Australia: Murray-darling basin

Abstract

Water resources are a major public issue in Australia because of their scarcity andextreme variability. Although the coastal fringes are relatively well endowed withwater, and are therefore where most of the population resides, the interior is aridand water is very scarce, making Australia the driest inhabited continent on Earth.The Murray-Darling basin is an interior basin of southeast Australia, taking its namefrom the two dominant rivers, the Murray and the Darling. It is defined by the catchmentareas of these rivers and their many tributaries.In light of the high degree of development of water use in the basin, the dominantbasin management issues of the 20th century were water scarcity, overallocation ofwater rights,1 and drought exposure. These issues stimulated the development ofcertain institutional arrangements in the basin from the beginning of the 20th centuryto the 1990s. Those institutions provided for the management of water distributionthrough the issuance of water use licenses; the allocation of Murray River flows amongthe states of South Australia, New South Wales, and Victoria; the construction andoperation of water storage facilities to conserve and regulate river flows; and in thelatter decades of the century, moratoriums on the issuance of water licenses, andultimately a cap on diversions from the Murray-Darling system.The gradual decline in the health of the Murray-Darling system over this periodindicated that a more innovative approach was required, and the integrated waterresource management approach initiatives that have been introduced in responsehave had some degree of success in finding a balance between complex hydrologicaland institutional issues.