Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub launched at CDU
A new joint-project revealed at CDU on Thursday will help agribusinesses and drought-prone communities in Central Australia to cope when the wet seasons fail.
Northern Territory
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FUTURE-PROOFING the Northern Territory against crippling drought will be the focus of a major $21.9 million hub announced by the federal government yesterday.
The Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub, to be based at Charles Darwin University and with “nodes” in Alice Springs, Broom, Katherine and Perth, will engage with graziers and drought-prone communities to access new drought-busting projects and practices.
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The new hub at CDU’s Casuarina campus is one of eight nationwide to be delivered by the $5 billion Future Drought Fund.
Federal senator Sam McMahon said the hubs were aimed at reducing destocking on cattle stations across Central Australia, particularly during weak wet seasons.
“Whilst this one has been excellent, the two before that were fairly poor and a fair chunk of the Northern Territory suffered a fairly severe drought,” Ms McMahon said.
“So the Northern Territory does experience droughts, and this was something that I was very keen to point out to my colleagues in Canberra,” she said.
“They were quite surprised.”
Ms McMahon said research would be conducted into water storage across the Territory, to take advantage of good wet seasons.
“We haven’t built any large-scale water storage facilities for about the last 40 years,” she said.
“It’s ridiculous that when we do get all this rainfall, we catch very little of it, so we’ve got great opportunity to come up with innovative methods for capturing and storing water.”
Ms McMahon said large dams, smaller weirs, off-stream water storage and “recharge solutions” were all on the table.
CDU vice chancellor Professor Scott Bowman welcomed the new hub, which would be funded by $8 million in federal government funds and $13.9 million of private investment.
“This is just so important to us,” Prof. Bowman said.
“It’s fantastic that we’ve gone out and formed a broad collaboration with lots of interesting parties in the Northern Territory,” he said.
“We will be doing research – we will be looking at water sustainability and water security.”
Prof. Bowman said the shopfronts in Katherine, Alice Springs, Perth and Broome would allow university research to be taken directly into the “real world.”
“It’s really no good doing research in institutions like this, if it’s not going to go out into the real world and make a difference,” he said.
“That’s really what this hub is going to be primarily about - working with stakeholders to make better use of water.”
Originally published as Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub launched at CDU
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