Australia’s future water security has been assessed as “extreme” under projected climate conditions – a warning that should sharpen focus across every corner of the sector.
Released in September as part of the National Climate Risk Assessment, the Water Security Technical Report paints a detailed picture of what’s at stake. It identifies how climate-driven changes – from declining rainfall and streamflow to increased evaporation, more frequent droughts and severe floods – will affect our catchments, infrastructure and communities.
The report makes it clear that no region will be spared from these escalating risks. Natural environments will bear the heaviest impacts, but every water-dependent system – from farms and cities to ecosystems and industries – will be tested.
Maintaining water quality and supply reliability will demand adaptation across scales, from the way catchments are managed to how water is shared and governed.
As the technical report notes, cities and regional centres have recognised that a chance of running out of water is not an acceptable risk and have already shifted to strategies of “enduring water security”.
Such strategies depend on maintaining good water storages to buffer variability. Our skill at maintaining these storages will be tested, though, by events and conditions we are already experiencing and can reasonably expect to become more severe.
According to the report, we can expect more frequent and more intense dry periods – worse than past events. Greater variability in rainfall will make it difficult to judge how much water is effectively available for human and ecological needs – even if average rainfall remains the same.
Catchment management strategies are another way to buffer variability by retaining water in the landscape and enhancing groundwater recharge. These will be hampered by changes in the timing, frequency and sequence of floods and other water-generating events.
Harmful floods that bring sedimentation, cause erosion and damage infrastructure are expected to increase in frequency. Floods that are beneficial to riverine environments and ecologies, on the other hand, are expected to decrease in frequency. Other stresses and shocks will come from contaminated flood waters, algal blooms, more intense tropical cyclones, saltwater intrusions from storm surges, and bushfires and their run-off.
Extreme heat – expected under all climate scenarios, including the one we’re in now – will increase demand. Evapotranspiration is also projected to increase across the country. Both make it harder to keep water in catchments and to buffer variability, especially if it compounds with drought.
At least 75% of water used in Australia sourced from surface water. Most catchments supplying water for human consumption are projected to yield less water. On top of that, the infrastructures of storage and supply are reaching the end of life in many places and were not designed for our new conditions. We are vulnerable.
I have yet to encounter anyone in the water sector who is not keenly aware of climate hazards and their implications for water quality, infrastructures and catchments.
Those bio-physical hazards compound, of course, with population growth, legacy practices of water and land governance, and political priorities at odds with long-term safety and security.
Change is needed. Arguably, the change most urgently needed – and the most difficult – will be in cultures and techniques of decision-making, cross-boundary cooperation and governance of change.
Water sharing, for example, is one of the few available options for replenishing ecosystems, when competition for water is extreme. This entails cross-boundary cooperation but also decision-making practices that are focussed on creating and protecting value rather than avoiding catastrophe.
For the sector it will be important to bridge the gap between information about system-level phenomena of the kind we see in the report and local-level knowledge and information about what is exposed in their domain of governance and how it is vulnerable to shocks and stresses.
To do this, water sector organisations will need to integrate information and knowledge from a range of sources: Traditional Knowledge, lived experience, place and practice-based knowledge, corporate and institutional information – as well as what is produced by scientific and financial methodologies.
Policy makers and governing bodies will need to become skilled in using foresight and risk analysis methods that expose tail-end risks, hazard-impact linkages, outlier events, and compounding and cascading risks. That means scenarios, spatial and lifecycle mapping, storylines, safety factors, and other methods that focus on causal and functional consequences.
Navigating different evaluative frameworks will be one of the key challenges ahead for water sector organisations. A financial analyst’s conception of value and uncertainty, for example, is different from that of an adaptation strategist. A fear of over designing or gold-plating infrastructure will need to be put aside as the rhetorical moves they are, in favour building systems that function in a different range of conditions.
Last, but not least, leaders from all sectors must prepare us for change. Regulatory and other state authorities will need to facilitate adaptation measures and send clear signals that they expect to see pricing submissions and other policy designed to improve water security and resilience. The endemic hazards of political will and attention must be anticipated by cross-sector cooperation.
This brief overview of the report and its implications may seem bleak. However, the losses ahead and the challenge of change should not be sugar-coated. Innovation is needed. This is something that the water sector knows how to do. Perhaps the greatest value of this technical report, then, is that it can be the common ground for further inquiry and deliberation into those opportunities for positive change.
Lynette Smith is the principal consultant at gramma consulting. She has more than 20 years of experience working with experts in climate science, water, natural resources, the built environment, economics, engineering, health, and IT to communicate findings and inform policy. Before starting gramma, she worked in organisational change management. In the last 10 years, Lynette has worked with corporate and state government insurers on climate action planning, guidance for boards on climate risk, harm reduction strategies, and risk analysis for building resilience.
With this strong knowledge base and a repertoire of effective techniques for analysing risks and uncertainty, Lynette now works with governing bodies, policymakers, managers and research teams on scenario development, analysis of risks and opportunities, knowledge translation, and strategies for change. Recently, Lynette was appointed to CSIRO’s Enabling Resilient Investment Panel to provide services on capacity building and change management for climate change adaptation.