Water sharing risk in agriculture: Perceptions of farm dam management accountability in Australia

Sources of water have always been critical to the success and sustainability of agricultural businesses. But with demand for food and climate variability increasing globally, pressures have been mounting on farmers to capture, store and use more water to achieve higher yields under worsening extremes of drought and flood. These pressures are causing farmers to store excessive water for irrigation unfairly in times of drought. This has the secondary consequence of creating unsafe structures in times of flood, which can be devastating for downstream communities and businesses. Hence the need for accounting and accountability for fair and safe water sharing has arisen in Australia. However, prior research has found complacency amongst farmers to be common. When combined with a disjointed policy response by government, in addition to recent objective evidence of different farm dam water storage and sharing practices around Australia, further investigation of how farmers perceive dam management, regulators, regulations, and other stakeholders in different farm dam policy environments is critical. A survey of 404 farmers in four different states in Australia finds a large percentage of farmers undertaking high risk farm dam behaviours because of concerns about the future of runoff in their region. Whilst farmers in weaker policy environments are more likely to undertake high risk behaviours, farmers across the sample identify farm dam financial and operational concerns such as budgeting and bank lending to be of importance. The findings further highlight the need for involvement of other key stakeholders, such as banks and financial institutions to be involved in developing strategies to generate improved accountability for risk reduction.