FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT
Innovative technical solutions: Water learnings for sustainability
Adjunct Professor Paul Perkins
Paul Perkins is an Adjunct Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University. He is a national leader in public sector reform and the emerging sustainable development movement.
Presently:
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Chairman of the National Envi ronmental Education Council
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Independent Chairman of the Cooperative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Environmental Remediation (CRC CARE)
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Facilitator of the development of an investment plan for a Terrestrial Ecosystems Research network (TERN), funded by Australian Government (DEST, under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy)
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Member of the Australian Government's Business Roundtable on Sustainable Development
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Chairman of the Barton Group, a national CEO alliance implementing the Environment Industry Development Action Agenda
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Deputy Chairman, Perpetual Water Pty Ltd, a water recycling technology start-up.
Paul was project director of the National Water Industry Roadmap study and provides advice to governments on science-policy-operations integration focussed on environment and natural resource management, industry development and sustainability strategies. He was appointed as a Member in the General Division of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2005 for contributions to public sector reform, environment and export development.
The reason I am at the Fenner School is that after the bushfires in Canberra I nearly gave it all away in despair. I had spent a lifetime reforming government business. I was the change manager and the environment manager for a utility, a multi-utility, which had done it all. By that I mean we had de-politicised the environment, made a fortune for our owners, the government and, in the end, created the situation where we had a publicprivate partnership for more efficiency which was even more profitable. And it all came to a tragic end with a fire which destroyed the middle of our catchment forever. It wasn't done by malice or mal-intent, it was done through ignorance. We preserved our forests; that was the best knowledge we had.
By agreement with my government and my board, the last thing I did before I adjourned to the university, to spend my pre-dotage years trying to improve the flow of knowledge from science to operations, was to sign off $60 million for a water treatment plant which we should never have needed because Canberra was designed around pristine and protected catchments, flow of the river, and so on. Nobody cared about the waste. The greens, politicians, administrators and so on, nobody cared. They just wanted the water. No learnings.
I was very depressed and very frustrated, but since then I have been on a journey of discovery. It has been great fun and I have had time to reflect, I've had time to help people like John Grimes (Perpetual Water), I've had time to help the industry, I've had time to help Premiers, I've had time to help Prime Ministers and a wonderful, wonderful journey, all based on science but a failure of science. Sorry, not a failure of science, but a failure of us to have our act together. It has led me to be confident in our ability to better adapt in future. I call it Gen II of the environment: learning sustainability.
We have been through the first generation, which was the emotion of the environment, awareness that we are overusing our resource and all that. Well, it is now the time to stop the rhetoric and get on with it a big ask, because it's not just the hard sciences, it is about how you get value from all of them together.
So today I've tried to put together just a few things to help you reflect on some of the things you have heard, and see how this next generation the very reason the Fenner School exists, I might add might actually extract the value from them all for a more integrated, complex system society, reducing the inefficiency just as we do with bio-mimicry. We really have to achieve it.
And none of you should sit there comfortably. We don't have time to be comfortable. Equally, we don't have time to be pious and say, 'Well, that silly stuff that they're doing over there is too expensive.' There are a couple of university faculties in this nation who should hang their head in shame, because they are using beautiful mathematical and economic (least cost) models to prove you shouldn't do any of it. Well, if they are right, we should close the doors, move out of Australia and shift to Singapore, because it is cheaper to live in the high-rise buildings and desalinate there. But that's not what nation-building is about, that's not what sustainability is about. It's about how we live with nature and how we have a quality of life so that it is sustainable over generations and eons.
I want to share just a couple of principles.
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I don't have this slide just as a background. This comes from the Australian Water Industry Roadmap which I was privileged to work on, with all of the various players in the industry, signed off by the Prime Minister 18 months ago, to try and get at how we could make it not just a policy thing but something which engaged us all in the process.
Well, the end play of all of this is about water innovation in terms of cycles of development, cycles of learning, understanding that there are dominant drivers of each, understanding that it is not just the hard science but all the other things to hammer the point that these wonderful nanotechnology initiatives we heard about from Max Lu, for example, should give us hope. That is the real hope of the long-term future, but not this week, though that is what Australia wants, or the frustrated greens still want. It is about the difference between now, short-term immediacy, and what is achievable in the long term.
It is all about convergence of knowledge and how we operationalise that knowledge, in complex system science. It is about two words, just to bring it back to the simple non-scientist's language. Firstly, it's about portfolios of things. It's not all about demand management or rationing, it's not all about supplying everything they want, it's about a whole raft of things. As Mao Zedong said, 'Let a thousand flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.' The monopoly concept is self-limiting. The Gen II future is about partnering. But by partnering I mean something we don't even yet understand. My university doesn't understand it. I can't find anybody for a science thing I am doing for the nation in the next two weeks they're all overseas collaborating, individually. The only reason we can get a meeting is that modern technology lets us do it, thank goodness. There is a challenge, though, in learning a new form of partnering, and the benchmarks are already there.
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I think it is best put by Donald Schon, a futurologist of some time ago now, who talked about change principles. Schon said it is not just technology, it is also culture and the structure of society that we are talking about. To get new technology to take hold, we go through a zone of instability in which the term he used was 'dynamic conservatism' all those who have prospered under the old will fight it, and all of those who might succeed in the new are hesitantly hedging their bets. Indeed, in business it is called hedging. Eventually, however, it becomes contagious and you move to a new order of things.
If you doubt that, think about the steam engine, trains, automobiles and we have got planners here, so you understand those cycles or, in the current age, information and communication technology. We are still at the beginning of IT and communication application not the science, but the application.
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You can see from this slide what happened with water. The first big cycle was in the 1800s, when diphtheria and other diseases in the cities caused problems because of a once-through design approach to water. A lot of the things we still have, such as monopolists resisting change, were born in those times. But they did a wonderful job. They did reduce the mortality rates in the cities of the world, and countries like us don't even think about it now because we have been so successful. That's an achievement. We shouldn't be too critical.
Then the next big phase was a nation-building phase in Australia after the Second World War: 'We're going to build the nation.' Well, we did. We more than doubled the population. We built dams all over the place. We learnt to irrigate. We did all those good things which knowledge at the time said were excellent things to do. In places like Canberra they put trees, pine trees, all over the place because they thought that would help the landscape. It didn't do very much good in 2002 and again in 2003, but it's a learning thing.
Now we are in a time when, in a multi-decadal dry cycle and with climate change and whatever, and having used up all the excess capacity, we are confronting a convergence of issues. And all sorts of horrible things are happening. We have people spending a fortune all around the country, catch-up water infrastructure projects, risking double the cost outcomes and at very great risk of putting water supply ahead of environmental balance, and in the end risking even the functional outcomes they set out to achieve, because it is a mad scramble to catch up. We are getting the difference between the immediate and the long run.
But we have heard today these phrases 'integrated water cycle management' and 'joined-up planning', excellent terms, but we are struggling with the efficient application of those things at the moment.
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I call it moving from the stump-jump plough approach or, if you look at it on a big scale, that big pipe from the dam right through to the outfall, which used to be and is still the way many people think of water, a once-through thing into an integrated system where you look at it all together. You might be surprised to know there are very few places where all of the water cycle functions are done in one entity. Even if they are, it is usually a monopoly which really has different departments. Some places, like Perth, in Western Australia, have done better than most in being able to do it all, but not many have. They still have the old cultural barrier of monopolies within departments, or even outside of entities and in other agencies.
The stump-jump plough was like that a lovely Australian invention, which went straight down the middle, serial processing. We really have to go from that to a much more sophisticated approach of integrated planning.
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The essence of what I am talking about is right here: design principles. I hesitate to use this because I am not an engineer, but I think this encapsulates the big challenge we face. The emotion and the nonsense that have gone on for too long are about insisting on immediate change. It can't happen. The naïve greens thought that if we took a mud-brick solution to all the overuse and bad practices we would solve it too. Well, they're right, of course. But society won't do that. The challenge is to use our power and our money and our capacity for all these things so that we actually go to a stage where, instead of this crude linear, exploitative flow-through methodology which infiltrates all of our designs of applied science, we get to an integrated closed loop or, if you think 50 years further out, bio-mimicry.
Science can do wonderful things. But it's not doing them in water! The science is there, but the application is still a long way behind. It is not the fault of the water utilities; I ran one and I know. It is the fault of all of us and our institutional linkages. Think of it in design concept terms: a quantum creep. We have come a long way in 30 years; we have still got a long way to go.
When people say you can't do desalination, you can't do this or that, you can do all of them. But it wouldn't be wise to do all of them. It's a question of finding a way to fit a portfolio of initiatives together.
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I won't dwell on this except to say that this learning thing goes on. When I came into this place, wastewater unregulated, by the way had no technology applications crude pipe and dump was the accepted process. Now you will find from Noosa all along the coast these wonderful 'no harm discharge' systems, and three or four Australian companies exporting them to the world, because we learnt that we could do it.
On the left of this slide are two dams. The first one, Bendora Dam a beautiful little dam, now partially useless because of the fires and silt was built only 30 years ago. In terms of benthic invertebrates and so on downstream, we now have the most sophisticated environmental flow requirements. You know what? We keep killing them, because when the dams were designed they didn't have this sort of knowledge about fish and whatever, and so we didn't put enough levels in the offtake tower. So with the normal turning over of water, the temperature becomes a problem. Even though we might mount an argument about how much water we should let go for the health of the river, we still get it wrong because we don't know enough. The challenge is not to criticise them but to understand and learn from it for the next cycle.
Finally we have Googong Dam a beautiful dam. It was built in a rain shadow, which we didn't know at the time. A wonderful dam. The first major project I did when I came here was to make sure we were one of the first to increase the size of the dam wall for the newly calculated maximum possible flood. Well, we did. It cost a fortune. It has hardly overtopped since. Again, learning takes cycles. And just as it does at the big end of water, in dams and harvesting, it goes all the way through to John Grimes' domestic recycling at the using end.
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In fact, it goes right back to the beginning of built civilisation, with the qanats of Persia. In just a few centuries from the time we came out of the caves, people were in Mesopotamia and it got stinking hot the Holocene. It was hotter than now, in fact. They had to find a way very quickly to make sure that they didn't lose all their crops and they could live. Well, they built these wonderful qanats. Labour wasn't a problem and I suspect that the mortality rate was high. But with air/access wells at 50 feet apart they did it, and the original ogave tunnels came from their innovation. Beautiful, self-regulating. It took the flow from the mountains, through aquifers, and the water flows through the qanats 200 km to the farms and the little towns. The most important person in the society, at water offtakes, was the water priest. They had methods of measurement, methods of sharing. We lost it all. We forgot. We built dams on the surface, rather than using underground aquifers and so on, because we got ahead of ourselves and exploited beyond the capacity of the land or, indeed, our capacity to keep up with it.
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The Prospect Water Treatment Plant, shown here, was built as an improvement nearly 14 years ago. There have been no more of those since, which is sad.
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Lower Molonglo, the best treatment plant in Australia in terms of its environmental and water recycling capacity, is 30 years old, and there are only two other plants in Australia that still do it. Interestingly, one of them discharges to the ocean.
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I won't dwell on all these wonderful things that are going on because we don't have time.
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This is my own home, 12 years ago it looks a bit better than that now all recycling, grey water and black water, and rainwater, plus photovoltaics. The only difference now is that we have got to have a cover over the pool because restrictions are tougher.
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The World Bank is confident that we can feed 2 to 3 billion more people over the next 50 years, given climate change projections, but not without radical action not to pay more for science, but institutional change.
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Finally, it's money.
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Given the national water commitment of $2 billion, given the Prime Minister's $10 billion water security plan announced on the eve of Australia Day, and given the $10 billion water strategies from the states all working flat out on all sorts of things there is an unprecedented level of activity going on in the industry. The challenge, however, is to always relate these things to benchmark performance. A lot of it is catch-up, 'me too', whatever.
What we have to aim for is 'no harm discharge'. It's what we should be insisting on and what we tried to get the Prime Minister's people to agree to he said the Premiers wouldn't agree, so the best they would do was to say 'over 10 years we will make substantial progress towards it'. The target for urban new investment in infrastructure writ large, and that includes metering and everything, is that the water supply efficiencies effected by this investment must produce a return greater than the growth needs in water, which addresses population and everything else. If it doesn't, we will be in real crisis in less than 20 years from now.
Finally, the rural productive output must be doubled. It has to be 200 per cent, with 50 per cent less water. If we believe in global warming, and we believe what is happening in parts of the world, then that would mean we have a productive economy, a balanced economy, and at the same time we would be doing something to help our colleagues around the world and probably become a world leader in water, as Holland was a century ago.
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The hypothesis I end with is this learning for sustainability. It is easy to criticise everybody and I am guilty here out of frustration, We can learn to do it better but it is about convergence. These things have all come together. Knowledge has made it possible, IT has made it possible. Environment, micro-reform, technology, it is all about a very simple step of going out and benchmarking, asking what is the extant information, what is the best knowledge we can find, and then coming back and applying that conceptual knowledge to your particular problem.
And if it's not there, then fund some more money for basic research in science, and so we take the next step. Remember, though, that all of that takes time.
In the end, the outcomes will be complex adaptive systems, integration in a true sense, and the true triple bottom line.
Given the urgency of water to this nation, given the recognition of it as shown by the current investments and so on, surely water can be an exemplar of this learning for sustainability. If it isn't, the obsolete windmill is a reminder. Nobody can force us to actually succeed; it is within our own hands and hearts. But, to do it, we have to learn to do things very differently, make use of the science that is being produced, and do it in such a way that it is to the benefit of us, our land, our water and our children.
Discussion
Question: Paul, one comment I have about our whole proceeding over the last two days is that we have paid insufficient attention to the issue of governance to achieve the outcomes. You touched on it. Would you just elaborate a bit as to where you see the deficiencies, but also and more importantly, the thinking and other changes we need.
Paul Perkins: I think that is too big an issue to deal with, but I will give you just one little snippet of reflection.
When I was looking across the 30th Parallel to see what was happening in our summer here, because big models tell us all sorts of different things but I have been able to find that if you look across the world you can get the answers, I found wonderful stuff in Spain about how they have almost a socialist approach to water management CMAs [catchment management authorities], if you like, allocation trading in that hot, harsh Man of La Mancha place. I found that their system goes back before the Reformation. I thought, 'That's interesting. We were burning witches at that stage. How did this system come about? It's fascinating.'
It is a wonderful system, which originally came from Mesopotamia through the influence of the Arabs and the Moors when they occupied the south of Spain. It is the same system which we use for our emergency services around the Western world that is, you have a collegiate system where in normal times all of the stakeholders are engaged and involved in collective management or whatever it is called. And when it gets too hard, you bring in an expert, whether that be an engineer, a scientist or military. In their case, when water conditions get harsh, as it has done regularly it has done, for millennia guess what happens? That all goes, one person is appointed, they have all the authority. That system is the one we use in 'declarations of emergency' and it is written into the legislation of all Western countries. That is the sort of thing I mention in 1) learning from the past and 2) benchmarking.
Our governance is too rigid. It is not resilient. And just as we are learning about resilience in natural systems and so on, we have to get back so that our systems of government can cope.
This is not meant as a barb but it's a learning thing! I think the world's best current example of an operationalised process of getting science all the way through the value chain (in water) down to citizen science, including all of the agencies involved, is in a complex, hard-pressed area in south-east Queensland. It was called, when it started, the Moreton Bay Catchments and Waterways Partnership. It is an extraordinary thing. And I see the heavy hand of bureaucracy 'coordinating' it right now not by mal-intent but because the mindset of the planners tends to be (and please forgive me, this is the view of a committed person) that we need to bring it all together. Well, biology doesn't work like that. It actually has to have biodiversity going on all the time. We have to learn how to get the planning together but at the same time encourage all that innovative stuff going on all around. That is a hard lesson, and I don't think we have learnt it yet. I think we will have lots of PhDs coming out of the Fenner School, and all over the country, over the next generation, and I think water should be where it is at. The governance will take care of itself, in time.
On governance: you can presume that, in most significant changes, just like the first 2½ years of the National Water Initiative the application of the Duke of York syndrome, I call it, where they marched them up to the top of the hill and they marched them down again the first iteration is normally bloody, nasty, grossly inefficient, but it is necessary. It's a learning process. If we don't know how to do it better, if our resources are conditioned to the old ways, we have to go through that process. So all of that inefficient catching up and learning how not to do it had to happen. It might be bad, but it's a step on the way. And, sadly, governance is just like that.
