There was a brief exchange in the Senate over a report entitled Engineering a Crisis in a Ramsar Wetland: the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth, Australia from the Australian Wetlands and Rivers Centre at the UNSW. It part of a squabble about the water --- flows in rivers, water in dams and irrigation channels--in the Murray-Darling Basin.

The Engineering a Crisis report called for 700 gigalitres as the minimum requirement for an estuarine-freshwater ecosystem in the Lower Lakes to restore conditions favourable for waterbird populations in the Coorong.

foreshore, Coorong, originally uploaded by poodly.

Senator Wong's question was how do we conjure up this water when over the last three years we know we have been at one-fifth of the long-term average? Her answer was that we do not have enough water. Hanson-Young's response was to ask whether it was responsible to relax Adelaide’s water restrictions whilst returning no water to the lower lakes and the Coorong.

This raises the issue of sustainable limitsraised by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. This refers to enforceable limits on the quantities of surface water and groundwater that can be taken from the Basin water resources. What is environmentally sustainable is defined as the level at which water can be taken from a Basin water resource without compromising the key environmental assets, key ecosystem functions, productive base or key environmental outcomes of the water resource.

The context here is that the satellite data shows that the big loss of water happened beneath the surface in the Murray-Darling Basin: the groundwater, essentially, is drying out. So the situation in the Murray-Darling basin system is not one of a crisis for the river; it's a crisis for our groundwater system and also for the entire landscape as a whole.

It is a crisis for the landscape as a whole because the 13-year drought is not just a natural dry stretch but a shift related to climate change.