The water quality crisis, 2023 update

Despite constant reports that the turbidity levels in the Nymboida River after rain are too high to allow extraction to occur, we’ve never heard a complaint from either council about forestry practices, including their being leased for grazing. Even the announcement by Forests NSW in 2015, that they intended to undertake intensive logging of some forests, i.e., clear-felling, there was no complaint. Then again total silence in 2019 when the State Government changed the Integrated Forests Operations Approval, halving the width of buffer zones along all mapped gullies and creeks, allowing logging to occur to within 5m of smaller waterways.

Continue ReadingThe water quality crisis, 2023 update

Submission to the Review of the Water Sharing Plan for the Clarence River

Fundamentally, we believe there has been an overallocation of licensed extraction in the Orara River which occurred without due consideration of the harvestable rights of all properties along that river for domestic and stock purposes. The Clarence WSP appears to be trying to mask the problems that water extraction poses for that river by including it in a broad, catchment-wide water sharing plan. The CEC believes that the Clarence WSP is also flawed by the lack of lack of fine detail in defining the extraction management units, which has allowed the dealing (or trading) in water access licences between disparate sub-catchments and micro-catchments.

Continue ReadingSubmission to the Review of the Water Sharing Plan for the Clarence River