“It is better to be approximately right rather than comprehensively wrong.”

When groundwater aquifers are connected to a river, they need to be managed as a single integrated system.  A connected river gains water when an aquifer is higher than the river and loses water when the aquifer is lower than the river. The rate of gain or loss is determined mainly by an aquifer’s gradient towards a river and its capacity to transmit water. Significant time lags can be involved.

How should entitlements be defined and allocations made when ground and river water systems are connected? Should river entitlement holders or the river be given an entitlement to the other resource? Is trade between ground and surface water systems possible? How should any impact of climate change be managed?

Groundwater Entitlement Systems

As is done in NSW, the state of the art when establishing a groundwater entitlement system is to issue unit shares in the system.  In systems where shares have been issued, allocations are made in proportion to the number of shares held.  The system is simple and can cope with changes in supply.

A formal announcement process is necessary.   Each year an assessment of the amount of recharge needs to be made and, once enough water has been put aside for base flow and mandatory inter-system transfers, the remaining recharge can be allocated to share holders.  Shareholders should expect allocations to vary from year to year and, if it gets drier, to receive a smaller allocation.  In the simplest of systems, allocation announcements are varied with changes in the depth to the water table.

To ensure efficient water use, it is necessary to allow entitlement holders to carry forward unused allocations with adjustment for losses and flows out of the system.

Where the aquifer is contiguous and porous, water tends to move quickly from one location to another. In such systems, groundwater trading is possible.  As porosity declines and/or the aquifer becomes fragmented, trading rules become harder to set.

Types of Aquifer

When discussing the effects of aquifers on river flow, Rick Evans has proposed that aquifers be zoned according to the time it takes for the act of extracting water from a bore to reduce river flow.

Aquifers right next to a river

Right next to a river, pumping reduces river flow almost immediately and entitlements are more accurately defined as part of the river system. In much of Australia, however, aquifers right next to a river are not considered to be part of the river system.  This means that those able to pump right next to a river gain access to an entitlement that is more reliable than any river entitlement.

It is interesting to note that Queensland legislation is now written so that a river boundary can be defined to include all groundwater bores within a specified distance of a river.  Reflecting on the merits of such an approach, Evans has suggested that most groundwater licences within 5 kms of the River Murray should be defined as part of this river’s entitlement system and managed accordingly.  In a drought, this would mean that allocations to groundwater and surface water resources would reduced at a similar rate.

Aquifers that can store river water

Further away from a river, there is often a transitional zone where the rate of contribution to or extraction from river flow depends upon river height.  In these zones, allocation and pumping rules need to be based on river height and on the time it takes for changes in the rate of extraction to affect river flow.

These are the aquifers that tempt groundwater hydrologists to suggest they could be managed like a dam. In highly regulated rivers, river height tends to be constant and, hence, opportunity to do this may seem limited.   If river management rules were changed, however, so that river height could be managed strategically with a view to reducing drought risk. Run the river high and the adjoining aquifers could be gradually filled.  Run the river low and the water stored in the aquifer could be gradually returned back to the river.  We think this opportunity is worth evaluating. New accounting would be necessary.

Aquifers further out from the river

The time it takes for groundwater to flow from more distant zones to a river can take many years.  Time lags of 20 to 50 years are not uncommon.  As a result, entitlement trades which involve the movement of the point of extraction closer to the river need to be managed with great care.   The solution is to set trading rules by sub-zone.  Entitlement trading from these sub-zones to a river is possible with adjustment for the time lags involved and to ensure that the trade does not result in long-term or even permanent “borrowing” of water from other zones or from the river.

Dealing with Adverse Climate Change

Having set the scene, we can now explore one of the key questions posed in this droplet.  In a system where a river gains water from an aquifer and it gets drier,

a)  Should river or aquifer users be protected from the impact of this decline in water availability; or
b)  Should the impact be shared?

If the latter sharing approach is taken then one option is to issue a “gaining” river formal shares in the aquifer system and, conversely, a “gaining” aquifer formal shares in the river system.

Under such an arrangement, managers would be forced to manage connected systems as a single interacting system. When recharge increases, those with an interest in a gaining river would get more water and when recharge declines, they would get less water. The result is a regime that would establish a level playing field between ground and surface water users. We think the approach has merit.

Trading among connected river and groundwater systems

Pushing the envelope one step further, it is possible to imagine an entitlement regime where an irrigator or an environmental water manager could purchase a groundwater entitlement and, with appropriate adjustment, arranges either for

a)  The entitlement to be converted into a river entitlement; or
b)  It the entitlement to be tagged so that any allocations made to it are transferred, with an appropriate volumetric adjustment and time delay, to a river account.

The main difference between these two options lies with the way allocation risk is distributed.  When a groundwater entitlement is converted into a surface water entitlement and the exchange rate is wrong, the reliability of all other entitlements in the system changes. Under the second tagged approach, exchange rate errors can be corrected so that there is no long-term impact on the interests of others.  Given the risks involved, in the case of groundwater to river water trading, a tagged approach is likely to result in more efficient decisions.

Where to from here?

Obviously, careful aquifer-specific analysis of the options presented in this Droplet needs to be undertaken. Significant investments in aquifer mapping, connectivity assessment and monitoring would be necessary.

The challenge now is to work out how to get the foundations for such a aquifer-river sharing systems right, cut through the complexity and put systems in place that can be expected to improve with increased understanding and knowledge.

As a bare minimum, we recommend that system managers should start to define the size of each river’s share of the water in each aquifer connected to it and vice versa.  We also recommend that agencies trial the tagged trading of water entitlements among between connected river and groundwater systems.

The good news is that all this is not new.  In places like the Arizona, California and Texas, existing regimes enable people to store water in aquifers.  In these parts of the world, it is also possible to swap surface and groundwater allocations.  In fact, it has even got to the stage that some American States are doing ground-surface water trades with one another.

Examples of the early development of such ideas can also be found in Australia.  In South Australia’s Angas Bremer system, for example, irrigators are given credit for 100% of any surface water they drop into an aquifer on the condition that this water is used within 5 years.  Another example can be found in Queensland’s Burdekin River Delta where up to 250 GL of water per year is pumped into a groundwater recharge system so that cane growers can access groundwater when they need it.   Draft Australian guidelinesfor management of the health risks associated with aquifer recharge have been released.

Authors
Mr. Mike Young
The University of Adelaide
Email: Mike.Young@adelaide.edu.au
Mr. Jim McColl
CSIRO Land and Water
Email: Jim.McColl@csiro.au

Acknowledgements
Comments made on earlier drafts by Rick Evans, Phillip Kalaitzis, John Radcliffe, Greg Raison, Alistair Watson, Nadeem Samnakay, Mark Brindal and Mike Williams are acknowledged with appreciation. We would also like to acknowledge the opportunity to discuss this issue with a significant number of state administrators and the support of our Project Steering Committee

A recent study by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that bottled water contains chemical contaminants at levels routinely found in tap water. The findings are not new, however, as several recent studies have raised doubts about the image of bottled water as more pure than typical drinking water.
The EWG study concluded, “Our tests strongly [...]

An effort in the California Assembly to ban water softeners failed recently as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill.
According to the Sacramento Bee (http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/1146604.html), the bill would have allowed “cities, counties and special districts—whichever entity oversees wastewater—to ban water softeners.”
The proponents of the bill argued that salt levels from water softeners make it more difficult [...]

An effort in the California Assembly to ban water softeners failed recently as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill.
According to the Sacramento Bee (http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/1146604.html), the bill would have allowed “cities, counties and special districts—whichever entity oversees wastewater—to ban water softeners.”
The proponents of the bill argued that salt levels from water softeners make it more difficult [...]

Tap water advocates may find a silver lining in today’s economic clouds. The casualties of housing’s busted bubble could spread beyond Wall Street to take the last of the sparkle out of the bottled water boom.

Tap water advocates have offered any number of good reasons to kick the bottled water habit. But as long as consumers felt they had the money to spare, they didn’t seem to worry much about paying a thousand times more for the bottled stuff.

Since I first wrote about the decline of tap water’s brand in 2006, we’ve seen more municipalities and organizations working to rehabilitate tap water in the public mind. The Dayton, Ohio Water Department launched a "Take Back the Tap" campaign at a city-wide "Live Green Fest" on August 24, which included handing out free re-usable water bottles to the first 1,000 visitors to the Dayton Water Exhibit.

A 20-page report (PDF) by the consumer group Food & Water Watch, titled "Take Back the Tap," is available for download. The same organization recently sponsored a $1500 video contest in which students were asked to produce a convincing story about why college campuses should kick the bottled water habit. 128  contestants posted their entries on YouTube. You can also see the top 10 finalists and the winner posted on YouTube. 

Perhaps economics will prompt Americans to look again at bottled water as an occasional indulgence, rather than a total replacement for tap water. They might also reconsider all the other good reasons for taking the tap over the bottle.

It’s safe
People are finally starting to realize tap water’s safe; some say safer than bottled. It’s been widely reported that the government requires more rigorous and frequent safety testing and monitoring of municipal drinking water than it does of bottled water.

It’s incredibly convenient
Tap water is readily available throughout the United States. It requires no special equipment for the end user, and you don’t have to carry it with you because it’s available in nearly every public place.

It’s the environmentally correct thing to do
Bottled water leaves a significant carbon footprint, from the production of the bottles to the long distribution chain to move all those bottles across the nation and even around the world. Then there’s the whole bottle disposal issue, whether it goes to recycling or a landfill.

It tastes good
Most areas have good-tasting water. As much as 40 percent of all bottled is simply "purified" tap water; so where’s the taste advantage there? Some communities take great pride in the quality of their water.

As I wrote in "You Can Buy 40 Different Brands of Bottled Water at the Water Works Restaurant," it’s possible to spend $50 for a bottle of water at Philadelphia’s Water Works Restaurant. Here is a water works that was once one of the world’s great tourist destinations, in a city where to this day people praise the "delicious tap water." After this week’s market fall, perhaps we’ll see a few more Philadelphians choosing their city’s delicious tap water over the conspicuous consumption of stylish bottles.

Don Dunnington
Moderator

As governor Schwarzenegger proclaims a statewide drought, educating ratepayers about conservation is more important than ever. But the era of belt-tightening that now permeates our economy simultaneously has many water districts reassessing their budgets. The good news is that there are ways smart districts can stretch their communications dollars to effectively educate the public and change customer behavior.

How can it be done? Below are a few quick thoughts on how to cost-effectively build trust with customers through effective communications.

1. Take Credit for Your Actions: Your district is probably already doing a host of great things, so make sure you’re getting the credit you deserve. Remember to take pictures and promote the laudable efforts of your district through outlets such as customer newsletters, the media and e-blasts.

2. Explore Communications Options: Organizations like the Water Education Foundation can provide semi-custom collateral pieces to help districts communicate the macro-level messages, like conservation. These pieces often cost just a few pennies a piece! (Watch for WaterWords, Laer Pearce & Associates’ new on-line store for semi-custom collateral pieces, which we’ll be launching soon!)

3. Re-Think The Fundamentals. Challenge every communications expense and tool. Is it the best use of funds? Is there a better way to do it? We recently found a way to cut mailing costs in half for one of our client’s mailings by simply re-sizing the piece.

4. Bolster E-Communications: We live in an increasingly electronic world, and printing and postage fees often can be up to 50 percent of a brochure or newsletter’s cost, so shifting towards e-communications can be a real cost-saver.

5. Utilize Outside Resources: Whatever the size of your communications staff, outside agencies can help boost your district communications output without a long-term financial commitment.

Whether utilized for one-off projects or as a member of your day-to-day team, consultants like Laer Pearce & Associates can optimize your budget.

There’s no one “silver bullet” solution, but these ideas may help you build trust during these critical times while conserving your communications dollars.

Laer Pearce
Laer Pearce & Associates

Laer Pearce is president of Laer Pearce & Associates, one of Southern California’s premier public affairs firms, specializing in regulatory issues and community outreach for the water and land development industries.

For more information, please visit http://www.laer.com/

A recent article on wcco.com notes that:
“Residents in Minneapolis have been complaining about a foul taste and smell in their tap water lately, but the city stresses it is safe to drink.
Minneapolis Water Works said the odor typically shows up during spring, when melting snow gets into the water supply. It’s not as usual to [...]

Recognising the need to stop expansion of water use in the Murray Darling Basin, in 1994 Basin States agreed, as an interim measure, to a volumetric cap on surface water diversions.  This cap was set at the volume of water that would have been diverted under 1993/94 levels assuming similar climatic and hydrologic conditions and using the infrastructure in place at that time. Although it had no basis in science, several years later, it was decided to agree to this limit.

In unregulated rivers with no storage capacity to dampen flow variability, States recognised that a volumetric limit on diversions might not achieve a sustainable outcome.  Basin States agreed that “this cap may be expressed as an end of valley flow regime.”

Acting in the national interest, the main object of the Water Act 2007 is to optimise the allocation, use and management of the Murray Darling Basin water resources.   CoAG has now agreed and Commonwealth legislation requires that a “Sustainable Cap” be set for each part of the Murray Darling Basin.

In regulated systems, recent experience has shown that a volumetric cap is not sufficient to ensure both river system health and community well being.  Both outcomes need a regime that can cope with all climatic futures. This droplet asks how a “sustainable cap”, or, in effect, a sustainable allocation regime might be set in a regulated river system with lots of dams, weirs and locks. It addresses a question that is fundamental to the future of the Basin.

What would a sustainable water allocation regime look like?   What principles need to be considered?

Focus on inflows

In a system that might be getting drier, a volumetric limit on the maximum amount of water that may be diverted in a wet year serves little purpose.

Under the current MDB Agreement, NSW and Victoria share inflows whilst South Australia is given access to guaranteed volume, when it can be supplied. Because of this guarantee, South Australian irrigators cannot carry forward unused water. As we showed in Droplet 6, when unused water cannot be carried forward and saved, too much water is used.  Dams are depleted more quickly and, as a result, the impact of droughts is more severe than otherwise would be the case. This year, as an emergency measure, South Australian irrigators have been allowed to carry forward water. If water storage and use is to be optimised, SA irrigators should always be allowed to do this.

With a focus on inflows rather than diversions, all users are exposed to the nature of the risks they face.  With access to an efficient water market and the capacity to determine how much water is left in storage, users have a much better capacity to cope with climatic variability, the emergence of long dry periods and adverse climate change.

Principle 1  When designing a sustainable water allocation regime, the focus should be on the development of inflow sharing rules and the role of the market in optimising storage (carry forward) rather than on setting a volumetric limit on diversions.  Unless all States operate under the same rules, storage management and use will be sub-optimal.

Allocation priorities

With a focus on inflows, the next step is to work out the order in which allocations should be made.  If one is to have a river, then the first priority is to put aside sufficient water to maintain system function and ensure that water can be delivered throughout the system. Where one or more systems are connected, sufficient water should also be put aside for transfers between systems.  In our report on future-proofing the MDB, we call the water needed to meet all these requirements, maintenance water.

Principle 2  As the first allocation priority, any sustainable allocation regime should begin by setting aside sufficient water to enable conveyance and delivery throughout the system, to provide for intersystem transfers, to cover evaporative losses and to flush pollutants to the sea.

As the amount needed for river maintenance varies and, as this is a critical system wide need, decisions about the required volume of maintenance water needs to be taken centrally.  Once this has been done, the remaining water that flows into the system, including that held in storage, can be allocated.

Giving the environment an entitlement

After providing maintenance water, it is the sharing rules that determine how the remaining non-flood water should be allocated between environmental and consumptive users.  There are two ways to do this.

One way is to use catchment water sharing plans to determine how much water should be allocated to the environment. As the National Water Initiative recommends, the other way is to define the environment’s entitlement in exactly the same way as all other entitlements are defined.

Recent research commissioned by the National Water Commission has found that communities and many governments have great difficulty in preparing water-sharing plans that work in long dry periods.  As result, a significant number of water sharing plans are currently in suspension!  If the alternative, equivalent entitlement approach is taken, then the role of catchment water sharing plans can be more strategic and less rule-based.

One of the strengths of the National Water Initiative equivalent-entitlement approach is that consumptive users and the environment face the same risks and have the same opportunities to decide how much water to save, use or sell.    Both have an equal degree of security.  Neither can impose costs on the other.

Principle 3  Define environmental and consumptive entitlements in the same manner and place them under a regime that empowers all entitlement holders to manage their own supply risk.

Managing environmental water

If the environment is given an entitlement and defined differently from maintenance water, then we may need to rethink the need for a volumetric cap on diversions. Environmental managers are searching for ways to replicate the small to medium size floods that no longer occur.  One of the simplest ways to do this is to hold water in storage and then release it quickly when river flow circumstances are advantageous.  But, with a cap on diversions, this could result either in a breach of the cap; or impose a cost on irrigators by reducing the amount of water that irrigators may divert later in the season.

Once a significant proportion of the entitlements on issue are held in the environment’s interest, a volumetric cap could prove to be a barrier to the efficient realisation of environmental outcomes.  A way to allow the environment to carry forward unused water allocations and arrange for minor floods without limiting irrigation opportunities will need to be found. Replacement of the current volumetric cap on diversions with a sharing regime that defines all entitlements in the same way solves this problem.

Accounting for all uses

As pointed out in Droplet 3, the viability of any water allocation regime is determined by its coverage and completeness in water accounting.  Unfortunately, if there is an increase in the number of small farm dams, if the area under forestry increases, and as water use efficiency increases, the amount of water available for allocation decreases.  When ground and surface water systems are connected, increases in groundwater use have the same adverse effect.

Unless all water supply affecting activities are included, no water allocation regime can be defined as sustainable. As is currently planned, it is critical that connected ground and surface water systems are managed as one system and all uses are fully accounted for – even if they are unmeterable.

Principle 4  Include all activities that affect water supply in the allocation regime.  Meter the meterable and off-set the unmeterable.

Where to from here?

CoAG recently agreed to the development of a “Basin Plan, which will include a sustainable cap on surface and groundwater diversions across the Basin.”   CoAG’s intention clearly is to try to fix MDB problems once and for all – to put a sustainable management regime in place.

CoAG will be meeting in early July to finalise an Inter-Government Agreement (IGA) that will further the journey towards development of a sustainable management regime for the MDB.  It is also expected that the new MDB Authority will be established in the near future and be given a significant role in the implementation of the IGA and developing a new Basin Plan.

In view of the critical state of the River Murray System, we consider that the IGA should give maximum flexibility to those given the responsibility for developing the new plan.  To this end, the concept of a sustainable cap should be interpreted widely and that the principles set out in this droplet given the fullest consideration. The allocation regime’s structure ideally should be finalised before development of plan detail.   The challenge of moving from the current regime to one designed to cope with extreme climatic variation, the re-emergence of long dry periods and, worse still, a shift to a drier climate should not be underestimated.

Authors:
Mike Young, The University of Adelaide
and
Jim McColl, CSIRO Land and Water

Email comments to:  droplets@adelaide.edu.au

Acknowledgements:

Comments made on earlier drafts by our Steering Committee, Alistair Watson, Mark Brindal, Leith Boully, Fiona McKenzie, Tony Read, Dick Thompson and several government officials are acknowledged with appreciation.

Dan McCarthy, President and CEO of Black & Veatch’s global water business, today cited the need to increase public awareness of three key challenges surrounding the UK water industry’s response to climate change, including issues related to water scarcity, flooding and greenhouse gas emissions.

In a column issued today, McCarthy appealed to water industry leaders to work together with the public and all other relevant stakeholders to develop robust legislation, strategies, technologies and infrastructure for dealing with these climate change challenges.

The column “Climate Change and the UK Water Industry: Stepping up to the Challenge” is available at http://www.bv.com/downloads/Resources/Reports/WaterClimateChangeUK200806.pdf. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser’s address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

In the column, McCarthy points out that although the UK water industry emits less than one percent of the nation’s greenhouses gases, water companies are on the front line in terms of vulnerability to climate change because of the combination of flood and drought.

“To serve the public best, the water industry’s response to climate change will need to be flexible, imaginative and, above all, collaborative,” McCarthy said.  “As one of the foremost global companies involved in developing and installing advanced water and wastewater treatment technologies, Black & Veatch can provide an objective perspective on these issues,” he added.

Dan McCarthy
Black & Veatch
http://www.bv.com/