What the world needs now: a balanced approach to water issues

Whether the issue at hand is scarcity, abundance, treatment, recycling, disposal or competition, the discussion around water is about securing our future and no issue is more important than the sustainability of our water supplies. Peter Fagan*, Asia Pacific Practice Leader, Sustainability for MWH, provides his opinions on this issue.

“Fierce competition for fresh water may well become a source of conflict and wars in the future,” said Kofi Annan during his time as United Nations Secretary General.

Another Former UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, as well as Former Vice President of the World Bank Ismail Serageldin are two of the many more political leaders to have observed our world’s future wars may very likely be waged over water. It has been said before that water is our most precious resource and it remains a hot topic - around the country, the region and the world.

Whether the issue at hand is scarcity, abundance, treatment, recycling, disposal or competition, the discussion around water is about securing our future and no issue is more important than the sustainability of our water supplies.

Drivers such as climate change, population growth and urbanisation add to the dilemma and Australia, like everywhere else, faces these issues, in many cases in a more transparent way. The challenge is that present decision frameworks are dominated by single-issue thinking and competition between demands. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the recent stop-start efforts in developing a Basin Plan for the Murray Darling system. Competition for water between consumptive users, environment and other needs has divided governments, communities and families.

Furthermore, climate change demands an approach that allows infrastructure and communities to cope with and recover from natural disasters more quickly and effectively. While infrastructure and communities cannot be made invulnerable, they can be made much more resilient.

Consider our approach on this and our methods of traditional planning for infrastructure, which rely on standards that are historical records and forecast demand based on past experience. Recent experiences in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and northern Western Australia, however, highlight the need to think and plan more laterally for the future. It was not long ago that our decisions were driven around the thought that it would never rain again and that cities and towns would run out of water.

Some argue that the cost associated with building resilience into our infrastructure and communities is prohibitive, but a whole-of-life assessment that considers the likely increase in size and frequency of weather events is often more economic in the long run. This is particularly the case when considering the cost of disruption and repair.

Also critical is the need to build resilience into our communities. The development of volunteer service organisations and local disaster plans is an example and one that has been proved to be effective in bushfire-prone parts of the country.

Our political landscape and decision frameworks are framed at making unrelated, one-off decisions; this interferes with a rational debate of how to fund forward-thinking infrastructure initiatives. Our tax base across Australia is shrinking, hence the interest in taxes on mining and big business. These debates, like the infrastructure discussion, are issue-specific in that the cash that would be raised by one option or the other is quarantined to a particular outcome. Consequently, we are still left unable to fund infrastructure needs of the nation.

What is needed is a balanced look at the issues we are facing and the opportunities that are presenting themselves to secure not only our water future, but our collective wellbeing. Currently, we debate ‘this project versus that project’ rather than how to fund the whole of what we require. We must begin to look at how to deliver value to each project, and to our communities. Most importantly, the nation must begin that debate now if we are to cope and prosper.

*By Peter Fagan, Asia Pacific Practice Leader, Sustainability for MWH, a global engineering, construction, technology and consulting company. For more information, please contact him at Peter.Fagan@mwhglobal.com.