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OS6c Water markets and water sharing approaches

abstract 110

MONITORING THE IMPACTS OF WATER TRADING SOME METHODS AND RESULTS FROM AN AUSTRALIAN WATER MARKET

Author(s): Bjornlund Henning

Keyword(s): water markets, water trading, monitoring, Australia, impact assessment

Article:

Poster:

Session: OS6c Water markets and water sharing approaches

AbstractWater markets are introduced in many jurisdictions as a key economic instrument to facilitate a

reallocation of existing water between competing users and to encourage water conservation. This is done to achieve

two objectives, to: i) avoid or defer investments in supply infrastructure and thereby reduce the associated financial,

political, social and environmental costs; and ii) reallocate exiting resources from inefficient low value users to

efficient high value users. It is anticipated that this will reduce the socioeconomic impact of reallocating water away

from existing users (irrigation) to meet increased demand from new or expanding users (the environment, recreation,

and urban).

However, the introduction of water trading has been widely opposed within irrigation communities

and among environmental advocates. The community concern is associated with the social and community impact

within the communities depending on irrigation as the economic engine to generate off-farm and on-farm jobs and

council revenue as well as the impact on individual irrigators. The environmental concern is associated with the

potential negative impact of trading water from one location to another and from one use to another. Proponents of

water markets argue that the socioeconomic benefits from trading water into new areas and uses by far outweigh the

potential cost of moving water out of existing areas and uses.

In response increased reliance is placed on

monitoring the impact of trading so that policies can be adapted over time to ensure environmentally, socially and

economically sustainable or acceptable outcomes within the context of the wider catchment community. Australia has

implemented aggressive policy reforms since the early 1990s. This reform process gained momentum in 2004 with a

National Water Initiative. This calls for more efficient and sophisticated water markets based on an unbundling of the

set of rights traditionally embedded in a water right, the creation of new secure water registers facilitating investor

confidence and certainty, and the removal of barriers to trade. As part of this process, as well as of the process of

developing water sharing plans to define environmental needs and share the water available for consumptive use

between competing users, the monitoring of the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of trading and new

allocation outcomes has been an integral requirement of implementing authorities. Much research has therefore gone

into designing processes to regularly monitor and report on the impact of theses policies.

This paper will

report on the outcome of one of these research projects. We have surveyed traders annually from 2003-06 within

the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District in Victoria resulting in more than 1,200 returned questionnaires. A different

approach was used each year including electronic questionnaires, questionnaires send to all traders and

questionnaires send to a sample of traders to find the cheapest and fastest way of collecting data in a reliable manner.

We also compare results from each of the three years as well as comparing these three years to the results from a

similar survey conducted by the author in 2000 to try and establish a suitable time interval between each monitoring

and reporting activity.

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Practical Infos

MONITORING THE IMPACTS OF WATER TRADING SOME METHODS AND RESULTS FROM AN AUSTRALIAN WATER MARKET