Managed aquifer recharge in farming landscapes using large floods: an opportunity to improve outcomes for the Murray-Darling Basin?

Abstract

2013) Managed aquifer recharge in farming landscapes using large floods: an opportunity to improve outcomes for the

Protection of groundwater dependent ecosystems in Canterbury, New Zealand: the Targeted Stream Augmentation Project

“…Assessing the feasibility of MAR requires the integration of many types of data and information from many disciplines. Overviews of the basic requirements and feasibility guidelines for MAR have previously been described (e.g., Dillon et al 2009;Gutteridge et al 2011;Rawluk et al 2012;Arshad et al 2014). These requirements include:…”

Underground Transfer of Floods for Irrigation (UTFI): exploring potential at the global scale

“…In addition to the studies conducted in Thailand and India mentioned above, the idea of using large floods to recharge groundwater has independently been evaluated elsewhere. Several notable examples come from Nebraska (Gibson and Brozović 2018) and California (California Department of Water Resources 2018) in the USA, Namoi Valley in Australia (Rawluk et al 2013), Madhya Ganga Canal in the Upper Ganga Basin, India (IWMI-Tata Water Policy Program 2002), Hinds pilot trial in New Zealand (Golder Associates 2017) and the lower Cornia valley aquifer system in Tuscany, Italy (LIFE-REWAT 2018).…”

Can existing practices expected to lead to improved on-farm water use efficiency enable irrigators to effectively respond to reduced water entitlements in the Murray–Darling Basin?

“…Those initiatives employed a range of policy instruments (reviewed in Rawluk et al, 2012) including: markets established or freed-up to enable water to move to higher value uses; upgraded infrastructure to reduce transmission losses; improved governance arrangements so that water pricing better reflects the cost of supplying that water, including the cost of infrastructure (maintenance and replacement); new institutional arrangements that link surface and groundwater resources, as well as government purchases of water for environmental watering; research, development and extension to identify and encourage farmers to adopt improved crops and practices to increase WUE; and public support for farmers to upgrade their farming systems in return for a share of water saved (i.e. a proportion goes to the environment).…”