Land and Water Link

Issue No. 12, May 2002

Global Spotlight on the Murrumbidgee Cooperation between researchers, farmers and industry in the Lower Murrumbidgee catchment - and its power to achieve useful and practical on-ground results - has won global recognition. The southern NSW catchment has been named as the UNESCO HELP program's first global reference basin. This means that the region's farmers, researchers and irrigation companies will be used as an example to the world, to showcase practical solutions for water resources management under competing water uses and economic concerns. UNESCO's HELP (Hydrology, Environment, Life and Policy) program seeks examples of good solutions-oriented science, which are delivering real outcomes to real people in real catchments, both locally and globally. HELP's interest in the Murrumbidgee catchment arises from work by CSIRO Land and Water and its partners, including the CRC Sustainable Rice Production, Coleambally Irrigation Cooperative, Coleambally Outfall District Water Users Association and Murrumbidgee Irrigation. Their research efforts are addressing problems including rising watertables and salinity, reduced river flows, legislative reforms, competition between water users including the environment, and falling deep aquifer pressure levels. The catchment is significant, with 2730 farms spread over 560,000 hectares in the Murrumbidgee and Coleambally irrigation areas. Almost a quarter of the water extracted from the Murray-Darling Basin each year is used in the region to produce more than $1 billion worth of crops - almost 16 per cent of Australia's agricultural produce. There are more than 10,000 kilometres of irrigated channels and the region's combined irrigated agriculture is worth about $408 million. A critical factor underpinning the catchment's new status was the way people put research into practice on the ground, using modeling tools such as the SWAGMAN hydrologic, economic and community education models developed by CSIRO Land and Water. According to CSIRO Land and Water scientist Dr Shahbaz Khan, 'The Lower Murrumbidgee catchment presents an excellent example of community involvement in hydrological research and the development of integrated catchment management policies using a range of tools. Hydrological projects involved communities, researchers and regulatory bodies in catchment management as GIS, hydrological, economic and educational models were developed.' Dr Khan explains, 'Science is required to manage the water resource, but it needs to look not just at the water but also at the economic, policy and legal aspects. There are regions in the world where this is done in bits and pieces, but here in the Murrumbidgee we have managed to pull it all together.' Modeling tools and participatory hydrologic research methods used in the Murrumbidgee catchment are also being adopted by communities in Liuyuankou irrigation area along the Yellow River in China and Rechna Doab in the Indus basin through projects supported by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). There is also considerable interest in applying these tools in catchments in India and South Africa. CSIRO Land and Water has created a website to provide information on the HELP project.

For further information:
Contact
Dr Shahbaz Khan
Ph: 02 6960 1578