Moving water at Sydney Uni

As I am currently in the Netherlands, I have a chance to consider different political perspectives on water management. There area few things I would like to comment on. I noted that Prof. Garnaut has published his report this week in relation to possible targets and prices of carbon. My PhD student Claire and her husband Vivek have been sending me information about the devastating floods in Bihar, possibly the result of lack of maintenance on a dam in the river. In addition, Haiti and other Caribbean areas are suffering from the effects of a series of Hurricanes and are bracing for more . And here in the Netherlands a government commissioned report on the future needs of water management under climate change has been published.

Or should I say some watery issues? This week the Senate in Australia decided to have an Inquiry into water management in the Coorong and Lower Lakes and into the long term sustainable water management in the Murray Darling Basin. I think this requires some comments from me. But I also wanted to say how pleased I was with the renewed interest from high school stundets in environmental science as indicated on the number of inquiries I got on the University’s open day yesterday (Or all of you read last week’s posting…..)

This is partly an unashamed plug for our Faculty and the degrees that we offer. Don’t be scared, even though we are called “Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources”, we don’t all wear 10 gallon hats. Next weekend on Saturday is Sydney Uni Live! Come and have a look, I am actually scheduled to give a mini-lecture at 10 am, so if you wonder who is behind the blog, here is your chance!

This week the ABS came out with a new report which summarises the statistics of the Murray Darling Basin. The media immediately picked up the story pointing out that cotton was the biggest water user in the Murray Darling Basin. What I want to talk about is that, while the ABS document is of course well balanced and clearly indicates that this is a snapshot over a series of years, the media coverage only selected one period (2005 – 2006) to cover. This brings me to statistics, the power of statistics and the use of statistics in argument. Basically, I believe that statistics are often abused in arguments and education about statistics in the wider community is poor, it is seen as some sort of wizardry.

This week Minister Penny Wong was compared to Saddam Hussein by the opposition in terms of “environmental vandalism without precedent in Australian history”. This was in response to a radio interview in which the minister argued that there wasn’t enough water in the Murray Darling System to save the lower lakes.

I am glad the minister is echoing my words , and in this blog I will argue again that while buying water from irrigators is a noble cause and should be pursued, it will currently not save the lower lakes. As I have argued, flooding the lower lakes with seawater is the only possible solution. The mistakes of long past are now catching up with us and there is no quick fix. Fixing should have started many many years ago, and maybe there never actually was a possible fix, once the barrages where constructed in 1935. So if there has to be comparison to Saddam, I am afraid we all have to shoulder that title, including the Hon. Greg Hunt.

There is water on Mars!
Well, if we are going to manage it as well as we do here in Australia… Hang-on, the real pictures of Mars look a bit like what Australia will look like in a couple of years. So maybe we can learn something! On the other hand, it all sounds like a lot of money and effort which might be spend somewhere else.

Of more concern to me is water management here in Australia, and in particular the biophysical sciences needed to really make a difference. From the discussions about water in the media (see my earlier blogposts) I am becoming more and more worried that there is still a major gap between what we know and what we need to know. Prof. Johan Bouma at a soils conference once spoke of: The things we know we know, the things we know we don’t know and … the things we don’t know we don’t know. I am afraid that in terms of hydrology in Australia the last two are still the largest.

We are currently struggling to manage our water resources in Australia. Wetlands are drying out, acid sulphate soils are developing, river flows have been altered, water supplies in cities are under pressure. Much of current debate focuses on the effect of climate change, and sceptics and believers are battling it out on the newspaper pages. However, rather than getting stuck in a “tis” “tisnot” debate it might be more useful to see if we can disentangle management from climate effects.

First up I would ask the climate sceptics (yes that is you Miranda Devine) the following question: If you had to make a business decision and the general consensus among investment advisers was that is was 80 – 90% certain that the market would go one way or another, would you follow their advice? The current IPCC report estimates that it 80 – 90% certain that climate change is due to human influences…