The Basin Plan sets a number for the Sustainable Diversion Limit (SDL) or water take. States are required to look for up to 650 GL of extra savings by 2019.
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The Water Act 2007 and the MDBP are focused on numbers and attempts to effect changes are also trapped into focusing on ‘savings’ numbers. Rural communities know that a good water management plan doesn’t start with a number.
A good plan starts with a goal or a vision. Before we land on numbers we need to understand what we’re trying to achieve for our communities. Through this process, federal and state authorities have managed to demonise evaporation. They are attaching modelled ‘evaporative savings’ numbers in order to help achieve that 650GL number. Realistically, no water is actually ever wasted through evaporation, it is just recycled.
The more we look into the modelling and the legislation surrounding this process, the more it looks like various government departments are focusing on how to charge for evaporation and losses and who to charge for them. If we continue to drain and dry down areas to achieve ‘evaporative savings’ we will most likely continue to negatively impact rural communities and their environments right across the state.
This ‘grand experiment’ with evaporative losses has been played out at Menindee and the Lower Darling where a whole system has been ‘hung out to dry’ by various state and federal authorities. Essentially, the evaporative losses have just being shifted elsewhere. The water went to places like Lake Victoria, the Lower Murray and the Lower Lakes. The evaporative losses are just as great or greater at the bottom of the system as they are at Menindee and the Lower Darling. Why is the Lower Darling the only place where there is zero water for the river environment and communities there are now at critical supply levels? Those SDL offsets or savings figures don’t look achievable without trading off and therefore risking the economic, social and environmental health of rural communities. We need to get some common sense operating in water management and stop arguing about unworkable numbers.
We should be focusing on our economic, social and environmental goals - not cost shifting.