ANU academic professor Jamie Pittock said scientists and those with environmental and agricultural interests in the Murray-Darling Basin share a common concern that governments had done a “pretty bad job” with measuring, monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of the water reforms.
“We are spending $13 billion on the buyback scheme, and Australians deserve to know that there is solid evaluation of what is working and whether it is changing or not,” he said.
Prof Pittock also said when buybacks were first adopted in 2012, all state governments removed their funding on monitoring programs.
“And that effectively means that there has been no science-based, whole-of-basin monitoring program to determine the effectiveness of the scheme.
“I think we will be crucified if we have taken water from agriculture and can’t explain what has happened to it in helping the environment.”
The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder established Flow-MER (flow monitoring, evaluation and research) in 2012 to study a portion of the places where common water is directed.
Prof Pittock said Flow-MER was hampered by its minimal budget to produce robust and widespread results.
“Flow-MER runs on too much of a shoestring to cover the whole basin, so they are only covering a subset.
“And that’s small beer compared to what is needed.
“It doesn’t cover areas where there has been damage like the lower Barker and Darling.
“We want to know how much of the red gum stands are in good health, how the Murray cod population is recovering downstream and such — these need to be addressed.
“The plan basically says also that we will conserve all the red gum forests but you’re not going to know that if you’re not measuring them.”
Prof Pittock said the governments were also not monitoring wetland flooding.
“My calculations are that only two per cent of wetlands are getting ‘wetted up’ each year with managed water,” he said.
“However, our research did not measure the natural flooding, so what the governments need to be doing is calculate how much flooding is attributed to the extra water.”
There are environmental indicators that governments have put along the river and only about a third have been met.
Prof Pittock said red gums needed to be flooded every three years, coolabah and black box trees every 10 to 15 years and Moira grass floodplains annually.
“At some point everyone is going to have to take a haircut, because there won’t be enough water to do everything we want.”
