Editorial

1. Introduction

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan, adopted in November 2012, represented a major change in the management of the water resources of this nationally important river Basin. The two dominant features of the Plan were the increased focus on water for the environment and a greater role for the Commonwealth government in Basin water management.

However, in the 11 years since its introduction, the Basin Plan has not been out of the national spotlight. There have been calls to strengthen the Plan, through better linkages to catchment management, greater involvement of First Nations peoples, improved integration with regional communities and irrigators, modifications to the water market, and consideration of the likely impacts of climate change.

The Basin Plan is required by legislation to be reviewed by June 2026, and this provides an opportunity for the Commonwealth (through the MDBA) to address many of these issues in the next Basin Plan.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to provide input to the Basin Plan review. Ten papers are published in this Issue that cover a number of areas that could be considered in the forthcoming review. Additionally, there are a number of other areas that need attention and these are also identified and discussed. Another related Special Issue of this journal on Shared risks to water in the Murray-Darling Basin has recently been published (Pittock et al. 2023).

2. Managing the plan to date

The last 11 years have highlighted the very real challenges of implementing major changes in water governance and management in a large, trans-boundary river basin. The persistence of political conflicts over the implementation of the Basin Plan show how an important part of water’s political salience arises from the ability of key actors to link its management to a wider range of broader political and policy concerns. Political conflicts between the Basin states, the Basin states and the Commonwealth, and between major interest groups have delayed and reshaped implementation of the Plan over the last decade and look likely to continue to do so. Despite these challenges, the Plan has reshaped the governance and management of water in the Basin and returned to the environment around a fifth of the water that was in the consumptive pool.

The Water Act 2007 (Cth) (‘Water Act’) originally required the Plan be reviewed ‘during the tenth year of the period that starts when the Basin Plan takes effect’ (i.e. in 2022). However, subsequent legislative amendments delayed this until 2026. The Plan was meant to deliver key elements, including water recovery targets, by 30 June 2024, but this is now not possible. Australia’s current Government has introduced a bill – the Water Amendment (Restoring our Rivers) Bill 2023 – to amend the Water Act and Basin Plan to add to the set of options for water recovery, introduce water markets reform measures, clarify the compliance framework, extend the timeframe for completion of work towards achieving water recovery targets, and delay the required review of the Water Act (Explanatory Memorandum, Water Amendment (Restoring our Rivers) Bill 2023). The new timeframes in the Bill extend the time available for delivery of the 450 GL/y of additional environmental water (31 December 2027) beyond the term of all current state and Commonwealth parliaments and the timeframe for delivery of Sustainable Diversion Limit Adjustment Mechanism (SDLAM) projects (31 December 2026) beyond the term of all current parliaments except NSW. The review of the Basin Plan, however, remains scheduled for 2026, creating the unusual situation that a review will be undertaken while key elements of the Plan like the 450 GL/y and SDLAM projects may yet to be delivered in full.

It is not yet clear whether the Bill will successfully make it through Commonwealth Parliament in its current form. Victoria has also refused to agree to the revised Plan, raising questions about the effective implementation of the changes (ABC 2023).

3. Conflict and cooperation in the water politics of the Basin

Delays, amendments and implementation challenges arising from contested water politics should be expected. Water politics has had a powerful influence over water policy and management decision-making alongside interstate relations for more than a century in Australia, with interjurisdictional disputes driven as much by short-term parochial political incentives as the recognition of the importance of resolving longer-term collective action problems for the management of the shared waters of the Basin. Comparative scholarship on the management of transboundary river basins within nations suggests that conflict arising from ‘subnational hydropolitics’ is pervasive and far more common than conflict between nations over water (Moore 2018). However much subnational hydropolitics is characterised by conflict, it also contains the potential for cooperation (Moore 2018) as evidenced in Australia by the cycles of cooperation and conflict that have underpinned the multiple revisions of the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement, likely Australia’s longest interstate compact (Guest, 2017).

Several papers in this Special Issue grapple with the dynamics of conflict and cooperation in the water politics of the Basin. Martin, Alexandra, Holley and Thoms (2023) note the importance of stable politics in all Basin jurisdictions for the continuation of the cooperative federalism that has underpinned governments’ ability to work together. However, they also note the potential fragility of this political settlement during disruptive events. They note the difficulties in predicting future changes to water rules that will inevitably arise from shifting politics and interest bargaining. Alexandra (2022) highlights the difficulties associated with major reform where there can be a ‘deep unwillingness to tackle the political dimensions of resource access arrangements’. He observes that much of the discussion about water resources planning omits its profoundly political dimensions by focusing on technical issues. However, ‘water planning under climate change is explicitly political because preparing for more dynamic, changing and extreme climatic conditions involves policy choices with profound consequences […] difficult policy decisions with uncertain outcomes’. The Basin Plan review should examine opportunities for institutional reforms capable of mediating divergent interests and channelling inevitable policy and political disagreements into effective action. The MDBA’s recent announcement of focal themes for the review (MDBA 2023), which include ‘regulatory design’, could well encompass this examination.

4. Uncertainty and the importance of adaptive management

Alexandra (2022) recommends future reforms to the Basin Plan focus on increasing the adaptability of policy settings (e.g. allocation regimes) and seek to identify the institutional arrangements that increase adaptive capacity under conditions of dynamic change and uncertainty. Noble, Guillaume, Wyborn and Jakeman (2023) continue the focus on uncertainty in their retrospective examination of how uncertainty was addressed in decision-making processes leading to the establishment of the sustainable diversion limits (SDLs) under the Basin Plan. They draw attention to the ways uncertainty can drive political conflict and emphasise the need for policy makers to explicitly communicate uncertainty and foster public awareness of its impacts on policy. Like Alexandra, they stress the importance of institutional arrangements that strengthen the capacity for adaptive management and ongoing dialogue to contribute to managing trade-offs in the presence of values conflict and pervasive uncertainty.

Gawne and Thompson (2023) also underline the uncertainties associated with the impacts of climate change. While climate change is predicted to both reduce the total quantity of water available and increase its variability (e.g. more frequent and perhaps longer droughts), they explore the risks uncertainty presents for environmental flow planning under a changing climate and the importance of adaptive management given the uncertainties associated with the outcomes from flow restoration at a Basin scale. They stress the uncertainty arising from the high variability in environmental responses to environmental flows, which can confound the design of environmental flow regimes. An option they suggest further exploring is the use of multiple models and the development of frameworks for making trade-offs that ensure decisions are robust, transparent and defensible.

Alexandra (2022) argues that climate change makes it more difficult to determine what constitutes an environmentally sustainable level of take (ESLT) and raises the unresolved issue of sharing climate impacts between consumptive and non-consumptive uses. Climate change will likely require a reassessment of environmental water requirements in the various Basin catchments and the overall Basin, and by extension the SDLs. The uncertainties surrounding ecological responses to environmental watering and climate change impacts were highlighted as risks to a future plan by the review of the Guide to the Proposed Basin Plan by a team of international experts in 2011. The international review dismissed the notion that the development and implementation of the Basin Plan could ever be ‘value neutral’. The Plan inherently involves value judgements, trade-offs, and difficult decisions at every stage of its formulation and implementation (Briscoe et al. 2011). Given the critical role of value judgements, uncertainties and ignorance, the review of the Plan – and any subsequent modifications – requires a thorough examination of governance issues. Specifically, it is crucial to address who will be involved in making value-based decisions under uncertainty and how conflicts will be resolved when differing values and risk appetites collide.

4.1. Establishing and working towards Basin Plan objectives

A rebalancing of water from consumptive uses to the environment was a key objective of the Water Act. The Act seeks to return consumptive use to ‘environmentally sustainable levels of extraction’ and to ‘protect, restore and provide for the ecological values and ecosystem services’ of the Basin. However, determining what it might mean in practice to define and meet these overarching legislative objectives is no simple problem in one of the most highly engineered river basins in the world. As a result, the Basin Plan contains a complex array of objectives that gloss over some of the difficult trade-offs and compromises likely required for its implementation.

The last 11 years have demonstrated the political and policy challenges inherent in implementing management actions consistent with this array of objectives in a river basin where over 150 years of landscape and river system change have created a vast water storage and delivery machine, particularly in the southern Basin. Environmental objectives remain in tension with the social and economic aspirations of Basin irrigation communities deeply integrated with this machine. Consequently, managing to the Plan’s objectives requires an ongoing, complex interplay of science and values. This emerges as a key theme across the papers in this issue, revealing both substantive and procedural opportunities for change and the potential for joined-up policy reforms.

Freak et al. (2022) consider process aspects of stakeholder concerns using case studies of irrigators. They explore opportunities for cooperative partnerships with farmers and other landholders that open the way for broader influence over catchments and non-flow environmental issues and objectives. Ison et al. (2023) explore related questions of water governance, contrasting a citizen-driven, deliberative and catchment-based approach with that of competing rationalities and narrower focus on environmental flows. Framing rivers as complex social-ecological systems, Martin et al. (2023) point to maturation of First Nations water rights as a key factor with the potential to influence outcomes of the Basin Plan – a factor to which McClelland (2022) also points to in placing the Basin Plan in the larger context of the transnational water norms of the human right to water and rights for rivers.

Brookes et al. (2023) evaluate how well the Basin Plan is meeting its objectives through a focus on the Coorong as a ‘sentinel of change’. They highlight the importance of the environmental water secured through the Basin Plan and the work of the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder in delivering it. However, they also identify the constraints within which contemporary river managers must work and the future climate challenges of managing a system likely to be drier on average. The Coorong’s location at the terminus of the system provides important indications of the effects of environmental water delivery and effectiveness of work towards the Plan’s objectives for water quality, salinity concentrations, export of salt and openness of the Murray Mouth.

Water quality issues are, of course, not confined to the Coorong. The algal blooms and fish kills of February-March 2023 in the Darling-Baaka River at Menindee show the links between catchment management, river management and issues related to water quality. The event triggered an independent review (https://www.chiefscientist.nsw.gov.au/independent-reports/menindee-fish-deaths) that emphasised, among other things, data limitations, agency silos, and simply insufficient attention to water quality. All are key issues for attention in the Basin Plan review, which have been discussed previously in the context of MDB reforms (Nelson 2021). The public concern surrounding fish kills and other environmental events exposes tensions around what Brookes et al. (2023) refer to as ‘non-negotiables’ in future negotiations over water management in the Basin-–a point that underscores the need, identified in other papers in this Issue, for processes that enable more effective engagement across the competing rationalities identified by Ison et al. (2023).

The Basin Plan review will need to wrestle with the disproportionate impact of climate change on environmental water unless the current policy settings in the Water Act and the Basin Plan are changed. A number of studies (e.g. CSIRO 2009, DELWP, 2020; Hart 2022) have shown that a reduction in water availability due to climate change will impact entitlement water (consumptive water and ‘held’ environmental water) and non-entitlement water (largely environmental water – water used within the catchment and outflows) quite differently. Under current settings, reductions in the volume of water available to maintain river and floodplain ecosystems will be many times greater than reductions in water available for consumptive uses.

The relatively low profile of groundwater in the public dialogue about water in the Basin belies its importance. Walker (2023) reminds us how groundwater supplies irrigators, supports water-dependent ecosystems and its important role in low-rainfall periods. Groundwater was discussed in a previous Special Issue of this journal in the context of a broad suite of risks related to groundwater in the MDB (Ross, Evans, and Nelson 2023). In this Issue, Walker (2023) analyses the cumulative risk of irrigation efficiency improvements, increased groundwater extraction and climate change (all operating through a groundwater pathway) to groundwater-river exchange fluxes in the south-eastern MDB, finding a significant probability of high impacts within 20 years. This issue is an important candidate for consideration in the Basin Plan review.

In this context, Page et al. (2022) explore options for encouraging water banking – intentionally recharging water to aquifers for subsequent withdrawal – and indicate inconsistent and relatively rudimentary state legal arrangements to support the practice, with clear gaps. Pursuing these options would require state-level reforms, perhaps driven by a renewed National Water Initiative, but there are also key implications for the Basin Plan in relation to trade and accounting. Page et al.’s work reinforces the importance of investment in ongoing technical and policy innovation to meet the future challenges of managing the Basin in a changing climate.

5. Consideration of other legislation and opportunities for improved integration with other Commonwealth and state policies

The Basin Plan review is occurring alongside other major changes to the architecture of Commonwealth involvement in water and the environment. The Water Act, which provides for the Basin Plan, will itself be reviewed in 2027, assuming the present Bill before Parliament passes. Following an independent review in 2020 (Samuel 2020), amendments to the Commonwealth’s flagship environmental legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) (‘EPBC Act’), are now being considered. That Act relies on many of the same international treaties as the Water Act. McClelland (2022) examines the ways in which plans for a renewed National Water Initiative present an opportunity to reconsider broader water issues, and perhaps integration of water and environmental issues, within and beyond the framework of the Basin Plan.

Martin et al. (2023) point to the co-occurrence of these reviews as key drivers for Basin Plan ‘Mark II’. This busy policy space presents significant opportunities for the Basin Plan review. A Basin Plan review that was isolated from these other significant reviews would be constrained in how it could change – its changes would still need to be consistent with the Water Act as currently written. Pursuing the Basin Plan review in a way that coordinates with these other processes provides greater opportunity for more significant change to the Basin Plan, and a more coherent approach to Commonwealth policy development. If the MDBA determines that the Basin Plan needs better or more diverse tools to address its objectives, or better integration with protections for listed threatened water-dependent species under the EPBC Act, changes to the Water Act could make this possible.

Equally, climate change and effective monitoring and evaluation challenge both the Basin Plan and the EPBC Act in relation to water-dependent species and Ramsar wetlands. Using markets to accommodate development is another common feature – water markets and ‘nature repair’ markets, respectively – as is controversy surrounding the use of offsets, which take the form of SDLAM projects in the Basin context.

The fact that these reviews coincide does not mean that they will proceed in a coordinated way. Coordination across agencies requires time, consideration, an administrative appetite for confronting complexity, and an administrative appreciation for lesson-learning across silos. But the opportunity is there, and it is important, because the operation of the Basin Plan intersects with a range of other Commonwealth and state policy domains including: drought policy; agricultural policy; regional development; catchment management; bushfire and emergency planning; Closing the Gap; and environmental protection. These are poorly considered in the implementation of the Basin Plan, which is focused largely on water security and management as the key drivers (Hart et al. 2021). The coincidence of these reviews is an opportunity to ‘join up’ policy thinking in these connected domains.

6. Conclusion

The Water Act does not set parameters or questions for reviewing the Basin Plan (s 50), leaving this to the MDBA. This editorial draws out a number of important issues regarding the management of the Murray Darling Basin that should be considered in the forthcoming review of the Basin Plan 2026, identified in the 10 papers in this Special Issue. Our hope is that the issues raised in this Special Issue will help those charged with the review of the current Basin Plan to consider how to improve the Plan so that it is ready to address the challenges of the next decade of managing one of Australia’s most important river systems.

In this spirit, we offer 10 questions for decision-makers involved in the review of the Basin Plan. Each is integrally linked to the effectiveness and ultimate success of the Basin Plan and the objects of the Water Act:

1. What opportunities are there for institutional reforms capable of mediating divergent interests and channelling inevitable policy and political disagreements into effective action?

2. What institutional arrangements would best strengthen the capacity for adaptive management and ongoing dialogue to contribute to managing trade-offs in the presence of values, conflicts and pervasive uncertainty?

3. Given the critical role of value judgements, uncertainties and ignorance, how can future governance structures identify who should be involved in making value-based decisions under uncertainty and how conflicts will be resolved when differing values and risk appetites collide?

4. What changes are required to include more stringent transparency requirements, a more local and participatory approach, and greater prominence for First Nations water rights?

5. What changes or additional mechanisms are needed to ensure better coordination of the Plan with other Commonwealth and state policy including: drought policy; agricultural policy; regional development; catchment management; bushfire and emergency planning; Closing the Gap; and broader biodiversity protections?

6. What alternative options are available for determining sustainable diversion limits (SDLs) for Basin catchments and the Basin as is permitted in the Water Act (s23)?

7. How can more adaptive and flexible approaches towards environmental water planning and implementation be introduced to take account of uncertainties, variability and longer-term climate changes?

8. What changes to policy settings in the Water Act and the Basin Plan would help address the disproportionate impact of climate change on environmental (non-entitlement) water compared with consumptive (entitlement) water?

9. How can the protection and management of water quality, including salinity, algal blooms and fish kills be improved?

10. How can policy and management improve consideration of the environmental support provided by groundwater to rivers and groundwater-dependent ecosystems in the Basin and consider cumulative risks in an integrated way?

Disclosure statements

Professor Hart is an emeritus Professor of Monash University. He is Director of the environmental consulting company Water Science PL, Chair of Alluvium Holdings, Alluvium Consulting Australia and the Goyder Institute for Water Research. He was a Board member of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority from 2009 to 2017, and was also member of the ecology advisory committees for the 2020 Basin Evaluation process. The views expressed in this Editorial are his own.

Rebecca Nelson is Associate Professor, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. Dr Nelson has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Native Title Council and Watertrust Australia. She is a member of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s Social and Economic Advisory Group and Advisory Committee on Social, Economic and Environmental Sciences. She is a member of the Board of Bush Heritage Australia. The views expressed in this Editorial are her own and not necessarily those of any organisation of which she is a member.

Rod Marsh is Director of Strategy and Programs at Watertrust Australia Ltd. Watertrust is an independent NGO focussed on improving water and catchment policy decision making in Australia. Watertrust is funded by a coalition of 16 philanthropies and receives no government or industry funding. The views expressed in this Editorial are his own.