Moving water at Sydney Uni

Last week Thursday, Professor Mike Young visited and gave a seminar for the Agriculture and Resource Economics discipline in our Faculty (yes, I know, our website needs a major shake-up, I am working on that). The seminar mainly discussed the plan Prof. Young is suggesting for sustainable management of water resources in the Murray Darling Basin (A future proofed basin). I broadly agree with the plan, but I do have reservations about three points.

This is going to be a short one, bit busy this week. I was listening in to a discussion between some of my colleagues, economists, in the Faculty. They were having a quite in depth discussion about presenting some material at the upcoming Ecological Society of Australia Conference at the University of Sydney. At some point in the discussion the following point was raised by Dr. Michael Harris.
"An overarching theme of all this is, as you say, to think about “values” and how economists regard values in an anthropocentric context (hence: can be monetized) while ecologists will (typically) think of them in terms of some biophysical metric or benchmark. Bridging this divide seems crucial."
I actually had to think about that for a while.

As I mentioned earlier, I am currently in the Netherlands for a workshop on “Roots an interdisciplinary link?” My interest is of course in how plants use water, as transpiration by plants is one of the largest components of the water balance. The workshop is at Wageningen University, which is 10 km from my parents’ home. So every morning I cycled through the lovely “Binnenveld” from Rhenen to Wageningen (see picture).

This is the little river that flows through the middle of the “Binnenveld” and drains the peat and clay area. It looks like a beautiful natural place. But is it really? How much of nature is really “natural” and how much of it is man-made?

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.