The Australian Government’s $4 billion irrigation efficiency program has led to irrigators who received irrigation infrastructure subsidies extracting up to 28 percent more water in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) than those who did not receive any funds – affecting the environment and other users, new research has found.
Water management experts across disciplines from University of New South Wales, The University of Adelaide, Australian National University and the Environmental Defenders Office examined the impact of taxpayer-funded irrigation infrastructure upgrades on water extractions and environmental water recovery in the MDB.
Their findings identified a ‘rebound effect’ of increased water extractions, coinciding with the Australian Government’s investment in irrigation infrastructure upgrades.
Combined with documented concerns around measurement of water and compliance, this raises serious doubts about the true extent to which environmental flows are increasing at a catchment and basin level, as a consequence of the subsidised upgrades.
The subsidies aim to help irrigators upgrade their infrastructure technology to save water and return some savings to the environment, in a bid to increase stream flows and ultimately reinstate a sustainable level of extraction in the MDB.
Study co-author and environmental scientist Professor Richard Kingsford, Director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science at UNSW Sydney, said “The ‘buyback’ of irrigation water has put water back into the rivers, but our research found the subsidised infrastructure program could be ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ by enabling more water extractions than water recovered through the efficiency program.
Compounding the problem, the study used publicly available water data that suggested reductions in extractions from the MDB, supposedly commensurate with increases in environmental flows may have been overestimated, particularly in the Northern MDB.
