Victoria’s plans for engineered wetlands on the Murray are environmentally dubious. Here’s a better option

• That’s why Victoria has been spending millions on planning “red gum irrigation ponds” – essentially, engineered wetlands along the River Murray.
• These wetlands are designed to save some red gum ecosystems, leave many others to decline, and redirect billions of litres of water promised to the environment to farmers.
• Now, Victoria appears to have blinked, with the state’s water minister, Harriet Shing, halting the development of four of nine projects.

What was Victoria trying to do?

• But the basin is also home to most of our thirsty crops, from rice to cotton to orchards.
• The demand for irrigation alongside the long-term drying trend from climate change means something has had to give.
• In 2012, state and federal governments launched the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in a bid to solve longstanding tussles over water.
• The plan was intended to preserve environmental flows while allocating set volumes of water to farmers.
• As a result, actual environmental flows are 19% lower than the Basin Plan target of 3,200 billion litres per year.

Building wetland infrastructure is unprecedented

• Around the world, nations are going the other way to Victoria and removing floodplain infrastructure.
• In China, across Europe and in the United States, efforts are under way to reconnect rivers to their floodplains.
• To reduce flood impacts (levees intensify floods downstream), improve water quality, restore flood-dependent ecosystems, make river systems more recreation-friendly and diversify local economies.
• Only in the Murray-Darling Basin are we seeing governments building infrastructure for environmental water offsetting on such a huge scale.

What’s likely to happen now?

• In 2013, the basin’s governments agreed to a strategy that would allow pulsed releases from existing dams to fill river channels and spill onto the floodplains.
• Our research shows this approach would reduce flood damage by moving infrastructure off floodplains, and allow floods to spread out more, lowering water height and speed.
• The stage is set: will Plibersek prevail and finally achieve long-sought environmental restoration goals under the basin plan, or will Victoria hold out?
• In the past he has received funding from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility.