Australia's Drought
Could Be Worst in One Thousand Years
November 07, 2006 — By James Grubel, Reuters
CANBERRA — The drought gripping
Australia could be the worst in 1,000 years, government officials said on
Tuesday, as Australia started to draw up emergency plans to secure
long-term water supplies to towns and cities.
The drought affecting more than half of Australia's farmlands, already
lasting more than five years, had previously been regarded as the worst in
a century.
But officials from the Murray-Darling river basin commission told a water
summit of national and state political leaders on Tuesday that analyses of
the current prolonged drought now pointed to the driest period in 1,000
years.
"What we're seeing with this drought is a frightening glimpse of the
future with global warming," the leader of the South Australian state
government Mike Rann told reporters.
A spokeswoman for the Murray-Darling Basin Commission said the current
consecutive years of drought had not been observed in the 114 years since
records were first kept.
She said mathematical and probability analyses of the current dry spell
found Australia was moving into what was possibly a one-in-1,000-year
drought.
"We don't have the records to substantiate a one-in-100-year drought any
more -- it's beyond that," she told Reuters.
Lack of winter rain has meant record-low inflows into the Murray-Darling
river system, which drains an area the size of France and Spain combined
and provides water to Australia's major agricultural areas.
The average inflow of water into the Murray River, which flows through
three states, is 11,000 gigalitres a year. In the past five months it has
received less than 600 gigalitres. One gigalitre is one billion litres.
Green groups have warned that towns and cities along the river system
could run out of water if the drought goes into another year.
Prime Minister John Howard used the water summit to announce moves to
investigate how to secure log-term water supplies for towns and cities
along the Murray River.
The summit also approved a new weir across the Murray to provide emergency
water, if needed, for the South Australian capital of Adelaide, a city of
about one million people, which draws 40 percent of its drinking water
from the Murray River.
But Howard, who remains sceptical about the impact of global warming,
declined to publicly declare the drought the worst in 1,000 years. "All I
know it is a very bad drought. It is the worst in living memory," Howard
told reporters.
The Australian Democrats party criticised the summit, saying the meeting
had ignored both the need to buy water back from farmers and irrigators,
and the need to put a higher price on water use.
"Making water more expensive is not going to be popular, but it needs to
be done," Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett told reporters.
The Murray-Darling catchment covers 1.06 million sq km (409,000 sq miles),
15 percent of Australia's landmass, and accounts for 41 percent of
Australia's agricultural production and A$22 billion ($17 billion) worth
of the nation's agricultural exports.