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Environmental Flows for the River Murray Report on The MURRAY-DARLING BASIN MINISTERIAL COUNCIL ENVIRONMENTAL FLOWS FOR THE RIVER MURRAY … a healthy River Murray System, sustaining communities and preserving unique values REPORT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF OPTIONS Prepared for the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council from Murray-Darling Basin Commission Meeting 31 – 12 April 2002 Page 1 © Copyright Murray-Darling Basin Commission, 2002 This material is copyright. Any portion may be reproduced by any process with due acknowledgment. Murray-Darling Basin Commission GPO Box 409, Canberra ACT 2601 Tel: 02 6279 0100 Fax: 02 6248 8053 E-mail: [email protected] Web Site: www.mdbc.gov.au ISBN XXXX XXXX XX Page 2 1. INTRODUCTION 4 1.1 ENVIRONMENTAL FLOWS FOR THE RIVER MURRAY SYSTEM 4 1.2 VISION AND OBJECTIVES 5 1.3 STAKEHOLDER SURVEY 6 1.4 IMPACTS OF REGULATION ON THE RIVER MURRAY SYSTEM 6 1.4 WATER QUALITY OBJECTIVES 11 2. DEVELOPING FLOW SCENARIOS 12 2.1 PROCESS OF DEVELOPING FLOW SCENARIOS 12 2.2 MODELLED COMPONENTS 15 2.3 OTHER COMPONENTS 16 2.4 FURTHER PROPOSALS 17 3. FLOW SCENARIOS 19 3.1 FLOW SCENARIOS EN ROUTE TO OPTIONS 19 3.2 THE SELECTED STRUCTURAL AND OPERATIONAL MEASURES 20 3.3 ERP ASSESSMENT OF FLOW SCENARIOS 23 4. IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES 26 4.1 BASIN-WIDE ACCOUNTING FOR ENVIRONMENTAL FLOWS 26 4.2 RECOVERY OF WATER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL FLOWS 26 4.3 LEGAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE RECOVERY OF WATER 28 4.4 COST SHARING – “WHO IS GOING TO PAY?” 29 4.5 RELATED ISSUES 29 5. THE NEXT STEPS 32 5.1 AN OVERVIEW OF THE INFORMATION PRESENTED IN THIS REPORT 32 5.2 THE OPPORTUNITY PROVIDED BY THIS REPORT 32 5.3 COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY 32 5.4 PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION PLAN 38 6. CRP ADVICE 39 6.1 CRP RECOMMENDATIONS 39 6.2 DIVERSITY OF VIEWS 42 REFERENCES: 44 APPENDIX A: WATER QUALITY OBJECTIVES FOR THE RIVER MURRAY 46 APPENDIX B: NGARRINDJERI CULTURE AND THE CLOSURE OF THE MURRAY MOUTH 56 Page 3 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Environmental Flows for the River Murray System This report provides the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council with a summary of the work of the Project Board on Environmental Flows and Water Quality Objectives in developing options for improving environmental flows in the River Murray System. The Project Board, as requested by the Ministerial Council in March 2001, has developed five flow scenarios as a first step to providing fully costed options. These flow scenarios cover a range of levels of increase in environmental flows and include methods for providing the water and undertaking necessary works and a description of the relative environmental benefits. Community consultation requirements are also addressed. A Project Implementation Plan has been prepared, which outlines a proposed budget and schedule to develop the scenarios into full options. To inform the process, the Project Board on behalf of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission established four separate reference panels: • Community Reference Panel (CRP); • Expert Reference Panel (ERP); • Jurisdictional Reference Panel (JRP); and • Socio-economic Reference Panel. The ERP has independently prepared a report for the consideration of the Ministerial Council (Jones et al., 2002). Key conclusions of the ERP are: • The future condition of the River Murray system is clearly dependent on our actions now and over the coming years. Ecological condition continues to degrade under the present Cap and current river operations. Returning the River Murray System to a healthy condition will require major improvements to river management – significant environmental flow allocations, improved habitat condition, improved catchment & floodplain management, and better water quality. • It is the considered opinion of the ERP that there is a substantial risk a working river will not be in a healthy state when key system level attributes of the flow regime are reduced below two/thirds of their natural level. It is now universally recognised that the river system has been significantly altered and that it will be impossible to return it to an entirely natural state. Therefore what is required is identification of the future state that we want the river system to be in. The flow scenarios developed by the Project Board represent a range of likelihood (from low to high) of achieving what the ERP have described as a healthy working river system. Page 4 1.2 Vision and Objectives The vision and objectives for River Murray environmental flows adopted by Ministerial Council in March 2001, which have guided the work of the Project Board, are as follows: Vision: … a healthy River Murray System, sustaining communities and preserving unique values. Objectives: River health objectives 1. Protect and restore key habitat features in the river, riparian zone, floodplain and estuary to enhance ecological processes. 2. Protect and restore healthy riverine and estuarine environments and high value floodplain and wetlands of national and international importance. 3. Prevent the extinction of native species from the riverine system. 4. Overcome barriers to the migration of native fish species. Environmental flow objectives 5. Reinstate ecologically significant elements of the natural flow regime. 6. Keep the Murray Mouth open to maintain navigation and fish passage and to enhance estuarine conditions in the Coorong. 7. Significantly improve connectivity between and within riverine, wetland, floodplain and estuarine environments. Water quality objectives 8. Substantially improve water quality in the Murray system to a level that sustains ecological processes, environmental values and productive capacity. 9. Manage salinity to minimise impacts on ecological processes and productivity levels. 10. Manage nutrient levels to reduce the occurrence of blue-green algal blooms. 11. Minimise the impact of potential pollutants such as sediment and pesticides within riverine environments. Human dimension objectives 12. Implement an adaptive approach to the management of the River Murray consistent with the Integrated Catchment Management Policy Statement, monitoring ecological outcomes and reviewing operations in the light of new information. 13. Gather, evaluate and disseminate the community's living, scientific and intuitive knowledge to optimise environmental flow strategies. 14. Ensure participation of the entire community by recognising the cultural and historical relationship to the river, its landscape and its people and acknowledging the past to effect the future. Page 5 15. Recognise the importance of a healthy River Murray to the economic, social and cultural prosperity of communities along the length of the River. 1.3 Stakeholder Survey The Project Board commissioned a stakeholder survey with the main aim to: ‘identify the range and geographic spread of stakeholders, their prevailing attitudes and diversity of views on matters relevant to addressing environmental health of the River Murray.’ The survey (Nancarrow and Syme, 2001) has shown a high level of support for the principle of having an environmental allocation for the River Murray, with 95% of respondents indicating that the River Murray should have water especially provided for the environment. However, this level of support dropped to less than 40% if the decision making process did not involve users and local people. There was also a high level of agreement with the need to do something now without exact knowledge, and general agreement with the need to accept decisions from a fair process. Responses also indicated where the greatest disagreement would be likely to occur when discussing specific water allocation issues. The issues where split opinion could be identified were associated with arguments of economics, prior rights and priority preferences between environmental and human uses of water. Respondents also generally disagreed with the environmental allocations being set by experts alone, allocation decision making through dollar cost analyses, and the priority of people’s needs over those of the environment. 1.4 Impacts of Regulation on the River Murray System A comparison of natural and regulated flow regimes enables quantification of the impact of regulation. A computer-based monthly simulation model (MSM) was used to predict both diversions and river flow. It is useful to consider the impact of regulation on the River Murray System. The scale of our intervention in the Murray-Darling Basin which can be summarised by the following statistics: • The Murray-Darling Basin has 6% of Australia’s run-off upon which around half of Australia’s water use is based; • The average annual run-off in the Basin is around 24,000 GL/year and the average annual total diversion (“the Cap”) is around half this amount (approximately 12,000 GL/year) of which an average of around 4,100 GL/year is diverted directly from the River Murray System; • The average flow to the sea under natural conditions was around 12,900 GL/year and is now 5,200 GL/year (40% of natural) (NB. Diversions do not exactly match reduction in flow to the sea, as a component of the water that is now diverted would not have made it as far as the sea under natural conditions); and • The median annual flow to the sea from the Murray Mouth has reduced to 27% of that under natural conditions. Page 6 Although most of the water in the River Murray comes from the upper Murray catchment area, incoming flows from the lower tributaries have a significant impact on flows in the lower part of the River. These tributaries, principally the Goulburn, Murrumbidgee and Darling Rivers, are currently under various degrees of regulation. Some of the tributaries are delivering much less water to the River Murray than if they were not regulated. Figure 1 illustrates the proportion of the natural median annual flow that reaches the end of the major rivers in the River Murray System under current conditions. Recent research has indicated that these changes to river flows, in conjunction with the effects of regulatory structures, have had a detrimental effect on native riverine plant, waterbird and fish communities.
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