Atakelty Hailu

1 Introduction Australian Water utilities currently invest around $5 billion per year in capital works projects (Coombes 2024). A substantial portion of this investment involves water supply augmentation projects designed to ensure that there is sufficient supply to meet forecast water demand.

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1 INTRODUCTION Land degradation is threatening food security in developing countries where approximately 1.26 billion people practice agriculture in ways that may not always be sustainable (Barbier & Hochard, 2016; Lal, 2004; Stevens, 2018), with adverse consequences for the environment (Nkonya et al., 2011; Stevens, 2018) and the wellbeing of farmers (Gerber et al., 2014).