Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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The Budget, Peer Review (Part 2) & A Worst Ever Report

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Yesterday I wrote that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) are the big ticket/big budget environmental issues. Well the Treasurer has even made special allocations for both in this year’s budget.

There is only ever going to be so much money for the environment.

Can we have confidence that budget allocations are determined on the basis of need i.e. that the MDB and GBR are areas of greatest environmental need?

A functioning peer review process could assist prioritization by helping to ensure correct information as a basis for public policy decision making (see my yesterday’s blog-post).

To what extent is the peer reviewed literature setting the public policy agenda? To what extent is the peer reviewed literature relied upon by research leaders?

When it comes to the GBR and MDB, I will contend that research leaders increasingly rely on government reports and the non-peer reviewed literature rather than publications in reputable scientific journals to influence public policy decision making.

As an example, when John Quiggin reacted to my review paper ‘Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment’ in his much quoted 24th March 2004 blog-post he made much of a graph within a government report (rather than something peer reviewed) to suggest a Murray River salinity problem that was likely to get much worse.

I wonder whether the graph would have made it through a peer review process? It represents 40-50 years of daily salt readings stretched and smoothed over an 80 -90 year period with this trend line then merged into a projection from a computer model that as far as I can tell has never given a correct forecast. Certainly the model has been predicting in the wrong direction for the last 6 years.

I suggest the graph is a disgrace and designed simply to perpetuate the myth of a worsening salinity problem. Salinity levels are in fact significantly less than suggested by the graph and have been reducing, not increasing over the last 20 years.

But perhaps the worst all time unpublished, non-peer reviewed report that has significantly influenced public policy decision making in the MDB is The NSW River’s Survey by the CRC for Freshwater Ecology and NSW Fisheries.

The report’s principal conclusions include that “A telling indication of the condition of rivers in the Murray region was the fact that, despite intensive fishing with the most efficient types of sampling gear for a total of 220 person-days over a two-year period
in 20 randomly chosen Murray-region sites, not a single Murray cod or freshwater catfish was caught.”

Most remarkably at the same time, in the same years and regions, that the scientists were undertaking their now much-quoted survey that found no Murray cod, commercial fishermen harvested 26 tonnes of Murray cod!

Criticism of the report’s findings from a local fisherman goes something along the lines “The scientists, although having letters behind their name, spending some $2million on gear, and 2 years trying, evidently still can’t fish.”

This is some of the non-peer reviewed literature driving public policy decision making in Australia – including how our money is allocated for the environment as part of the budget process.

Problems with Peer Review (Part 1)

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There has been quite a bit of comment on this web-blog about the importance of peer review (e.g. see comments following my post of 29th April 2005, titled What do Geologists Know about Climate?).

Peer review refers to a researcher’s work being vetted by his/her colleagues as part of the publication process. The idea is that the non-expert can have a high level of confidence in articles, reports, reviews, papers in ‘reputable’journals because the work has been thoroughly ‘checked’ by others with expertise in the field.

I generally believe in peer review as a process.

I greatly appreciated the constructive criticisms I received from anonymous expert reviewers when I published as a research entomologist. Indeed at that time I mostly only read the peer reviewed literature in my areas of expertise and interest.

However, once one moves from the relatively mundane-type of research I was undertaking in the 1980s to mid 1990s, into politically sensitive research on big ticket environmental icons like the Great Barrier Reef and Murray Darling Basin … well, I have discovered the peer review process just doesn’t seem to work.

Indeed it has been my observation that many research ‘managers’are being paid very high salaries to virtually ensure the research from their ‘research team’ actually confirms policy decisions that governments have already more-or-less made, often as election commitments, often as a consequence of intense environmental campaigning from organisations like the WWF.

It seems certain assumptions are just not allowed to be challenged!

I will use my work on the Murray River as an example to illustrate this point – perhaps in my next blog-post which will probably be tomorrow.

Wetland Group Pockets $3.8 Million in Water Sales

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A student from RMIT (a Melbourne University) is doing a project on water and has asked me how environmental water is allocated.

There is no national or state-wide ledger (or website) showing how environmental water is acquired and allocated.

The following example is based on information that I have received from the NSW Murray Wetland Working Group Inc..

In the year 2000 this newly formed wetland working group was given a yearly allocation of 30,000 megalitres of water from ‘water saving’ made by Murray Irrigation Ltd..

The environmental water was to be used to save red gums, water wetlands and can also be traded.

This is how the group used their water over the first four years of their operation:

Year 2000
26,000 megs to water Barmah-Millewah Redgum forest
1,500 megs to Wanganella Swamp
2,500 megs traded

Year 2001
4,500 megs used to water Werai State Forest and
800 megs used to water wetlands on private properties
15,000 megs traded

Year 2002
3,945 megs used to water wetlands on private properties
23,000 megs traded

The 23,000 megs was traded at the height of the drought when water was selling for a premium. The 23,000 megs was sold for $3.8 million. Much of the money from this trade was apparently used to build a fish ladder.

Year 2003
7,510 megs used to water wetlands on private properties
1,600 megs used to water Gulpa Creek Reed Beds Swamp and Duck Lagoon
950 megs used to water Pollacks Swamp
550 megs used to water Thegoa Lagoon
11,910 megs traded

Totals for each year do not necessarily equal 32,000 megs as the allocation is nominal and dependent on the allocation within the Murray Valley.

When I asked the Murray Darling Basin Commission in June 2004 how much water wetland working groups have been nominally allocated overall and how this water is generally applied I was informed, “I am not able to advise you of the volume of environmental water throughout the Basin. Environmental water comes in a variety of forms including:
Minimum flows
Environmental flow rules
Contingency allowances
Tradeable entitlements.
Details of some of these entitlements can be found in the NSW water sharing plans.”

There is a lot of money potentially involved in managing environmental water. Yet it is difficult to access the most basic information.

I suggest there is a need for the type of information detailed here to be pubicly available for all wetland working groups and other managers of environmental water.

There should also be reports showing the environmental benefits of the water allocations as well as how the money from the trades is spent.

When I last contacted the Murray Wetland Working Group (September 2004) they were undertaking no monitoring work as such.

If Another 5 Years of Tony Blair, And

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The big news this morning is that exit polls suggest Tony Blair will be re-elected to lead Britain for another 5 years. What does this mean for the environment?

Blair clearly cares about the environment and is concerned by what he sees as a situation of general and accelerating deterioration in the global environment. He has spoken about the need to “bring the environment, economic development and social justice together” and is particularly concerned about climate change.

During the election the Greens made much of the possibility that a future Labour government would commit Britain to a “nuclear future“.

The UK apparently has 14 ‘ageing’ nuclear power stations and Blair has not ruled out the possibility of a new generation of nuclear power stations on the basis that nuclear power is almost ‘carbon neutral’ and would help Britain meet its Kyoto targets.

ALSO TODAY (sent in from blog readers) …

Greenpeace in Court:
This week, opening statements were heard in Alaskan District Court in a case that charges Greenpeace with violating environmental law. Greenpeace is charged with criminal negligence by failing to have the proper oil spill response paperwork during an anti-logging campaign.

Global Dimming:
Today’s New York Times has an article about global dimming: “I think what could have happened is the dimming between the 1960’s and 1980’s counteracted the greenhouse effect,” Dr. Wild said. “When the dimming faded, the effects of the greenhouse gases became more evident. There is no masking by the dimming any more.”
A reader of this blog sent the link with the comment, “Actually, it is a clear contradiction, showing that nature (the Sun), not rising CO2, is responsible for Hansen’s ‘energy imbalance’.”

Pilliga-Goonoo Lock-up Announced

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The NSW Government has finally made a decision on the Pilliga-Goonoo forests and the decision is likely to decimate local timber communities.

Click here (jpg 136kb) to see a picture of 24 Pilliga West State forest, one of the WCA so-called iconic areas.

The decision to ban logging over a further 350,000 hectares will have implications for biodiversity. While the government has described the decision as achieving ‘permanent conservation’ of the iconic forests, the reality is that without active management there can be no conservation.

150 years ago, areas now thick with cypress were grassland or open box woodland with cypress controlled by local aboriginals through the use of fire.

The forests that the government now wants to ‘conserve’ are a recent phenomenon and have developed with the local timber industry – koala and barking owls habitat enhanced through responsible forestry practices.

The Government has announced that workers who lose their jobs will be offered either new jobs or receive redundancy payments of $72,000.

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The picture at the above link is from Ted Haymen. He sent it to me with the following explaination, “This is compartment 24 Pilliga West State Forest, one of the WCA so called icon areas. It would have once been open box woodland but has been invaded by cypress and bull oak regrowth. Although they still look attractive, the large Box trees in this photo are at the end of their life, decaying, with many in a state of collapse. Competition from the dense regrowth has prevented the regeneration of replacements. There was a thinning operation in this block but it was stopped due to the moratorium. If left unmanaged, in perhaps fifty years few box trees will remain.”

Background information can be found at my blog post of April 21, 2005 titled ‘Timber Communities and National Parks (Part 1)‘ (scroll down to find it).

John Quiggin’s Publications

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Following my blog post of 26th April (Australia’s Highest Paid Blogger) John Quiggin has written to me asking that the following information be provided by way of clarification with respect to the paragraph in that blog post starting “Quiggin’s University home page gives a list of his submissions, newspaper articles, conference and …”.

“The project will develop tools for the modelling of uncertainty in the absence of probabilities and with imperfect knowledge about possible events. It will also formalise and assess the precautionary principle for the sustainable management of complex systems. Finally, the project will apply these tools to analyse and improve policies for the reform of property rights, institutions and land and water management in the Murray-Darling system. The project will assist in the formulation of sustainable responses to problems of drought and irrigation-related salinity in the Murray-Darling system.

As reported on the RSMG website, http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/rsmg/index.htm,
the project has so far produced more than 50 publications, in the Murray-Darling Basin Program and the Risk and Uncertainty Program. (The Public Policy Program relates to a separate grant). Restricting attention to the Murray-Darling, and to papers written by me, I have published 2 journal articles, 4 conference papers and 7 working papers.”

Ends.