 The
Murrumbidgee Catchment, NSW
At 84,000 square kilometres, bounded by Cooma, Balranald, Temora
and Henty, the Murrumbidgee
Catchment is home to approximately half a million people and
generates $1.9 billion in agricultural production.
Pilot Study 5: Recharge Trading
Irrigated agriculture in Australia often leads to recharge of
shared groundwater systems beyond their capacity to absorb water,
thus causing salinity and water logging. In turn, salinity and
water logging impose a range of costs on individual landowners,
their neighbours and the wider community. These impacts are primarily
reduced agricultural productivity, damage to ecosystems and degradation
of built infrastructure both locally and off-site. Some of these
costs are not fully included in farm management decisions because
they are largely external to landowners.
This proposed National
Market Based Instruments Pilots Program project will build
on the net recharge and groundwater management work by Shahbaz
Khan and colleagues at CSIRO
Land and Water in Griffith to develop methods to physically
measure recharge from irrigation systems and the resultant biophysical
and economic impacts. The goal of this project is to work with
the Coleambally
community to develop and test the potential for an integrated
market mechanism to improve irrigation-induced salinity management
based on reductions to net groundwater recharge. >>Fact
Sheet
Pilot Study 6: Targeting Markets
Natural resource management (NRM) targets are being set by catchment
management organisations across Australia. While not using the
language, these targets are essentially specifying a desired level
of ecosystem service provision. However, significant uncertainty
remains around the most appropriate policy options for supporting
the sustainable and efficient delivery of these services, and
achievement of target levels.
To date, the work in this pilot outlines the importance of heterogeneity
in selecting and developing appropriate market based approaches
to address natural resource management issues. We discuss three
scales of heterogeneity (biophysical issues, management actions,
and socio-economics) that are important in determining whether
a MBI is an appropriate tool for a given natural resource issue.
Further, a rapid assessment tool for assessing the levels of heterogeneity
has been developed and tested on two sub-catchments within the
Murrumbidgee. Initial conclusions indicate when there is a high
degree of heterogeneity in these factors, a market based approach
may be an appropriate policy option for a given issue when compared
to more conventional methods, such as regulatory and non-targeted
or inflexible incentive approaches.
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