Audit the Groundwater Auditors

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The National Water Commission chairman, Ken Matthews, recently commented that there was a general lack of knowledge about how much and where, groundwater was in Australia.  He said this poor ‘water accounting’ hindered effective planning and could be contributing to the over extraction of groundwater.
 
The National Land and Water Resources Audit, which was introduced more than six years ago, has, interestingly, been wrongly preaching that we have a situation of rising groundwater for most of this period.  One of the first publications from the Audit was Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000.  This 129-page glossy document warned that, because of rising groundwater, the area with a high potential to develop dryland salinity would likely increase from six million hectares in 2000 to 17 million hectares in 2050.

Interestingly, the assessment did not distinguish between what might normally be considered irrigation salinity as opposed to dryland salinity.

It determined areas with groundwater within two metres of the surface were at high risk of dryland salinity.
The forecast ground-water levels were "based on straight-line projection of recent trends in groundwater levels" including the Murray-Darling Basin.

Yet data did not support the notion that we had a situation of rising groundwater in the Murray-Darling Basin.  Groundwater levels in the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Coleambally irrigation areas - the regions considered most at risk in eastern Australia - have generally fallen in the past decade.

They were rising in the 1970s but started falling by the late 1990s. 

In 2004, the CSIRO provided me with the following reasons for the general fall in groundwater levels: improved land and water management practices; relatively dry climate over the past ten years and increased deeper groundwater pumping and higher induced leakage from shallow to deeper aquifers.  

Data collected by Murray Irrigation Ltd since 1995 from 1500 sites covering 500,000 hectares of land considered most at risk from irrigation salinity has shown a 90 per cent drop in the area affected by shallow water tables.

Interestingly in the Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000, even when values are shown for years before the report was published (for example 1998), the values are "predictions", not measured statistics. 

The assessment does not provide any information about the actual measured extent of dryland salinity, nor does it test its projections against actual outcomes. 

Yet the report was extensively quoted and accepted uncritically as evidence of a spreading dryland salinity problem and rising groundwater problem. 

This assessment and many of the other documents produced by the National Land and Water Audit have been useful in securing funding for science managers, in particular $1.4 billion dollars through the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality, while hindering a proper understanding of surface and groundwater flows.

While Ken Matthew’s has identified the need to put in place a proper process for “water accounting” across Australia as a key priority for the National Water Commission, the Federal Government might consider a process for auditing the vast sums of money recently wasted on nonsense reports by the National Land and Water Audit. 

Published in The Land

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