BARELY 10 per cent of the water owed to Victorian rivers for strategic environmental flushes was actually delivered over the past year, new figures reveal.
The figures come as NSW joins Victoria in spending tens of millions of dollars trying to improve water penetration to parched Red Gum forests on the Murray River.
Victoria's Department of Sustainability and Environment has revealed that about 31 billion litres of real water was delivered to rivers and wetlands in the year to June 2009, from the Environmental Water Reserve.
The reserve is the water set aside in water entitlements for strategically timed "environmental flows" that trigger breeding cycles and other important ecological events.
The 31 billion litres is dramatically less than the amount promised to the reserve in the legal entitlements governing water in Victoria, where more than 300 billion litres each year is dedicated to the environment. The poor result for the environment came because much of the water promised to the reserve is "low reliability", meaning it is only available in very wet years.
In some cases, environmental water was withheld to bolster drinking water supplies for towns and cities.
Of the 31 billion litres delivered last year, 18.5 billion was spread across the Murray and Northern Victoria, and about 11 billion was sent to the Snowy River. Small amounts were sent to the Wimmera and Glenelg river systems.
Environment Victoria spokeswoman Juliet Le Feuvre said Victoria's system of water entitlements was set up to meet the needs of consumptive users rather than the environment.
"Until the environment has an entitlement that is adequate and suitable to meet its needs, it is going to be disadvantaged," she said.
DSE sustainable water director Jane Doolan acknowledged the environment needed more water than it received last financial year, but she said farmers were also forced to cope with tiny percentages of their water entitlement.
"The environment needs higher than that but we are in an extended and incredibly severe drought, and the whole issue with the drought is doing a balancing act," she said. "It is always going to be a balance between allocating water to the environment or allocating water to farmers and towns."
Ms Doolan rejected suggestions the structure of water entitlements should be rewritten to ensure more water went to rivers in drought years.
"Rewriting it actually means taking water off people. I think the way forward is water savings and doing our best to create new water," she said.
Close to $90 million is set to be spent improving water penetration to a Red Gum forest that straddles either side of the Murray River west of Echuca.
Victoria announced plans earlier this year to spend $30 million reconfiguring the Gunbower forest, and now NSW has submitted plans to the federal Environment Department to spend close to $60 million reconfiguring the Koondrook Perricoota forest directly across the river.
The NSW plans will see a 3.8-kilometre channel bulldozed into the heart of the forest, helping to inundate an extra 16,000 hectares with water.
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