Managing our water demand in a fickle environment

Managing our water demand in a fickle environment

Thursday, 12 May 2011

By Ross Young In 2008/09, behind only mining, the urban water industry was the biggest investor in the Australian economy in capital works. This investment has been driven by our drying climate, climate change and our need to adapt very quickly so that our cities don't run out of water.   The steady rise in temperatures over the past century has accelerated the rate of evaporation. The raw material on which our product depends is surface run off, which has declined dramatically in the past decade.   The Australian map of mean decile temperature for 2009 showed that temperatures over most of the country were above average or the highest on average – another indicator that the country is getting warmer. Rainfall is more erratic – and the quintessence of managing water resources in Australia is not that we are the driest inhabited continent but that we have the most variable rainfall of all the continents on Earth. That is why our managing our water resource in Australia is particularly intriguing.   The national rainfall map for 2009 shows how the lowest rainfall neatly correlates with where the majority of the Australian population lives – on our south east coast.  Australia has the most fickle and variable rainfall of all the continents. Average rainfall is a meaningless measure. How do you plan a water system when you have such variable inflows?  Water inflows into our reservoirs are the X factor in planning for water – and the variability means you never know where you are going to end up. Climate change has meant that our yields have collapsed, up to 70 per cent in some instances, and there's a marked reduction in runoff due to rainfall patterns changing. In Perth the rainfall has only declined about 20 per cent but inflows are down by between 70 and 80 per cent.   Population growth is going to continue across Australia and most of the growth will either be in the big large capital cities or the major regional centres. The urban water industry has to accept responsibility to assist stressed rivers. Water restrictions are not the vision for the urban water industry. Water restrictions cost a lot, they are inconvenient, they are inefficient and – if you have them all the time – when you come across another very dry period you have no other lever to pull. The urban water industry sees water restrictions for emergency cases and not as an ongoing water conservation measure.  The great sustainability challenge is to manage the nexus between water and energy. You can't generate electricity without water and you can't pump and treat water without electricity.   Desalination has been a focus with six desalination plants across five states – completed or under construction – planned to have a total capacity of 525,000 megalitres (ML), with the ability to grow to 715,000 ML. Sydney’s Kurnell desalination plant will supply up to 15 per cent of Sydney’s water supply by 2015.  Sydney's annual consumption in 2009 was around 400 gigalitres, so the total planned desalination capacity for Australia is about a year and a quarter's water for Sydney – or about 1.9 years at 750 gigalitres. Desalination hasn't been the industry’s only response – a common misconception.  The volume of recycled water has shown steady growth over the last decade.  One point to emphasise is that none of this water has been used for indirect potable reuse – it's all used for irrigation, commercial and industry use, third pipes and golf courses and the like. Climate change impacts are often characterised just as a reduction in inflows, but every aspect of the urban water industry including its assets are impacted by climate change.   For example nobody ever envisaged, when we implemented the very successful demand management programs, what would happen to the waste water system and waste water flows – which have declined by 50 per cent in some areas because of people using lower volume shower roses and water efficient washing machines.  People are diverting their grey water back onto the backyard.  There is also less ground water infiltration into the sewers because the groundwater table has dropped, and also there is certainly less stormwater infiltration because it didn't rain. This combination meant that some of our sewers in parts of Australia were struggling to act and operate properly because they rely on a certain amount of water going through them in order to take the waste away. And it's also meant that the concentration that arrives at the waste water treatment plant has increased dramatically because the loads are exactly the same but the volume of water has decreased. Australia has the largest dam capacity per capita of population in the world.  Per capita we store five to six times the water compared to the average European country.  London stores only 5 months of water. If we had a five month buffer in Warragamba Dam, Australia’s largest, Sydney would experience regular water restrictions. Australia needs large dams so we can manage for the variability and fickleness of our rainfall. There has been an amazing reduction in household consumption over the past decade – one of the great social revolutions in urban Australia. The public’s response to water conservation has been really quite amazing. I think this is why climate change has been more of a lightning rod issue in Australia than anywhere else. Too often overseas climate change is characterised in terms of ice melt and sea level rise that impact the future, whereas water restrictions were a tangible manifestation that the climate had changed – and why people had resonance with it. Australia also leads the world in leakage management.  Around the rest of the world the leakage rates can be 30, 40 or 50 per cent.  In fact, in the UK they justify their leakage programs not to save water but to reduce their carbon footprint.  By the time you pump the water out of the Thames, and put it through a treatment plant, and pump it into your distribution system, you are looking at a quite carbon rich product.   There has been a lot of public debate about population growth in Australia and whether water availability would be a fetter on growth. WSAA’s recent report, Implications of population growth on urban water resources, estimates (using ABS figures) that by 2056 we will probably need somewhere around 1300 or 1400 gigalitres of water, about three or four times what Sydney uses now.  We think that that's quite an achievable figure over that period of time provided we start planning now and adopt new technology and we continue with water saving programs. Water prices are in the process of doubling around Australia – some prices have already doubled – and some sections of the community are feeling angst. I think that most people are happy to pay a little bit more to have a security of supply of their water, and water still is one of the cheapest household outgoings.   The Murray Darling Basin is a key issue for Australia, but it’s important to remember that back in 2004 there was very strong support from the urban people, from agricultural people and environmentalists about the National Water Initiative, which envisaged two very important outcomes.    One would be that, rather than licences, farmers would be given secure property rights that would enable them to trade with other irrigators and also allow them to trade with the cities – a one off significant transfer of wealth from the public to the private which would set up a market where water could move to a higher value use.   The second, which seems to be forgotten, was the recognition that something needed to be done about the over allocation of rivers and reducing rainfall. ABS figures show the gross value of irrigated agriculture in the Basin in 2001, a relatively good year, was $5.1 billion. Yet during the really bad drought year of 2005/06 it actually increased to 5.5 billion and was 5.1 billion again in 2008. This demonstrates the value of water trading and that those who received water to use in low-value production saw a way out of their financial trouble by selling their water to others who were producing a more value added product. ABARES modelling showed that a 3,000-gigalitre cut to water allocations would result in about an $800 million a year reduction in agriculture, assuming farmers took no offsetting measures, and ABARE estimates net job losses at between 800 to 1200. Nobody wants to lose a job but, compared to the job cuts in other sectors of the economy, these are relatively small numbers. Water use is the key issue. In both in New South Wales and, in particular, Victoria, flood irrigating pasture is still the largest use of water. There are few other uses of water that are less productive in terms of economic output per megalitre of water. Too often in the cities you hear rice and cotton maligned for the water they use but both of these crops produce many dollars per megalitre consumed. The irrigation entities don't fully recover all their costs of supplying the water to the irrigators, which means that taxpayers have to front up every decade with dollars to actually reinvest to support irrigation. If we were able to push a lot of this low-value production onto high-value production, I don't think we would be having too much of a debate about whether the water was being used properly or not.   Ross Young is Executive Director of the Water Services Association of Australia (WSAA), the peak body for the urban water industry, whose members provide water services to 16 million Australians. Mr Young Ross has extensive experience in urban water management at a senior level and represents the Australian urban water industry on water policy at the national level. He is Chair of the Global Water Research Coalition Board and a Board Member of WaterAid Australia.  He has a Diploma of Horticultural Science, a Bachelor of Applied Science, an MBA and a Graduate Diploma in Natural Resources Law from the University of Melbourne.