Australia’s Water Is Vanishing

We climbed into Whyte’s pickup, and I reached instinctively over my shoulder. “Don’t worry about seat belts,” he said, amiably but firmly. “I know it’s a habit.” His Jack Russell terrier, Molly, balanced herself on his lap as he drove. 

Whyte, who has reddish-brown hair, sheltered his ruddy, sun-weathered face beneath a battered bush hat. He raises livestock, mostly sheep and some cattle, on nearly 80,000 acres. Normally he’d run about 7,500 sheep, but he was down to 2,000. There wasn’t enough water for more. “I can’t remember it being this dry,” he said. “It’s disheartening to see a landscape like this. You hate it. This is where I was born and grew up, and it means the world to me.”

He kept driving, rattling off statistics about rainfall (down) and temperatures (up). Every so often he’d stop and get out to check on one of the storage tanks dotting the property, which held what little water he had. After a while we pulled onto the crest of a small hill, and Whyte pointed out Yelta Lake, a kidney-shaped landmark that’s colored, on maps, in a reassuringly cool blue. In real life it was the same dun color as everything else. “It hasn’t had any water in it since 2014,” he said.

This area, the Murray-Darling Basin, is supposed to be Australia’s agricultural heartland. It’s named for two of the continent’s most important rivers, which converge at the border of New South Wales and Victoria before flowing west and south to the sea. Three million people drink from the system every day, and locals like to boast that another 40 million rely on it for food—Australia’s population of 25 million plus many more across Asia.

The region has also long been at the vanguard of the Australian economy. Along the Darling, 19th century settlers made and lost fortunes from wool, one of the continent’s first global export commodities. The town of Broken Hill, near the basin’s western boundary, was a cradle of Australia’s labor movement and its all-important mining industry, lending its initials to what’s now the world’s largest miner, BHP Group.

Today the Murray-Darling is at the leading edge of  something very different: a series of crises that could soon envelop river systems in Africa, South Asia, and the American West, as temperatures rise and economies compete for strained supplies. The area has spent most of the past several years in a drought so savage that it completely dried out sections of the Darling for months at a time. In some areas residents rely on boxed water from the supermarket. Unable to afford water, farmers have resorted to pulling out once-profitable crops and pumping illegally from depleted stocks.

The basin’s weather has always been marked by extremes, but scientists say what’s happening now is utterly different: an historic shift driven by man-made climate change, with less-predictable rainfall reducing the amount of water flowing into the system and higher temperatures rapidly evaporating what does arrive. Australia’s hottest and driest year on record was 2019, and 9 of its 10 hottest have occurred since 2005—a significant reason the continent was ravaged earlier this year by some of the worst wildfires in its history. Although the Murray-Darling received welcome rain in recent weeks, long-term predictions indicate that, as the planet warms, the basin’s droughts will only grow longer and more severe.

That would be an environmental and economic disaster, caused in no small part by the fossil fuels Australia, the world’s second-biggest coal exporter, produced itself. The country also has some of the highest per-capita carbon emissions on the planet, and its last Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was ousted by his own party after trying to pass more ambitious emissions targets. His replacement, Scott Morrison, once brandished a lump of coal on the floor of Parliament to demonstrate his support for the stuff.

The situation in the Murray-Darling has become one of the bitterest subjects in Australian society, pitting family farmers, agribusiness tycoons, community activists, scientists, and politicians against one another in a cycle of mutual recrimination. The core of the problem, many say, is the reluctance of political leaders to address what’s happening to the climate, let alone to have an honest conversation about how citizens should use water as a result. And if Australia—rich, democratic, and with fewer people to supply than some Asian megacities—can’t manage this challenge, there may not be much hope for anyone else.

As we ranged around Whyte’s property, he spotted a few dozen sheep migrating slowly across the plain. One, an older ewe, had fallen away from the rest and lay prone in the dirt as the group ambled away. Whyte stopped the truck and walked over, helping her up and nudging her toward the others. She seemed all right as she shuffled off, but Whyte doubted she’d last much longer. “When it’s dry like this,” he said, “death’s in the air.”

Although the basin is rugged by almost any standard, it has been profoundly shaped by human activity. The Murray’s first weir—a low dam that regulates the flow of water—was built in 1922, the initial piece of a dense network of locks, dams, and pumping systems. The goal of all this engineering was, essentially, to smooth out the natural variations in the rivers’ flows, keeping more water upstream for farming and storing the excess. The result was a bounty that today accounts for more than a third of Australia’s food supply, with agricultural production worth A$22 billion ($14.4 billion) a year.

The area’s administrative infrastructure is equally complex. The Murray-Darling includes four states—New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and Victoria—that all influence its management and sometimes disagree angrily. In theory, overarching decisions are made by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, a federal body charged in 2008 with answering two basic questions: What, or whom, should a river be for? And how can it be managed to achieve the desired ends?

The plan the MDBA is implementing has several key components. One of the most important is to treat water as a commercial good, allocated to the highest bidder. The trading system that carries this out evolved from previous, less formal arrangements to become arguably the world’s most sophisticated water market, complete with options and forward contracts. Its defining feature is the separation of use and ownership; asset managers and hedge funds take positions in Australian water, betting they can profit by selling it on to farmers or industrial operations that need it.

The MDBA also seeks to reduce overall withdrawals by setting aside “environmental water,” which is then protected from human use and channeled to recharge wetlands and fish habitats. But environmentalists and scientists have argued that the authority’s environmental targets are much too modest—and therefore too generous to big water users—to keep the Murray-Darling healthy, and that it didn’t take sufficient account of climate change in projecting how much water would be available. 

“Every ecological indicator you can think of has been in decline” in the basin, including fish stocks and the health of bird habitats, Maryanne Slattery, a water consultant in Canberra, told me. “Socially and economically it’s in major decline as well.” She blames the trend in part on the trading system, which has allowed deep-pocketed farmers of a few lucrative, water-intensive products—above all, nuts and cotton—to accumulate water at the expense of other agriculture. “On the current trajectory we’ll be growing just these two crops,” she said. “I would just urge every other country not to follow what Australia’s done.” (The MDBA’s chief executive, Phillip Glyde, said in an interview that the agency has proceeded “based on the best science we could find” and will adjust its usage assessments as research evolves. “You don’t turn around 100 years of overallocation overnight,” he said.)

The most obvious signal that something unprecedented was occurring in the Murray-Darling came near the Menindee Lakes, which share their name with a small town a short distance from their shores. The lakes are natural features, but they were extensively altered in the 1950s to serve as reservoirs—absorbing water from upstream, sequestering it, and supplying farms and towns down the Darling as needed. When full, they hold 1,731 gigaliters, more than three times the volume of Sydney Harbour, across 50 square kilometers (about 19 square miles) of surface area.

As important as the lakes are, most Australians had barely heard of Menindee until December 2018, when residents began finding scads of dead cod, perch, and other fish floating belly up in a part of the Darling normally fed by the lakes. The culprit was a phenomenon called thermal stratification, which followed from a chain of environmental calamities. First, a lack of flowing water, extremely hot weather, and intense sunlight had created ideal conditions for algae to thrive. Then, when the algae died, they sank to the bottom and were consumed by microbes that also drastically reduced the quantity of oxygen available at depth. When the weather suddenly cooled—from a searing 49C (120F) to 23C during one fish kill event—the top layer of water sank, mixing with lower layers and reducing the overall oxygen levels too low for survival. The December 2018 event killed tens of thousands of fish, according to the Australian Academy of Science. Two more the following month eliminated millions.

A little more than a year later, water and its absence were Menindee’s central preoccupations. Outside the Maidens Hotel bar—the town has no stoplights but two pubs—a hand-painted sign thanked patrons for donating water. The fluid that comes out of the taps, drawn partly from what remains in the Darling, is sometimes pungent and brown, and residents avoid drinking it.

Then there are the lakes themselves. They were mostly empty by the time the fish started dying, thanks to scant rainfall and withdrawals for irrigation. When I visited, they were vast, scrubby plains, roamed by scattered livestock that kept close to the patches of liquid that remained. It was as if some deity had parted the waters and forgotten to release them back.

About 45 kilometers (28 miles) south of town, I met a farmer who’s become, for better or worse, the face of the Menindee area’s problems. Rob McBride is the owner of Tolarno Station, a sprawling ranch that dates to the early years of European settlement. He divides his time between Adelaide and the spacious Tolarno homestead, a whitewashed, slightly ramshackle pile so perfectly evocative of colonial Australia that it could illustrate a children’s picture book. Overnight visitors, McBride told me with complete seriousness, sometimes make the acquaintance of the house’s longest-tenured resident, a French-speaking ghost named Christine.

McBride is well over 6 feet tall, with thinning gray hair and lanky limbs. He came to prominence during the fish kills when his daughter, Kate, filmed him and another local standing up to their knees in the stagnant Darling, holding giant cod—stiff, bloated, and very much dead. McBride called it “a man-made disaster.” The video got millions of views online and media coverage across the country. He became a local celebrity, an advocate for what he portrays as a community failed by decision-makers at all levels of government and business. “It’s become a travesty, what’s actually happening in our river system,” McBride told me in the homestead’s dining room. At one end of the table stood a detailed model of the Rodney, a paddle steamer that once plied the river a few meters from the front door. “I’ve never seen this country look worse.”

Endurance in the face of volatile conditions has long been celebrated in rural Australia. My Country, an early 20th century poem by Dorothea Mackellar that’s widely taught in schools, reads, in part, “I love a sunburnt country / A land of sweeping plains / Of ragged mountain ranges, / Of droughts and flooding rains.” McBride is convinced the time for stoicism has passed. Temperatures in the basin have been consistently above the long-term average since the 1990s, while rainfall has declined. Those changes, which most scientists who’ve studied the issue say will only become more pronounced, are scrambling old assumptions about water use.

In particular, McBride said, industrial farming needs to be restrained. “Australia’s bringing in vast amounts of almonds and cotton because that’s about profit,” he complained. “Overextraction of water is creating an absolute disaster. … We’re at the precipice now. Literally within the next five years you could have the whole Murray-Darling Basin system collapse.” 

If that happens, he fears, the family farms that have defined the region for generations will disappear, along with most of the wildlife, as whatever water remains is siphoned up for one or two export crops. In his scenario, all manner of citrus orchards, vineyards, and dairy farms would no longer be viable, depriving the country of an agricultural fortress that ensures access to “the best-quality food in the world”—an asset whose value has been underscored by the coronavirus pandemic. “Unless we protect our rivers and our lake system, we will have less for our children,” he said. “Who’s going to feed Australia?”

At times, McBride gets carried away. In our interview he claimed that people profiting from the current state of affairs were conspiring with the media to suppress stories about the drought, and at one point he attributed the actions of pro-agribusiness figures to a “1933 brownshirt mentality.” But it was hard to argue with his contention that a slow-motion disaster is unfolding. After our interview we walked down to the river. It was almost entirely dry, a banked ditch shaped like a skateboard halfpipe, with just a few disconnected, greenish pools of liquid. You could wander far without getting your feet wet. A long-forgotten fishing net lay in the sand near a half-dozen freshwater mussels the size of small fists, their shells bleached white by the sun.

The pump building is probably the single most important structure at the Bunargool orchard, which is operated by Select Harvests, a Melbourne-based company that grows almonds in several locations around the Murray-Darling Basin. Until relatively recently, almonds were a niche product in Australia, their exports a tiny fraction of traditional staples such as beef and wheat. Then came surging demand from India and China, along with the rise of plant-based diets in more developed economies. In 2006 almond orchards accounted for a little more than 17,500 hectares of land; in 2018 they covered more than 45,000 hectares, sustaining annual exports in excess of A$500 million.

Rising sales have let almond growers afford sufficient water rights in Australia’s trading market to keep their operations thriving even as other farms run dry. To advocates, this demonstrates the system’s efficiency and its assurance that water is used for the highest economic return. To critics, it shows how the market distorts agriculture and punishes those without the capital and expertise to navigate its complexities.

Select Harvests’ managing director, Paul Thompson, had agreed to show me around Bunargool, so we headed out in his 4x4. Few people were around. Although almonds’ closest cousins include peaches and nectarines—technically they’re seeds—they don’t require the delicate handling orchard fruit does, so their growth and harvest is highly mechanized. What they do need is water, and lots of it: more than 6.4 liters per almond, according to a 2018 study of growing conditions in California. Partway into the orchard we passed a storage pool, surrounded by an earthen embankment, that looked about the size of a hockey rink. “That’s a day’s water,” Thompson said.

It was harvest time, and things were looking good. As we traveled down a row of neatly planted trees, each watered by a drip-feed from a small irrigation pipe, Thompson pointed out one that had partly split, leaving a large bough on the ground. “Crop so big it broke a branch,” he said approvingly. We soon caught up to a canary-yellow vehicle called a Shockwave, which had an operator’s cab on one side and a ferocious-looking clamp on the other. At each tree the driver stopped to secure the grips to the base of the trunk. He then activated the clamp, shaking the trunk from side to side with remarkable violence. Almonds rained down, kicking up little clouds of red dust as they hit the ground. 

Later they’d be gathered for shelling, sorting, and packaging at Select Harvests’ local plant. Some would go out intact, others as paste, in huge plastic drums for use in almond butter or almond milk. The operation is spotless, high-tech, and, as Thompson is eager to point out, designed to avoid waste. Among other measures, the company burns almond hulls in an on-site co-generation facility, producing electricity it can sell into the grid. (This is preferable to having the hulls combust spontaneously, as they’re liable to do when left in large piles—one of the reasons the factory has its own fire trucks.)

At the plant office, which had the look of an accounting firm trying to seem hip, Ben Brown, the general manager for horticulture, gave me an overview of Select Harvests’ efforts to increase yields. It’s using an Israeli-designed analytics platform, Phytech, to measure orchard conditions, attaching sensors to individual trees to help determine water and other requirements. Another system draws on high-resolution photos of the tree canopy to identify areas of stress that might not be visible on the ground. The goal is efficiency, getting more almonds out of every unit of input. Water is, of course, the most important. Including ancillary costs such as electricity to run pumps, it accounts for more than 50% of expenses, Brown told me.

Even at maximum productivity, there’s no question that, as they continue to expand, Select Harvests and other almond growers will need more and more water, leaving less for everything else. The company’s orchards grew in size by 43% between 2014 and 2019, to 7,696 hectares, and more than a third of its plantings are considered “immature” and have yet to reach their full output.

Thompson described water as “a critical national resource” that needs to be managed accordingly, and he agreed with farmers like McBride that Australia needs to maintain a diversity of food sources. But he and others in the almond industry argue that, in the Murray-Darling, the water is flowing to the uses that generate the highest economic returns—in this case, a successful export that generates plenty of profit and tax revenue, if not much employment. A drought “means the more efficient farmers survive and the less efficient farmers don’t, and that’s not a bad thing,” Thompson said. “If my dry cleaner at the end of my road is inefficient, nobody writes him a check to help him out.”

I asked whether, as the climate warms and there’s less water to go around, an almond industry that consumes such a great share is really sustainable. Thompson prefers to view the problem differently. “Some people will say, ‘Are you using less water or more water?’ That’s the wrong question. The question is, ‘Are you producing more per megaliter?’ And we are.” That means more cash, which can be used to innovate further. “We will be more inventive,” he said. “We’re wonderful beasts.”

Owner Alan Whyte—a cousin to Gus—wasn’t home when we arrived. Nor was there anyone else or, for that matter, more than a tiny number of citrus trees. Whyte is one of several local farmers who reached a deal with the federal government in 2019 to pull out their once-profitable crops, which had become uneconomical thanks to the drought. The farmers did well by the agreement, giving up water rights in exchange for what the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported was more than A$30 million in compensation, but the aftermath was jarring to see. Jamesville’s fields, once planted with neat rows of oranges, were completely denuded, and the trailers that used to house workers for the harvest were empty. Dust clouds swirled overhead. Here and there I could see piles of blackened wood left over from the crop burn.

There was a bit of fetid-looking water in the river where it intersected the farm, and MacAllister spotted some fish in the shallows. They seemed to be floating more than swimming, their silvery bodies half-exposed to the baking sun. “This is really disturbing to me,” she said as she watched them struggle. “The water’s too warm, and the oxygen’s all wrong. They cook and suffocate all at once.”

MacAllister, who grew up in Mildura and lived in Darwin and Perth before returning to the area, is as Australian as they come. But she argued that the country, after building its identity partly on the conquest of nature, needs to realize what’s happening now is anything but natural. “There’s this almost nationalistic pride in adherence to the Dorothea Mackellar poem”—to the assumption, MacAllister said, that boom-bust cycles of drought and flood, among other extreme climatic patterns, are just a part of life to be overcome. This attitude was on display during the recent bushfires, notably when Prime Minister Morrison played down their connection to Australia’s climate record and emphasized instead the need for “resilience.” (His deputy, Michael McCormack, characterized discussions of a link as “the ravings of some pure, enlightened, and woke capital-city greenies.”)

What’s needed now, MacAllister said, is a broad discussion of how to move the Murray-Darling toward a sustainable balance. “Climate has not been considered at all,” she said. Among other steps, she wants the authorities to monitor withdrawals much more closely, to build a more comprehensive picture of how much water is being used: “We don’t know how much water is extracted, and we don’t know by whom or where.” There have been a few high-profile cases of theft. In 2018 a cotton farmer, Anthony Barlow, pleaded guilty to illegally pumping more than 150 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of water from the Barwon, another river in the basin, and was fined A$190,000.

MacAllister attributes much of the responsibility for this state of affairs to the National Party, traditionally the dominant political force in the region. Dedicated officially to representing the interests of rural areas, the Nats, as they’re known, are the junior partner in the coalition that’s ruled Australia for most of the past three decades, governing with the more genteel conservatives of the Liberal Party. Although they win far fewer votes than the Liberals or the opposition Labor Party, the Nats have outsize influence on policy. In recent years that’s meant emphatic support for industrial agriculture, oil-and-gas drilling, and mining—particularly of coal—along with deep skepticism about efforts to reduce emissions.

The National Party often receives cabinet positions with implications for rural areas, and it supplied the current minister for resources, water, and Northern Australia, Keith Pitt. A former sugar cane farmer who represents a coastal part of Queensland, he was named to the post by Morrison in February. He’d resigned from his last spell in a senior role, in 2018, citing his objections to the Paris Agreement on climate change. “I will always put reducing power prices before Paris,” he said at the time.

When I met with Pitt at his Canberra office in early March, he sought to present the problems in the Murray-Darling as the most recent in a long chain of trials—really nothing new, despite many scientists’ confidence that Australia is facing an unprecedented climate crisis. “Water has been a challenge since Federation,” he said, referring to the 1901 union that created the modern Australian polity. “Australia has always had a history of droughts and floods. I don’t think that’s changed at all. …  Certainly when we’re in a prolonged drought, there are parts of the basin we can’t prevent from running out of water that is just not available.” Rather, Pitt said, Australians should be proud of their record managing their scarce supply. “We utilize it right down to the last teaspoon,” he said. “People come to us for our expertise in water management.”

He was eager to sidestep the subject that just about every scientific study identifies as a core problem. When I asked about the impact of a warming world, he replied, “My view is one of resilience. So we need to ensure that the basin is resilient from top to bottom.” I repeated my question. “Well, we all face challenges. … We do need to ensure we value the environment, that we ensure there’s water provided for its needs, as well as business and basin communities.” A third time: Australians have “always been conscious of water issues.” He didn’t, in the course of our conversation, use the term “climate change.”

As I left Parliament House, I passed a few protesters camped out on the lawn opposite. They’d erected a large black banner facing the main entrance. AUSTRALIANS DEMAND FEDERAL PARLIAMENT URGENTLY DECLARE AN ECOLOGICAL & CLIMATE EMERGENCY, it read. No one paid them any mind.

The basin’s future, in other words, is likely to look a lot like the past few years, but worse, with the economic pain for Australia exacerbated by expected declines in the market for fossil fuels. Other global river systems may not be far behind the Murray-Darling. In South Asia rising temperatures are shrinking the glaciers that feed the Indus and Ganges, primary water sources for hundreds of millions of people. In Africa the changing climate is making the flows of the Nile far less predictable—even as the population dependent on it surges. The Colorado, Mekong, and Yangtze all face their own climate challenges.

For many Australian environmentalists, the Murray-Darling stands as a cautionary tale, showing what happens when crucial river systems come under too much stress. “There are too many straws in the glass,” Chris Gambian, chief executive of the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales, told me. And some of those straws are too wide. “Markets are good at allocating scarce resources to the most profitable uses,” he said. “Making sure that towns have water is not the most profitable use of water. Maintaining the connectivity of the rivers so fish can survive is not the most profitable use of water.”

Change might be coming, but not necessarily to the environment’s benefit. In December, New South Wales’s deputy premier and water minister, who both represent the National Party, published a series of “demands” on river policy, led by an exemption from plans to give up more water for conservation projects. “We simply can no longer stand by the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in its current form,” the deputy premier, John Barilaro, said. Alterations could also be coming to water trading. Australia’s competition watchdog is conducting an inquiry into the water market, intended to examine, among other topics, what’s driving prices and how investors are affecting its operations.

For half a decade, David Papps served as the Murray-Darling’s official defender in the Australian government. As Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, he was in charge of efforts to direct flows to wetlands and fish habitats, allocating water acquired from the market or saved through efficiency efforts. That the office is even necessary speaks to how deeply climate change and overdrawing have disrupted the river system’s essential natural processes. Healthy wetlands, for example, reduce drought severity by absorbing and storing excess water during periods of steady rain; they can also serve as important carbon sinks—functions they can’t perform once they’re degraded.

Papps, who’s now retired, fears it will take dramatic action to save the basin—and that the country hasn’t grasped how much of its prosperity is at stake. “The principal concern we should have is ensuring that there’s enough water for the environment to get to some sort of basic level of health,” Papps said. Otherwise, “the equation doesn’t work. It will be the environment that suffers first, and then, when the river systems die, the economies will follow.”