Conjuctive Use of Groundwater and Surface Water in the Burdekin Delta Area

Abstract

One of the key economic issues faced by the managers of the two water boards in the Burdekin River Delta is the allocation of surface water between immediate use on farm for irrigation and storage in the aquifer for future use. Because of the significance of the interaction between surface water and groundwater and the return flow externalities within the delta, policies on surface water and groundwater need to be determined simultaneously. A model is formulated of the dynamic system of surface water and groundwater in the delta with water demand, groundwater extraction cost and stochastic recharge and surface water availability. The optimal pumping/artificial recharge policies for each state of the joint surface water and groundwater system is derived for the southern part of the delta and this policy is applied over a large number of years to derive the expected development over time of extraction/ artificial recharge and the state of the groundwater system. The implications of the optimal pumping/artificial recharge policy for any review of existing allocations of surface water and groundwater are discussed.

Water policy reform in Australia: lessons from the Victorian seasonal water market*

“…The agricultural economics profession's work in this area in recent years has moved in concert with the national policy agenda, including McColl's (2003a,b, 2004) work on design of entitlement systems; Freebairn's (2003) and Freebairn and Quiggin's (2006) discussion on the nature of entitlements with respect to reliability; the Productivity Commission's work on water markets Peterson et al 2004); numerous contributions on environmental flows (Siebert et al 2000;Crean et al 2003;Morrison and Bennett 2004;Watson 2004;Young et al 2002;Qureshi et al 2005); and the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics' (ABARE) efforts across a range of topics relating the water policy (Goesch 2001;Heaney et al , 2004Heaney et al , 2005ABARE 2002;Goesch and Hanna 2002;Goesch and Heaney 2003;Hafi, 2003).…”

Urban water management: optimal price and investment policy under climate variability*

“…Dynamic programming techniques have been applied to a range of water related problems including estimating optimal extractions from ground water aquifers (Hafi 2002) and estimating optimal release rules from irrigation storages (Brennan 2007). Previous dynamic programming models of urban water pricing and investment include the work of Hirshleifer et al .…”

Institutional directions in groundwater management in Australia.

“…Recent economic analysis indicates that effective recharge may be adequately provided from irrigation return flows alone, with better benefits from the primary use of the irrigation water compared to direct recharge (see e.g. Hafi, 2003).…”