HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

Innovative technical solutions for water management in Australia

University of Adelaide, 30 October 2006

Mixed breakout groups
Groups identify trends in advancing national solutions for water in Australia

Group A
Rapporteur: Dr Brett Bryan

Firstly, we opened up the discussion with analysis of the information space of water resources data in Australia. The focus of this area was data and integration, and the fact that there are, some reports say 200, some reports say 600, agencies collecting water data in Australia. We talked about the origins of this approach as being driven by historical legacy. Added to this is the influence of competition policy which is designed to generate private commercial benefits from collecting water information. The question was raised whether, in terms of infrastructure, cooperation is a more appropriate framework to go by, rather than competition. There were also questions about the roles of competition in regard to cooperation relating to infrastructure assets such as water resources data.

There was discussion of the analogue in health care, in particular that similar problems exist: a range of distributed data collectors and databases that are not necessarily all that well linked. A couple of examples were the NHITA, a national health information network, which had similar problems, and the national communicable diseases database, which was an example of a regulatory imposition on distributed data collectors, being general practitioners, who by law have to report any occurrence of communicable disease. These also had their problems, but may be a potentially useful avenue to pursue.

We discussed the current data infrastructure in Australia that tries to pull all these diverse and distributed databases together, in particular the Australian Bureau of Statistics water accounts and monitoring reports, Murray Darling Basin Commission reporting under the cap and so forth. So there is some infrastructure, but it is by no means complete or perfect.

The question was raised of whether measuring water to three decimal points or so is the solution for our dying rivers, when we can see such obvious impacts of over-allocation of water.

We talked about behavioural problems and social impediments: if we implement policies and so forth, people may still 'fix' their meters – you know, a stick falls into the meter. So what we really need is something to induce buy-in by users.

What tool sets do we require to build trust? How long does it take to change community attitudes? The example was given of Canberra, where community attitudes have changed within a couple of years and it is now 'un-Australian' to have a green lawn in Canberra. So that is a full turnaround there.

There was some discussion of the role of markets and particularly that they are set to increase within an environment. So water markets are also tempered by regulation in the form of allocations and caps.

Information: we talked about public versus private good. Water has got aspects of public good, environmental benefit, but also it is a private good because you can make money out of watering agricultural crops.

It has non-market aspects. We compared it to the electricity and telecommunications markets and discussed privatisation. We probably could have done with a couple of economists in the room, but we bumbled through that anyway.

We talked a little bit about fairness, and standards and accounting frameworks. So what is reuse, and how do we apply that in a robust and universal way to give a proper and full accounting?

If we had $100 million, what would we spend it on? Some acute minds said we would drop the cap and revise allocations, and follow that up with a barrage of communication, marketing, mediation, negotiation, information, and if that failed, lawyer's bills.

Communication and education was popular; also perhaps a demonstration city or town or village where we would implement new technologies in reuse and recycling, and show right from go to whoa how water reform decisions can actually work in full.

A National Water Week was proposed, where everyone tries to use half of their normal water use. Someone suggested that we use the money to buy people's trust. And we talked about information and infrastructure reform.

Group B
Rapporteur: Dr Michelle Bald

Our group was also quite excited by the prospect of spending $100 million. We probably started a little bit big, but we came up with an idea which formed the umbrella: the idea of securing Australia's water supply. That was a fairly broad thing: securing it from threats like terrorism, securing it from uncertainty like climate change. We didn't think we could address that with $100 million; we would need a bit more than that.

Then we explored a few other issues and talked about, 'Well, what are the real gaps in our scientific knowledge we would need to fill, in order to achieve this goal of securing Australia's water supply?' We had a few little things here and there, quite legitimate gaps that needed to be filled, but really we got the feeling that we know, largely, what we need to do. It's just that we don't seem to be able to manage to do it.

We were talking about what we could do in urban environments, what we could do in rural environments, what does the environment need: the rivers and the creeks and those sorts of things. And again, yes, there is a little bit of an information gap here and there that we need to plug, but it still left the question, 'Well, who gets what? And how do we effect change if we see that it needs to happen?' So we got down to the idea that we actually need to make political and social change, and we need to really understand fair allocation of water to all users.

Then we were talking about how to have this debate. Deciding how we could spend our $100 million, we came to the idea that, in order for this debate to take place, it needs to be well informed. And how can we be deciding who gets what amount of water when we still don't really know how much water there is, to go around?

So we would like to spend our $100 million on getting better systems to actually measure what we have: what falls, what flows, and how we use it. And that is not just a snapshot of what happens now, but also in the future, with uncertainty, climate change, things like that may actually change the 'pool' of water that is available. Once we have got that right, then we can start working out a fair allocation of that water, but until we actually know what's there, it makes it very difficult.

We had that discussion when we were talking about, 'Well, how much water does cotton really use, as compared with an urban user or a rural garden or a this or a that?' Until we really have that good, solid information, we thought, the community can't have the debate that needs to happen. And then we can effect that political and social change.

So ours is a very multi-stepped process. We'll be asking for lots more buckets of $100 million over the next few years, I think, in order to get that right.

Group C
Rapporteur: Dr June Marks

Our group discussed a few things. We thought that master-planning water management was imperative. There needed to be more access to a national education program, starting with the schools, on water cycles. We should reconceptualise how we live in a dry country, in a dry environment. We should have socio-, economic and environment criteria analyses; we didn't think we had that under way. There should be a quantification of total water balance, of groundwater and surface waters and the interaction between the two. And a politically palatable idea, we thought, would be to put dual pipes in every new housing development.

But the way we would actually like to spend $100 million was to have a national innovation program to achieve 'Water Security for Australia'. That was the title.

First of all, it would collect and expand the data collection base we already have on the environmental and user requirements. The second thing would be to develop new technologies to achieve water efficiencies and lower cost technologies for improving water quality. The third would be to develop tools to enable planners and water providers to connect community values and attitudes, and environmental requirements, into hard engineering modelling and planning processes. So that means they would get that community consultation up front, where it needs to be.

Communication

Community engagement – re carbon budget, global warming.
Lay people don't get to have a say. And, in Kyoto for instance science didn't even have a say. government/politics takes over.

ICT – information communication technology

But we have so much data already.
Agreed – national education. But public already has access to data, for example, numerous depictions of the water cycle. (But look at the representations of the cycle – some don't include wastewater discharges to rivers upstream of towns that take up the river water for their drinking water supply.)
Make tools more accessible to schools, public in general.

Reconceptualising how we live in a dry landscape

We need to get real about what Australia can deliver for agriculture, for city dwellers.
What do we want to keep in the landscape? Utopia … government subsidising farmers – but if not enough water to keep farms viable, this is a lost cause.

We need socio-economic-environmental criteria analyses

There isn't enough done to gauge the needs of the environment. The environment gets left out of the debate. Who advocates for the environment? Who will ensure it is managed for is own sake?
There has to be a balance between environmental needs and anthropocentric requirements, but the environment has to be protected.
Planning tool required that takes this into account.
Ecological risk assessment.

Quantification of total water balance

Groundwater and surface water and the interaction between the two. Not enough discussion between groundwater experts and those looking at above ground sources. Not well understood that there is an important connection between the two.
One solution:
All new developments should include dual pipes to use recycled water for garden watering and toilet flushing, and open space irrigation, as successfully achieved at Rouse Hill, Newington and Mawson Lakes. (This is mandated in California for all new developments – since 2000. They have to demonstrate they will be water self-sufficient and will look after their own waste water.)

Irrigation savings – smart technology

But in WA – didn't want water meters to be fitted.
Similar situation occurred in settlement just south of Darwin.
Virginia growers objected to monitoring as well. Growers are suspicious of government knowing how much water they abstract – fear of cutting allocations and putting the price up, threatening their livelihood.
(Therefore, another example where community consultation needs to be employed well before the decision is final, so that there is discussion about and understanding of the reasoning behind these policies.)

Leakages/evaporation

There are huge losses in metropolitan water supply systems. Sydney noted as an example by someone from NSW. (However, well-known world wide phenomena with infrastructure that is in some cases 60 to 100 years old.)
Need a national strategy to bring resources together. Managing change.
Master planning water management.
Web based water data – great leap forward.

Summarising so far:

1. Water web. National data regime.
2. Determining total catchment water balance.
3. We need to determine what data we need and for what reason.
4. Futures planning and modelling socio/economic/environmental scenarios:
   How we live in a dry climate.
5. Master planning in water management.

An innovative strategy to spend $100 million

A national innovation program to achieve water security for Australia:

1. Collect and expand the data collection base on environmental and user requirements.
2. Develop new technologies to achieve water efficiencies and lower cost technologies for meeting water quality.
3. Develop tools to enable planners and water providers to connect community values and attitudes and environmental requirements into hard engineering modelling and planning processes.

Group D
Rapporteur: Dr Marisa Collins

Unlike the other groups, we didn't even talk about the money. But we did come up with a whole series of knowledge gaps, and we focused on a very multidisciplinary approach. So they are from all over the place.

The first one: the majority of our group felt from this morning's sessions that there was a real question of identifying what information is actually needed, and that that was a key issue. And then, once you have got that information, what are you actually going to do with it? One of the things that people talked about was information gaps, frames of analysis – so if you do look at statistics for how much water you need to produce a rice crop, you also need to take into consideration that it may have an alternating crop with it. So you may have a farmer that produces a rice crop and then, with the same stored soil moisture, produces a wheat crop as well. So thinking about developing frameworks for data collection and then interpretation of the collected data was one of the things we actually focused quite a lot on.

In terms of the potential of technology development, one of the things that we talked about was the social side of understanding technology development, and the potential social science, I guess – the problems on the people level – of actually taking up the technology such as the nanotubes and other processing requirements involved in desalinisation or water purification. So what are the health concerns, and what sort of information do we actually need to give to the consumers that may make it something that they might take up, keeping in mind the sorts of things that the social sciences have talked about this morning? What sorts of things do we need to do to build trust and not just say, 'This is good for you. Here you go'? So that was one thing that was raised as a fairly pertinent point.

One of the other acknowledged gaps was actually to keep working on the technology development involved in desalinisation, so we are developing alternatives to water resources – and making those technologies affordable, so spending the money to get them to up-scale and see how affordable and how efficient they are on a bigger scale.

We looked at some kind of assessment – and we said that it was important that this was multidisciplinary – of whether consumers are actually willing to pay more for water. People have said that they might be willing to, but we don't actually know. With lots of products – cars and electrical whitegoods were used as examples – people have been given the choice of more energy efficiency, or less impact on the environment, but often people will still go for the cheapest product. So I think some kind of assessment of whether that is a realistic outcome is quite important. One of the things that was said was that we need scientists to make sure that it is a fair assessment of what is going on; we need the social scientists to see whether it does make a difference. So can we interpret the data and say that yes, it will make a difference, and they will want to pay more?

The other thing, too, is whether there is an economic basis for our doing that.

Consumers need to be more educated about the consequence of their choices. People talked this morning about rice farming taking up, say – as a random figure – 8 megalitres per hectare, so maybe we shouldn't be doing it. But people, particularly urban dwellers, are making statements like that without considering what rice would actually cost if we didn't grow it in Australia at all and it was fully imported from overseas. So I think that in this discussion of choices that consumers are making, and whether they are willing to pay more for their water or for the products they buy, they do need to have some understanding of the consequences of not growing barley in Australia, or not growing rice, and those sorts of things. People need to be more informed, or at least given access to information about making those sorts of decisions.

In regard to this morning's discussion about whether using stored soil moisture is a viable option or not: to explore that, and see in a model system whether you can do it. What is the long-term end product? Does it only last for one year, and then for the subsequent five years or ten years you have wrecked the soil? So some research in that area was raised as being quite a viable thing, to see whether that did have potential – and one of the things was that often with these sorts of things there are many competing targets, so work should be on a broad scale rather than having a single focus.

There needs to be some assessment of climate change impacts on water availability and water use in Australia for the future, because a lot of other countries, particularly the United States and some in Europe, are starting to model plant-water relations in terms of climate change impacts. There is work being done in Australia, but it is an area that definitely needs a lot more focus on it, and it is going to be become more and more pertinent.

Other points were getting people to understand what we do actually get for our water, giving people more information and better tools to process information, and the need for multi-themed approaches to this: scientific, social science and economic, so people get the full picture.

The next point was community and cultural values of water: assessing things like the effect of controlling water-use behaviour on reduction in water use. Our group had quite a significant discussion about the fact that, for example, Adelaide has imposed water restrictions where you can only water your garden for three days a week, but that doesn't necessarily mean people are using less water. They could be having longer showers, they could be irrigating their gardens on those days for an extra four hours just because they're so panicked that. 'It's going to be hot tomorrow, and I can't water my garden.' So we need some assessment of whether city-level controls of water use are effective tools in reducing water use, and maybe some kind of incentive scheme where people get choices that they can make, and what they are going to reduce their water use in.

There was some discussion about the urban/rural divide, in terms of water relations and awareness of water shortages. There is quite a dissociation between the food actually produced from the water applied in agricultural systems and urban people's view of what actually is happening. So people often say, 'Oh, they should be using water more efficiently,' but that agricultural system might be using water as efficiently as it can but it still may need 3 megalitres per hectare because that is how much you need to grow a field of wheat. People need to be quite aware of how efficient the system is, and not just say that because agriculture is using 70 per cent of our water, it all must be inefficient and we should stop doing it.

We talked about the real cost of food. Also, there are quite a few cultural and social issues to do with Australia being self-sufficient, and producing our own fruit and vegies. There are a lot of social issues as well that we thought aren't really that well highlighted in research or just in general social science. (I might be very ignorant in saying that, but I will just put it out there.) The last point – and we only briefly touched on this – was identifying areas of improving irrigation efficiencies in agriculture. I know that there are people doing that, but a broader-scale focused approach on saving water in irrigated agriculture, it was said, could play quite an important role in reducing the percentage of water that agriculture uses.