Friday 30th May 2014
The Murray-Darling Basin Plan (Basin Plan) is tasked with improving welfare by internalising the negative externalities derived from the past 130 years of policy development which has over allocated water resources to irrigators in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). Since the signing of the implementation phase of the Basin Plan in February 2014, there remains a small window of opportunity to influence both the final legislative agreement and the implementation review before Australia misallocates a large proportion of the $13 billion in public funds set aside to deal with water reform in the MDB.
This talk will argue three main points:1) In light of water supply uncertainty derived from climatic variability and climate change, that infrastructure investment programs will lock resources into inefficient production areas and possibly create a legacy of rural debt and failure; 2) By understanding the spatial and temporal nature of water rights and climate change influences on inflows that for $3.1 billion an optimal bundle of entitlements could be purchased that delivers the twin Basin Plan goals of increased environmental flows and salinity mitigation; and 3) The Basin Plan has a hidden gift of increased groundwater access that could shield irrigators from increasing climatic risk while potentially increasing the risk of long run aquifer degradation.
David Adamson started his professional life as the economist at the CRC for Tropical Pest Management and joined the School of Economics at The University of Queensland in 2004 to work on climatic variability and uncertainty impacts on water management in Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin. He has been commissioned to work on The Garnaut Climate Change Review and has recently completed a PhD reviewing the Basin Plan.
