One really needs to read the Peter Andrew's story, and about his pioneering ecological restoration approach.
He built a series of small upland dams, sort of like what beavers do in North America. In other words, he emulated nature!
His tiny dams were designed to lift the water table around a metre, and simply slow the flow of available water, and thereby force much of it into the landscape, which was then obliged to store billions of litres of water, and slowly release seriously cleaner water during the dry times. Thereby extended environmental flows two or three years, during the dry times!
And there is virtually nothing to stop many other farmers from emulating his highly successful example, other than hugely ignorant roadblock pollies and or, mindless greens?
This is just how the Australian ecology functioned before white settlement and widespread land clearances for farming!
The green movement were livid!
Thanks to their locked in concrete, no more dams approach to everything, including flood/harm minimization, and or, carbon free hydro power, or both?
I mean, even a two metre high, twenty metre wide weir can create enough power, to power up around thirty homes?
There are still some people who bag Peter Andrew's pragmatic approach and or, most ecological restoration, on the grounds, it's the wrong example, or it'll support more population growth; or even more nonsensical ideological rubbish.
These same people, will stop us mining the reef for its low carbon hydrocarbons, but remain strangely silent, as we import up to 91% of our fuel needs, from hydrocarbon types, that from well head to harvester, create four times as much carbon, as that which lays virtually beneath our feet.
I think doing something/anything that helps restore the natural balance, is a whole lot better, than simply doing nothing, or becoming virtual roadblocks in the path of restoration projects, or simple sensible pragmatism, out of sheer ignorance or rank stupidity, or both!?
Rhrosty.

An interesting post and worth following the developments. As Rhrosty comments, the pragmatic and successfull examples of Peter Andrews' approach is worthy of emulating and further studying. What depresses me with the article is "the effects of climate change become more evident". Where are the examples of this??, please do not cite floods and droughts, cyclones etc etc here, nor sea level rises nor any of the other, myriad but oh so elusive 'effects'. Such a pitty that an interesting and informative environmental post is degraded with the climate change meme.