Current Victorian initiatives
Substantial work is being undertaken across northern Victoria to move the irrigation industry onto a more environmentally and economically sustainable footing into the future.
- The Northern Victorian Irrigation Renewal Project (NVIRP) is investing more than $2 billion in a two stage project to modernise supply and on-farm delivery in the Goulburn Murray Irrigation District (GMID) and recover an estimated total of 425 GL water which is currently lost to the system through evaporation, poor metering and seepage. 80 percent of the total water savings are proposed to remain in northern Victoria, to be shared between irrigators and the environment, with the remainder exported to Melbourne. (34)
NVIRP offers a huge opportunity to link modernisation planning with specific environmental objectives, and to explicitly restructure the irrigation landscape to improve its resilience to economic, environmental and social change. (35)
- The Loddon Campaspe Irrigation Region Land and Water Management Plan (LWMP), released by the North Central Catchment Management Authority in 2007, is designed to assist the regional community to respond to a range of challenges. These include: the risks and opportunities arising from irrigation reconfiguration and modernisation; balancing competing demands for water resources; adapting to the effects of climate change on water availability; understanding the effects of taking water off land that was intensively irrigated; and refining priority actions for agricultural, environmental and social outcomes to guide public and private investment. The Healthy Productive Landscape (HPL) Framework developed specifically for the LWMP is designed to integrate targets set in the Plan with the reality of the biophysical and policy context in which it operates. It assists the regional community to identify key regional assets, the threats and risks to those assets, the critical areas for targeted investment, the tools by which meaningful change might be achieved, and the targets by which change might be measured. (36)
- The Torrumbarry Reconfiguration and Asset Modernisation Strategy (TRAMS) is a key community-lead regional planning process, Released in 2007, the TRAMS Stage One Report concluded that water use in the Torrumbarry Irrigation Area (TIA) would reduce by 50 percent, largely driven by increasing water trade out of the area, drought and climate change. The report recommended that 50 percent of infrastructure should be modernised and 30 percent decommissioned, based on the most productive and least productive land capability. (37) The strategy envisages that removing water from unproductive land and concentrating modernisation investment in key areas will deliver multiple benefits including improved customer service, improved floodplain connectivity and reduced salt load entering the Murray River via irrigation drainage water.
TRAMS has been a community-driven process that has taken the hard decision to begin identifying areas which do not have a viable future in irrigated agriculture. Further, the local Water Services Committee has been supportive of the idea of integrating environmental water purchase with modernisation and decommissioning. Other irrigation communities in the lower Loddon and Campaspe, after several years of severely reduced water allocations, are keenly aware of the need to explore viable options and alternatives.
Most irrigators in the Campaspe Irrigation District have recently decided that they wish to permanently cease irrigation, relinquish their delivery shares and sell their entitlements to the Commonwealth. The process has been facilitated by NVIRP as a better alternative to modernising the CID. (38)
References
(34) Northern Victorian Irrigation Renewal Project at http://www.nvirp.com.au/
(35) Irrigation Futures of the Goulburn-Broken Catchment, Final Report, Department of Primary Industries and CRC for Irrigation Futures, Tatura. 2007
(36) North Central Catchment Management Authority (2007) Loddon Campaspe Irrigation Region Land and Water Management Plan, Summary Report
(37) Goulburn-Murray Water (2007) Torrumbarry Reconfiguration and Asset Modernisation Strategy, Stage 1, Final Report, Brett Lane and Assoc, RMCG and Sinclair Knight Mertz
(38) NVIRP media release 26/3/10 http://www.nvirp.com.au/downloads/Communications/Majority_of_Campaspe_irrigators_to_exit_permanently.pdf
