s orchards grew in
size by 43% between 2014 and 2019, to 7,696 hectares, and more than a
third of its plantings are considered “immature” and have yet to reach
their full output.
Thompson
described water as “a critical national resource” that needs to be
managed accordingly, and he agreed with farmers like McBride that
Australia needs to maintain a diversity of food sources. But he and
others in the almond industry argue that, in the Murray-Darling, the
water is flowing to the uses that generate the highest economic
returns—in this case, a successful export that generates plenty of
profit and tax revenue, if not much employment. A drought “means the
more efficient farmers survive and the less efficient farmers don’t, and
that’s not a bad thing,” Thompson said. “If my dry cleaner at the end
of my road is inefficient, nobody writes him a check to help him out.”
I
asked whether, as the climate warms and there’s less water to go
around, an almond industry that consumes such a great share is really
sustainable. Thompson prefers to view the problem differently. “Some
people will say, ‘Are you using less water or more water?’ That’s the
wrong question. The question is, ‘Are you producing more per megaliter?’
And we are.” That means more cash, which can be used to innovate
further. “We will be more inventive,” he said. “We’re wonderful beasts.”
In
Mildura I was eager to speak to Jane MacAllister, a councillor in
Wentworth, right over the New South Wales line, who’s become an
outspoken critic of how water is being managed in the region. We met at a
cafe on the banks of the Murray, accessed through an attractively
landscaped park. Flowing gently and reasonably high, the river looked
like, well, a river. There was even a rowing club nearby. But
MacAllister told me not to be deceived by the Murray’s natural
appearance. “We’ve turned it into an irrigation channel,” she said,
explaining that its behavior in Mildura and elsewhere was the result of
intensive management. To see the reality, she suggested we take what by
local standards was a short drive, a bit over an hour, to a citrus farm
on the Darling called Jamesville Station.
Owner
Alan Whyte—a cousin to Gus—wasn’t home when we arrived. Nor was there
anyone else or, for that matter, more than a tiny number of citrus
trees. Whyte is one of several local farmers who reached a deal with the
federal government in 2019 to pull out their once-profitable crops,
which had become uneconomical thanks to the drought. The farmers did
well by the agreement, giving up water rights in exchange for what the
Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported was more than A$30 million in
compensation, but the aftermath was jarring to see. Jamesville’s fields,
once planted with neat rows of oranges, were completely denuded, and
the trailers that used to house workers for the harvest were empty. Dust
clouds swirled overhead. Here and there I could see piles of blackened
wood left over from the crop burn.
There
was a bit of fetid-looking water in the river where it intersected the
farm, and MacAllister spotted some fish in the shallows. They seemed to
be floating more than swimming, their silvery bodies half-exposed to the
baking sun. “This is really disturbing to me,” she said as she watched
them struggle. “The water’s too warm, and the oxygen’s all wrong. They
cook and suffocate all at once.”
MacAllister,
who grew up in Mildura and lived in Darwin and Perth before returning
to the area, is as Australian as they come. But she argued that the
country, after building its identity partly on the conquest of nature,
needs to realize what’s happening now is anything but natural. “There’s
this almost nationalistic pride in adherence to the Dorothea Mackellar
poem”—to the assumption, MacAllister said, that boom-bust cycles of
drought and flood, among other extreme climatic patterns, are just a
part of life to be overcome. This attitude was on display during the
recent bushfires, notably when Prime Minister Morrison played down their
connection to Australia’s climate record and emphasized instead the
need for “resilience.” (His deputy, Michael McCormack, characterized
discussions of a link as “the ravings of some pure, enlightened, and
woke capital-city greenies.”)
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A dry lake bed in Menindee, New South Wales. Photographer: Adam Ferguson for Bloomberg Green
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What’s
needed now, MacAllister said, is a broad discussion of how to move the
Murray-Darling toward a sustainable balance. “Climate has not been
considered at all,” she said. Among other steps, she wants the
authorities to monitor withdrawals much more closely, to build a more
comprehensive picture of how much water is being used: “We don’t know
how much water is extracted, and we don’t know by whom or where.” There
have been a few high-profile cases of theft. In 2018 a cotton farmer,
Anthony Barlow, pleaded guilty to illegally pumping more than 150
Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of water from the Barwon, another
river in the basin, and was fined A$190,000.
MacAllister
attributes much of the responsibility for this state of affairs to the
National Party, traditionally the dominant political force in the
region. Dedicated officially to representing the interests of rural
areas, the Nats, as they’re known, are the junior partner in the
coalition that’s ruled Australia for most of the past three decades,
governing with the more genteel conservatives of the Liberal Party.
Although they win far fewer votes than the Liberals or the opposition
Labor Party, the Nats have outsize influence on policy. In recent years
that’s meant emphatic support for industrial agriculture, oil-and-gas
drilling, and mining—particularly of coal—along with deep skepticism
about efforts to reduce emissions.
The
National Party often receives cabinet positions with implications for
rural areas, and it supplied the current minister for resources, water,
and Northern Australia, Keith Pitt. A former sugar cane farmer who
represents a coastal part of Queensland, he was named to the post by
Morrison in February. He’d resigned from his last spell in a senior
role, in 2018, citing his objections to the Paris Agreement on climate
change. “I will always put reducing power prices before Paris,” he said
at the time.
When
I met with Pitt at his Canberra office in early March, he sought to
present the problems in the Murray-Darling as the most recent in a long
chain of trials—really nothing new, despite many scientists’ confidence
that Australia is facing an unprecedented climate crisis. “Water has
been a challenge since Federation,” he said, referring to the 1901 union
that created the modern Australian polity. “Australia has always had a
history of droughts and floods. I don’t think that’s changed at all. …
Certainly when we’re in a prolonged drought, there are parts of the
basin we can’t prevent from running out of water that is just not
available.” Rather, Pitt said, Australians should be proud of their
record managing their scarce supply. “We utilize it right down to the
last teaspoon,” he said. “People come to us for our expertise in water
management.”
He
was eager to sidestep the subject that just about every scientific
study identifies as a core problem. When I asked about the impact of a
warming world, he replied, “My view is one of resilience. So we need to
ensure that the basin is resilient from top to bottom.” I repeated my
question. “Well, we all face challenges. … We do need to ensure we value
the environment, that we ensure there’s water provided for its needs,
as well as business and basin communities.” A third time: Australians
have “always been conscious of water issues.” He didn’t, in the course
of our conversation, use the term “climate change.”
As
I left Parliament House, I passed a few protesters camped out on the
lawn opposite. They’d erected a large black banner facing the main
entrance. AUSTRALIANS DEMAND FEDERAL PARLIAMENT URGENTLY DECLARE AN
ECOLOGICAL & CLIMATE EMERGENCY, it read. No one paid them any mind.
Last year the Murray-Darling Basin Authority published a
discussion paper
that summarized what’s coming. “Higher average temperatures will
increase the amount of water lost to evaporation and reduce soil
moisture,” it said. “This means more rainfall will be absorbed into the
soil, resulting in less runoff, reduced river flows and less water being
stored and regulated by dams.” It went on: “Longer periods of low flow
with higher temperatures will also increase the likelihood of blue-green
algal blooms, with potentially devastating effects on native fish and
town water supplies.”
The
basin’s future, in other words, is likely to look a lot like the past
few years, but worse, with the economic pain for Australia exacerbated
by expected declines in the market for fossil fuels. Other global river
systems may not be far behind the Murray-Darling. In South Asia rising
temperatures are shrinking the glaciers that feed the Indus and Ganges,
primary water sources for hundreds of millions of people. In Africa the
changing climate is making the flows of the Nile far less
predictable—even as the population dependent on it surges. The Colorado,
Mekong, and Yangtze all face their own climate challenges.
For
many Australian environmentalists, the Murray-Darling stands as a
cautionary tale, showing what happens when crucial river systems come
under too much stress. “There are too many straws in the glass,” Chris
Gambian, chief executive of the Nature Conservation Council of New South
Wales, told me. And some of those straws are too wide. “Markets are
good at allocating scarce resources to the most profitable uses,” he
said. “Making sure that towns have water is not the most profitable use
of water. Maintaining the connectivity of the rivers so fish can survive
is not the most profitable use of water.”
Change
might be coming, but not necessarily to the environment’s benefit. In
December, New South Wales’s deputy premier and water minister, who both
represent the National Party, published a series of “demands” on river
policy, led by an exemption from plans to give up more water for
conservation projects. “We simply can no longer stand by the
Murray-Darling Basin Plan in its current form,” the deputy premier, John
Barilaro, said. Alterations could also be coming to water trading.
Australia’s competition watchdog is conducting an inquiry into the water
market, intended to examine, among other topics, what’s driving prices
and how investors are affecting its operations.
For
half a decade, David Papps served as the Murray-Darling’s official
defender in the Australian government. As Commonwealth Environmental
Water Holder, he was in charge of efforts to direct flows to wetlands
and fish habitats, allocating water acquired from the market or saved
through efficiency efforts. That the office is even necessary speaks to
how deeply climate change and overdrawing have disrupted the river
system’s essential natural processes. Healthy wetlands, for example,
reduce drought severity by absorbing and storing excess water during
periods of steady rain; they can also serve as important carbon
sinks—functions they can’t perform once they’re degraded.
Papps,
who’s now retired, fears it will take dramatic action to save the
basin—and that the country hasn’t grasped how much of its prosperity is
at stake. “The principal concern we should have is ensuring that there’s
enough water for the environment to get to some sort of basic level of
health,” Papps said. Otherwise, “the equation doesn’t work. It will be
the environment that suffers first, and then, when the river systems
die, the economies will follow.”
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