Future impacts of climate variability, climate change and land use change on water resources in the Murray Darling Basin: Overview and Draft Program of Research

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has nominated the impacts of climate change on water as a key issue for Australia. Under current climate, the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) is affected by large climate variability, high water-use as a proportion of total streamflow and competing demands for water. Climate change is expected to impact on runoff and streamflow, but large uncertainties have hampered planning of practical steps to manage these impacts. The possibility that already limited environmental flows and plans to recover some of these flows in the MDB may be threatened by climate change is investigated through three avenues: • Climate change projections for Australia, recently released by CSIRO, are re-investigated for the MDB. • Conclusions from recent impact modelling and risk assessment on flows and water use in the Macquarie River catchment are used to infer possible basin-wide changes. • The impacts of climate variability and land-use change in combination with climate change are described.