Polluted runoff is still smothering the Great Barrier Reef, our first national assessment of water quality trends in Australian rivers has revealed. The problem on the reef is getting worse, not better, despite efforts to improve farming practices and billions of dollars committed by governments to water-quality improvements.
But in good news, there are signs of improvement in the Murray-Darling Basin, where less salt, sediment and phosphorous were detected in the water.
Our latest research quantifies, for the first time, how water quality in Australian rivers has changed over the past two decades. Around half our 287 monitoring sites experienced significant changes in water quality between 2000 and 2019 on every measure we analysed. But the results for the reef and the basin stood out.
