Acquiring Water for the Environment: Lessons from Natural Resources Management

Over-allocation of water resources to irrigation, industry, and cities has severely impacted flow-dependent riverine ecosystems and led to growing interest in ways to restore water to the environment; one increasingly popular approach is water buybacks. This paper reviews US and Australian experiences in buying back water, focusing on the conditions which enable and inhibit environmental water acquisitions in each country. We also compare experiences with buyback efforts in fisheries, another natural resource sector. Lessons from these experiences provide important insights into how future water buyback programmes to acquire environmental water could be operated more effectively. The review suggests that the overall success of an environmental water buyback is likely to be enhanced by (1) legal and institutional settings which clearly define water rights and lower administrative and other barriers to water transfers, (2) non-governmental organizations and community groups which play a complementary role to government, (3) creation of a system that will fairly distribute future risk of water availability and provide choices for a variety of ways of obtaining water, and (4) efforts that minimize negative community impacts, thus helping to maximize irrigator participation.