Credit: John Bull/COSMOS
Both sides of Australia's federal parliament - in a rare moment of consensus - have said the situation is dire. Australia's Parliamentary Secretary for Water Policy, Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull, says that, "In many parts of the nation, crisis is not too strong a word." While Labor's shadow minister for water, Anthony Albanese said, "A crisis is certainly looming".
There's no denying the statistics are frightening. Australia, on average, received only 513 mm of rain in 2004. The United Kingdom, in contrast, receives a mean rainfall of 1,100 mm each year, and damp New Zealand can get up to 1,500 mm in a year, averaged across the country.
Of the water available for Australians to use, one quarter of the rivers and lakes has already been snapped up for drinking, industry and agriculture, and a staggering one third of the water underground is being pumped to the surface and used for the same purposes. A lot of the areas where the water has not been already claimed are in out-of-the-way places that are largely uninhabited. But where humans are found, the water has almost all been earmarked and, in some cases, more than the available water has already been allocated to various users.
As Australia's population grows, this over-allocation of water is only likely to get worse. There will be more washing and cleaning, more drinking and, most importantly, more crops to grow to feed swelling populations - both locally and in export markets. Already, 75 per cent of the water used by Australians goes toward agriculture. Just 16 per cent of the total - 24,909 gigalitres (that's 24,058 billion litres) used in Australia in 2000-2001 ended up in the cities.
And if you ask Australia's national science agency, the CSIRO, the outlook is bleak. By 2030 rainfall on the major capitals (except Hobart) could drop by 15 per cent because of climate change. Perth could lose up to 20 per cent of rainfall, according to the 2001 report, Climate Change Projections for Australia. At the same time, rising temperatures will cause evaporation to increase, making our water storages vanish into thin air.
The Water Services Association of Australia predicts that if no water conservation measures are taken, and climate change and population growth continue as forecast, Australia's 10 largest cities will - by 2030 - be consuming 854 gigalitres (GL) more water than they use. That's a monumental increase in demand. To put it in perspective, that's nearly two times more water than the whole of Melbourne currently uses in a year.
Clearly, the driest inhabited continent in the world has a problem.
It's a perversely comforting thought that Australia is not alone it its predicament. Climate change is a worldwide phenomenon, uniting the human species - and every other living creature, whether they like it or not - in hardship. The United Nations describes the global water situation as a "crisis ... essentially caused by the ways in which we mismanage water". The U.N. is so concerned about water, it has named 2005 to 2015 as the Decade of Water.
According to the U.N., water use has risen six-fold in the past 100 years. We are now at the point where half of the world's wetlands have vanished, and 20 per cent of freshwater fish are endangered.
More than one sixth of the world's population, some 1.2 billion people, do not have enough clean water to drink every day. It is estimated that 3.3 million people die as a result of drinking this untreated water every year.
But disease is not the worst of the world's water worries: running short is a far more pressing problem. The U.N. forecasts that by 2050, between 2 billion and 7 billion human beings will be affected by chronic water shortages. Climate change will have a bearing, as will population growth and improving living standards, which leads to higher rates of consumption.
In an article for the U.N. Chronicle, Albert Schumacher, a Canadian physician, says: "China is an excellent illustration of the daunting water management challenge that we face in this century. It has approximately 21 per cent of the global population, but access to only 7 per cent of the planet's fresh water. This situation is exacerbated by its rapid industrialisation, with millions of people migrating from the countryside to the cities, a greatly increased use of indoor plumbing and changing diets that include water-intensive foods like beef and pork."
It's when the water runs out that things really start to get ugly. Many analysts have forecast that wars in the future will not be fought over land, religion, or oil; it is water that will trigger conflict.
"Just as war over fire sparked conflict among early prehistoric tribes, wars over water may result from current tensions over this resource in the next few years," according to a 2001 report prepared by the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers. "The Near and Middle East are the zones where there is the greatest threat."
