Irrigating The Environment
Abstract
Water insecurity and water inequality are international issues that reduce economic growth. Countries are adopting alternative approaches to rebalance the share of water between all users to mitigate economic loss for this and future generations. However, recent reforms have struggled to provide the necessary arguments to obtain political protection of the process. In the absence of proof, rent-seeking arguments have challenged the benefit of restoring environmental flows by arguing that policy design fails to maximise the environmental benefits. This is a problem in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), where despite establishing 3,200GL of environmental water, the policy is still under threat. Applied water economic policy advice fails, when it does not deal with uncertainty. The state-contingent analysis approach can map how individual decision makers can adapt to alternative states of water supply (i.e. drought, normal and wet) by reallocating inputs to obtain state-described outputs. By modelling changes to the states, or the frequency of the states occurring, climate change can modelled, and decision management responses explored. By treating the environment as another set of production systems, lessons learnt from managing perennial and annual agricultural production systems during the Millennium Drought in the MDB can be applied to explore the limits of irrigating the environment. The demand for water by a production system is a combination of state-general (must be irrigated every year e.g. perennial crop or permanent wetland) and state specific inputs (irrigate in response to the realise state). In simple terms, the greater the component of state-general water requirements a production system has, the less resilience it has when water supply is highly variable and if water is not available then production systems are irreversibly lost. While production systems that only need state-allocable water can adapt to alternative levels of scarcity without irreversible losses. This relationship then helps evaluate the alternative strategies for as environmental manager to maximise the gains from environmental flows. By utilizing a directed flow network, the trade-offs between hard and soft targets, and trading between alternative water users can be explored.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMPA23A0362A
- Keywords:
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- 1813 Eco-hydrology;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1830 Groundwater/surface water interaction;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES