Archives for February 2006

Continuing my blog posts on salt …

Mick Keogh, from The Australian Farm Institute, wrote in the Australian Financial Review that,

“Dryland salinity is a challenge that Australian farmers must continue to deal with, and cannot ignore. However, successful future management will require …that all involved reject the crisis mentality, and instead become coolly objective about appropriate responses, which in many cases may be to ‘do nothing’.”

This was certainly not the approach that the National Farmers Federation (NFF) was advocating a few years ago. A few months before the detail of the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality was announced,with the promise of $1.4 billion in funding, the NFF and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) made a claim for $65 billion!

At that time, the bogus dryland salinity audit, claiming 17 million hectares of farmland would be lost to salt, had not been released, but the NFF and member organisations knew its release was imminent.

This is what Wendy Craik, on behalf of the NFF, had to say to the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineers in November 2000:

“NFF’s membership was significantly encouraged to hear the Prime Minister himself acknowledge that compensation and incentives were necessary and key components of any implementation strategy for the National Salinity and Water Quality Action Plan.

Whilst we represent very different interests and viewpoints, NFF and ACF are under no illusions about the difficult choices we will face over the next decades. The sheer magnitude of the [environmental] threats facing us if we do nothing was a driving force behind the establishment of our alliance.

NFF and ACF – having identified the problem and put a figure on that cost, have proposed a five-point plan centred on:

1. a 10 year bipartisan commitment to tackling degradation;
2. national leadership by the Commonwealth Government;
3. a new scale of strategic investment;
4. strong private sector engagement; and
5. the active involvement of all Australians.

The future will be about repair and change to ensure agricultural production is sustainable and our natural heritage is conserved.

So how does the Salinity and Water Quality Action Plan, rate against the NFF/ACF proposal?

Bipartisan Commitment: We believe there has been acknowledgement by all sides of politics that the issues are so severe and pose such a threat to our resource base that action must be taken.

National Leadership: NFF and ACF warmly welcomed the leadership demonstrated by the Prime Minister in putting the plan to COAG and the commitment by COAG to its implementation. The significance of this commitment by COAG must not be underestimated, it is the first time that every leader of a Government in Australia has agreed to play its’ part in an integrated solution to an environmental issue.

A new scale of investment: It is fair to say the Action Plan is not of the magnitude of investment which NFF and ACF demonstrated was required. We believe the Action Plan offers the groundwork from which a long-term, sustained commitment of significant resources must be made.

Our estimate is that, over 10 years, the public contribution required to achieve sustainability targets will be at least $3.35 billion a year, together with an ongoing maintenance program of $320 million a year.

In terms of government expenditure, this represents $3.7 billion per year, over the next decade.

Given that we spend $43 billion per year on the health of the Australian population, is $3.7 billion too much to spend on the health of our country?

NFF believes that all levels of government should commit to increased and significant levels of financial resourcing to deal with dryland salinity.

This will need to be delivered in the form of a variety of incentives and direct investment.

And it will need to be delivered by working with land managers and communities in the transition to new production and natural resource management systems that will combat the degrading processes.

Strong Private sector engagement: Achieving sustainability targets in rural landscapes will require major management and land use changes over the next 10 to 20 years.

We estimate this will require an investment in the order of $65 billion over the next decade. Of which we estimate about $37 billion should come from government.”

The metropolitan media ran with the $65 billion figure for sometime along with interviews from leading conservationists and farmers … both communicating the same message that agriculture had destroyed the Murray Darling Basin, and the Australian landscape more generally, etcetera, etcetera.

At that time I was working for the Queensland sugar industry and I could not believe the damage NFF was doing to the reputation of Australian farmers … my protests fell on deaf ears. The focus was on securing money from the Action Plan, no one seemed to care too much about the long term implications of ‘crying wolf’ and so effectively.

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Postscript

I received a couple of phone calls from bureaucrats yesterday about my recent blog posts on salt. There is concern that problems still exist and that John Passioura’s paper “From Propaganda to Practicalities – the progressive evolution of the salinity debate” is not a completely accurate assessment of the situation. I am always keen to post the alternative perspective as a guest post, but someone needs to be prepared to articulate the case and put their name to it.

And while John Quiggin avoided comment at my post, he did start his own blog post on the issue, click here. Quiggin’s Federation Scholarship at the University of Queensland is on the topic of sustainability and the Murray Darling Basin, so I am surprised there not more interest in what the models have, and have not, accurately predicted by way of water quality and dryland salinity.

The consensus from Australian scientists in positions of authority on the issue of ‘river salinity’ and the ‘spread of dryland salinity’ appears to be crumbling.

As Mick Keogh wrote yesterday in The Australian Financial Review with respect to the issue of dryland salinity:

“Increasingly, researchers are concluding that many of the assumptions and much of the data used in generating this estimate [that 17 million hectares of farmland would be lost to salt] were wrong, or should not have been used. There are suggestions, for example, that some State salinity assessments used to calculate the national estimate overstate the current extent of salinity by factors of between three and seven times, let alone the projected future extent. Several of the state reports had no reliable data to base estimates on, and many made assumptions about future groundwater levels – a critical element in salinity assessments – that defy the laws of gravity and science, and are not supported by available data.
It would be easy to dismiss these criticisms if they were just coming from farmers who have an interest in downplaying salinity.

But increasingly, the criticisms are coming from senior scientists and researchers employed by State and Commonwealth Governments, from University academics, and are contained in official reports and published research findings.”

Mick Keogh heads The Australian Farm Institute and published several papers in the institute’s journal last November (Farm Policy Journal, Vol 2, No. 4) by scientists and economists explaining that previous estimates were a gross exaggeration and that many of the policy solutions funded under the $1.4 billion Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality are seriously flawed.

I have been questioning the figure of 17 million hectares since the Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000 was first published*. I am on record in submissions to government inquiries and, for example, in Quadrant magazine in December 2004 explaining how myths are made:

“…[journalists at The Australian] have relied heavily on the government’s report “The National Land & Water Resources Audit’s Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment 2000” (NLWRA) for information regarding the spread of dryland salinity. The document warns that the area with a high potential to develop dryland salinity (from rising groundwater) will increase from 6 million hectares in 2000 to 17 million hectares in 2050, as reported by Hodge in the Australian on March 17, 2001.

The NLWRA has been widely cited and was used to help secure $1.4 billion in funding through the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. It is therefore worth considering its technical integrity.

Interestingly, the report does not distinguish between what might normally be considered irrigation salinity as opposed to dryland salinity. It determined that areas with groundwater within two metres of the surface are at high risk of dryland salinity. The forecast ground-water levels were “based on straight-line projection of recent trends in groundwater levels”.

Yet no data supports the notion that we currently have a situation of rising groundwater in the Murray – Darling Basin. Groundwater levels in the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Coleambally irrigation areas – the regions considered most at risk – have generally fallen during the past ten years.”

I have also questioned claims river salinity levels were rising, and would continue to rise, including in my IPA Backgrounder Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment.

John Quiggin has been scathing of my work on salinity and my daring to challenge “30 years of scientific research”. In April last year he suggested that the debate really comes down to a “a pure question of comparative credibility” and concluded I had none.

What a difference a year can make.

Now some CSIRO scientists are suggesting that their organisation may have got it wrong including John Passioura who wrote in a review paper titled From Propaganda to Practicalities – the progressive evolution of the salinity debate that, “Our only defence against the charge of charlatantism is that before deceiving others, we have taken great pains to deceive ourselves” (Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture, Vol 45, pgs. 1503-1506).

John Passioura also commented:

“Remote sensing techniques, especially aerial electromagnetics coupled with good ground-truthing, were revealing great variation below ground in the occurrence of saline aquifers, both laterally and vertically. The methaphor of the ‘silent flood’, the widespread rapidly-rising uniformly-saline watertable that as going to take out millions of hectares of our most productive agricultural land, was therefore being questioned – not by the mass media, who embraced it with the macabre fascination that goes with gothic horror novels, but by experienced observers of landscapes and of hydrographs.”

Those who hate having to admit they might have been wrong, could now argue that Passioura and others are only referring to dryland salinity, not river salinity levels. That salt levels in the Murray could still be, just about to start rising again.

But come on, the boggie man with respect to reducing river salinity, has always been the argument that because of spreading dryland salinity, well, it would eventually find its way into the Murray and river salinity levels would start rising again.

This argument has now been exposed as just as hollow.

Let’s accept, it now appears that I got it right on both river salinity and dryland salinity! I feel vindicated. But I won’t hold my breath, waiting for an apology from John Quiggin or anybody else.

And I suggest Mick Keogh not hold his breath either, waiting for the ABC to correct the information at their websites.

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*It used to be easy to access the Salinity Assessment on the internet but now I just keep finding this ‘summary document’. Lucky I kept my hard copy!

Mick Keogh from The Australian Farm Institute had a piece published in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review titled ‘Getting a balanced perspective on salinity’. It reiterated what some scientists have been saying since late last year, that they got it wrong with their salt predictions.

Keogh wrote:

Conduct an internet search using the terms “salinity” and “17 million hectares” and you can access almost 500 references explaining that Australia could have 17 million hectares of salinised land by the year 2050. Websites providing this information range from the ABC and the CSIRO, to Parliaments, the BBC, the Australian Academy of Sciences, major Australian and international media groups, educational organisations, environmental groups and even sites containing speeches by the Prime Minister and the Governor General.
With such an impressive list of organisations, anyone from school children through to senior policymakers could feel comfortable that the figure is credible, and represents an authoritative estimate of the potential scale of the dryland salinity problem in Australia.
Unfortunately, the comfort is ill-founded.

Increasingly, researchers are concluding that many of the assumptions and much of the data used in generating this estimate were wrong, or should not have been used. There are suggestions, for example, that some State salinity assessments used to calculate the national estimate overstate the current extent of salinity by factors of between three and seven times, let alone the projected future extent. Several of the state reports had no reliable data to base estimates on, and many made assumptions about future groundwater levels