Australia approves plan to save vital river system

Space Daily via AFP: Australia approved an "historic" plan Thursday to save an ailing river system vital to the nation's food bowl by returning the equivalent of five Sydney Harbour's worth of water to the network each year.

Environment Minister Tony Burke said he signed into law the final draft of a water reform plan for the Murray-Darling Basin, a river network sprawling for one million square kilometres (400,000 square miles) across five Australian states.

The scheme will see 2,750 gigalitres of water, equivalent to five Sydney Harbours, returned annually as environmental flows to the system -- short of the 4,000 gigalitres sought by conservationists but more than wanted by farmers.

Burke said the figure could reach 3,200 gigalitres with infrastructure improvements to which the government had committed Aus$1.77 billion (US$1.83 billion). Two million tonnes of salt -- enough to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground -- would also be flushed out every year under the plan, which he described as "historic".

"The foundation and reason for the reform is unequivocally and unapologetically to restore the system to health," Burke told reporters "Consistent over-allocation and mismanagement (have) seriously degraded the health of the system."...

Menindee Lakes in NSW from 16,000 feet, part of the Murray-Darling system, shot by Tim Keegan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license