FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

Opening address
Professor Kurt Lambeck

Kurt Lambeck is Distinguished Professor of Geophysics at the Australian National University. His research interests range through the disciplines of geophysics, geodesy and geology with a focus on the deformations of the Earth on intermediate and long time scales and on the interactions between surface processes and the solid earth. Past research areas have included the determination of the Earth's gravity field from satellite tracking data, the tidal deformations and rotational motion of the Earth, the evolution of the Earth-Moon orbital system, lithospheric and crustal deformation processes. His recent work has focused on aspects of sea level change and the history of the Earth's ice sheets during past glacial cycles, including field and laboratory work and numerical modelling.

Professor Lambeck has been at the Australian National University since 1977, including ten years as Director of the Research School of Earth Sciences. He is currently also strategic science advisor to National Geospatial Reference System of Geoscience Australia. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 1984 and to the Royal Society in 1994. He is a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (1994), Academia Europaea (1999), and the Académie des Sciences, Institut de France (2005). He has received a number of prestigious international prizes and awards.

I think the history of the last few millennia has very much shown that water and people don't seem to mix very well. I think it is fair to say that since the very earliest time, man has struggled against the sea, he has suffered from droughts and floods. It has been a source of legends. But it is also, perhaps, interesting to realise that water – or the consequence of water – has also triggered many of the developments in our society. An example that comes to mind straight away is some of the early developments in mathematics that simply came out of dealing with the consequences of the Nile flooding.

Australia has not been immune from the struggle either, and water has been on the agenda for as long as the country has been a political entity. It is interesting to read back to some of the early conferences on water. One of the burning issues of the 1898 Constitutional Convention was, in fact, water. And it was as much an exercise in finger-pointing between the states as it is today, Queensland arguing that a good deal of the water that flows into the New South Wales rivers really should belong to them, and New South Wales responding, 'But it only comes down to rivers in times of flood, which are the times when you don't need it' – you see that sort of argument in the early documents. But something did come out of it, and that was the River Murray Commission.

Likewise, the big drought of 1940–47 or thereabouts did lead to the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, and the current drought is leading to a recognition that joint action is required to ensure that the country as a whole will be better prepared for when the next drought occurs.

What has changed over the last hundred years or so we will hear about today, but I think we all realise it is population growth, it is an increase in our per capita use of water – and it is superimposed on this growing body of information on climate change, with the potential for a significant geographic redistribution of water across the continents.

This makes it a volatile mix. Increased population results in more washing, more cleaning, more water-hungry manufacturing and energy needs, more crops to feed the swelling population, and a greater drive for exports. We will hear about some of those things today.

The consequences of these are also well known to you: rivers drying up, salination, gradual poisoning of the soil, groundwater, vegetation changes, and so on.

What the public debate of the last few months is showing – and it is only in those few months, really, that the debate has become public – is that there is a growing, even if terribly belated, political recognition that water in its potable form is limited, and that technological solutions are required to render the unpotable potable and to deliver water from areas of relative plenty to the areas of paucity of water. These are challenging issues indeed. They are issues that have the potential to resolve some of the future problems but they are also issues that have the potential to produce outcomes that we may live to regret at some time in the future.

It is against this background that the Academy has organised this Fenner Conference to provide a perspective on Australia's population movements, climate change, and the implications of both for water policy – in other words, to provide a framework for a continuing discussion (and I emphasise 'continuing' because it is not just one-off events – there needs to be a continuing discussion) and to provide input into action plans that ensure that the country is not going to be caught flat-footed once more when the next big drought occurs.

It is not the first time that the Academy has addressed the water–population nexus. The history of this discussion goes back almost to the foundation of the Academy in the mid-1950s, and several of our Annual General Meeting symposia have addressed the issue – in 1962 and 1977 the topics were devoted to people and water – and in 1980, for example, we had a Science and Industry Forum which dealt with water use in Australia. Then in 2004 we had the Fenner Conference on the population–environment nexus, which also addressed water issues.

What I find interesting, and perhaps disconcerting, in reading the resulting reports of these conferences is that really all the issues discussed now were already being addressed 30, 40, 50 years ago. A lot of the issues that are being discussed today were identified then as being important ones, and solutions were being proposed. The issues of the increasing per capita water consumption, the consequence of population growth, the consequence of the lowering of water quality, the pollution of groundwater, desalination issues, recycling, the increasing costs incurred in delivering potable water – these are all issues that you find already being addressed back in the 1960s.

The issues were there all along. Proposed solutions, in many instances, were there. And they are not so very different from what we hear today.

That, in a sense, is going to be the challenge that we face. How do we ensure that the topic doesn't vanish from the public and political horizon the moment that the current drought breaks? (I am assuming that it will break at some point.) How do we prevent the proposals that have been announced in recent times from being shelved and the funds being allocated into other important issues of the day?

I certainly hope that one of the outcomes of this meeting will be to give some attention to these issues. How do we ensure that there is a long-term benefit from these discussions? I think it is true to say that it takes a crisis before politicians and policy-makers recognise these issues. The danger is that if the current drought does break, then the urgency of the issue will dissipate and once more little will get done.

It is perhaps a thought that the drought and flood cycles are very much part of the Australian scene, but with the superimposition of long-term climate trends the period between extreme cycles will probably shorten. There is the potential that politicians and policy-makers will only pay attention to these issues once the two cycles – the political cycle and the climate or drought cycle – begin to have similar time constants. But of course then it is too late. To avoid this happening is what this conference is all about.

I am confident that by the end of the two days we will have made some progress on some of these issues.