The net effect of these nineteenth-century ‘solutions’ in the first decade of the twenty-first century is:
The per-capita consumption of water is now three times the level the original systems were designed to provide.
Stresses in the ecosystems from which water is abstracted to supply the cities.
Extreme stresses on the ecosystems into which wastewaters are discharged.
Stormwater runoff systems that are the major sources of pollution of the rivers, bays and harbours on which the cities are built.
The combined effect of rapid increase in population and massive increase in per-capita consumption meant that the demand for water soon outstripped supplies but the attraction and seeming felicity of the ‘scientific’ approach to water management fostered the engineering systems needed to increase supply — usually in the form of more dams which impounded the water in ecosystems further from the cities for transport to them. There was a comforting belief that there were always additional supplies available and all that was required was application of engineering skills to deliver them to the cities.
By the mid twentieth century, most Australian cities had exploited all the water resources available in their near hinterlands. Their supplies were in precarious balance with demand. Although they had originally been conceived of as ‘health authorities’, with a remit to protect the public health, water authorities had seen opportunities to avail themselves of the financial rewards arising out of increased consumption. The gradual acceptance by their residents of the commodification of water and their passive acceptance of increased use of water-using services and equipment increased consumption and brought with it increased financial rewards to the water authorities. The water authorities were remarkably efficient at harvesting, storing and transporting the available surface water resources, although system losses due to evaporation and leakages became increasingly important as they reached the limits of the ‘natural supply’. As the population grew and was accompanied by increasing levels of per-capita consumption, the water authorities increasingly found themselves with few reserves to cope with vagaries in supply. By the end of the twentieth century the situation became critical, in part because the apparent reduction in long-run rainfall over dam catchments meant that reservoirs were operating with small reserves.
The response has been to seek ways of increasing supply and, as a temporary measure, to introduce water restrictions aimed particularly at reducing water consumption on uses outside the dwelling. Generally, water restrictions have had some success in reducing demand but the scale of reduction has not been large, with the notable exception of Brisbane where the Queensland Water Commission in 2007 restricted water consumption to 140 litres per person per day and managed to improve on the target within a very short period (although there is some expectation that once the new desalination plants, water recycling, new dams and water grid come into operation consumption will increase (QWC 2008) — possibly with encouragement of the water authorities to increase revenue). These measures have not allayed anxieties but the current drought has brought underlying problems in the management of national water resources into high relief and led the Commonwealth Government to initiate national water-policy reform.