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The Shameful Mismanagement of the Murray-Darling River: Australia

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Millions of fish have died in the Darling River near his town, Menindee, in outback New South Wales, Australia in March 2023. After days under the sun, their bodies had started to “break up…transforming the river that locals rely on for drinking and showering into an ecological wasteland. Authorities have said the mass death was caused by a lack of oxygen in the water, called hypoxia, a result of recent floods and a heat wave. But furious locals say the true root of the problem is the overuse of Australia’s biggest and most vital river system.

The disaster is the latest episode in a long-running battle over the Murray Darling Basin, a vast network of lakes and rivers stretching across four states in eastern Australia, which sustains much of the country’s agriculture and dozens of communities along its banks. In an arid country where social, economic and environmental interests clash whenever water runs scarce, the issue has pitted states against each other, and riverside communities against farms upstream.

The 2019 fish deaths happened during a drought and the 2023 fish deaths happened after a flood, said Richard Kingsford, the director of the Center for Ecosystem Science at the University of New South Wales. But, he said, the long-term causes were the same both times: “There’s not enough water in the river, and the whole system is engineered so that escape routes are closed.” Over-extraction means parts of the river run dry more often, he said, and the small and medium-sized floods that used to periodically clear away organic debris have all but disappeared. That means when a big flood hits, that debris is all swept into the river, where it breaks down and deoxygenates the water. That, combined with the construction of weirs that have prevented the fish from swimming to better-oxygenated water, has made this disaster worse, he said….

The New South Wales fisheries and water management bodies, by contrast, both attribute the disaster to weather-related causes…

After many of the fish had already sunk to the bottom of the river, the cleanup started with workers in small boats removing floating carcasses with hand-held nets. Authorities said this will be followed by machinery that will drag nets through the river to scoop up sunken fish….

Excerpts from Yan Zhuang, A River Choking on Fish Corpses, and a Community Full of Anger, NYT, Mar. 24, 2023

How to Kill One Million Fish: Murray-Darling

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But it took a viral video posted on 8 January 2019 to drive home the ecological catastrophe that was unfolding in the Murray-Darling river system in Australia. In the footage, Rob McBride and Dick Arnold, identified as local residents, stand knee-deep among floating fish carcasses in the Darling River, near the town of Menindee. They scoff at authorities’ claims that the fish die-off is a result of the drought. Holding up an enormous, dead Murray cod, a freshwater predator he says is 100 years old, McBride says: “This has nothing to do with drought, this is a manmade disaster.” Arnold, sputtering with rage, adds: “You have to be bloody disgusted with yourselves, you politicians and cotton growers.”

Scientists say McBride probably overestimated the age of the fish. But they agree that the massive die-off was not the result of drought. “It’s about taking too much water upstream [to irrigate farms] so there is not enough for downstream users and the fish,” says Quentin Grafton, an economist specializing in water issues at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The Australia Institute, a Canberra-based think tank, blamed “policy failure and mismanagement” in a 19 January 2019 report, but called drought a catalyst.

Excessive water use has left river flows too low to flush nutrients from farm runoff through the system, leading to large algal blooms, researchers say. A cold snap then killed the blooms, and bacteria feeding on the dead algae sucked oxygen out of the water,   This wasn’t supposed to happen. In 2012, the national government adopted the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, touted as a “historic” deal to ensure that enough water remained in the rivers to keep the ecosystem healthy even after farmers and households took their share.

In 2008, the federal government created the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to wrestle with the problem. In 2010, a study commissioned by the authority concluded that farmers and consumers would have to cut their use of river water by at least 3000 but preferably by 7600 gigaliters annually to ensure the health of the ecosystem. Farmers, who saw their livelihoods threatened, tossed the report into bonfires.  The final plan, adopted as national law in 2012, called for returning just 2750 gigaliters to the rivers, in part by buying water rights back from users. “It was a political compromise that has never been scientifically reviewed,” Williams says, adding that “climate change was never considered in the plan, which was a dreadful oversight.”..

Grafton says there are also suspicions of widespread water theft; up to 75% of the water taken by irrigators in the northern part of the system is not metered. Farmers are also now recapturing the runoff from irrigated fields that used to flow back into streams, and are increasing their use of ground water, leaving even less water in the system, says Mike Young, an environmental policy specialist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

In February 2018, such issues prompted a group of 12 academics, including scientists and policy experts, to issue the Murray-Darling Declaration. It called for independent economic and scientific audits of completed and planned water recovery schemes to determine their effects on stream flows. The group, which included Williams and Grafton, also urged the creation of an independent, expert body to provide advice on basin water management. Young, who wasn’t on the declaration, wants to go further and give that body the power to manage the basin’s water, the way central banks manage a country’s money supply, using stream levels to determine weekly irrigation allocations and to set minimum flow levels for every river.

Excerpts from Dennis Normile, Massive fish die-off sparks outcry in Australia, Science, Jan. 22, 2019.