Understanding plantation water licensing: water rights, regulations and risks
Presentations Tuesday October 14
City Hall, downstairs Main Corner, 1 Bay Road, Mount Gambier
9.00 am REGISTRATION
9.30
Session 1
Welcome and expected seminar outcomes
Rob de Fégely, IFA President
Global and national perspectives
9.40
Forests and water - a global perspective
Ashley Webb, NSW DPI
10.10
The National Water Initiative; History, Regulations, Water
Markets and the MDBA
Phil Townswend, MDBA
10.40 MORNING TEA
Session 2
Regional settings
11.00
Regional hydro-geology, Obswells, DTW, drains and
pasture recharge rates
Jeff Lawson, DEWNR
11.30
Tree and plantation water use studies in the Green
Triangle region
Richard Benyon, UniMelb
12.00
12.30
Deemed models of plantation water use in the LLC WAP
Lower Limestone Coast Water Allocation Plan
2013: Forestry water licences, water markets, regulatory
compliance & penalties
Darryl Harvey, DEWNR
Tim Bond, DEWNR
1.00 LUNCH
Session 3
Other stakeholders perspectives on plantation water use
Mark Bachmann, Nature
Glenelg Trust
2.00
Regional Wetlands, and their interactions with plantations
2.20
Irrigator’s perspectives on the water allocation plan and
the inclusion of farm and commercial forestry.
Dairy - Graeme Hamilton
The challenges of change 1990 to 2014
Kent Martin
Potatoes - Terry Buckley
3.20 AFTERNOON TEA
Session 4
Water use economics & recent R&D
3.40
Plantation water use studies in surface water catchments
Ashley Webb, NSW DPI
4.10
Quantifying regional water use - a satellite view 2000 to
2011
Tim McVicar, CSIRO
4.40
Fire and water
Don McGuire
5.10
Future research needs
Don McGuire
5.20
Summing up and close
Jim O’Hehir, ForestrySA
6.30
Drinks and dinner at Sorrento’s
Visit the IFA website or contact our administrative office for more information or for registration:
events@forestry .org.au ~ 02 9431 8677 ~ www.forestry.org.au/ifa-events
Field tour, Wednesday 15 October 2014
Departing from behind Main Corner,1 Bay Road, Mount Gambier
8.00 am SHARP
8.15
Blue Lake Pumping Station
9.15
Telfords Quarry (Bus viewpoint)
9.40
Burrungle, High SQ PSP (550m3 at age 11)
10.15
MORNING TEA - Glencoe Nursery
10.45
11.15
12.00
12.50
1.20
1.50
2.05
3.10
4.00
Jeff Lawson, DEWNR
0800
Jan Rombouts, ForestrySA
Wetland monitoring at Diagonal Road Swamp
Claire Harding, DEWNR
EP117 Phosphorus response on wet sites
Don McGuire
LUNCH at Lake Edward
Marshes Swamp (Bus viewpoint)
Manga Lane, Pine / Bluegum Comparison
Mike Powell, ForestrySA
Robe Penola Rd, Bakers Range Drain (Bus viewpoint)
Robe Penola Rd, Giles Hole 49
Don McGuire
NAN009
Penola 3R yield plots
Don McGuire
Jim O’Hehir, ForestrySA
Mount Gambier Airport in time for afternoon departures
Melbourne 16.30, Adelaide 17.10 & 18.45
4.10
Airport Plantations - spacing trial, “Piney” plot, Lysimeters,
1979/82 Cooperative Eucalypt trials
5.00
Return to Mount Gambier library carpark
Don McGuire
Program accurate at 8 October 2014
Visit the IFA website or contact our administrative office for more information or for registration:
events@forestry .org.au ~ 02 9431 8677 ~ www.forestry.org.au/ifa-events
Rob de Fégely
Rob is IFA President and Director of
VicForests. He has over 28 years of
experience in the Australian forest
industry and he has a strong
interest in natural resource
management particularly the integration of forestry
and agriculture.
His consulting experience Australia as well as Asia and
North America extends from forest resource
assessment to processing and end product market
reviews.
Back to program
Dr Jim O’Hehir
General Manager – Ranges &
Research, ForestrySA
Dr Jim O’Hehir is the General
Manager, Ranges and Research
for ForestrySA.
Dr O’Hehir is based in Mt Gambier and is responsible
for executive management of ForestrySA’s estate in
the Mount Lofty Ranges and the plantation research
program.
Back to program
Kent Martin
Kent Martin and Family operate a
1000 acre farm at Kalangadoo, SA,
producing both terminal sires and
prime lambs from a 2000 head
flock, together with beef cattle and
irrigated crops. Kent has been
actively involved in agricultural
politics at a high level for some thirty years, serving
terms on the SA Soil Council, Land Care Council and
NRM Council, chairing the SAFF Horticultural Section
and the SAFF Natural Resources Committee and
serving three years on the SAFF Board.
He was instrumental in developing the SAFF
Sustainable Management and Water Harvesting
policies. He has been involved with both surface and
ground water projects within the region including the
Upper South East Drainage Scheme and the Lower
Limestone Coast WAP.
He represented SAFF in the initial stakeholder
Requirements for successful stakeholder
engagement in the development of regulation for
land use change under the National Water
Initiative.
The Challenges of Change 1990-2014
The sustainable management of Lower South East
ground water required development of not only
good policy backed by robust science but
communication strategies that would gain required
support from government, land owners, industry
and the community to implement a water allocation
plan containing an effective water resource
budgeting system structured around water property
rights.
The talk will focus on key issues involved in getting
the plantation forest industry along with other
landowner groups to participate in the development
of a responsible working Water Allocation Plan, the
Visit the IFA website or contact our administrative office for more information or for registration:
events@forestry .org.au ~ 02 9431 8677 ~ www.forestry.org.au/ifa-events
meetings in 2003. He specialised in developing strong
working relationships with governments, government
agencies, land owners and the forestry industry.
Equity for all participants was the benchmark.
Darryl Harvey, Department for
Environment, Water and Natural
Resources
Prior to joining the public service in
1996, Darryl was self-employed,
providing an irrigation design,
supply and installation service to an
extensive area of South Australia, Victoria and southwest New South Wales.
During this period there was concurrent ownership
and management of mixed farming and grazing
properties in the Padthaway-Western Flat area of the
South East. Farm enterprises included livestock,
irrigation and farm forestry (with several sites
participating in species and management trials).
Darryl has Bachelor of Economics (University of
Adelaide) and has held a range of positions in State
government agencies. These have generally been as
an interface role between technical and policy
functions. He is currently the Team Leader for the
Assessment and Advice Team in the Science,
Monitoring and Knowledge Branch of his department.
implications of the precedents set with the
introduction of water property rights for plantation
forestry and some suggestions on maximising and
sharing our resources for the next round of
negotiations. Likely agenda will include a range of
issues such as full cost recovery for management of
water, drought proofing of ground water dependent
eco-systems and Indigenous access to and
ownership of water.
Development of deemed annualised forest water
accounting in the Lower Limestone Coast
Plantation forests are an extensive land use in the
Lower Limestone Coast region with approximately
145 000 ha of plantations covering about 15 per cent
of the landscape that can be considered available for
industrial scale plantation forest. This plantation
forest area is about 85 per cent of the State’s
industrial scale plantation forest estate.
The recently adopted Water Allocation Plan for the
Lower Limestone Coast now requires existing and
proposed plantation forests to be accountable for
impacts on the regional groundwater resource with
licensed forest water allocations. The existing estate
is to be granted licensed water allocations to reflect
the deemed impact on the groundwater resource.
Licensed water allocations are a transferable
property right and generally convertible with other
licensed uses. Plantation forests account for about
30 per cent of the groundwater allocation in the
region.
The region has an extensive unconfined aquifer
which generally occurs at relatively shallow depths
and is dependent on local rainfall for recharge. This
aquifer is an important natural resource for both
environmental and economic purposes.
Evapotranspiration of plantation forests is greater
than agriculture land use at the same location,
therefore a land use change from agriculture to
plantation forests can impact directly on the
availability of naturally occurring water resources.
Plantation forests in this region reduce groundwater
recharge and where the water table is shallow,
plantation forests can directly extract groundwater.
It is impractical to commercially measure actual
water consumption by plantation forests at a
management area scale, whether in terms of
impacts on surface water yield, groundwater
Visit the IFA website or contact our administrative office for more information or for registration:
events@forestry .org.au ~ 02 9431 8677 ~ www.forestry.org.au/ifa-events
recharge, or by direct extraction from shallow water
tables, thus making it necessary to develop and
adopt a robust forest water accounting system in
which stakeholders can have confidence.
The adopted accounting values are not point scale
impact values, but a characterisation of water
resource impacts by plantation forests, compared to
the alternative agricultural landscape in the same
management area. The models are based on
biophysical principles and provide an annualised
accounting expression of plantation forest impacts
on the local groundwater resource; they ‘smooth’
the aggregated hydrologic impacts of the forest over
the full forest rotation period.
Visit the IFA website or contact our administrative office for more information or for registration:
events@forestry .org.au ~ 02 9431 8677 ~ www.forestry.org.au/ifa-events