Developing Australia’s cross-sector water future

When leaders from across industry, government and utilities gathered for Connected by Water 2026 in Perth earlier this year, they shared a common view that Australia’s sustainable water future will not be shaped by single-sector solutions or business-as-usual planning. 

The biennial event is convened around a shared recognition that industrial demand and climate pressure are colliding, and that water has become a constraint that can no longer be managed in silos.

As Australia works towards a more circular, cross-sector water future, the challenge is not simply finding new sources or reusing old ones, but learning how to plan, invest and collaborate through uncertainty.

While water is no longer considered automatically available once industrial projects are approved, the newer and more interesting test is how demand challenges are solved to ensure the right processes, people and places are supplied sustainably.

GHD Technical Director for Water Treatment and Desalination Daniel Visser said emerging and new industries have brought this issue into sharp focus.

“Water is moving from supporting utility to strategic constraint in industrial development,” Visser said. “Projects for hydrogen, ammonia, sustainable aviation fuel, green steel and critical minerals now treat water availability as an enabler for investment, not a background service.”

Many of these industries are not only new or rapidly evolving, Visser said, but are also “thirsty”. The result is growing demand layered with deep uncertainty.

“There’s a big question around where the market is actually going,” he said. “Are all of these industries going to progress, and therefore, are these water demands going to be as we are currently projecting?”

That uncertainty has convinced governments and utilities to think differently about how water infrastructure is planned, staged and governed.

Growing complexity

In the fast-growth environment of Western Australia, pressure for water is coming from all

directions. Infrastructure WA Chair and Connected by Water 2026 keynote Nicole Lockwood said the multi-faceted economy creates overlapping and often competing demands.

“We’ve got AUKUS and Defence generally,” Lockwood said. “We’ve got a new port being built. We’ve got energy transition in its broader sense – green iron, batteries, minerals, data centres, hydrogen, ammonia – the list goes on and on. Then we’ve got the resources sector activity, and we’ve got a huge housing pipeline.”

All of that activity introduces new pressure on water and on systems enabling and supporting it.

“Water and power are inextricably linked,” Lockwood said. “If you think about what it takes for us to survive, it is power, water and housing. Without that, nothing else can happen.”

Within regional utilities, these pressures long ago shifted from theoretical to practical. Busselton Water General Manager Operations and Planning Dr Stacey Hamilton said climate change and population growth are already reshaping planning horizons.

“We’re potentially going to hit our groundwater allocation by 2033. To build a desal plant and get that running takes 10 to 15 years, and water recycling or recharge also takes significant time,” she said.

Hamilton said part of the solution is in understanding not just how much water is available, but who needs what quality of water, where and when.

“The challenge is working out what sort of water is fit for purpose for each area,” she said. “A lot of agricultural users at the moment use potable water, for example. So, one solution lies in finding alternative sources for the ones that don’t need that quality.”

Systems, not silos

There is now clear recognition that siloed planning no longer works. What’s more, traditional water management processes have been built around an approach that is much less flexible than required, Visser said.

“Conventional planning follows a predict-and-plan approach, where a single preferred future is forecasted and a fixed strategy is developed to achieve it, assuming conditions will remain stable and predictable rather than allowing for flexibility or adjustment over time,” he said.

However, modern management processes require flexibility and acceptance of uncertainty.

“Adaptive Pathways Planning is a more forward-looking approach designed to manage uncertainty by creating flexible, staged strategies rather than committing to a single fixed plan,” Visser said.

“The approach maps out multiple possible pathways, identifies thresholds where current options may fail and sets trigger points for switching to new actions as conditions change. This method emphasises continuous monitoring and keeping options open as long as possible.”

Such an approach can lead to financial, environmental and resource-related savings. That’s because, in industrial settings at least, the traditional approach often led to over-investment that meant full capability was rarely or never utilised, or under-investment that constrained growth.

Hamilton sees similar thinking emerging at the utility level, particularly as circular economy concepts take hold.

“I was at a meeting with water utilities in Victoria a few weeks ago. One of them said: ‘Don’t assume your service finishes at the tap’. From a circular economy perspective, you’re still involved in the process,” she said.

That shift is also visible in the mining sector internationally. Yapo Allé-Ando, Principal Water Stewardship at Okane Consultants, headquartered in Canada with offices in Australia, said mining companies are increasingly recognising their role within the broader catchment systems.

“I’ve seen a shift in the mining industry moving away from operating in a vacuum and towards a water stewardship approach, where water is considered holistically,” Allé-Ando said.

“Mining companies understand that they operate within a watershed context and recognise that stronger water governance, along with increased transparency and accountability, is needed when it comes to water management.”

Fit-for-purpose circularity

Some of the clearest and most practical examples of systems thinking over siloed planning relate to circular water use.

Hamilton said potential groundwater salinity risks in Busselton have led the utility to exploring reuse, recharge and trading options, in partnership with Water Corporation and agriculture.

“We’re looking at the feasibility of either treating water ourselves to get it to drinking water quality, then putting it back underground – banking it for when we need it – or treating it to a fit-for-purpose level for the agriculture sector around here,” she said.

The ongoing plan is to increasingly match water quality with the needs of the water users.

“We would consider what we might call water trading. We would basically build a water recycling facility then say to the agricultural users, ‘We can give you fit-for-purpose water, and we’ll take your allocation for the interim’. It’s just one idea we’ve got at the moment,” Hamilton said.

For industrial projects, circularity and sustainability also means designing systems that reduce water demand at source. Allé-Ando points to a mining shift away from treatment-only solutions.

“Leading practice is no longer just the collection and treatment of affected water,” he said.

“Leading practice includes site-wide water management strategies which involve designing landforms that minimise the generation of affected water in the first place and incorporate source control practices.”

Playing catch-up

As technical solutions advance, governance frameworks are not yet keeping pace. Hamilton said while regulators understand the challenge, they also bear the weight of legacy rules.

“The great difficulty in unravelling legislation and regulation that’s been going or 100 years, to make it more contemporary again, which makes it a slow process,” she said.

Visser agrees, saying it’s a challenge that urgently requires a solution as regulation and policy are central to managing uncertainty. This is particularly true in industrial areas containing multiple projects at varying stages.

“There is now a more collaborative approach. There seems to be greater initiative from the government to actually preparefor some of these sorts of things than there was in the past,” he said.

“Having said that, there are still different projects moving at different paces. We’ve got one, for instance, that is moving faster than the government. So, there needs to be collaboration to reduce uncertainty.”

Lockwood argues what is also required is a connective governance framework that sits above projects and links them together, making sure they’re not undermining each other or causing constraint. She described the resulting challenge as both human and Technical.

“There is a growing level of recognition that the planning processes we have in place have been quite siloed, and that now there is a need to connect those processes to ensure the system solution is created, rather than the sector or asset solution,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s complex. I think it is complicated by power structures and human relationships. So, I think once we can prioritise where the effort needs to go, we can make the system far more integrated and the process far more simple.”

Place-based decisions

Allé-Ando said the importance of cultural values is emerging as a foundation for collaboration, with water stewardship frameworks in Canada increasingly recognising Traditional Knowledge and water rights.

“Considering mine planning through a co-development lens, integrating past and future land stewardship principles and Aboriginal rights into the design offers opportunities to integrate multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary insights that are site-specific, and culturally and scientifically supported,” he said.

“It can also strengthen social license and enable adaptable management strategies that help minimise residual risks.”

Lockwood believes place-based planning and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Knowledge are becoming central to long-term strategies in Australia, too.

“We’ve got four focus areas as part of our strategy,” she said. “We’ve got one around infrastructure’s role in climate adaptation and one around the role of regional centres as they assist in the economic diversification of the state.

“Those two in particular have an emphasis on place-based planning and understanding opportunities for bringing more Traditional Knowledge to the fore, for lessons and wisdom around how the landscape needs to be managed.

“There are opportunities that come from all the ways that we engage with Aboriginal people, and what comes from that, as a result.”

Without new structures to support collaboration, Lockwood said, progress will be incremental, meaning we will always miss targets, miss opportunities and be at greater risk from major events.

Across sectors, the message is consistent – Australia’s sustainable water future will be shaped less by individual projects and more by how effectively systems are connected.

Adaptive planning, circular water use, shared governance and respect for place and culture are no longer optional extras. They have instead become essential ingredients in the recipe for economic, environmental and cultural success.

This article was originally published in Current magazine. Take a look at the 2026 edition on Indigo.