Australia simply does not have enough water to sustain our present irrigation needs

Since Federation, Australian policy makers have grappled with recurring long-term droughts, which have significantly impacted its river and groundwater systems and the agriculture industry. In the grip of an environmental catastrophe with a dangerously parched Murray Darling Basin, the Australian Government responded to its water resource problems by legislating significant water reforms through its National Water Initiative process. The current Government is continuing to implement these water reforms and build its scientific knowledge, databases and models so that it can successfully plan how to share water between the environment and other uses such as agriculture.

Professor Tony Jakeman, from the Fenner School of Environment & Society, leads a program for the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training, which was set up as part of the National Groundwater Action Plan and co-funded by the National Water Commission and the Australian Research Council in 2009. The role of the program is to integrate socioeconomics, policy and decision support to help the Government understand the various impacts on the health of catchments and surrounding communities.

“Australia simply does not have enough water to sustain our present irrigation needs and not enough to maintain the health of aquatic environments and replenish aquifers,” says Jakeman, who was awarded the Silver Medal of Masaryk University at the International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems 2011 in the Czech Republic for his work in the field of environmental modelling and software. “During decades of plentiful rain, farmers were encouraged to expand irrigation and consequently some groundwater systems became over allocated. Now the Government is trying to implement policies that allocate water to the environment first, with the remainder then available to other users.”

The program’s modelling offers potential solutions to the country’s susceptibility to long stretches of drought. He works with landholders, irrigation groups, local governments, catchment management agencies and government policy advisors as well as ecologists, hydrologists, economists and other disciplinary experts. Together they define the problems and options to be modelled and assess how ecological, social and economic outcomes can be improved.

“Building these interconnected relationships is also about eliciting everyone’s knowledge, debating it, sharing it and integrating it into the modelling process,” Jakeman explains. “We are trying to work with the best information we can get, identify gaps in that and build trust with the interest groups.”

Participatory modelling is becoming more commonplace for addressing complex problems, according to Jakeman. Hydrological analysis tells us how much water is available to downstream users and the associated effects on the ecosystems in the rivers, floodplains and wetlands. Yet broader modelling can show how the economics of farmers are affected in a certain scenario and how new technology, clever planting practices and public policy innovations affect these as well.

“Of course modelling carries with it many uncertainties about what it predicts,” Jakeman says. “The trick is to manage this uncertainty so that we can make comparative judgments about the differences between numerous strategies.”

Problems will no doubt continue to beset the allocation of groundwater, according to Jakeman. “Our research has already helped to yield positive management outcomes, but ever-changing political, economic and environmental factors mean there is plenty more work to be done.”