Murray Darling Basin Plan

The Conservation Councils of Australia, representing 450 groups across all the states and territories, have signed onto a joint submission on the proposed Basin Plan in recognition that the Murray-Darling Basin is an issue of national significance. As a group the Councils had 10 key recommendations to improve the proposed Plan and called on the Government and the MDBA not to risk long-term health of the Murray-Darling Basin for short-term economic and political gain.

Download the submission here.

• Conservation Council of SA
• Conservation Council ACT (ConsACT),
• Conservation Council of Western Australia (CCWA),
• Environment Centre Northern Territory (Environment Centre NT),
• Environment Tasmania (ET),
• Environment Victoria (EV),
• Nature Conservation Council NSW (NCC),
• Queensland Conservation Council (QCC).

The Conservation Council of SA put forward 19 recommendations in our submission on the Proposed Basin Plan. Click here to download our submission.

Some of our key concerns included

• Environmental targets do not represent all Basin ecosystems and their functions
• Patchy use and presentation of best available science
• CSIRO findings did not consider massive increases to groundwater extraction
• Climate change has not been accounted for
• 2750 GL fails to meet a significant number of environmental targets
• The MDBA has failed to identify the environmentally sustainable level of take