Climate change shadow over water forum

The three were guests at a forum organised by a cluster of Rotary clubs titled: “Securing the water future for the Goulburn Valley”.

Just over 80 people attended the event, and many engaged in a vigorous question and answer session for over an hour, following the three presentations.

The Murray-Darling Basin, water reform, innovation and water pricing were all on the agenda, addressed by Goulburn-Broken CMA chief executive Carl Walters, G-MW managing director Charmaine Quick and Goulburn-Valley Water CEO Dr Steve Capewell.

Dr Capewell is soon to take over the G-MW role, following the announcement that Ms Quick will be leaving the rural water authority.

Charmaine Quick discussed the largest rural water authority in Australia, which encompassed 70 per cent of Victoria’s water resources, and included 23 dams and 60,000km of irrigation channels.

Ms Quick said that under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, environmental water was introduced in about 2010.

Prior to the millennial drought, the authority was delivering about 2000 gigalitres to irrigators, whereas now the average was about 900 Gl of water, and about 700 to 800 Gl of water to the environment.

Highlighting the impact of climate change on inflows, the authority was seeing, in the Murray system, about a 31 per cent reduction from long-term averages and about 36 per cent in the Goulburn system.

“We are seeing a 31 per cent reduction in inflows coming into our catchments.”

Ms Quick said one of the impacts of water buy-backs was the “Swiss cheese,” effect.

“I can have a channel with irrigators having sold their water except for one or two, while I can’t consolidate or rationalise the infrastructure, so therefore, it’s really hard for me to reduce my costs. That is a real challenge for someone to store and deliver water efficiently,” she said.

She reflected on the advances in a modernised irrigation system, through total channel control.

“People can’t imagine going out to a letter box to put your order in, when you can now do it on the phone.”

Ms Quick said some commentary that modernisation did not remove enough assets, but the process did remove 1800km of channels and rationalise a number of assets.

When he first arrived in Shepparton, Dr Capewell couldn’t believe the size of the waste water treatment lagoons.

He thought they were two or three orders of magnitude bigger than they should be.

But the GV Water chief executive later found out it was because of the trade waste generated by industry.

“We are processing waste water equivalent to a population of 1.1 million,” Dr Capewell said.

“It’s the second-largest waste water treatment plant in the state.”

He said the changing nature of weather events was very disruptive for water authorities.

The infrastructure was developed on a predictable pattern of filling storages in winter and running them down during summer.

“Now that predictable pattern is changing,” he said.

Floods and bushfires both affected water quality and impacted on the treatment of water.

While most Australian, coastal capital cities had the options of accessing desalination plants, that option was not available in the Goulburn Valley.

He said addressing climate variability was going to introduce further costs.

Goulburn Broken CMA chief executive Carl Walters said the authority covered about 10 per cent of Victoria and included 248,000 people.

“Our focus is on trying to make the region as resilient as we can,” Mr Walters said.

“We are preparing for more extreme and bigger events. From storms to drought. Generally, we believe it’s going to get hotter.

“We will have less reliable flows through the systems.

“Our ephemeral streams will tend to dry out.

“The Broken River may end up not flowing much at all.”

“We’re going to see different flows, some streams will run dry, we will have fish deaths.

“This is very challenging,” he said.

Mr Walters said the CMA was trying to direct environmental flows where they achieved the most advantage.