Australia’s Big Dry
They’ve been living with one since 2002 with no end in sight. The impact of their dry siege is being felt hardest in Australia’s food bowl, which is the Murray-Darling basin in the southeastern part of the continent. Here, on a vast arid plain the size of France and Spain combined, 40 percent of the nation’s agricultural produce is grown and 85 percent of the water used nationally for irrigation is collected and dispersed.
But by common acknowledgment, the good times are over. The once flourishing ecosystem of the Murray River is virtually gone and its steady flow, which normally supplied up to 90 percent of urban Adelaide’s water supply, is at a near standstill. Even when the drought breaks, as it assuredly will some day, few environmental scientists expect Australia to return to the cooler, wetter conditions that farmers and developers relied on over the last half-century. With a sense of urgency, and only a fraction of the usual water allotments to hand out to this thirsty land, Australia’s provincial and federal governments are now scrambling to figure out what to do about the belatedly acknowledged crisis and how to get the public to accept the tough conservation measures that must come.
“What we’re seeing with this drought is a frightening glimpse of the future with global warming,” says South Australia’s premier, Mike Rann. He echoes the warnings of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which has predicted that the hotter, drier future will also bring more frequent and intense brush fires, tropical cyclones, significant loss of biodiversity, and coastal flooding. Not even the Great Barrier Reef is expected to escape catastrophic damage.
Reminiscent of California’s experience, the crisis inevitably pits region against region, big cities against rural areas, environmentalists against farm interests, and growers of some crops against others in what is fast becoming a high-stakes competition for a shrinking water supply in many parts of the world. How Australians sort it all out may hold important lessons for the rest of us.