For much of the 20th century, the expansion of irrigated agriculture in the Murray Darling Basin, was treated as a self-evidently desirable objective, to be pursued without excessive regard to questions of economic costs and benefits. Irrigation seemed to offer a ‘droughtproofing’ solution...

For most of the last decade, water policy in Australia has been dominated by emergency responses to what was, on most measures, the worst drought in our history. Irrigators have received only small fractions of their normal allocations of water, while urban water users have been subject to...

In this paper we consider the problem of accommodating indigenous cultural heritage values in resource assessment and valuation. We suggest a need for price-based approaches to valuation to be replaced by or complemented with quantitative constraints, reflecting the requirement that rights...

The precautionary principle, presented as a guide to environmental policy decisions in the presence of uncertainty, has been the subject of vigorous debate. However, the has generally not been discussed in relation to formal theories of choice under uncertainty developed as generalizations of...

Questions relating to the allocation and management of risk have played a central role in the development of the National Water Initiative, particularly as it has applied to the Murray-Darling Basin. The central issues of efficiency and equity in allocations are best understood by considering...

The MurrayÐDarling Basin comprises over 1 million square kilometres; it lies within four states and one territory; and over 12,800 gigalitres of irrigation water is used to produce over 40 per cent of the nation's gross value of agricultural production. The supply of water for irrigation is...

The standard approach to modelling production under uncertainty has relied on the concept of the stochastic production. In this paper, it is argued that a state-contingent production model is more flexible and realistic. The model is applied to the problem of drought policy.

Most urban areas in Australia are facing the prospect of increasing scarcity of water. Further pressure arises from evidence that existing levels of water use in many catchments are environmentally unsustainable. One option, feasible for some but not all Australian cities is the diversion to...

High population pressure and the rapid pace of human activity including urbanization, industrialization and other economic activities have led to a dwindling supply of arable land per capita and a process of agricultural intensification in South Asia. While this process has significantly...