News: Tradeoff Complexities in Water Planning

Today's Sydney Morning Herald contains two seperate articles on the ecological and the socio-economic impacts of water planning and management decisions - highlighting both the significance of water allocation decisions and the complexities of the trade-offs involved in reaching those decisions.

Andrew Gregson, the NSW Irrigators' Council chief executive, is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald arguing that the New South Wales economy will be rocked, regional towns will suffer and the state's food production will plummet if the Federal Government goes ahead with its plan to accelerate a water buyback scheme under its deal with the Independent Senator Nick Xenophon over the Murray-Darling Basin. Gregson has indicated that the buy-back will cost more than $10 billion of economic activity to the state:

Irrigators are the driving economic force of a whole lot of regions of NSW. The irrigator not only runs his own operation and shops at the local shops and goes to the local cinema, he also employs people who live in those towns . . . If the irrigator goes, they're all gone. You can start closing towns.

At the same time, research released today by Professor Richard Kingsford and Jessica Armstrong from the University of NSW shows an 85% mortality rate for river red gums in the wetlands of the Lachlan River in the past 12 years. The report, which investigated the historical rainfall patterns, irrigation extractions, aerial photography of the trees' canopy and on-ground ecological assessments, attributes the crisis to patterns of irrigation, exacerbated by drought and climate change. In contrast to the Irrigators' Council, Professor Kingsford suggests that in fact a larger buyback of irrigation licences by state and federal governments is needed.