The Murray-Darling Basin is Australia’s largest river system, covering 1 million square kilometres and spans across South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, the Australia Capital Territory and Queensland. The Basin is important culturally, environmentally, economically and socially and provides values in each of these areas. Underpinning these values is the need for a healthy functioning system, which can sustain its values into the future.
As part of a broader project looking at the current and future trajectories of the Basin, we assess the current trend and condition of key environmental indicators and their outlook given known future pressures such as climate change. Based on the process used for the Great Barrier Reef outlook, we use multiple tools, including expert elicitation, of a broad range of experts across the Basin to provide an outlook and a repeatable process for assessment into the future.