coolbrisbane.org

Source: Australian Conservation Foundation
February 2, 2011

How do you measure the value Australians place on a healthy river system?

The Murray and the Darling are iconic rivers for Australians. Some of us live there, some of us visit to go camping, others may never visit parts of the river system but still value its health and existence and hope that it is passed on to future Australians.

But how do we estimate a value for things such as a river system that society values highly but doesn’t have a price tag?

Well, such values can be measured, and the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) has commissioned work to start getting their heads around those numbers. And they’re big – the Coorong alone is worth $4.3 billion to Australian’s to restore it to health!

What that means is that Australians would be willing to pay over $4 billion to maintain a healthy Coorong, not because they directly benefit from it (although some may) but because we care that our environment is looked after long into the future.

Now these values are in addition to the many contributions a healthy river makes directly to the economy – e.g. the Basin’s $3.4 billion tourism industry – but also in addition to the unpriced economic benefits provided by river systems such as water storage and filtration, habitat for insect predators and pollinators, salinity control and so on (so called ‘ecosystem services’) – our recent analysis estimated these services are worth $2.1 billion each year from just 16 significant wetlands in the Basin.

The recent report for the Authority pulled together massive amounts of research on the willingness of Australians to pay for a healthy river in order to estimate a value on the environmental benefits of restoring the river system.

But unfortunately that report has been largely ignored. So we took those numbers that were compiled for the Authority and expanded them across all the 19 river valleys of the Basin to try to get a handle on what level of support water reform has to Australians.

$9.8 billion – that is what a healthy river system is worth to Australians. Taken from the Authority’s very own commissioned work and detailed in our latest report released today.

Unfortunately, the benefits of a restored Basin – priced and unpriced, for communities and environment – are being largely ignored.

We’re working to get the full set of values on the table. Help us spread the word (or numbers!).