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/

There was an interesting article from the Associated Press yesterday titled “Economy Makes Bottled Water Out, Tap Water In”. They say that Tap water is making a comeback. Here are a few paragraphs from their article:

Marriott International Inc. distributed free refillable water bottles and coffee mugs to the 3,500 employees at its corporate offices in Bethesda, [...]

Book Review
"The Last Taboo: Opening the Door on the Global Sanitation Crisis"
By Maggie Black and Ben Fawcett
Published 2008 by Earthscan, UK and USA

Despite its subject matter (human waste), "The Last Taboo" is a surprisingly readable and interesting book, even for the lay person, and it challenges the currently fashionable focus among those who fund such projects on providing third world peoples with clean drinking water. The authors, Maggie Black and Ben Fawcett, seek to reframe the discussion toward fixing the underlying problem of human sanitation. The book was funded by UNESCO and offers an extended analysis of the connection between human fecal matter, water contamination and disease.

The authors suggest that while most of the developed world’s attention is focused on the need for clean drinking water in the undeveloped world, the more basic problem of preventing contamination of drinkable water by human waste is largely ignored. The authors see this situation as an environmental and human health time bomb, especially in third world mega cities where official counts have climbed to over 10 million residents and millions more go uncounted. At least a billion people, one sixth of the world population, now live in and around these mega cities in dwellings that lack adequate sanitation. At the current rate of rural migrants leaving home to find work in these cities, "The moment is expected sometime in 2008, when humanity will become a mainly urban instead of a mainly rural species."

Making matters worse, the authors cite the strong tendency in developing countries to undercount the poorest urban dwellers. These undercounted folks are also underserved when it comes to sewage systems. They frequently occupy squatters’ quarters or floating slums outside official city limits and outside any semblance of sewage disposal. In seeming contradiction to this urban squalor, the World Bank and other funding sources have been concentrating on rural areas in the third world with the apparent hope that they might thereby reverse migration to the cities.  While appearing to address a great need, this rural focus leaves neighboring mega cities to continue to fill up with rural migrants and no sewage systems to serve them.

The authors offer an enlightening, even entertaining, history of human sanitation from Roman times to London’s cholera epidemics and beyond. Until John Snow applied scientific methodology to determining how cholera spread in London in an 1854 epidemic, wild theories thrived.  Miasma, or bad air, led the list of causes for much of Western history.  Nobody considered  human fecal matter to be  a contaminate which  caused  disease. It was a terribly smelly problem, and especially bad in hot and overcrowded dwelling areas of cities.  

By the 1850s and ’60s, the unsanitary conditions in parts of London had become so bad that politics, if not smell, finally brought action to clean up the poorest areas of the city. It may have been more fear of revolution, now rampant in much of continental Europe, that prompted London to do something about delivering clean water and sewage disposal even in the poorest neighborhoods.

The most basic of human needs – sanitary living conditions, appropriately safe,  private places for disposing of fecal matter and accessible running water – continue to be unavailable to much of the world’s population.  

In the last chapter, "Bringing on the New Sanitary Revolution," the authors address the question of if we build enough toilets for the urban poor, will they use them. The answer is a qualified yes: people tend to adopt cleaner living habits when they have the oprion to do so. The authors seem to hold great hope in particular for educational efforts where children, though their good example and social pressure, become the change agents for the entire community.

Bringing modern, affordable sanitation to millions of poor urban residents in Africa, Asia and Central and South America poses both a terrific problem and a wonderful opportunity for those who are able to supply the solutions. Although the problem areas are easy enough to find on a map, solutions can come from anywhere. This huge human sanitation problem presents us with an opportunity to  improve  health and productivity among a significant portion of the world’s inhabitants. 

The book is available on Amazon.com, click here for more information.

Don Dunnington
Moderator