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Synergies in environmental and agricultural water availability under climate change

Nature Sustainability (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Freshwater resources need to simultaneously support environmental and agricultural outcomes; this is a critical challenge under climate change. Many environmental and agricultural outcomes have contrasting requirements for water, leading to difficult trade-offs which should be supported by integrated assessments. Here we analysed the effect of climate change and climate variability on key ecological values and agricultural economic activity simultaneously in the Macquarie catchment in Australia and assessed the effect of plausible management adaptation options. Under severe climate change, ecological outcomes were rarely met while the impact on agricultural outcomes was less severe; annual cropping reliant on insecure water allocations was most vulnerable. Under moderate climate change, altering flow delivery patterns was as effective as altering the total licence volume of environmental water. Neither change adversely affected agricultural benefits. Thus, environmental water management can potentially influence environmental outcomes, while continuing to meet the needs of core agricultural activities.

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Fig. 1: Distribution of changes in precipitation and temperature projected for the Macquarie catchment.
Fig. 2: Distribution of environmental, water allocation and agricultural outcomes.
Fig. 3: Vulnerability of each outcome.
Fig. 4: Outcomes based on changes in the total environmental water volume.
Fig. 5: Outcomes based on changes in the environmental water delivery strategy.
Fig. 6: Impact of targeting environmental flow delivery.

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Data availability

Data are available from Figshare via https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29345789 (ref. 36).

Code availability

Code is available from Figshare via https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29345789 (ref. 36) and from GitHub via https://github.com/galenholt/toolkit-macquarie.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported through funding from the Australian Government Murray–Darling Water and Environment Research Program (MD WERP, received by R.L. and D.R.). It was undertaken with the assistance of resources from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia), a National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy enabled capability supported by the Australian Government. The authors acknowledge the valuable contribution and access to information and tools, particularly the Macquarie IQQM model and stochastic climate data, provided by the New South Wales Government via a working group led by the NSW DCCEEW. We thank the members of that working group for their expertise and insights which have strengthened the results of this work. The authors acknowledge NSW DCCEEW’s Macquarie IQQM was used to inform the analysis and NSW DCCEEW is not responsible for any data or results presented here. Similarly, we thank the members of the Climate Adaptation End User Advisory Group under MD WERP for their constructive comments. We thank Murray–Darling Basin Authority collaborators including M. Job, L. Palmer, T. Bjornsson, R. Rawlings and A. Craig for their assistance and support. We thank N. Potter and A. Freebairn from CSIRO for their assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Regional and Rural Futures, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia

    Rebecca E. Lester, Georgia K. Dwyer & Galen Holt

  2. CSIRO Environment, Research Way, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    David Robertson & Ashkan Shokri

  3. Murray–Darling Basin Authority, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Joel Bailey

  4. CSIRO Environment, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Shokhrukh-Mirzo Jalilov

  5. University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

    Shokhrukh-Mirzo Jalilov

  6. CSIRO Environment, Black Mountain, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Muhammad Arif Watto

Authors
  1. Rebecca E. Lester
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Contributions

R.E.L. contributed to conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, writing—original draft, project administration and funding acquisition. D.R. contributed to conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, writing—review and editing and project administration. J.B. contributed to conceptualization, methodology and writing—review and editing. G.D. contributed to methodology, formal analysis, software, validation, investigation, visualization and writing—review and editing. G.H. contributed to methodology, formal analysis, software, validation, investigation, visualization and writing—review and editing. S.-M.J. contributed to methodology, formal analysis, software, validation, investigation and writing—review and editing. A.S. contributed to methodology, formal analysis, software, validation, investigation and writing—review and editing. M.A.W. contributed to methodology, formal analysis, software, validation, investigation and writing—review and editing. R.E.L. and D.R. contributed equally and so are joint first authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rebecca E. Lester.

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Competing interests

The authors received research funding support from the Australian Government MD WERP.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Junko Mochizuki, Amandine Pastor and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Location of the case study catchment the Macquarie River catchment in the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia.

The Macquarie catchment is highlighted in yellow among the other catchments (outlined in black) in the Basin45.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Differences in the delivery strategies used to explore the impact of changing delivery strategy on outcome achievement.

Panel a) illustrates the target environmental water order volume as a function of available water at decision date (Aug 1st). Delivery strategies 3 and 4 overlap entirely. Panel b) illustrates the time series of ordered water using different delivery strategies (1, 2, 3, 4) for 1991-92. Panel c) illustrates the time series of ordered water using different delivery strategies (5, 6, 7) for 1991-92.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Value of average irrigated agricultural benefits from different categories of crop under six climate scenarios relative to the total value under the historical climate.

The relative index is calculated so that total agricultural value (the sum of the three crop categories) is relative to the historical climate, that is the total agricultural value for the historical climate is equal to 1 and the totals for other climates are greater or less than 1 relative to the change from the historical climate. Within each climate, the contributions of the three crop categories are then illustrated and the total value reflects an overall increase or decrease relative to the historical value of benefits.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Texts 1–3, Table 1, Figs. 1–12 and references.

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Lester, R.E., Robertson, D., Bailey, J. et al. Synergies in environmental and agricultural water availability under climate change. Nat Sustain (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01720-8

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