CHAPTER 5
Andrea Gaynor, Margaret Cook, Lionel Frost, Jenny Gregory, Ruth Morgan, Martin Shanahan and Peter Spearritt
City people often take water for granted – until there isn’t enough of it, or it roars through the city in a flood. Yet as urban populations grow and climate challenges intensify, the provision and management of urban water is likely to become more difficult. It is estimated that by 2050 up to 13.3 million additional people may live in Australia’s capital cities, all of whom will expect equal access to clean water and effective sanitation.1 At the same time, rainfall patterns and quantities are changing in ways that current water infrastructure is not designed for, and for which prevailing water cultures are not prepared. Australia’s crisis of water management continues, with restrictions saved for shortages, and flood mitigation addressed largely through engineering rather than planning decisions about where it is safe for people to live. Regulated water usage and recycling remain unpopular and politically unpalatable, potable (i.e. drinkable) water charges generate considerable revenue, and economic and cultural norms retard societal change.
How can history help? The past is never a sure or straightforward guide to the future, but the history of water and Australian urbanisation yields insights that may assist politicians and water managers to find a sustainable approach. For example, our research on water in the five Australian mainland state capitals points to the often short-term and reactive nature of urban water policy and planning. Frequently, the development of solutions has been left until crisis point, and responses have failed to grapple with the inevitability of climatic variation and population growth. Furthermore, decisions made many decades ago have left us with large and somewhat inflexible systems that may require transformation through major investment to deliver integrated water cycle management. Our historical research also suggests that water, which is essential for all life, is rarely best placed in the hands of the market. Political appetite for change, however, will require diverse Australian voters to understand that, like many of the resources we depend upon to maintain our current lifestyles, fresh water is limited. And this means we need to consume less of it.2
Past decisions and future choices
All Australian capital cities have been subject to multiple periods of restricted water consumption. Usually these episodes have arisen from population growth, exacerbated by a period of dry conditions that produces conditions understood as a ‘crisis’. How a ‘crisis’ is framed matters because this determines the actors who are summoned to respond to it. In Australia, when urban water supplies have run low, this has rarely been portrayed as a crisis of exceeding environmental constraints, but of inadequate infrastructure and thus supply. While the immediate response has been to restrict water use in order to share remaining supplies, the ultimate solution has been seen to lie in expanding capacity to extract or manufacture more potable water – via dams, rivers, groundwater, or, most recently, desalination. In the case of flooding, the crisis has generally been seen as arising from inadequate provision for floodwater control rather than poor urban planning creating flood vulnerability. This framing has summoned engineers rather than well-informed town planners and local governments. While such solutions have often worked in the short term, they have frequently served to defer problems to the next generation, postponing vulnerability rather than offering true sustainability. As we move further into a period of global climate volatility, in which both extreme rainfall events and periods of drought are expected to increase, the challenge for urban water managers is to proactively plan for enduring, long-term and resilient solutions that encompass the cultural, municipal and technological components of urban water systems.
Forging a new direction will not be easy. The choices that were made at critical points in the creation and development of today’s water infrastructure, at both community and individual levels, are prime examples of decisions being subject to what social scientists call ‘path dependency’. Path dependence means more than just ‘the past matters’: it refers to the fact that ‘once a country or region has started down a track, the costs of reversal are very high’.3 Cumulative actions reinforce previous decisions or limit the range of options available for future selection. When considering water network infrastructure, path-dependent development is especially influential because of the highly collective nature of identifying, constructing and sustaining such infrastructure. It is characterised by large set-up (fixed) costs, learning effects (with increased use come higher returns and more effective systems), coordination effects (the system is refined as more people use it) and adaptive expectations (people anticipate future use patterns and adapt towards these expectations). While these effects vary in significance across different contexts, all water infrastructure networks are subject to decisions for which subsequent adoption and replication magnify the initial effect and make action along a different path less likely. Initial choices frequently take advantage of the ‘easiest’ options of financial cost or location. When these choices focus on short-term gains, or ignore non-financial consequences (such as the environment or social equity), they can have extremely high opportunity costs that are only fully realised many years later.
Take dams and reservoirs, filtration systems, pipelines and sewerage treatment works, for example. The location and construction of these have historically involved high set-up costs. The difficulties in funding the first water storages serving each capital city related directly to the size of these initial costs and disputes over who would pay. Once constructed, these large assets were expensive to change. Desalination plants similarly became locked in, as expandable, modular means of manufacturing potable water. Sewerage networks that dispose of waste by pushing it out to sea with minimal treatment established expectations of ‘cheap’ disposal.
Past decisions about water supply and sanitation have had far-reaching effects, shaping not only infrastructure networks but also housing. With the advent of deep sewerage, the ‘dunny’ (lavatory) at the bottom of the backyard joined the bathroom on the back verandah. By the interwar years, piped water and the drive for efficiency in modern housing design enabled the bathroom to move conveniently closer to the bedrooms. Later again, the availability of the odour-free S-bend saw the toilet moved inside as well, though this was a slow process. In 1940s Melbourne, for example, new government houses were still built with the toilet and laundry on the back verandah. In all cities, older rental housing fell far short of the standards of newly built housing. Today, most new houses have two toilets and many have two bathrooms. These conveniences have contributed to a dramatic increase in the per capita consumption of water since the late nineteenth century. In Sydney, for example, water consumption rose from 112 litres per person in 1890, to 488 litres in 1990.4
Water availability also shaped conventions and expectations around suburban gardens, which ultimately locked in unsustainable outdoor water consumption patterns. In the nineteenth century and indeed, for much of the twentieth, British cultural norms dominated Australian cities and their suburbs. European trees were prized, familiar flowers and vegetables were grown, and exotic grass lawns were valued for their cool green expanse that kept down dust and provided a soft play surface for children. Initially only the wealthy who had their own water supply from tanks or bores could create and maintain such gardens. Once piped water was available in sufficient quantity and restrictions on its use for garden purposes were lifted, many more householders were able to realise their garden aspirations.5 Consumption was further elevated by the backyard swimming pools that were only feasible because of abundant and relatively cheap water.
Buying time: Conservation and desalination
Decades of dependency on piped water supply produced deeply ingrained expectations of abundant and convenient water. However, population growth and diminishing opportunities to develop cheap new fresh water supplies have forced authorities to encourage a degree of public water conservation, buying time to ‘keep up’ with demand. Since the 1970s, user-pays pricing has had an enduring impact on excessive water consumption, especially outdoors – at least among those less able to pay. Campaigns encouraging voluntary water conservation have also had some impact.6
The greatest changes, however, have been largely ephemeral. During the urban water crisis created by the Millennium Drought (2001–2009), governments introduced policies and incentives to reduce household and business consumption. Brisbane, with the most wide-reaching policies, offered financial incentives to install water tanks and water-saving appliances, distributed four-minute shower timers to every household, and permitted some garden use of laundry water (enabled by development of safer detergents). Businesses, schools, airports, warehouses – any structures with extensive roof catchment areas – were encouraged to collect rainwater for their own use. As a result, Brisbane reduced per capita consumption to 112 litres per day – lower than in any other capital city. While commendable, however, these policy efforts arguably did little to reduce the path dependency of reliance on large-scale public water supplies. When the overflowing of dams makes the TV news, the public becomes complacent about water use, and standards and habits revert almost to how they were under previous water regimes. Corporatised water utilities facilitate this reversion; given their primary income source is the sale of water to households and businesses, they have a financial interest in scaling back or abolishing water restrictions after periods of high rainfall.
During the long drought, desalination plants were built in most of the capitals between 2006 and 2012. These plants were in some cases technological fixes for governments anxious to show they were doing something about potable water. They were relatively quick to build and integrated readily with existing infrastructure, while energy offset deals were a clever exercise in greenwashing. While Perth and Adelaide have continued to operate their desalination schemes, as rain fell, Sydney’s plant was put on standby and Brisbane’s was mothballed, along with water harvesting and recycling schemes. If the same amount of money and electrical energy had been invested in water recycling plants, using stormwater and/or wastewater, the environmental achievement would have been impressive.7 In 2017 the Productivity Commission’s National Water Reform Report recommended an integrated approach that included reusing wastewater or stormwater.8 But these approaches were not mandatory and implementation has been slow. Moving rapidly from an official emphasis on supply to a focus on recycling has been perceived as too politically risky, because voters have come to expect abundant water from sources that they perceive as ‘pure’ and ‘natural’.
According to the logic of path-dependent development, when faced with future challenges to existing networked systems, the tendency will first be towards incremental, low-cost change (such as raising dam walls). If such responses are insufficient, the environmental, economic and social costs of larger and more fundamental change are likely to be high. One key issue is whether the institutions responsible for managing urban water exist within a framework that supports protection of the long-term public interest to provide sustainable water and sanitation.
People and environment versus profits
What does history tell us about the likely risks and opportunities of rearranging the balance of public and private interests in urban water systems? Collective agreement on the importance of protecting water resources has been expressed through legislation establishing catchment control and monitoring. Since the nineteenth century, protecting urban water catchments from private interests such as farming, logging and mining has gone a long way to ensuring the high quality of potable water supplies in Australian cities. In Victoria, for instance, evidence of contamination of Yan Yean’s water from timber cutting and farming in the 1860s and 1870s eventually led to the permanent reservation of the catchment for water supplies.9 As other cities have subsequently found, such an approach is cost effective; in New York in the 1990s, for example, water planners calculated that it was cheaper to buy land to protect water catchments than to build and maintain water treatment plants.10 Despite Melbourne’s leadership in this regard, it is worth noting that resource conflict continues in the Yan Yean catchment, as scientists found in 2019 that the state-owned VicForests had breached its code of practice to limit logging on particular slopes.11 Meanwhile in the hills to the east of Perth in Western Australia, bauxite mining occurs within reservoir protection zones to which public access is denied.
The ongoing importance of government oversight of sanitary provision for the public good is illustrated by the flow-on effects of changes introduced to the organisation of water utilities in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent decades, the rise of neoliberalism has led to the corporatisation of urban water in Melbourne (1992), Sydney (1994), Perth (1996), Adelaide (2002) and Brisbane (2010). Corporatisation is essentially a soft form of neoliberal management, in which agencies are fully owned and operated by the state, but have a separate financial and legal status. This ostensibly separates political decision-making from the pursuit of economic efficiency, and managers must account for expenses and revenues as though the utility were an independent company. In some cases, operations have been contracted out to private corporations. According to independent inquiries, both Adelaide’s Big Pong of 1997, involving mechanical failures and inadequate monitoring at the Bolivar wastewater treatment plant, and Sydney’s 1998 water crisis, which saw public water supply contaminated by cryptosporidium and giardia, were the consequence of newly corporatised agencies favouring cost minimisation over infrastructure maintenance and monitoring.12
Closer regulation of urban planning is one proven approach to minimising the human, environmental and economic impacts of urban flooding events. The international hazard scholarship has advocated land use regulation since the 1970s as an effective tool for flood mitigation. The extent and impact of Brisbane’s 2011 flood were the consequence of inadequate land use regulations, insufficient flood mapping and continued residential development on the floodplain of the Brisbane River.13 Similar issues are arising in relation to urban development in areas susceptible to flooding in Western Sydney and the proposal to raise the wall of Warragamba Dam. These issues involve a conflict of interest between different government roles, as land release and housing development is a historically significant proportion of state government revenue, yet the state is ultimately also responsible for protecting residents from known natural hazards – including flooding. In order to safeguard residents, the incentive to chase revenue – or to engage in patronage relationships with property developers – must be removed, not least as we move further into a climate of increased extreme rainfall events. More broadly, putting profits before people and environments is an unwise approach to urban water management.
If water, then, is inevitably political, what does history suggest about the potential risks and opportunities for democratic management of urban water systems? In a liberal democracy, most Australians have been able to take collective action in demanding improved water infrastructure through voting and a robust free press. Public investment in domesticating water with large-scale water supply and sewerage infrastructure was often piecemeal and reactive, not because of voter resistance to increased charges and cost of connections and fittings, but because of uncertainty about which level of government was responsible. The creation of water boards in Sydney and Melbourne to deliver services across metropolitan areas was one solution. As costs rose due to growing suburban populations pushing usage beyond the capacity of water storages and waste treatment and disposal plants, path-dependent effects made it easier to build new storages and extend old systems, rather than change technology.
In the twenty-first century, the development of sustainable urban water management systems is a ‘wicked problem’ that defies simple solutions because of multiple, contested causes and interdependencies. In the absence of revolutionary change, solutions will have to be worked out through public dialogue within present political structures, and require active support from the Australian electorate.14
In an era of neoliberalism, globalisation, deindustrialisation and technological disruption, political parties of all shades have struggled to develop effective policy solutions to environmental challenges. Rising income inequality, the loss of secure full-time jobs, declining trade union membership and unaffordable housing have impacted Australians unevenly. Voters in outer suburbs, small towns and rural areas are more sensitive to job insecurity and cost of living pressures than those in well-off central and inner cities.15 Such voters are highly susceptible to narratives that present sustainability as the enemy of growth, or an unaffordable luxury. The challenge for the political class is to lead the electorate to understand the importance of developing water institutions, cultures and infrastructure that will serve us well over the long run. This means not always turning to infrastructure to solve problems, but sustaining the slow process of embedding consideration for water within all of our urban systems, from planning and design to education and the arts. The era of crises followed by infrastructural fixes must end.
Lessons from history: A holistic approach to water
There are some encouraging signs of change. Since the 1990s there has been some implementation of water-sensitive urban design, particularly in new urban developments. This approach integrates the water cycle into urban planning and engineering, resulting in benefits like enhanced public open space and biodiversity, flood mitigation and water conservation, and reuse within the landscape. There is significant potential to roll out such approaches on a wider scale, including retrofitting older suburbs, but a change in organisational culture is required, as well as significant investment. At the pointy end of climate change in a region that has experienced significant rainfall decline since the 1970s, Western Australia’s Water Corporation has undertaken a major publicity campaign seeking to educate consumers about the impact of rainfall decline. In 2009 it developed a 50-year plan (‘Water forever’) that used climate change projections to 2060 and included a 60 per cent increase in wastewater recycling, but only a 25 per cent reduction in annual per capita water use, from 145 KL per person to 110 KL per person. Even though community support for water efficiency and large-scale recycling is high, the main government strategy for eliminating the gap between future water demand and supply is further desalination.16
Water has the potential to play a key role in some of the biggest challenges facing our society. Many of these challenges arise from growth, at a range of scales. At a global scale, growth in human consumption of planetary resources is threatening biodiversity and climate. At an urban scale, growth of metropolitan areas is continuing to strain the capacity of existing systems and sources, as well as increasing the complexity and vulnerability of centralised networks. The problem of reliance on endless growth in finite systems cannot be avoided: the question is whether change will be experienced through design or disaster.17 We know that decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions and other forms of environmental harm will not deliver the biodiversity and climate outcomes we need. We also know that we can no longer pursue the dream of universalising the kind of affluence much of the West has enjoyed for the past seven decades without disastrously accelerating climate and biodiversity harms.
What role might there be for water policy in pursuing a degrowth agenda?18 While the market has for many years been the dominant mechanism for distributing resources in Australia and other developed countries, water is one of the few areas in which urban residents have accepted the need to reduce consumption during times of crisis in order to ensure that there is enough available for all. If water managers can build on this history of public resource consciousness, along with positive developments associated with new, conservation-oriented ways of dealing with water (such as the best implementations of water-sensitive urban design), this could reduce the fear and uncertainty associated with a transition to degrowth in other areas.
The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an opportunity for people to reflect on their priorities and the kinds of change they would like to see in society more broadly.19 While many are suffering from change fatigue and craving a return to business-as-usual, the reality is that life will never be the same, and this disruption perhaps provides an opportunity to work towards new, more sustainable and equitable social norms.
Reflecting, then, on the social history of water in Australian urbanisation, we see several opportunities for learning. There is the pressing need to treat water supply and sanitation holistically, as a set of habits, institutions and infrastructure entangled in wider social and environmental contexts. In the past, responses to urban water issues have been dominated by engineering and infrastructure, rather than tackling the more difficult long-term work of cultural adaptation. This approach has been facilitated by the relatively short-time horizons employed by urban water managers. Infrastructure fixes may solve problems for a matter of decades, but to be truly good ancestors we need to think in terms of centuries, if not millennia. While detailed projections at those time scales are impossible, some of the larger planetary constraints – such as an inability to support indefinite growth at current rates – are obvious. Although path dependency means that change away from our current structures and systems will be difficult, delaying the process of change will only make the job harder. On the positive side, the social history of water provides encouraging evidence that change is achievable: from short-term responses to water scarcity, to the growing implementation of water-sensitive urban design and water recycling. As Australia’s Indigenous peoples have always known well, water is life. When settler Australia takes that message on board, we will be closer to achieving the resilience needed to meet the challenges ahead.