ABSTRACT
Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin (hereafter ‘the Basin’) provides a key case study for the adaptation of water resources management to climate change. The region encapsulates many of the issues associated with climate change impacts on water resources and, as a result of recent experiences, offers a valuable ‘learning laboratory’ to water policy makers and managers around the world (Pittock and Connell, 2010; Godden et al., 2011; Cummins and Watson, 2012). The large, complex Basin supports a diversity of cultural, socio-economic and environmental values, all strongly dependent on water. Characterized by a high degree of climatic variability and extreme weather events (i.e. floods and droughts), the Basin’s ecosystems and human communities have developed in the face of hydrologic uncertainty. Consequently, they might be expected to have a relatively high capacity to adapt to future climate change (Füssel and Klein, 2005). Warmer and drier conditions, with more frequent and intense extreme weather events, are anticipated for the Basin under climate change, representing changes analogous to those projected for many of the world’s river basins (Bates et al., 2008). Recent decades have seen the advent of the worst drought on record across the Basin, resulting in widespread environmental and socio-economic impacts and precipitating a range of adaptation responses to increasing water scarcity (Leblanc et al., 2012). Indeed, the current programme of Basin water reform represents one of the most ambitious attempts at basin-scale change ever made (Connell and Grafton, 2011).
