FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT
Four break-out group discussion 4: Innovative technical solutions
Chair: Professor Philip Kuchel
Rapporteur: Mr Rory Eames
Rory Eames: We started off talking about technological solutions and innovation for water management issues. We had quite a diverse group of local government people, researchers, practitioners.
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The first point is a very obvious one, but one which I think could be stated more, and in different contexts. Taking the scientific approach and making it central to high quality decision-making is not solely the domain of scientists; it is an approach to decision-making across the board, be it social science, be it community engagement, be it data collection at the community level, at the stream level or the national and international level. And this goes for climate change as much as for water management. So it is probably worth stating that, right up front.
Coordination is also sitting behind that as the corollary for what we actually do with the scientific data, as a first step of manipulating it, communicating it and realising that decisions will be made based on this best available data.
In a hard-nosed sense as far as water management is concerned, the four main issues are water supply, distribution, use and reuse. In this conference yesterday and today a lot of the technical solutions have been based around these issues, and for good reasons.
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Getting back to some of the basic technical solutions to water management that we have heard about, the first thing we discussed in our group was sensors. There is a big debate about the quality of our dataour data about water quality and even water quantityand geographic and temporal distribution. It was pointed out earlier today that our information about how much water we've got, its quality, where it goes and so on, is still at a fairly basic level. But we have got the technology to knowthere is a technology out there to let us know this information.
We also discussed a range of different kinds of filters.
Energy efficient distribution systems: we have heard a couple of times today, and it is a crucial point, that water and energy are inseparable, and it is quite easy to imagine a glass of water as embodied energy in a number of waysthe energy that it took to get it there, to process it, to transport it, to remove it once it has been used, and distillation technologies as well, ranging from distillation of seawater, grey water, black water right through a whole range of different processes and technologies there.
Biosensors have been a big part of the debate, and some really exciting technologies and, particularly as Max Lu has talked about, some very economically viable technologies as well. This is not the kind of technology that only works in the lab, it has very practical applicationsapplications which are cost-effective and in the same realm as things like desalinisation.
I have spoken a little bit about environment sensors, but I will break that down into meteorology and hydrology. On the one hand we have got emerging technologiesnot so much emerging technologies but refined technologiesto let us know how much water we have got, stream flows, stream hydrology and fluid dynamics. But we have also got meteorology in terms of our ability to predict local and regional weather patterns, to input better decision-making data into farm management, regional water management, dam levels and so on, just in the short to medium term. And we have seen some great data management technologies today.
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Filters: There is a variety of emerging technologies there.
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A broader theme which emerged in our discussion and is also emerging in this conference is that there is a range of sciences. Our group was charged with talking about technological innovations, but coupled with that and inseparable from it is innovative science in decision-making processes, policy science, social science. These are the sciences of learning how to deal with complex sets of data, so on the one hand we might have emerging fields of good environmental data management and capture. The quality of our ability to capture that information is improving, so in a sense we are moving into an area where new innovation is actually conceptual: how do we integrate very different forms of knowledge? Each is very critical to the others, but at this point we don't yet have great tools, at the local, state or national level, to integrate those forms of information.
I have put up 'transdisciplinarity'. This is a word which hasn't come up yet but we have been talking about it in many different contexts at this conference. I put it up there as a reminder that there is really quite a lot of work done on this stufftransdisciplinarity and bringing together different research fields. And there are the conceptual tools, and also the technological toolsweb-based tools, data analysis tools and communication channels as parts of those technologies.
We, like the other groups, talked quite a lot about values and our ability, or inability at times, to put appropriate values on things like waterit happens with energy as welland what the flow-on effects are in terms of innovations for water management. The point was made in our group that even economic values, while we economically grossly undervalue things like water, are stifling technological innovation, particularly in traditional business incubation models, where it is done on a return-on-cost kind of model. And so we are still in a frame of mind where our innovation is on an environmental footprint basis and it is very difficult, while water is cheap, to have that economic driver. We saw that today with the Perpetual Water example. The decision to spend up to $15,000 for a domestic water treatment system is a personal one and it is one which incurs a significant cost. The return on that investment is a good garden, a garden for kids to play in, and freedom of water use; it is not yet an economic return.
We also talked about our inability to optimise existing technologies. A range of technologies which have been developed over the past 80 to 100 years have been either left or built on with new technologies. Those new technologies are fantastic, but I think the point was made that as a country we haven't learnt how to go back to existing technologies and improve those, where we have the infrastructure based on those technologies, so perhaps that is where we can create some good water-saving initiatives.
Comment 1 (Stuart Chalker): One of the things in relation to social science is that technology actually has a great advantage in potentially changing individuals' behaviour to water, in terms of water use. The internet-based model we saw in Stuart Minchin's presentation had a live-time, accurate model of how much water is in our dams. There is potential there to influence people's behaviour if you can show their water use, because you get remote water meter readings and those sorts of things. If you can show the impacts you are having, there might be a system that potentially changes people's habits, rather than just focusing on the current demand that we insist on having.
Comment 2: With all our discussion of technology and its ability to contribute to innovation and to management of water, one thing to keep in mind is that reliance on high technology involves all sorts of risks. Some people have used the term 'resilience'. We have to remember that a resilient system is not necessarily a high tech one; sometimes it is based on simplicity. We can just imagine what happens when some of these systems start failing. Can we still run the system? Can we still get the same results?
Rory Eames: That is a very good point. We are talking about technological innovation here, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion about local level innovation, in the sense of surviving, and living with, the ups and downs of our natural environment. So quite a lot of our technological innovation, even our policy-making, is still directed at levelling out the ups and downs of the natural environment, possibly at the expense of learning how to live with those fluctuations.
Comment 3 (Bob Humphries): One topic related to both this group and the previous one, and probably all of them, is the very strong anti-science dominant thought in society. We didn't really discuss it much. I am just reading Shelley Gare's book called The triumph of the airheads, and I can commend it to you all. Basically, it is about short-term gratification, complete denial of the laws of physics and mass conservation in terms of the way we run our lives. She claims it has led to decisions like the Iraq war, where the neocons in the Bush administration basically said, 'We are the new reality and we're not worried about the social complexity in Iraq. We can get rid of Saddam and then our reality will prevail.' Now, in John Howard's terms, they've been 'mugged' by it.
I think it is an incredibly important issue, because our political processes are actually responding to the unbridled demand'If I want to live on the coast I should be able to,' or, 'If I want to have a new mobile phone every six months I should be able to,' and so on. I am not quite sure how we deal with that, exceptto pick up on the pointto use the current water shortage and the very real threat of climate change as a major method of trying to replumb people's intellects a bit. But social science has got a big challenge here.
Comment 4 (Jenny Goldie): I want to pick up on the comment about resilience and simplicity. It struck a chord with me, especially with regard to our natural resources. There was a time when there was plenty of water to go round and we didn't need all these technologies to recycle and reuse it. It was a time of lower population in Australia, coupled with lower individual demand. But I think that there is the worry that technology won't work or it will be too energy intensive in an energy constrained world, or it will not be economically viable to implement it. So, without being a Luddite, I think that one aspect, one form of resilience is to go back to a simpler world of fewer numbers and fewer demands.
