Water and climate change: sustaining rivers

摘要

While the experts at the two meetings concluded that climate change impacts on river ecosystems are not substantially different in nature to other impacts, they do exacerbate non-climate threats and increase the complexity of response measures. Professor Richard Kingsford, Director of the Australian Wetlands and Rivers Centre at the University of NSW, concluded:'Many countries are increasingly affected by water shortages reflecting effects of river regulation and abstraction of water from rivers and groundwater ecosystems, and now climate change. Many wetland systems are moving to new degraded states, affecting biodiversity and communities reliant on rivers and floodplains.Therernis a crisis in the management of rivers, such as the Murray-Darling basin in Australia, with governments buying back water for the environment. At the same time there is a need to protect the world's free-flowing rivers to avoid the problems currently found on many of the world's rivers.'