Watching our future going down the gurgler

We live on a blue planet abounding in water. But only 2.5 per cent of this water is fresh and over two thirds of it is locked up in glaciers. A tiny fraction makes up our lakes, rivers, wetlands and groundwater - replenished from the oceans, as the earth functions like an enormous water processor pumping trillions of litres each day up into the atmosphere and back onto the land.

Humans already use about half of this annual renewable fresh water resource. Yet over 40 per cent of the world’s population suffers from water shortage, over one billion people lack access to safe drinking water and nearly three billion do not have access to adequate sanitation.

Changes to the global climate have resulted in lower rainfall and higher evaporation in some regions, diminishing surface water supplies. Increased pollution of waterways has compounded the problem further by reducing availability of safe, clean water. Add to this mix the increasing demand for water for food and energy production and there is little wonder we face a global water crisis. Little wonder too that our rivers and wetlands are now considered to be the most threatened ecosystems on the planet.

Australians consider water conservation and management as the single most important environmental issue facing the nation today. From a global perspective, it must be difficult to appreciate why. Even though Australia has the distinction of being the driest inhabited continent, we have abundant freshwater resources relative to our small population size. Australia is in the top 20 per cent of countries in terms of total renewable water resources with more than 10 times the water availability per person compared to India, China, South Africa and even the United Kingdom, and twice as much as the United States. We also have the dam capacity to store more water per capita than any other country. So why the talk of a water crisis?

In part, the problem is that most Australians choose to live where the water isn’t - about two-thirds of the available freshwater is in our tropical north. To compound matters, the water isn’t always there when we want it because our rainfall is highly variable between years.

Australia is without question a land of droughts and flooding rains. However, to a large part, the problem is one of our own making. Australia has one of the highest rates of water use in the world - third after the US and Canada. Although much of this comes from high use in the agricultural sector, our domestic consumption is staggering - the national household average is over 300 litres a day per person.

All jokes aside, the average person in the UK uses about half of the Australian rate - even our American counterparts are less consumptive (around 260 litres per day). Where does it all go? About 40 per cent of the water delivered to our doors is poured onto gardens, 15 per cent goes down the toilet and a similar amount is used in the laundry - less than 10 per cent is used in the kitchen.

Given our deplorable record of excessive water use and the combination of rapid population growth and a few dry years in succession (the sign of things to come in a future climate), it is perhaps not surprising that our cities have arrived at the current water crisis. As storage levels continue to remain low and restrictions on water use become the norm, calls for new dams become more strident.

In the past, we have expected governments to respond by building new dams or mining new groundwater resources. More recently, “nation-building” schemes involving pipelines or canals and even super-tankers have been proposed to tap river water flowing unchecked from our northern tropical rivers. Not only have these proposals been shown to be uneconomical, they are based on the false premise that “water flowing to the sea is wasted”.

Such proposals ignore the considerable ecosystem goods and services provided by natural river flows and the wetlands and estuaries they sustain. Some of these services, including productive recreational and commercial fisheries and tourism, can easily be valued in economic terms. Others that relate to biodiversity, cultural or spiritual values cannot, and we demean them by trying.

As a society, we are becoming increasingly aware that these grand proposals come with unacceptable environmental and social costs - as is apparent with the recent debate over the proposed dam on the Mary River in southeast Queensland. There are smarter ways of dealing with the water problems we face today.

What then can be done to meet this tremendous challenge?

Instead of consuming water as if there is no tomorrow, we must make better use of the resource we have. It is clear from the recent water restrictions in our cities that considerable savings can be made and more could be done with the right incentives. Unfortunately, changing behaviour alone will not be enough in the face of a rapidly growing population and increased uncertainty of supply as a result of climate change. We must seriously invest in the recycling and reuse of urban water. Less than 1 per cent of our total water use currently comes from wastewater and most of that goes to agriculture and industry.

This is too valuable a resource to continue to be pumped into the sea and we should move quickly to create opportunities for greater uptake by industry and agriculture. Similarly, we can do much to reduce stormwater run-off from urban areas, including the adoption of water-sensitive design in new urban areas and retrofitting in the existing urban footprint. These measures will not only help solve our urban water supply problem but also help to improve the health of waterways downstream.

We should also not dismiss out-of-hand options for indirect potable use, where highly treated urban water is returned into the supply chain, for example through irrigation in the upper parts of water storage catchments. There are considerable community concerns around this issue but it is far too important to be hijacked by emotive campaigns.

Visit any major European or American city and you would be hardly surprised to learn that the water you drink has already passed through at least one wastewater treatment plant upriver and returned to the urban water cycle. Indeed it is often claimed, though not true, that the water in the Thames has passed through six sets of kidneys before it arrives in London. Residents in rural towns on the Murray and indeed those in Adelaide must know that their water has been “borrowed” by others living along the way. We need to be reassured that new technologies for treating wastewater can provide a range of safe options for reuse.

To their credit, governments are already exploring these and other options - but is there something more we can do to assist? We can undoubtedly help by reducing water use in our homes. But perhaps we can do far more by actively contributing to open and informed debate about the future use of our water resources.

This should not simply be a debate about how we supply our thirsty cities. At the national scale, urban dwellers aren’t the real water guzzlers. Household water consumption accounts for only 9 per cent of the total water use in Australia, compared with 67 per cent used in agriculture. The rice industry alone uses almost as much as all Australian households combined (about four times the volume of Sydney Harbour), dairy and cotton use far more.

Much of this agricultural production is exported - a virtual trade of thousands of gigalitres of water shipped overseas. Such industries support important regional economies but this international trade has come at the expense of the health of our rivers. As we have seen with the River Murray, much of the considerable cost of environmental repair is left to the taxpayer. As the irrigation sector looks to the tropical north for new opportunities, it is timely to consider whether we can afford to allow the same to happen again.

The real water crisis in Australia is that we have yet to come to appreciate the true value of our freshwater assets. If we continue to treat water as a cheap commodity and our rivers as little more than tubes that carry it to the sea, then our opportunity to overcome these challenges will be lost, and we will watch our future go down the drain.