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PUBLIC LECTURES

Water management options for urban and rural Australia 2009

Water is our most fundamental natural resource – one that is both limited and subject to great variations in availability.

Balancing the needs of agriculture, industry and people for water, while maintaining the diversity and functionality of our unique ecosystems, is providing many technical and policy challenges. The magnitude and complexity of these challenges are further compounded by our expanding population and the impacts of climate change.

This series will inform both debate and action on Australia’s future water security by exploring the role of science in understanding the location and amounts of water we have, in predicting how supply and demand may change into the future, and in developing technical responses and improved management techniques. It will also examine situations where such information is being brought together to provide practical, environmentally responsible solutions.

4 November 2009
Converging insecurities: The water, energy, carbon and food nexus

Andrew Campbell
Managing Director
Triple Helix Consulting

Recent modelling from the CSIRO suggests that the world will need to produce as much food over the next fifty years as it has in previous human history. Rapid increases in global food production have historically been driven in large part by clearing more land, cultivating more land, irrigating more land and using inputs of energy and nutrients more intensively.

The next agricultural revolution will need to deliver more and better food using less water and less land, in generally more variable and difficult climates, with steeply increasing prices for energy, nutrients and, hopefully, carbon. The age of abundant, cheap fossil fuel energy is coming to an end, for transport fuels in particular.

All of the world’s great irrigated food bowls have fully- or over-committed their surface water and groundwater resources. Global freshwater availability per capita is declining sharply. The implications of the looming oil crisis for Australian agriculture in particular are profound, irrespective of one’s views about climate change, but are receiving little policy attention.

This forbidding macro context is thrown into stark relief at the level of the farm, the rural community, the irrigation district or the regional economy. It is at this ‘real life’ scale that the convergence (and often collision) of water, energy, carbon and food becomes tangible, and the integration challenge crystallises. Yet at our national policy level, we continue to consider these issues as if they are separate, distinct, discrete. Our current approach is dis-integrated and myopic, centralised yet fragmented, and eerily complacent.

Drawing on current work on a National Water Knowledge and Research Strategy for Council of Australian Governments (COAG), and strategic planning work with Murrumbidgee Irrigation and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, this public lecture will attempt to weave together the intertwined threads of water, energy, carbon and food policy in an Australian context, sketching the contours of a forward-looking agenda for science and policy, commensurate with the immensity and urgency of the challenges before us.

6 October 2009
AUSTRALIA’S WATER CHALLENGES

Dr Don Blackmore
AM FTSE Chairman, eWater CRC Chairman,
Advisory Council for CSIRO’s ‘Water for a Healthy Country’ Flagship

The drought in southern Australia combined with climate change has caused both rural and urban Australia to confront its water future.  Drought conditions are unprecedented over our recorded history.  Environmental sustainability of our rivers and streams is now at the forefront of community thinking.

Recognising the unprecedented pressures on water resources, Australia has committed to ambitious and world leading water reforms.  Never has it been more important for the response to these challenges to be integrated and coordinated across government policy and programs in partnership with industry and the community.

Australia is not alone in these challenges. Some examples from countries and regions facing similar challenges will be discussed. On the international scene a key question is whether climate change vying with increased population pressures will lead to tension that could escalate into conflict.