Watching our future going down the gurgler

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.