FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

Break-out group discussion 1: Water – population nexus
Chair: Professor Kurt Lambeck
Rapporteur: Dr Daniel Connell

Dan Connell: I am just going to do is just to cover a few brief points and then encourage other members of the group to put their points of view.

I think a lot of people in our group agreed with the feeling that the conference hasn't really come to grips with the issues that are involved in the waterpopulation nexus. There hasn't really been a lot of discussion about the nexus between water and population that took us far beyond what people already thought.

The thing that a number of people commented on, though, that was quite new and did shape their thinking was the concept of embedded water. Once we saw those figures in Barney Foran's presentation of what a high proportion of water use is actually embedded water use, we realised that that has a significant impact on the way in which you think about the interaction of water and population. As one of our group said, if you have got an agricultural country, you are inherently going to have very high figures. If you relate the amount of water used to the number of people in the country, you are inherently going to have very high figures because of the way in which agriculture embeds a lot of water in whatever it does. In a sense, in that sort of society, even reducing the population, if you continue with the same agricultural production you are still continuing with the same sort of water use.

Quite a few of us were drawn to the business of energy as well. In so many different ways, when you talk about water you have to talk about energy, because moving water around involves enormous energy costs and treating water frequently involves enormous energy costs. So there is an incredibly tight nexus between energy and water. They were things that I think people in our group came to feel were really important.

There was some feeling that the conference had concentrated disproportionately on technological issues. They are obviously very important, but there are other issues which people in our group wanted to talk about; there are a lot of cultural and political issues as well.

There were other distinctions the distinction between rural and urban water, and not seeing water in different places as interchangeable. This goes back to the connection with energy that I was talking about before.

There was also a lot of interest in the question of centralised versus local solutions. There are a lot of advantages in recycling, from a local perspective. On the other hand, it makes it much more difficult to have large public policy in the immediate sense it is public policy, I guess, that can be related to the idea of going to local recycling situations such as centralised management of catchments that are under pressure. There are a lot of catchment managers who are obviously rather frightened by the idea of encouraging a lot of local autonomy, whether it is Catchment Management Authorities or people in their own situations.

Our group covered the full spectrum. There were people who felt that it is very difficult to discuss the relationship between water and population, because there is a history to discussing limits to population in Australia that makes it a very difficult issue to discuss. You are skirting around difficult political issues that have been present when these issues have been discussed previously. And I think everybody present in the group wanted to be able to discuss these issues in a way that was free from the accusations of racism that quite rightly, perhaps in the past have applied to these discussions. But there was an important emphasis that our group wanted to make, that it should be possible to discuss these issues free from that particular context.

That being said, there were also a lot of other people in our group who thought that in discussing population we tend to just discuss numbers, when really what we are talking about is consumption patterns this goes back to that embedded water question and there is far more variability and complexity in consumption issues.

These were big divisions within our group, and I have done the best I can to try and give some idea of the range of things that we talked about. But there were a lot of other things that I haven't mentioned. So I think that, in terms of giving you an idea of the discussion that went on in our group, the best thing is for me to get out of the way and allow some other members of the group to put their points of view.

Comment 1 (Jenny Goldie): To follow on from what you have said: we didn't address the second question at all, and we didn't really come to a conclusion as a group about the first one. Probably if we had had a bit more time we might have got onto such issues as a national population policy, and I personally would have liked to see our group supporting the concept of a national population policy where all disciplines were involved (this is what Graeme Hugo was talking about yesterday) and where water would be discussed and would be a big item when the various disciplines sat down to draw up a national population policy. I hope that will happen one day.

Comment 2: I wasn't in the group, but I just wanted to comment on something that came from that group that is, that some people said that you were discussing population numbers when you really should have been discussing other aspects of population. But there are at least a couple of hundred groups Australia wide who look at our level of consumption and look at our affluence, and I don't think we should forget that our impact on the environment is three things, the I=PAT formula: population times affluence by technology. So all the factors have to be considered, and I would have thought that at a conference like this, particularly with a title like the one it has, population would have been given a little bit more consideration, and that this would be a perfect forum to try and get rid of that racism slur that is so often associated with discussions of the impact of population. It is a factor that simply can't be and shouldn't be excluded from discussions.

Here today somebody said that we have got to have 40 per cent reduction in our requirements for water, or we have got to find 40 per cent more water. But they didn't then say, 'Or we decrease the per capita demand for water.' For the most part we have discussed decreasing per capita demand, but if we don't look at decreasing the 'per capita' itself, to borrow somebody's analogy it is like mopping up an overflowing bath without first turning off the taps.

Graeme Pearman: From my perspective, anyhow, I think the issue of racism is part of the problem but it is not all of the problem. Part of the problem is that population growth is equated to economic growth, and while you remain in that paradigm you also find it difficult to talk about population because to do so is seen as being anti-development.