Ten-year wait for Murray-Darling Basin Plan southern review.”

-      Robert McLean

The Murray-Darling Basin is known
as the food bowl of Australia.

Water and climate change are intricately linked.

Climate change is not going to lessen the amount of fresh water in the world but will have a significant impact on its distribution, that is where the rain falls and the intensity with which it falls.

That is critical for Australia for, beyond Antarctica, it is the driest continent in the world and so as the population increases so does our consumption of water.

Much of Australia’s population lives one the east and south coasts and those people, although many don’t realize it, look to the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) to ensure urban communities, our rural towns, and primary industries, along with thousands of species can survive and prosper.

The MDB stretches from Queensland, through New South Wales, feeds and waters Victoria, and finally South Australia until the River Murray empties into the ocean.

The “basin plan” as it is called, has long been at heart of passionate and convoluted debate and conversation with some in southern parts arguing that those in southern Queensland and northern and western New South Wales are taking inordinate amounts of water for personal enrichment at the expense of those in southern parts of the basin who would normally benefit from natural unimpeded flows south.

The predicted 10-year wait for a review to the MDB plan is simply too long as climate change, albeit slow, is moving more quickly than that.

Read the latest on the MDB from the ABC - “Ten-year wait for Murray-Darling Basin Plan southern review.”