Dealing with salinity in Wheatbelt Valleys - Department of Water

with Salinity in Wheatbelt Valleys Conference
Dealing
Prospects and Practical Options
Processes,
GOAL
1. Any drainage systems should NOT have downstream environmental impacts
2. Attempt to retain excess water in catchment – dealt with in situ – NOT PASSED on to other systems where
impacts not understood.
Ideally water discharged from a catchment should be no more than was discharged before European settlement.
Broaden focus of Salinity Council to include work on understanding human systems of change i.e. what are the kinds
of behaviour and cultural determinants of people or communities that adopt change successfully.
The people that attended the conference should not need a report as much as those people who could not or did not
want to attend.
We were part of the vision process and should include those who weren’t. It seems as though the same people
attend with the same ideas and it would be more beneficial to include new people with new ideas.
Next step is to immediately implement several full drainage schemes and monitor their affect then positively involve
the entire catchment in the known perennial, water harvesting, aquaculture, high value tree-cropping etc so that
within 5 years we have concrete evidence. Preferably in the organised motivated catchments like Belka,
Narrembean and Beacon.
Regional Groups e.g. Avon Working Groups need to be more proactive in embracing community efforts – other than
being just a funding body.
Mass communication of workshop outcomes, including shared vision and major research findings
Concerted effort to connect wider community
Extension of information/understanding to be community/affected landholders.
Valley floor problems can that have developed since clearing can be reversed.
Soil is alive it must be kept in balance 1 water/air ratio, humus to produce nutrients etc for soil animals (micro and
macro).
Water movement (shallow) from top of catchment to valley floor is creating the majority of the problem and needs to
be held where it falls.
How do you get (convince) the reluctant farmer to take that extra bit/acre of arable land for conservation?
The problems/solutions to salinity, and the systems that drive it (both landscape and human economic/social etc) are
at least catchment of “regional” in scale and process.
But we are still looking for solutions at farm scale where the “solution space” is too small physically and too narrow in
terms of options, and squeezed by external factors (cost/price, loss of land to salinity etc etc).
To delete the disaster, must we erase the cadastre; find catchment/regional scale enterprises to conduct catchment
scale land use changes??
Where’s the process to start exploring how we might do this?
A shared vision can come only from a shred understanding.
The technical papers covered excellent ground, but maybe they need to be distilled into simpler form so we can all
understand and accept them as the basis for developing a vision.
This simpler form would include drawing out the fundamental principles of the landscape, the history, the economics
etc on which the vision is built.