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Context: Increasing water scarcity creates the major challenge of how to achieve environmental outcomes while meeting human water demands. In the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia, this challenge is being addressed by the Murray–Darling Basin Plan and the 'Sustainable Diversion Limit Adjustment Mechanism' (SDLAM), an offsetting program seeking to achieve environmental outcomes using less water. Aims: We provide a critique of the legislated method for evaluation of the SDLAM and the suitability of the process for evaluating whether equivalent environmental outcomes have been achieved. Methods: Four project case studies, project documentation, external reviews and relevant legislation were used to assess the implementation of the SDLAM and the evaluation method. Key results: The SDLAM evaluation method is not scientifically rigorous. It excludes residual risks, Basin-wide impacts and climate change. The evaluation timeline is biased towards measuring infrastructure outputs rather than environmental outcomes and impacts. Conclusions: Flaws in the SDLAM evaluation processes mean that environmental benefits are likely to be overstated, risking further reductions in allocations of water for the environment, contrary to the objectives of the Basin Plan. Implications: Improved evaluation, including empirical data on outputs, outcomes and impacts, is needed to ensure that conservation objectives can be met for wetlands subject to SDLAM projects. In the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia, policy-makers have implemented a program that attempts to use environmental water more effectively, allowing more water to be allocated for human uses. This program must be rigorously evaluated to ensure that the environmental benefits are not overstated. We provide a critique of the legislated method for evaluation, highlighting flaws and recommending improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freshwater ecosystems are among the most vulnerable and endangered in the world, facing continued uncertainty under climate change, development of water resources and land use change. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (1971) is one of the longest-standing international agreements on biodiversity conservation. Its central objective is the maintenance of the ecological character of Wetlands of International Importance and the wise use of all wetlands. Here, we examine how the maintenance of ecological character has been addressed in Australia as part of the Murray--Darling Basin Plan, one of the most ambitious water reform programs to be undertaken globally and intended to restore water from irrigated agriculture to the environment. We analyse policy and planning documents from Commonwealth and state jurisdictions on the management of environmental water. Despite stated objectives to conserve Ramsar wetlands in the Basin Plan, we found a pattern of complex and convoluted arrangements for delivering environmental water to Ramsar wetlands and a lack of transparency and accountability about how Ramsar obligations are considered within each jurisdiction. We conclude that consideration of the ecological character of Ramsar wetlands has been marginalised by governments when managing environmental water, despite the statutory requirements to maintain these wetlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Damming rivers addresses a range of society's needs, but at the cost of fragmentation and other negative effects on freshwater ecosystems. This article examines hydropower development and fish conservation in the Upper Yangtze River Basin to explore strategies for managing dams more sustainably at the basin scale. We highlight the need to limit the effects of hydropower dams on freshwater biodiversity, and that protecting fish in reserves could be one of the most effective approaches to limiting the ecological effects of dams on fish. However, in the Yangtze River basin there are dams on the rivers in all but 1 of the 14 fish reserves mapped in this study, thus compromising the effectiveness of the reserves. In addition, the removal of some dams may not be as effective as suggested. Thus, we propose that limiting dam construction in protected tributaries is a ready-to-adopt conservation strategy. However, the adoption of this policy by the Chinese government will be determined by which of two competing policy changes (i.e. gradual or sudden) in the policy subsystem of dam construction will prevail. In this paper we illustrate how greater triage in the Upper Yangtze River Basin can deliver services to people and conserve freshwater biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

River flows in the Murray–Darling Basin, as in many regions in the world, are vulnerable to climate change, anticipated to exacerbate current, substantial losses of freshwater biodiversity. Additional declines in water quantity and quality will have an adverse impact on existing freshwater ecosystems. We critique current river-management programs, including the proposed 2011 Basin Plan for Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin, focusing primarily on implementing environmental flows. River management programs generally ignore other important conservation and adaptation measures, such as strategically located freshwater-protected areas. Whereas most river-basin restoration techniques help build resilience of freshwater ecosystems to climate change impacts, different measures to enhance resilience and reoperate water infrastructure are also required, depending on the degree of disturbance of particular rivers on a spectrum from free-flowing to highly regulated. A crucial step is the conservation of free-flowing river ecosystems where maintenance of ecological processes enhances their capacity to resist climate change impacts, and where adaptation may be maximised. Systematic alteration of the operation of existing water infrastructure may also counter major climate impacts on regulated rivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]