HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

Innovative technical solutions for water management in Australia

University of Adelaide, 30 October 2006

Opening address

by Emeritus Professor Maxwell Brennan, Chief Scientist for South Australia

The topic of water is now front page news in Australia. Every day some aspect of the challenges facing us concerning the availability and use of water is covered in the media. The item that had the greatest impact on me was the picture of a young girl in Wentworth, New South Wales, jumping across a halfmetre- wide Darling River, just 50 kilometres from where the Darling feeds into the Murray River. It's an extraordinary photograph.

So the issues that you find in the press, and on television and radio, cover almost every aspect of availability, treatment, quality and usage of water. I have picked out just three particular examples.

One of the oldest issues, and one that is particularly important for South Australia, is the salinity and water flow for the Murray River. There is a startling statistic on that: the inflow for the Murray River for September (and this has been reported in the media) was 112 gigalitres, compared with an average of 1558 gigalitres. That is an enormous drop in the inflow into the Murray and poses a huge threat to the health of the river and, through that, to the viability of farming activities and other activities, and wildlife. The whole ecology of the system is really under threat because of that extraordinary drop in the inflow.

A second issue is that about 70 per cent of water used in Australia is used for agriculture. Much of that evaporates in open channels used for irrigation. There are several solutions. One is to cover up all the channels; another would be to price water at a cost which would encourage people to be less profligate in their use of water for agriculture.

A third area is the drought we are currently experiencing, which is placing enormous strains on the supply of water in our cities. In that area there is a whole host of options: desalination, piping water over long distances – even across the border between Queensland and New South Wales has been mentioned in the press – and the recycling of waste water for domestic use.

Already many, many initiatives have been taken or proposed to be taken to meet this challenge. And again it is perhaps useful to pick up a few, in this case partly from the weekly Australian Water Association Newsletter. I think the first four of these five examples were covered in there, although that is not my only source.

First of all, there is a proposal by Sydney Water for a new sewage treatment plant that would recycle waste water for agriculture and domestic use. I think the domestic use is a pilot of some 340 homes in Appin. So that's one example of an initiative that is at least at the proposal stage.

A second one, also from New South Wales, is from BlueScope Steel. BlueScope Steel I think is the largest single user of water in the Sydney basin area, using 37 megalitres of water a day. It is currently in the process of putting in place a recycling scheme that, when it is fully operational, will produce 20 megalitres of water. That is a very substantial reduction in its use of the high quality mains water that it is currently using.

In South Australia, a salt interception scheme at Bookpurnong that will prevent something like 40,000 tonnes of salt from entering the Murray annually is another initiative that I think is actually under way.

Also in South Australia, a beautifully named ecology cluster, the CLLAMMecology Cluster, which stands for Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth cluster, will address some of these issues that are particularly important for the Murray. That is interesting because it is a cluster of researchers. It is a CSIRO Flagship program, so there is funding from the CSIRO Collaborative Research Program for it. It will include researchers from CSIRO, the University of Adelaide, Flinders and SARDI, the state government R&D organisation, as well as several state and federal management agencies.

In that list of solutions or initiatives that are under way, if I counted correctly, five of the 54 Cooperative Research Centres in Australia have water as a major part of their programs at the moment.

These problems also require input from economists, social sciences more generally, and political scientists, because in the end the issues require adoption. There is no point in having a scientific and technological solution if it is not going to be adopted. Indeed, as we saw in the recent referendum in Toowoomba, non-technical issues can have a major effect in the decision-making process, even when there are technical solutions actually available.

I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate Kurt Lambeck, Sue Serjeantson and the other people who have planned this workshop for recognising the importance of having that broad expertise of people, right across the whole spectrum from science and technology through to the social sciences. I am sure that the mix which is here today will ensure a lively discussion and, I would hope, a report that is of high quality and relevance.