Thursday, November 02, 2006
What happens when a city runs out of water?
What happens when a city of 1.5 million people runs out of water?

We may soon find out.

Many Australian cities are facing water shortages; all capital cities (but Darwin) have some level of restriction in place. In Brisbane, Level 4 are now in place, as regional dam levels hit 25%.
Level 4 means its buckets only on alternate days, when it comes to watering the garden and washing cars, houses and windows.

(However, if you are planning a new swimming pool, that’s fine. You can fill it up solely on the proviso you have a water efficient shower and washing machine and dual flush toilets. Brisbane maybe running out of drinking water, but we are not going to spoil any middle class fun.)

Two related factors have got us here. It hasn’t rained (the climate appears to be drying) and the population continues to boom (it's good for the economy). The water storage capacity that was supposed to last for 20 year’s growth, now appears hopelessly inadequate. What policy makers assumed was a short dry spell, has gone on and on.

But the Australian water ‘crisis’ is full of conundrums. It is the ‘driest’ continent on Earth, yet receives more rainfall per capita that most of Europe. Brisbane is desperately short of drinking water, yet we consume far more water per head than Europe, and pay virtually nothing for it. We then throw it on our European-inspired green gardens. The nation’s farmers have adopted some of the world’s most water-efficient technologies, yet we grow rice and cotton in the desert, relying on 100% irrigated water, thus use more water for agriculture than most places on the planet.

In the good times, Australian water policy was premised on two simple strategies. One, dam enough water in the short (3 month) wet to see you through the long dry each year and two, mine it from the Great Artesean Basin - taking more each year than is replenished.

The prolonged drought and concerns over the sustainability of simply allowing aquifers gush-forth unregulated are now finally impressing on policy makers we need a more sophisticated approach to how, where and what sort of water we use.

True, some of the responses, such as desalination powered by fossil fuels, continue to force us down an unsustainability path (and ironically contribute to the global warming that is probably inducing the current drought), but there are plenty of other projects being pursued, which contribute to achieving a more robust supply.

The keystone is diversity: the trending away from the simple ‘tree’ pattern of centralised provision of water resources for consumption, whereby we rely on a few, large sources to meet the demands of millions of consumers in thousands of different categories.

Using recycled water for industry, large scale stormwater harvesting and bore water are all now being carried out in various parts of Australia. Nested, smaller scale schemes, such as domestic rainwater tanks and community level stormwater capture, along with demand management incentives for efficient appliances and water sensitive gardens, all contribute to suppressing demand on inefficient, ineffective and unresponsive, centralised dam-to-consumer reticulated systems.

But it is also now time to get innovative. Consider this: Unmeasurable amounts of environmental damage has been caused and billions of dollars has been spent in delivering drinking quality water to every urban household in Brisbane. 50% of this is thrown on the garden and another 40% is used in washing clothes and houses and flushing toilets. Around 1% is directly consumed by humans.

Yet we spend millions of additional dollars on extracting, ‘purifying’, bottling, distributing and displaying mineral water - then treating the packaging - because so many people do not trust the system that delivers water to their home.

This grossly inefficient phenomena is glibly dismissed as ‘consumer choice’; but really, it’s pretty stupid. Our Indigenous cousins must despair when see us flush our toilets with water good enough to drink.

Furthermore, through the study of ‘path dependencies’, it is demonstrated that inefficient consumption of one good – say reticulated water – leads communities down the an increasingly inefficient pathway, where good money gets thrown after bad. For example, when previously water self-sufficient communities are connected to the town water system, the increase in water consumption inevitably means that the community then requires connection to the town’s waste water treatment, thus creating a dependency – and ever more investment in large infrastructure - that wasn’t there to begin with.

Small and nested is nearly always more efficient, effective and responsive than large and centralised.

But naturally, the progressive diverse schemes being encouraged by current governments will always be tempered by their old-fashioned desires for grandiose schemes. As a colleague in our marketing department said to me the other day: the Lord Mayor wants lots of ribbon cutting ceremonies.

The State government continues to moot outlandishly massive schemes, such as pumping and piping water from as far afield as Townsville and Papua New Guinea. With a constantly changing [meteorological] climate – notwithstanding the impacts of global warming – you must question the sanity of sinking further billions into all-or-nothing schemes.

But the end game is economic growth. As long as GDP remains the only politically acceptable measure of well-being, then more infrastructure, more consumption and more

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