Posts Tagged ‘Water’
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
David Uren & Asa Wahlquist; 27/4/10
Environment Minister Penny Wong has released a report claiming the government’s controversial buy-back of water licences will cause only minimal damage to irrigators and rural communities. The $1.5 billion that the government is expected to spend buying water licences over the next two years will reduce the amount of water going to irrigation by 6 per cent but will only reduce output of irrigated crops by 2.4 per cent, most of which would have been phased out anyway, according to the report, prepared by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Senator Wong said the report answered criticism that the government’s water purchases were bad for regional economy. “The report shows that purchasing water is not only helping the environment by returning much needed water to the basin’s rivers and wetlands, it also helps irrigators,” she said.
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Tags: Australia, Environment, Murray-Darling Basin, Water
Posted in Aid / Trade, Australia, Environment, Human Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
Matthew Franklin; 9/1/10
Federal Water Minister Penny Wong has deflected opposition criticism of the government’s $23 billion purchase of Toorale Station in NSW, revealing the move has returned 11 gigalitres of water to the Darling River. Senator Wong said through a spokeswoman yesterday that recent rains in Queensland had passed through the Warrego River and through Toorale, where they would previously have been stored for irrigation. Her comments came as opposition agriculture spokesman John Cobb said “not a gallon” of water had been returned to the system since the government’s purchase of Toorale late in 2008 and that five levy banks had been left standing to contain water. But the Australian Conservation Foundation described Mr Cobb’s claims as “just wrong”, and a spokeswoman for Senator Wong said rains had passed through the Warrego to the Darling.
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Tags: Australia, Environment, Water
Posted in Aid / Trade, Australia, Environment | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Michael Pelly; 25/8/09 (2 Items)
High Court judges yesterday questioned claims by the nation’s largest private agribusiness that ground-water entitlements allowed it to “take and use” bore water as if it was private property. ICM Agriculture says the 2005 funding deal between the commonwealth and NSW, which cuts its allocation by about 70 per cent, is unconstitutional because it allows NSW to acquire the entitlements on other than just terms. Former federal attorney-general Bob Ellicott QC, for ICM, told the court there was a historic right to “water percolating beneath the land” and that it “was a proprietary right”. “If you sell the land, the next owner or the tenant has that right, the right to take and use.”
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Tags: Australia, Environment, Trade, Water
Posted in Aid / Trade, Australia, Environment, Human Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
Pia Akerman; 4/8/09
Political tensions between Queensland and South Australia over water have dramatically reignited, after Queensland brushed off calls from Mike Rann to rule out taking more water from Cooper Creek. The Queensland government is considering activating dormant water licences worth 10,000 megalitres, threatening the water supply to South Australian graziers and outback communities such as Innamincka, on the edge of the Strzelecki Desert. Mr Rann yesterday warned Queensland not to proceed with the plan, with local tempers already running hot over the state of the Murray River. “We’ve seen the damage overextraction by the upstream states has done to the River Murray,” the South Australian Premier said. “I would urge the Queensland Premier to act consistently so as not to deprive the environment of important water … to act in the interests of the whole system.”
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Tags: Australia, Cooper Creek Basin, Environment, Water
Posted in Aid / Trade, Australia, Environment | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Khetam Malkawi’ 21/4/09; (2 Items)
A Lower House fact-finding committee has finished its investigation into last month’s incident in which the King Abdullah Canal was contaminated with pollutants originating from the Israeli side of the Yarmouk River. In its report, expected to be submitted to the House speaker on Thursday, the committee concluded that Israel violated the Wadi Araba Treaty signed between the two countries in 1994 and is accountable for the pollution.The committee also found Water Authority employees responsible for not handling the problem in a timely manner. On March 12, the Ministry of Water and Irrigation said it stopped pumping water from the canal after it detected oil waste and sewage in the Yarmouk River. The river is a shared water resource for both Jordan and Israel and is one of the main tributaries of the Jordan River.
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Tags: Environment, Israel, Jordan, Water, West Bank & Gaza, World Bank
Posted in Asia, Environment, Health & Children, Human Rights, Israel & Palestine | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
17/3/09; (2 Items)
A world water forum has opened in Istanbul, the capital of Turkey, amid violent protests.
Anti-riot police used teargas on Monday to disperse some 300 demonstrators who accused the forum of helping big companies to promote privatisation. The protesters responded by hurling rocks and beating officers with sticks. Police held at least 15 people for questioning.The forum, held every three years, will address growing water scarcity, the risk of conflict as countries squabble over rivers, lakes and aquifers, and how to provide clean water and sanitation to billions of people.
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Tags: Global, UN, Water
Posted in Environment, United Nations | No Comments »
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
Wallace Kiala; 2/2/09
Today is World Wetlands Day. To mark the ocasion, many countries are set to celebrate it diligently to provide a framework for national action and international co-operation on conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. The Department of Environment and Conservation launched the date last Friday. The DEC said the country was party to the Ramsar convention that was signed in Iran in 1971. PNG became a contracting party to the convention on July 16, 1993, with two sites listed as Ramsar Wetland areas.
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Tags: Environment, PNG, Water
Posted in Aid / Trade, Environment, PNG / West Papua | No Comments »
Monday, January 12th, 2009
Pia Akerman; 12/1/09
Testing to be conducted this month at Lake Albert, the smaller of South Australia’s stricken lower lakes, is expected to show the lake used to be “an ephemeral wetland”, supporting calls for the pumps currently topping it up from Lake Alexandrina to be switched off. A study by paleoecologist Jennie Fluin will date core samples taken from the lake’s centre to show salinity levels over the past 6000 years. “At the moment there is a lot of water being pumped from Lake Alexandrina into Lake Albert, principally because of the acid sulphate situation, but it wouldn’t surprise me … if in the past it was an ephemeral wetland, not a filled basin as Lake Alexandrina was,” said Dr Fluin, a research fellow at the University of Adelaide. “Instead of sacrificing two big lakes, if Lake Albert was naturally a completely different system, then why not return it to what it was?”
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Tags: Australia, Murray-Darling Basin, Water
Posted in Australia, Environment | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
Paige Taylor; 7/1/09; (3 Items)
Western Australia’s Liberal-Nationals Government has thrown its support behind Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett’s efforts to fast-track the World Heritage listing of the Ningaloo Coast, following years of tension between the former state Labor government and federal Liberal governments over the protection of the region. But the Government of Premier Colin Barnett wants parcels of land set aside for development near the pristine Ningaloo Reef, raising concerns among environmentalists who a few years ago helped see off a proposed resort and marina there. The epic fight against the resort drew support from a wide cross-section of West Australians and culminated in a rally of 15,000 people at Fremantle in 2002 at which author Tim Winton told the crowd: “On an empty beach where endangered turtles lay their eggs, one company wants to cut a hole for hundreds of luxury boats.” Yesterday, state Environment Minister Donna Faragher said World Heritage listing would make “tourist infrastructure” necessary, and facilities could range from tents to buildings.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Environment, Rights, Trade, Water
Posted in Aboriginal, Aid / Trade, Australia, Environment, Human Rights, Workers | No Comments »
Monday, January 5th, 2009
Nicolas Rothwell; 5/1/09
Gliding, circling in a blur of black and white, the magpie geese of Darwin descend, furl their wings and settle until the swamps and tidal flats are full. How lovely they are, with their ungainly, offhand grace. How unmistakable: the harbingers of thunder and tropical humidity, the emblematic creatures of the wet. Distinctive in look and lifestyle, much loved and much mythologised by indigenous north Australians, Anseranas semipalmata is set apart by its biology. There is nothing else quite like it in the avian world. It survives almost exclusively today in the marshy plains of the Top End of the Northern Territory and in Papua New Guinea’s Fly River region, though once it was common up and down the Australian east coast. It feeds on water-lily bulbs and on the roots of wet-season grasses, and as its diet changes, the taste of its meat also undergoes a subtle shift, so that one can reliably tell the time of year from the savour and aroma of a magpie goose’s flesh. There is a kind of ornate formality about the bird, and a tranquillity. Despite the large numbers in their flocks, they never fight; they appear reflective, and lost in deep domains of abstract thought they form an intriguing counter to the hectic realm of man. Perhaps because of this, ornithologists study the geese to the point of obsession and speculate at length on their unusual features: the semi-webbed feet of deep orange, the convoluted windpipe, the progressive moult, the knobbed crown that swells with increasing age.
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Tags: Australia, Water
Posted in Australia, Environment | No Comments »
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
Carmel Egan & John Elder; 4/1/08
Australia has snubbed an international agreement — to which it is the No. 1 signatory — by refusing to provide information on the neglected state of our most endangered wetlands. Now wetlands experts have joined a chorus of criticism of state and federal governments for failing Australia’s obligations under the Ramsar Convention by not reporting wetlands damage caused by drought, pollution and irrigation. Some of those wetlands are so degraded the experts believe they may no longer meet the standards to be classified as internationally significant.
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Tags: Australia, Environment, Water
Posted in Australia, Environment | No Comments »
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
2/1/09
Coral growth since 1990 in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has fallen to its lowest rate for 400 years – a troubling sign for the world’s oceans. This could threaten a variety of marine ecosystems that rely on the reef and signal similar problems for other similar organisms worldwide, Glen De’ath and colleagues at the Australian Institute of Marine Science said. The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral expanse, and like similar reefs worldwide is threatened by climate change and pollution. “These organisms are central to the formation and function of ecosystems and food webs, and precipitous changes in the biodiversity and productivity of the world’s oceans may be imminent,” the researchers wrote in the journal Science.
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Tags: Australia, Environment, Water
Posted in Australia, Environment | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Matthew Denholm; 21/10/08 (4 Items)
Tasmanian Premier David Bartlett has sided with the forest industry in a fierce debate with conservationists about whether old-growth forests should be protected as reservoirs of carbon. Mr Bartlett told The Australian that calls by the conservation movement to suspend old-growth logging, because of evidence they might be more valuable as carbon sinks, were nonsense. “This is bullshit – this is just not true,” the Premier said. “They can make that claim at the moment because Kyoto Protocol accounting for timber got it totally wrong.
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Tags: Australia, Environment, Logging, Rare parrot, Water
Posted in Aid / Trade, Australia, Environment, Human Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
Roy Williams; 26/7/08; ; Roy Williams is a lawyer and the author of: God Actually.
Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It; By Elizabeth Royte; Scribe.
The bottled water industry took off in about 1990 and is now worth $60 billion a year in global sales. Elizabeth Royte, a savvy US journalist with an elegant turn of phrase, considers it “an unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the 20th and 21st centuries”. Royte is not a radical leftie — far from it — but Bottlemania is a powerful case study of the excesses, dangers and downright absurdities of neo-liberal capitalism. I finished the book convinced bottled water is an emblem of almost everything that’s wrong with the Western world today. That makes it sound like a heavy read, but it isn’t. Royte’s style is conversational, almost chatty. Although she includes lots of pertinent facts and figures, she also has the knack of bringing a weighty subject to life, and often in a humorous way.
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Tags: Global, health, Trade, Water
Posted in Aid / Trade, Environment | No Comments »
