AUSTRALIA–INDONESIA JOINT SYMPOSIUM IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Jakarta, 13-17 September 2006
Water management, policy to practice especially in irrigation
Professor Wayne Meyer, Chief Scientist, Cooperative Research Centre for Irrigation Futures, Glen Osmond, Adelaide, South Australia
Australians are rapidly re-valuing their finite but renewable water supplies. We are currently facing an unprecedented period of low runoff and storage particularly in the southern and eastern parts of the country.
This physical situation coincides with an ongoing reform and adjustment process in many of our institutional and accepted practice arrangements for water. The most significant influence is the agreement by Australian governments to implement a National Water Initiative. This follows some quite active developments in governance and management of the major water resources in the south east of the continent, the Murray Darling Basin. This has seen the implementation of limits on the amount of water that can be extracted from the river systems. Arrangements to better define water entitlements, access rights and use licenses have also been developed. At the same time water is being increasingly thought of as a connected resource so that surface water and groundwater need to be managed together.
As water becomes more sought after there is increasing competition among different users, not only for quantities of water but also for assured access to a particular quality of water.
70 per cent of all water used in Australia is used for irrigation. With limited water supplies it is generally irrigators who are the most affected because their use is a lower priority and irrigation use will generally be economically uncompetitive in a commercial water trading situation. In recent years irrigation practices have improved because of deliberate actions to get better control on water applications and improve productivity of irrigated crops. Water trading has also seen some water move from areas of low, often salt affected productivity to crops such as grapes, olives and vegetables. In areas close to major cities irrigation has a potentially important role to play in using re-cycled and treated water for productive and amenity purposes.
With such an active reform and adjustment process, scientific research has been heavily involved in providing underpinning information on the magnitude and condition of water resources and helping to assess the implications and effects of different policy options. There is increasing emphasis on trying to find supply, use and management practices that assure water for productive purposes and at the same time protect the environmental services that water and land systems provide. This is particularly critical in systems and catchments where irrigation uses large quantities of water and as a consequence river and riverine ecosystems are negatively affected.
Professor Wayne Meyer, country born and educated, has been driven by the belief that our wealth and well-being are determined by what we can grow productively and what we can mine. Underlying our ability to harvest the sun's energy for growing plants is our understanding of the fundamental need for, and limitations of, water. The journey of learning for Wayne has taken him from water use by wheat root systems as a PhD topic in Adelaide and Texas, to measuring water use in South African irrigated crops, on to water and salt balances in irrigated crops of the Riverina. A four-year term as Foundation Professor of Irrigation at Charles Sturt University, seven years as Program Leader of Sustainable Agriculture and Business Director in CSIRO Land & Water, and now as Chief Scientist of the CRC for Irrigation Futures, has not diminished his conviction that water is, and will continue to be, a primary determinant of our wealth, our well-being and our future as a civilized and learning society.
