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Climate change: The plight of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin
photo by Time Keegan (suburbanbloke on Flickr CC)
The mismanagement of irrigation, compounded by drought and a drop in commodity prices, has spelled disaster for Australia’s most important agricultural region.
The waters of the Darling River and the massive Murray irrigate a region that produces almost half of Australia’s fresh produce. But the worst drought in over 100 years has plunged the Murray-Darling Basin into crisis causing economic hardship and many farmers to pack up and leave.
Australian climate scientists see the country as ‘extremely vulnerable’ to climate change and the Murray-Darling Basin as a ground zero for global warming. Climate change advisors to Australia’s government have warned that agricultural production in the basin could fall by up to 92% by 2100.
According to the country’s Department of Climate Change, global warming will trigger more frequent and severe droughts, as well as more devastating bushfires, cyclones and floods. The government’s main scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, says there is growing evidence that lower rainfall in south-eastern Australia is linked to global climate change.
–Kathy Marks, Independent
The regions lakes and lagoons have also suffered from increased salinity, affecting fish and other marine life. This has had an obvious effect on the local fishing industry.
For more on the story, including how Australian politicians are proposing to alleviate the country’s environmental problems while staying largely silent on the unpopular issue of climate change, see the following article by Kathy Marks in the Independent:
On the front line of climate change
Tags: agricultural, australia, Australian, Basin, climate, Climate change, Darling, drought, Independent, Kathy Marks, Murray, Murray-Darling, region, river
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Thanks for your comment and the additional info, Michele.
Hopefully the election of the first Green MP in Australia (following the first in UK earlier this year) will add a bit more attention to environmental issues like this one. The mainstream parties seem to have backed off a bit due to typical populism employed by the usual subjects (the Right, big business).
Thanks for always coming up with great articles. I’d just like to add to this good piece thank Graham. And there are as you have mentioned many factors contributing here.
One of the problems worth discussing is the OVER allocation of water permits along the upper reaches in Queensland. But through other states also.
While the federal government’s ‘buy-back scheme’ to buy back water permits has been underway we have seen the buy up of an enormous pastoral property, again in Queensland, by a UK owned company which is now using it’s allowed and owned water permits. The compounding pressure here is that this property had never used it’s enormous water rights in the past. So for now far more water will be taken out of the system before it even reaches NSW. We can’t have it both ways.
And yes the long standing drought is causing enormous difficulties for those that depend on the river systems but it’s now causing catastrophic worries for the environment. So very much to do, it’s an enormous task ahead.