Acquiring Water for the Environment: Lessons from Natural Resources Management

ABSTRACT

Over-allocation of water resources to irrigation, industry, and cities has severely impacted flow-dependent riverine ecosystems and led to growing interest in ways to restore water to the environment; one increasingly popular approach is water buybacks. This paper reviews US and Australian experiences in buying back water, focusing on the conditions which enable and inhibit environmental water acquisitions in each country. We also compare experiences with buyback efforts in fisheries, another natural resource sector. Lessons from these experiences provide important insights into how future water buyback programmes to acquire environmental water could be operated more effectively. The review suggests that the overall success of an environmental water buyback is likely to be enhanced by (1) legal and institutional settings which clearly define water rights and lower administrative and other barriers to water transfers, (2) non-governmental organizations and community groups which play a complementary role to government, (3) creation of a system that will fairly distribute future risk of water availability and provide choices for a variety of ways of obtaining water, and (4) efforts that minimize negative community impacts, thus helping to maximize irrigator participation.

KEY WORDS:

• Buybacks
• environmental water
• instream flows
• Murray–Darling basin
• western USA
• water markets
• fisheries

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Peter Söderbaum and two anonymous reviewers, whose helpful comments improved this paper. This research was funded by grants from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and the Lois Roth Foundation, which enabled the lead author to spend a year researching in Australia. The research was also supported by a George Perkins Marsh Conservation Fellowship from Vermont Law School and an Australian Research Council linkage grant with partner organizations including the MDBA, Goulburn-Murray Water, NSW Department of Energy and Office of Water, Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, CSIRO, and University of Lethbridge, Canada.

Notes

1. Currently the only environmental water purchase in Canada is by Ducks Unlimited, who extracts water and then pumps it into wetlands to maintain it for duck habitats (Bjornlund, 2010).

2. Schempp (2009) provides a detailed overview of different legal approaches western states have employed to manage water more sustainably, including various ways in which states have recognized environmental flows as beneficial uses.

3. Irrigation districts are formed when land owners come together to create a district typically for new irrigation development or to acquire existing irrigation infrastructure. The district, rather than individual irrigators, usually owns the water rights and irrigation infrastructure.

4. In this paper, the term community or communities refers broadly to the people who are part of or impacted by the agricultural or fishing industry in a particular geographic area (small rural towns in irrigation regions or fishing villages). There is almost certainly a diversity of views toward water transfers and water buybacks within these communities, and thus it is important to keep in mind that these statements about communities are necessarily general, referring to the most commonly expressed attitudes.

5. In Australia, water right holders have water access entitlements, which give the right holder permanent access to a share of water. All entitlement holders also receive water allocations each year, which are specific amounts of water and are expressed as a percentage of the entitlements. The percentages vary from year to year, based on the amount of water available.

6. Total figures for environmental water available for the MDB are higher than this number because they include water saved from irrigation infrastructure and other efficiency projects. This paper focuses solely on market buybacks of water.