Professor of Environmental Science with the Australian Wetlands and Rivers Centre, Richard Kingsford, says that there is still too much we don't know about the Murray-Darling Basin.
Making plans without adequate knowledge is setting us up for future water debates "full of angst and uncertainty", he argues.
Prof. Kingsford says we don't know:
the real impacts of water resource development;the effect of restoring water removed from the environment by irrigation;how different ecosystems and organisms respond to different volumes of water;whether trees are a good surrogate for the environmental health of other organisms;what effect climate change will have on water flows. There is no modelling of river health under climate change.the effect of doubling groundwater extractions of river flows, as proposed by the plan. This may nullify the impacts of putting more water into the rivers;* Summarised with permission from Prof. Kingsford from an article online at The Conversation.
Email a friend