At 2,500 km long, the Murray is Australia’s longest river. It provides 3 million people with drinking water and irrigates around 1.5 million hectares of farmland.

But this intensive use has come at a cost: the lower Murray — defined as the River Murray downstream of the Darling River and its meandering creeks and floodplains — is now dangerously environmentally degraded.

In mid January, the lower Murray was listed as a critically endangered ecological community under Australia’s nature laws. This means there’s an extremely high chance its native ecosystems will become extinct within the immediate future, in as little as ten years. The Macquarie Marshes in northern New South Wales, one of the largest inland wetlands in south east Australia, was listed as endangered on the same day.

The health of the lower Murray matters greatly. It is the lifeblood for a large swathe of southern Australia and supports a diverse range of unique plants and animals, local economies and the well-being of people that love and rely on it.

The lower Murray is one of a growing number of Australian ecological communities at risk of becoming extinct. These communities include all the plants and animals co-existing in an area, in some cases for millions of years.

The lower Murray winds through expansive floodplains, limestone gorges and swamplands as it flows 830 kilometres downstream from its junction with the........

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