☔️ Water series: Future extreme dynamics of water use: Difference between revisions

==Water Markets==

So, what are the solutions experimented to answer water stress? Water market is the answer of most liberal nations, and to that end, Australia is an interesting case study. Although its water stress is considered low (3.14%), a vast part of aquifers in Australia are slightly saline water, thus unusable for most human activities. The South of the country, were climate is the driest, experiences regular droughts despite the presence of the Murray-Darling Basin. That is why Australia opened the way to localised water markets since 1983, when South Australia introduced a permanent water trading scheme.<ref name=wikisource>source: Wikipedia pages:

</ref> than others like animal husbandry. One could state that it is just a way to accelerate the adaptation to climate change with the means of capitalism. Thus, the dairy and beef industry, also number one resources user, should naturally be pushed out of the game — to the benefit of almond producers.<ref name="lordsofwater">(FR) Jérôme Fritel, <i>Main Basse sur l’eau (Lords of Water)</i>, Arte, 2019.

source: https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/082810-000-A/main-basse-sur-l-eau/</ref>

For cattle farmers, this is not a transition, just a violent crash happening while almond orchards invades Australia (7th global producer in 2017 (FAOSTAT)) following the path of the Central Valley in California (1st global producer). Here too, the Nasdaq, California’s stock market, opened up to a water market that relies on an algorithm developed to predict water price. Its designer is Clay Landry, who participated to the launch of carbon trading markets a few years before. He is convinced that this type of mechanisms would have a positive effect on water stress worldwide, and he is supported by environmentalists and NGOs. They are interested to buy water rights as a way to “save” water for ecosystems, so that this resource stays away from humans activities. This kind of transactions is said to represent a quarter of the market’s exchanges in California. This seems like a hopeless action, but environmentalists also managed to pass the SIGMA law in 2014, that regulates groundwater use, which was not part of water trading. Thus, some localised markets are created to allow neighbours farmers to trade the groundwater that the law allocated to them. Of course, non-farmers with water rights from their lands (called “riparian” water rights) are gradually joining those market to speculate.<ref name="lordsofwater" />