Abstract
In 2003, the Australian government launched The Native Fish Strategy for the Murray Darling Basin 2003– 2013 with the objective of restoring native fish populations in the Murray Darling Basin to 60% of their of pre-European (before 1788) settlement levels. Ten years on, there is no evidence that native fish populations show any sign of recovery, despite the Millennium drought breaking and significant government expenditure including the buyback of irrigation licences to increase in-streamflow and facilitate the watering of adjacent forests and wetlands. We review the native fish strategy, considering the five priority interventions originally identified. We conclude that more freshwater is unlikely to be effective at restoring native fish populations unless three additional issues are addressed: cold-water pollution, predation from introduced salmonids and the damming of the estuary. Unfortunately, however, these contentious issues are neither identified nor discussed in the new official planning document.
Highlights
The Murray Darling catchment, known as the Murray Darling Basin (MDB), drains an area of over one million square kilometres in south-eastern Australia
There is no evidence that native fish populations show any sign of recovery, despite the Millennium drought breaking and significant government expenditure including the buyback of irrigation licences to increase in-streamflow and facilitate the watering of adjacent forests and wetlands
We review the native fish strategy, considering the five priority interventions originally identified
Summary
The Murray Darling catchment, known as the Murray Darling Basin (MDB), drains an area of over one million square kilometres in south-eastern Australia. Significant water infrastructure development, providing water diversions for irrigated agriculture, has occurred in the MDB, resulting in a reduction in the average annual quantity of water that flows out to sea, approximately from 13,000 GL (gigalitres) to 5,000 GL [1] Such statistics, highlighting the reduction in end-of-system flow, have been combined with claims that rainfall has declined due to climate change. Schedule 1 of The Plan refers to the serious decline in the distribution and abundance of native fish as a reflection of the continuing poor state of the river system and the impacts of human use This is despite significant government funding since 2002 to oversee the development and implementation of The Native Fish Strategy for the Murray-Darling Basin 2003–2013 [2], referred to as The Strategy. The other important contentious issue that was first ignored in The Strategy, and ignored in the Basin Plan, is that of restoration of the Murray River’s estuary that was destroyed with the construction of sea dykes in the 1930s
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