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Abstract
Excessive irrigation has caused waterlogging in some parts of the Burdekin delta, while continued extraction of groundwater has reduced the hydraulic head of the aquifer and resulted in seawater intrusion. A groundwater management model was adapted to simulate the impact of various groundwater management strategies on waterlogging and seawater intrusion. The estimated areas subject to waterlogging and seawater intrusion, along with simulated data from a crop yield model, were used in a mathematical programming model to account for the economic impacts of the alternative groundwater management options in two neighbouring water board areas – North Burdekin Water Board (NBWB) and South Burdekin Water Board (SBWB) – in the Burdekin delta. The aggregate net revenues of all the management options are lower in the NBWB compared to the SBWB. In the NBWB, the aggregate net revenue is highest when groundwater use is also highest, while the aggregate net revenue is lowest when groundwater use is also lowest. In the SBWB, the aggregate net revenue is highest when groundwater use is relatively low and lowest when groundwater use is maximum.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
M E Qureshi
Dr M Ejaz Qureshi is a senior economist and policy analyst in the CSIRO’s division of Land and Water in Canberra. He is involved in CSIRO’s flagship program Healthy Country for Water Benefit, in development of an integrated biophysical and economic modelling framework to account for water benefits and examine economic impact of various policies addressing water scarcity issues and management in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB).
Ejaz recently completed a social and economic integration project to examine economic impact of natural resource management policies on different sectors and regions of Australia, including impact of regional and sectoral impacts of increased water demand in the future, using a computable general equilibrium modelling framework. He also coordinated a project on tourism values in icon sites of the MDB and estimated regional, sectoral and national impacts of tourism values due to enhanced environmental flows while at the same time reducing irrigation water allocations.
Before joining CSIRO, Ejaz worked as a principal research economist in the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and carried out a range of projects on natural resource research issues, including sustainable groundwater use, salinity, asset fixity and impact of economic instruments on sustainable water resource management. He also coordinated and administered the Australian National Action Plan for Salinity, and Water Quality and Market Based Instruments projects.
K Bajracharya
Dr Kiran Bajracharya is a senior hydrologist at the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water. His responsibilities primarily involve addressing the real world regional scale problems on sustainable use of Queensland water resources and assisting the managers in their decision making process by means of numerical modelling.
In the past decade, Kiran has developed several regional scale groundwater and seawater intrusion models for the management of groundwater resources of Queensland. More recently, he has been working on management models required for Water Resource Plan and Resource Operations Plan, addressing the issues on environmental flows and groundwater dependent ecosystems. He is also involved in collaborative work on efficient solution of density dependent problems with the Queensland University of Technology, through Strategic Partnerships with the Industry – Research and Training Scheme.
Prior to joining the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water, Kiran was a research fellow with the University of Western Australia in Perth. His primary research area is in flow and transport processes especially on reactive heavy metals. His research interests include numerical methods, optimisation and uncertainty analysis. He has published extensively and is the author of a number of journal articles, refereed conference papers and technical reports.
S E Qureshi
Sumaira Ejaz Qureshi has recently started her PhD program in the field of bioinformatics at the Australian National University in Canberra. Before starting her PhD, Sumaira worked as a lecturer in the School of Mathematics at Canberra University, teaching various statistics-related subjects to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. During this time, she also continued her research activities in the filed of geostatistics and worked part time as a research officer (Technical Editor) in the W H Bryan Mining Geology Research Center at the University of Queensland, Brisbane.
Earlier, Sumaira was a visiting research fellow and tutor for statistics in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at James Cook University, Townsville, along with being involved in a mathematical modeling project. As a part of this project, she helped in the development of various algebraic and mathematical modeling tools used in assessing profitability of sugarcane growing in the central and north Queensland regions, particularly examining impact of alternative groundwater management options on sea water intrusion and waterlogging, and their impact on sugarcane profitability.
M Kirby
Dr Mac Kirby is a principal research scientist with CSIRO Land and Water. He has worked on a range of natural resource issues in soil management, irrigation and drainage. Mac is currently working on large scale integrated water resource and economic assessments, mainly in the Murray-Darling and Mekong river basins. He has written over 200 journal papers, conference papers and reports on natural resource management.