Abstract
Climate change is threatening water security in water-scarce regions across the world, challenging water management policy in terms of how best to adapt. Transformative new approaches have been proposed, but management policies remain largely the same in many instances, and there are claims that good current management practice is well adapted. This paper takes the case of the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia, where management policies are highly sophisticated and have been through a recent transformation in order to critically review how well adapted the basin’s management is to climate change. This paper synthesizes published data, recent literature, and water plans in order to evaluate the outcomes of water management policy. It identifies several limitations and inequities that could emerge in the context of climate change and, through synthesis of the broader climate adaptation literature, proposes solutions that can be implemented when basin management is formally reviewed in 2026.
Highlights
Introduction the MurrayDarling Basin, Australia.Climate change is impacting on water security in water-scarce regions across the world, via declining precipitation, increasing potential evapotranspiration, and increased water demands [1,2]
Part of this tenacity might be due to the fact that the unsatisfactory consequences of current water management under climate change have not been made clear compared to the difficulties of implementing transformative change
Risk assessments in water resource plans go as far as identifying climate change as a risk to the outcomes sought from water management, and running scenarios of possible future conditions
Summary
The Murray–Darling Basin is Australia’s largest river basin, producing 50% of Australia’s irrigated agriculture, and spanning five state jurisdictions responsible for water management, making it a transboundary river basin. The limit on water use across the basin—termed the Sustainable Diversion Limit—aims to balance water use to support healthy water environments, irrigated agriculture, and regional communities. Water management in the Basin is fundamentally adaptive to climate change. The Basin’s states set water resource plans for each valley, compliant with and accredited under the Basin Plan. These are renegotiated every 10 years and reviewed every 5 years. Risks to the plans need to be identified and managed as part of the accreditation process; a review of the published plans, given below, shows that the principles of adaptive management to climate change are not always well implemented in practice
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