Managing our natural resources together

About

This consultation has now closed, thanks for your interest.

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Let us know how you think our natural resources should be managed.

What is being decided?

The SA Murray-Darling Basin NRM Board and the SAMDB community are faced with a number of financial and environmental challenges. There are different ways that we can respond to these challenges, and we want to work through these together, seeking community input into what we should focus on to effectively manage our natural resources, and how it can be funded.

Managing natural resources in the South Australian Murray-Darling Basin region is important and challenging. The region is home to over 110,000 people who use and enjoy the natural resources of the River Murray and surrounding areas. It is also home to South Australia’s most productive agricultural region and ecosystems that are internationally recognised as having significant environmental importance. Managing natural resources is about working together to ensure that these needs of the community, industries and the environment are balanced in a way that is sustainable.

How can your input influence the decision?

The community’s input will provide the SA Murray-Darling Basin NRM Board with useful information about the community’s values and ideas with regard to the management of natural resources. Take the survey and join the discussion to have your views heard.

This input will also be fed into a Deliberative Panel process, being held from 31 October to 7 November, during which a diverse, representative group of community members will ultimately provide recommendations to the Board.

There is no draft decision that the SA Murray-Darling Basin NRM Board has prepared. What is recommend by the Panel will be made public and taken to the Board unchanged. The Board will then publicly respond to those recommendations.

How will your input be used?

It is anticipated that the Deliberative Panel recommendations to the Board will be considered by the end of November 2015. Feedback will be provided to community members through media releases and the Natural Resources SAMDB website and social media channels. You'll also be able to find out the recommendations on this page.

Contacting us

For more information:

• Email: claire.stephenson@sa.gov.au
• Call: 08 8391 7500
• Find us on Twitter and Instagram: @nrsamdb and #nrmtogether
• Visit: http://www.naturalresources.sa.gov.au/samurraydarlingbasin/home

Background

Our region

The SA Murray-Darling Basin region (PDF, 585 KB) extends from where the River Murray crosses the border from Victoria into South Australia, down to where it meets the sea at the Coorong. It covers 70,000 square kilometres and includes six distinct ecological areas:

• River Murray
• Coorong and Lower Lakes
• Murray Mallee
• Murray Plains
• Eastern Mount Lofty Ranges
• South Olary Plains.

The region’s natural resources support a wide range of human activities. The River Murray supplies the majority of the water needs for the capital city of Adelaide as well as other towns in the state. The natural resources also support tourism, recreation and manufacturing, as well as one of the most productive agricultural areas in South Australia. About 82% of the land in the region is used for primary production, including pastoral lands, dryland cropping, grazing, horticulture, irrigation and dairy farming.

Within the region, there are ecosystems that are of state, national and international significance, including the Ramsar-listed Chowilla Floodplain and the Coorong and Lower Lakes. As a result, there are large areas of national parks dedicated to nature conservation.

Click here to find out more information about the region