HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

Innovative technical solutions for water management in Australia

University of Adelaide, 30 October 2006

General discussion 2
Chair: Professor Kurt Lambeck

Kurt Lambeck – There is perhaps one point that I would like to raise. Something was said earlier on about needing a well-informed debate, and obviously I don't disagree with that. But it was followed by, 'But we need to know what we have, and until we get that right we cannot establish what is fair.' That sort of statement worries me a little bit, because to 'know what we have', we may know what we have today but we need a basis for knowing what we are going to have tomorrow. And to have that we need long records, and the time scales of change are such that we will never be in that position. In other words, we will never be able to have that debate. So I am not sure that I agree with that point. But I will throw the discussion open.

Participant – I completely agree with your point about our having the necessary records to do that, and I think the comment that you made was on a point that our group, Group B, raised. I think we even tacked onto that statement a little bit saying that we needed some sort of a reference point – that not only was this to be a snapshot of what we have today but also some sort of capacity to predict and forecast what it may be in the future, based on the best climatological modelling. Perhaps that is something we didn't stress enough, but I think it is definitely a very important thing.

I think the point I made individually in the group was that any snapshot we do have of a current water budget of our continent today is going to be very shortly irrelevant anyway. So yes, I agree.

Stuart Minchin – I have just been sitting here coming up with crazy ideas for what to do with $100 million. Even with $10 million, suppose you had 10 prizes of $1 million each for households, as a national lottery – bearing in mind our love of Tattslotto – and all you had to do to become eligible was to use 25 per cent less water in your household over a given year. And then everyone who was eligible went into a bucket and 10 prizes of a million bucks each were drawn out. And you could keep a national tally of how many households were eligible to go in the bucket as time goes along. I reckon you would get a lot of behaviour change for the chance of winning a million bucks, just for using a little bit less water. I mean, just thinking laterally about these kinds of things, it's not all about education; it's about having an incentive.

Blair Nancarrow – I was asked before we went to afternoon tea, 'We know what we are going to do. We need to do it now. So how are we going to do it?' And then in the next breath, Michelle said, 'Right, now we need social change and we need to do social change. Oops, but hang on, we need to find out how much water we've got first. Then we'll go to the community.' So what we're doing again is leaving the community behind. You'll spend all your years finding out what we've got, and then we'll go and say, 'Right. Now you've got to decide, by tomorrow, how you're going to share it.' But in fact the community could be sorting out their sharing rules while you're sorting out what's there. And then you can come together and you can do it.

Participant – If we continue to focus on urban water use, we are forgetting where most of the water is actually used. I know that is the majority of the population, but it is not where the majority of the water is used. If there is going to be a prize, it should be for agricultural water use, not just for urban water use. It has to be the whole lot. And you can't treat water independently of food.

Kurt Lambeck – I would just like to follow up on that. Some of the things that have stuck in my memory are (1) that 70 per cent of water use goes to agriculture, and (2) the other comment that was made, that 70 per cent of that water is actually lost and not used, and all we have to do is make a 10 per cent improvement in agriculture to, effectively, equal the amount used in the urban setting. So isn't there a simple solution to the problem: make the distribution, transport of that agricultural water more efficient?

Participant – I was going to say about the 70 per cent water usage: I think it was the 2002 ABS statistics that showed that in Sydney households, 70 or 80 per cent of the water use in households is due to eating food. And so when you do all your budgeting for embodied water you find 70 per cent is actually in your food, and then the rest is in whitegoods.

David Beattie – This might be going to a slightly different topic. I certainly agree that we need to engage with the community and get people's trust if we are going to effect social change. However, I would say that most people use 'trust' in place of 'understanding'. People will look to someone who does understand things to lead them. I would say that information campaigns can go some way to help bring down the level of the community's distrust of the scientific people who can tell them how to do things, but I think there is, in Australia, a very poor level of scientific literacy in general. In the modern world we are coming up against more and more issues where scientific literacy is critical. The Australian Academy of Science obviously has a big role to play in trying to generate better scientific literacy in the community, and some people have said today that education is the key, we have to start off in the schools and so on, but how can we start off in the schools when science isn't really treated properly in the curricula of most states in this country?

Kurt Lambeck – This is probably an opportunity for a free advertisement on the education programs of the Academy. We do, of course, run PrimaryConnections and Science by Doing. The PrimaryConnections program is introducing the concept of science through literacy into the primary schools, and in fact some of the units developed actually deal with water. So we are well ahead of you on that one. And we are also trialling the secondary school program. So you are certainly right that these are issues that are of very considerable concern to us. They are not going to provide us with quick answers, of course.

Paul Dalby – One of the things that interests me about today is that we had a group of scientists and social scientists coming along to an event organised by the Australian Academy of Science, and we spent very little time talking about new technologies and new science. We had a fantastic presentation from Jason Holt up front, talking about some new technology which could make a real difference – a really significant difference – to how you manage water, but for the rest of the day we have talked a lot about how we need more information for centralised Marxist-Leninist planning, and how we need to educate the community on what they should and shouldn't do. But there really hasn't been a lot of talk about science and scientific solutions.

Sue Serjeantson – I share with you this interest. This is the fifth annual High Flyers Think Tank that the Academy has held, and invariably we will start off with a highlight of one or two innovative technical solutions that come to bear in terms of addressing issues of national import. Almost invariably, in every single one, the conversation has centred on educating the public: 'We've got the answers already. There aren't any gaps in our knowledge. All we have to do is communicate to people and everything will be okay.' This has been applied to safeguarding Australia, emerging diseases, and now we are seeing it again.

However, never fear. The day following the Think Tank, Academy staff sit down with the four rapporteurs and I keep reminding them, 'Okay, you're getting wishy-washy and going into social sciences again. What are the technical solutions, and what are the gaps in knowledge?' So at the end of the day I hope that we will have a report that will perhaps even mention some innovations that haven't been addressed today. Dr Soloman who invented plastic banknotes, for example, has got some very interesting data relating to reduction in evaporation. And so we will cast our net very widely, and I hope that you will approve of the final report.

Kurt Lambeck – When I introduced Jason last week, at a lecture he gave in Canberra, I said how refreshing it is to be talking about some of the new technological areas rather than water trading. And I share the comment that was made a moment ago.

Lingxue Kong – Actually, I was not able to be present when Jason reported this morning, but we have a CSIRO Flagship focused on the development on new membrane materials. In Australia, we are developing some new technologies for the country.

David Chittleborough – I would just like to counter what Paul was saying about not discussing technology. We actually discussed the soil B horizon penetration at length this morning, about ways of doing that. But in the end it came down to whether it would really make a difference, and what the price and cost-benefit would be. This is where it comes into the economics. It is the same with the filtration, the reverse osmosis technology: we were discussing the actual price per megalitre of doing that, and on just a rough estimate it is still 100 times more than irrigators pay to irrigate their crops in Australia at the moment. So I don't know how you can divorce the science from the social science and the economics. You just cannot do it. You can't just talk about technological solutions, I'm afraid, even though it's a great thing to do.

What we got to was actually talking about reverse osmosis for slightly saline water – not sea water but slightly saline water – and the costs are much less because the energy gradient is much less. You could then, perhaps, solve the problems of declining soil that we have with slightly saline irrigation water. That was quite an interesting idea, I think, that could come out from this.

Oliver Mayo – Just further on the technological fix way of doing things, I think what Sue Serjeantson mentioned is really important: reduction of evaporation, and whether there are novel ways to do that. But if you look at how the water becomes available, you see that it becomes available through rain. And I have heard the figure today and recently from a CSIRO publication that a 21 per cent reduction in precipitation, under present conditions, leads to a 64 per cent reduction in runoff. And you're going to need a very special technological fix if you haven't got any runoff. It doesn't matter what you try to do to prevent evaporation if there is no runoff.

The 70 per cent of water that is used by agriculture includes that runoff, or what goes into the soil. And if that is getting less and less through climate change, you'll need a wholly different approach from anything that's being discussed now.

Kurt Lambeck – The previous speaker's comment, I think, touches on something: where the groups have discussed something that seemed to be important and then dismissed it as not being important, it may be quite useful if we have that information as well. Otherwise there is a risk that we consider that it hasn't been discussed. Could those who are writing the notes just make sure that things like that are jotted down.

June Marks – I agree that there is no silver bullet solution here, but I think if you are going to discuss the social sciences or the community and technology, what is crying out there is not education; it is building familiarity with technologies and different ways of doing things, and transparency of what we already have in place. So it is transparency – where does our water come from, what is happening to it at the moment, how does it get here? – and transparency in the information and science that is around at the moment. That's got to get down to the community, throughout the community. And who are the people who make up the community? Well, they're doctors, they're lawyers, they're very highly educated people compared with the same cohorts about 50 years ago, so they will understand. You just need a system of loosening up the information so it is out there.

Participant – Just quickly leading on from that: something that I have felt is that you could probably sum up most of the opinions today in just three words, 'informed decision making'.

Nick Schofield – I just want to raise a slightly different issue, northern Australia, because I think a lot of our discussion today has been on the so-called water crisis in southern Australia. That will in some ways convert itself to questions about our major water resources in the north. I guess it's just making the point that there is a big requirement for science and research to develop a knowledge base in northern Australia that is largely absent at the moment. There will be some pressures for developing in the north; there will be some opportunities as we go forward. So I am just registering the point, and it is an area that Land and Water Australia is focusing on quite substantially; it is basically not advocating any position, but to put together a knowledge base for a very large part of Australia where most of our water resources are.

Oliver Mayo – I just want to ask a question on that. The issue that was being raised by Senator Bill Heffernan, presumably with some sort of approval from Prime Minister John Howard, about putting resources into agriculture in the north and forgetting about the south. What is your view about that? Surely we would just replicate our problems.

Nick Schofield – I think you make the right point, that there is a danger of a knee-jerk reaction of migrating the problems we have encountered in southern Australia to the north. So I guess we want to be on the front foot to make sure that good decisions are made in the north. You know, the prospects for agriculture there face a whole range of difficulties; that is the reason why it hasn't happened to date. There are a lot of different cultural issues as well, with the Indigenous land management. Jim Donaldson is leading our northern Australia program, so I might let Jim have a couple of words.

Jim Donaldson – I guess for us it falls under our tropical rivers program, the Tropical Rivers and Coastal Knowledge (TRACK) research hub, which has received money from the Department of the Environment and out of the National Water Commission.

Fundamental to it is the whole ecological understanding of rivers and coastal resources and how they work, and in some ways that hasn't come up a lot in the discussion today, even though environmental allocation is mentioned in the matrix. To me there is a whole series of knowledge gaps there about environmental flows, and understanding what it is we even want, how ecology of different water-dependent ecosystems functions, and how we can make environmental allocations.

So I guess in northern Australia the starting point of the TRACK initiative is around that sort of initiative, but then trying to also relate land use and management to riverine health, Indigenous enterprises as Nick has mentioned, and things like that. So there's a whole mix of knowledge that's trying to be developed there.

Kurt Lambeck – Thank you all so much for an informative and most interesting Think Tank. I invite you to join with me in thanking our sponsors, Land and Water Australia, our speakers, and our amazingly competent rapporteurs who synthesised and articulated the key points from the break-out discussion groups. Tomorrow, the rapporteurs and Academy staff will draft the summary report for this meeting. Thank you all, – chairs, speakers, rapporteurs, and participants for your contribution to this most successful High Flyers Think Tank.