Water

When the Soviet Union existed and included Kazakhstan and Usbekistan, tremendous volumes of water were diverted from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to grow cotton. This resulted in the drying up of the Aral Sea a once huge body of water in Central Asia supporting a large fishing industry.

Its a famous example of cotton and irrigation destroying a downstream environment.

Last night I was sent a link to a piece in The Independent titled ‘The Dead Sea that Sprang to Life’ by Geoffrey Lean suggesting that the North Aral sea has been restored, that its a sea again:

“The Aral Sea was one of the world’s biggest inland bodies of water – until Soviet engineers destroyed it in the 1960s. Now, thanks to a new dam, it’s coming back.

… Fresh fish are on sale cheaply again in markets near the world’s most desiccated sea. Cold green water is creeping back towards dozens of long-abandoned harbours, and for the first time in a generation, fishermen are launching their boats where recently there were only waves of sand.

Life is returning astonishingly quickly to the North Aral Sea in Central Asia, partially reversing one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters. Just months after the completion of a dam to conserve its waters, the sea has largely recovered – confounding experts who said it was beyond rescue. Since April the level of the sea has risen by more than 3m, flooding over 800 sq km of dried-out seabed, and bringing hope to a part of the world bereft of it since Soviet engineers stole the waters in the 1960s.”

The North Aral Sea is part of Kazakhstan and this country is apparently making money out of its large oil and gas reserves. It has wanted to restore the Sea and successfully got money from Japan through the World Bank to build a dyke to hold water back from flowing south to Usbekistan and the South Aral Sea.

What is the impact going to be on the South Aral Sea?

According to this report from a traveller who visited the South Aral Sea in July 1998 there was still some water and a fishing industry:

“It took us about 3 hours to reach Moynaq. Crossed another pontoon bridge outside Nukus. I had expected to see miles of salted sand and rocks. Instead there was a fair bit of wild vegetation on what was previously the sea. The graveyard of ships – the most “popular” attraction of Karakalpakstan – was a sad and desolate place. I was told that the Aral Sea’s shrinking seemed to have reversed slightly in recent years. In fact, they said that the fishing industry is not totally dead. There are still 120 fishermen. Let’s hope this is a turning point. Even then, most people do not see substantial improvement for the foreseeable future.

Has anybody been to Central Asia recently – more specifically the Aral Sea?

The piece in The Independent finished with comment that:

“But after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the new state of Kazakhstan, home of the North Aral Sea, decided to try to rescue it [North Aral Sea], first by building a dam across its narrow connection with the southern sea and then trying to fill it. Two attempts failed, but the World Bank eventually agreed to help. By the time the new dam in the Berg Strait was completed last year, work had also been done to rescue the Syr Darya river, which flows into the northern sea, and its flow was doubled.

Even optimists thought it would take years for the small sea to recover; pessimists said it could never happen. But it has now filled up to the top of the dam, and the waters are flowing back towards Aralsk, the main port in the north, having previously retreated as far as 80km. Fishermen in the surrounding villages are going to sea again, and there are plans to release 30 million young fish into its waters to restock the North Aral.

There are seven wonders in the world and the eighth is the dam on the Aral Sea,” says Kolbai Danabayev, vice-mayor of Aralsk. There are now plans to raise it further, swelling the sea over the next five years. As it is, water is now spilling over the dam into the southern sea, but there is no sign of a similar recovery there. It is much bigger, the problems are much greater, and Uzbekistan, which controls much of it – and most of the Amu Darya river – shows little interest.

In the south, journalist Fred Pearce says in a ground- breaking book, When the Rivers Run Dry, even the local International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea is increasing diversion of the water away from it. But the recovery of the north, which has the potential to be the greatest environmental comeback ever, shows all need not be lost.”

But there must be more to the story than this? Who did they take the water from? Was it just a case of closing down the local cotton industry? Have they had rain upstream lately?

Has anybody been to Central Asia recently – more specifically Kazakhstan?

The largest dam in the world, The Three Gorge Dam on the Yangtze River in China, was completed, and ahead of schedule, just last week. And last week controversy errupted where I live in south eastern Queensland, Australia, over plans to dam the Mary River.

Interestingly the proposal to dam the Mary was not part of the blueprint for future infrastructure development released by the Queensland state government just last year, click here for the full report.

Right now, I don’t really have an opinion on whether the dam should or shouldn’t be built. But I would like some information about how much water it is going to deliver relative to other options including water recycling and desalination.

But I guess a problem for government scientists making forward projections is global warming. I guess there is an expectation that the dam will fill with water, yet the same Queensland government last year announced in parliament that we are going to have 40 percent less rainfall in 70 years (or was it 70 percent less rainfall in 40 years) as a consequence of global warming. [ Can someone find the link for me to the comments by Minister Stephen Robinson?]

For anyone interested in reading some of the opinion associated with a new dam proposal in Australia, I’ve been sent the following list of links by a reader of this blog:

http://www.qld.greens.org.au/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=243
http://www.savethemaryriver.com/
http://econews.org.au/story1_14.php?PHPSESSID=d0ba0bfd1dfdf5bb290ec2517a234e2a
http://www.themaryvalley.com.au/html/cms/103/traveston-dam-mary-river
http://www.qld.nationals.org.au/news/default.asp?action=article&ID=560

It is also interesting that the Queensland government just last year essentially banned dam building in northern Queensland through its Wild River’s legislation. Yet this is where the big rivers are in this big state. The Mary is really a little stream. Perhaps hardly worth the bother of daming?

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About the Three Gorges Dam, according to Xinhua News:

“The concrete placement of the Dam’s main section was completed 10 months ahead of schedule, which will enable the Dam to start its role in power generation, flood control and shipping improvement in 2008, one year ahead of designated time.

After the cofferdam is demolished on June 6, the dam’s main wall, often compared to the Great Wall in its scale, will formally begin to hold water, protecting 15 million people and 1.5 million hectares of farm land downstream from floodings, which had haunted the Yangtze River valley for thousands of years. Upon the demolition, a new landscape featuring a reservoir with a serene water surface behind the spectacular dam will gradually come into being along with planned rises of the water level.

The Three Gorges, which consist of Qutang, Wuxia and Xiling Gorges, extend for about 200 km on the upper and middle reaches of the Yangtze. They have become a popular world-class tourist destination noted for beautiful natural landscapes and a great number of historical and cultural relics. This section of the Yangtze has a narrow river course which is inconvenient for shipping but boasts abundant hydroelectric resources.

… As China’s longest and the world’s third longest, the Yangtze River, together with the Yellow River, nurtured the Chinese civilization. However, its floodings have since long threatened lives and properties of residents along its valley. The latest deluge happened in 1998, which claimed about 1,000 lives and incurred approximately 100 billion yuan (12.5 billion U.S. dollars) in economic losses.”

On the downside I understand more than a million people were displaced as part of its construction and it was to cost about $27 billion to build.

I have previously expressed concern that graziers in the Macquarie Marshes are diverting environmental water from the Ramsar-listed nature reserve to private land.

About two weeks ago I asked the NSW government whether the levy bank, as shown in this aerial photograph blocking the flow of water into the southern nature reserve in November 2005, was a legal structure.

At the time I was advised by email, following a phone conservation, that:

“We are still trying to identify where this bank/levee/channel is actually constructed. Until we can accurately locate it we cannot say for sure whether it is an approved work or not. Similarly, until we locate it accurately we are unable to ascertain whether it had any impact, adverse or otherwise, on the October/November 05 environmental flow release. The department will contact you again once we have more details.”

Following is a satellite photograph showing the Macquarie Marshes in December 1999 (green areas show flooding) and it is evident that the same levy bank is blocking water from reaching the southern nature reserve and holding it on private land.

Environmentalists, and graziers, and government, all agree the marshes need more water. Indeed reed beds need water. Yet, I received the following justification for the levy bank from the NSW government today:

“Investigations carried out by DNR have now confirmed that the bank in question is located on a water course known as the Monkeygar Creek Return. This embankment was constructed by the then land-holders approximately 15 years ago with the sanction of the then Department of Water Resources and National Parks & Wildlife Service.

This embankment was constructed to slow down the passage of water in the Monkeygar Creek Return so as to prevent serious headward erosion and channelisation of Monkeygar Creek.

Headward stream channel erosion has been a major cause of wetland degradation and this embankment has been beneficial in the establishment and maintenance of important reed beds in the Marshes.

This work is considered to be an environment improvement work because of the benefit it serves to the preservation of the Macquarie Marshes reed beds and by preventing stream channel erosion.”

It doesn’t make sense.

I would like to see the extent of the change in the area of reed bed since that levy bank went in – bet it has contracted.

Yesterday the Sydney Morning Herald ran yet another nonsense story about the Macquarie Marshes. I reckon that their journalist, Anne Davies, was hoodwinked.

There is a strong belief that more water, in particular more environmental flows, will solve the environmental problems of the Murray-Darling Basin. Flood plain graziers have a vested interest in lobbying for more water, particularly in the Macquarie Marshes, where they claim “fat ducks equal fat cattle”.

I have previously posted photographs at this blog suggesting that a problem in the marshes may be overgrazing rather than inadequate environmental flows. Only 12 percent of the marshes are nature reserve leaving 88 percent for cattle fattening.

But the ‘eye poking’ is mostly always of cotton growers, despite evidence of overgrazing. This is what Anne Davies, the State Political Editor, at the Sydney Morning Herald had to say yesterday under the emotive title ‘As politicians squabble the wetlands die’.

“Then in the 1960s the Burrendong Dam was built, and after that came more intensive farming of cotton. By the late 1980s cotton farming had increased fourfold and irrigation licences meant less than 30 per cent of the original water flow was reaching the marshes.

Measures were then put in place to save the remaining 50 per cent of the marshes with considerable pain to the irrigators. But it proved to be insufficient. Last October, the Department of Environment conducted its annual aerial survey of wetland birds. The results, compounded by the continuing drought, were shocking.

“For the second year in a row, record low numbers of waterbirds were counted on the Macquarie Marshes,” the scientists wrote. “The marshes averaged 30,000 in the 1980s, never below 100 but this year less than 10 birds.”

There is a lot of misinformation here. I wonder who gave her that story? Who is the unnamed scientist?

I visited the marshes last October, when there were apparently only 10 birds to found, and here is one of the many photographs I took. Also, I saw lots of birds including great egrets, black ducks, reed warblers, straw necked ibis and spoon bills.

While Davies suggests the marshes are now receiving less than 30 percent of original water flow, since the 1996 water sharing plan, the official figure has been 85 percent. That is the marshes now receive 85 percent of their long term average annual flow.

The idea that birds have reduced in number from 30,000 to 10 since the 1980s is not consistent with the various technical reports or Atlas of Australian Birds which shows numbers of most colonial nesting waterbird species increased for the Darling Riverine Plains Bioregion over the past 20 years.

The graziers manipulate water flow in the marshes and one land holder in the region tells me new wetland habitat has been created by artificially directing flow into the Gum-Cowal Terrigal Creek wetlands and in this way directed water away from nature reserve to private land.

Here is an aerial photograph taken on 25th November 2005 showing a levy bank in the Terrigal/Gum Cowal system.

According to the landholder who sent me the photograph, “This is the system that we have been challenging strongly about even receiving much water, has now got the Ramsar wetland on it on private land although it is in conflict with the nature reserve. This is a system that should only receive minimal water under current conditions. An exceptional amount of environmental water has been pushed down there of late and virtually doesn’t reach the other end. It is held up by many banks such as this purely to develop wetlands for grazing as you can see in the image.”

The following photograph shows a levy bank just south of the southern nature reserve holding water on private land and preventing it reaching the nature reserve.