[00:00:00] Bridget Scanlon: Welcome to the Water Resources Podcast. I am Bridget Scanlon. In this podcast, we discuss water challenges with leading experts, and today I would like to welcome Quentin Grafton from Australian National University. Quentin, would you mind giving a little bit of background on what you've been up to during your recent work.
[00:00:23] Quentin Grafton: Yeah. Thank you, Bridget, and thank you for inviting me to your podcast. I am based at the Australian National University. My profession discipline is economics, but I work in multiple spaces in the sense that I work with hydrologists, ecologists, et cetera, and that I think has been very rewarding for me personally, but also in terms of the water space, I think.
Connection to other people and other disciplines, other knowledge, not just Western knowledge, I think is really important to grapple and to understand, to see what is actually going on and then how to respond to those challenges. So that's the space that I operate in. I have been an academic for, gosh, no, I think about it, it's quite a long time, 30 years now, but I did take a couple of years to work in the Australian government and the Australian Public Service. So yes, that's me. I convened the water justice hub. That's one of my roles. And I engage with public policy in multiple ways, writing opinion pieces, of course, but engaging with policymakers, decision makers who don't always want to listen to me.
But it's sometimes it's good for people, including myself, to listen to other points of view. So we can get to a, I think a better understanding of what is happening. And again, it's not just what understanding is, it's about taking that understanding to meaningful action. And meaningful action is really what we need to be about, not only in the water space, but in the global space, whether it's in climate change, biodiversity, or the range of challenges that we currently face.
[00:02:01] Bridget Scanlon: And you currently hold the UNESCO chair in water economics and transboundary water governance. Earlier today, you were in a webinar with other people preparing for the upcoming New York conference, UN conference on water. Maybe you could describe a little bit about that briefly.
[00:02:19] Quentin Grafton: Yes, I and seven others co-wrote a paper, a perspectives paper, peer review, perspectives paper for Nature Water, which reviewed what progress we made on the goals that we were set.
When I say we, I am talking about the world at Mar del Plata in Argentina in 1977, which was the point of the UN first UN Water Conference and, fast forward 46 years, that's a long time. We take ourselves to 2023 and 22nd to the 24th of March, 2023 in New York City, in fact, will be the second UN water conference, so it's only the second.
And in 46 years there have, of course, been other water conferences in other places, and Stockholm and many others. S Center, Dublin, Ireland. Think it was, yeah, every place seems to have one, but they're not UN water conferences and there's world water conferences, et cetera. But this is under the auspices of the UN and the national governments of the UN.
So that makes it more of a big deal to the extent that national governments want to engage in the water space. And that means that, not only funding, but initiatives, et cetera, et cetera, all of the sorts of things that are needed. And certainly at a global scale, that's what is needed.
Governments can do whatever they're gonna do in their own countries and there's some good initiatives underway and not so good places, as well. But on a global scale, we do need national governments. That's the nature of the world that we live in. National governments make those determinations of how we get global collective action and we need it in a water space.
I can absolutely value that. And there was no disagreement today. Yeah, there maybe disagreement on how to do that, but there's no disagreement. We definitely need to do it.
[00:04:01] Bridget Scanlon: And I think one of the points that came across to me listening to the webinar was recognizing that climate change is a global issue, but a lot of the water issues are local issues and that need to be addressed in that form.
And also, I thought you raised an excellent point, but you said, okay, you may not have a water problem, but if you're importing food, you need to be aware where your food is coming from and maybe they have water issues. And then we have all these climate extremes, floods and droughts in different places, so that might impact your food supply and other things. So I think it's important, understand the connections.
[00:04:35] Quentin Grafton:. So thank you for raising that, the connection between food and water and energy and ecosystems, and, most of Western Europe relies on imported food. Now some of it's imported within Western Europe itself, but they do rely on food imported from other countries.
So they're natural food importers. Now I'm in Australia as a natural food exporter, and the United States does import a lot of food, but also exports a lot of food too. We are fortunate to live in two countries that are in that space, that food exporters, but many countries aren't.
And they need to ensure that we have a stable climate, but we also need to ensure that we're using our water effectively. So if you're importing food from a country, S America or has water scarcity, water stress, and climate change is gonna increase water stress and heat stress, and in particular, in mid latitudes, then you are going to have to be aware of that and be part of the solution.
Not pretend that it's someone else's problem, because the problem's gonna come knocking on your door. And I think that's the point that I think people need to get. In 2023, if we are in the global north, we'd switch on our taps, at the least in the big cities, we've got good clean water. That's not true for billions of people and elsewhere in the world.
But more importantly, from those people in the global north who think that they are immune to these challenges, think about the migrations that are going to happen. Think about the food. Think about the impacts through water. As in flooding events, more frequent flooding events, more extreme flooding events and droughts.
Those two extremes are gonna go together. And that's a climate change issue, but it requires adaptation. And of course mitigation is an absolute priority, but it's in the water space that adaptation has to take place. So we don't get it wrong, we don't have the right storms, pipes. We are gonna have flooding in our streets if we don't do what's right in terms of planning for our water and doing so an effective basis, short and long term, we're gonna get to a day zero like Cape Town
Almost got to, Barcelona did in fact get to, in I think 2008 and other cities, global cities have faced that. And it's gonna be more of that coming if we don't plan and adapt and manage our water in a much more effective way.
[00:06:54] Bridget Scanlon: And I think, when we chatted before you mentioned that some areas globally that have a lot of potential are Africa and South America.
And I think it would be great to bring those countries along and make sure that try to help them to develop more sustainable practices and get their food production off because they won't be able to afford possibly to import food from other countries.
[00:07:18] Quentin Grafton: critically important, yes, of course, it's for Africans to make the choices they need to make.
But if they seek assistance from others in the global North, then we should certainly respond and give what assistance they are seeking, and certainly in Africa. I think most of your listeners will be aware that the greatest percentage increase in population is going to take place in the African continent, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, but not exclusively.
Africa's got 55 countries, but many places in Africa are importing food, and they're importing food from countries that won't be exporting food into the future. So India has been an exporter of food. Just stopped being an exporter in the last 12 months. Might bounce back again one or two years, but it's not going to be an exporter of food going into the future.
Okay. For example, that may also happen to China. Okay and those countries that will continue to export and our projections, United States will continue to export food, but they're going to export less food. Okay. if you are a food importer, you better make sure that you’re doing whatever you can to ensure your own food production and Africa in the sense that Sub-Saharan Africa, of course you go on to generalize over a big continent, there are opportunities, in terms of rain fed agriculture and there are a number of things, that are being proposed, how to improve yields, for example, but also of multiple practices that are possible, as well as of course, that's intensification.
Getting more out of the existing agricultural land. And of course there's intensification as in using more land for agriculture and there are possibilities in Africa in the context of grasslands and water is critical to that, how you use the water to be able to get what you want.
That's of course for Africans to make the call about. It's not for me to tell 'em what they should or shouldn't do, but that issue about food production, intensification and extensification is going to have to be front and center on the minds of decision makers within Africa. And if it isn't, they should be because there's serious trouble coming in the near future.
[00:09:22] Bridget Scanlon: I had Chris Funk on an earlier podcast and he was talking about drought in east Africa in the Horn of Africa. Yeah. Six rainy seasons that they missed because of La Nina conditions, and I'm sure people have recognized, Australia has been subjected to floods recently related to La Nin, so the same La Nina that's causing drought in East Africa is causing flooding in much of Australia.
Maybe you can describe some of those floods and on top of that, then I think you've experienced atmospheric rivers. Yes. Which we have been subjected to a lot in California in the last couple of months, so that's right. That extreme flooding is really problematic and very difficult to manage.
[00:10:04] Quentin Grafton: Yes, of course. The higher the surface temperature, the more moisture that the air can hold. The opportunities or the likelihood of these atmospheric rivers, which are these massive downpour events that can happen over a few hours. Indeed over a few days even they can be dramatic, in terms of, loss of life and property.
The La Nina that we've been experiencing and has now come to an end. The official certification came through the last few days, I think that the La Nina is now over. So that's hopefully good news for the Horn of Africa, given the millions that are vulnerable to hunger and already hungry.
Because of the extended drought. What we experienced in eastern Australia during La Nina events is these sorts of flooding events. They're more frequent and a high magnitude, and we experienced it, in 2022 and then indeed, not just in 2022 and in 2021, but and also there's an overflow of that in terms of 2023.
And so there were a number of communities that were completely submerged for a period of time. So those communities have grown up, generalizing here, but pretty much along floodplains next to rivers. And that's the opportunity place in terms of the transportation hubs. Before we had roads, for example, and they've continued to be there. What's happening is that with climate change as a multiplier in terms of these flooding events, of course we've always had flooding events, but they're getting morefrequent and then of higher magnitude, and that's what's experienced both in southeast Queensland and New South Wales. The eastern part of New South Wales, we had some severe flooding events and people who have had homes for many decades, they've gone and the federal government is now offering funds for them to move out to high locations, and that's, at least that's adaptive. So it's better to understand what's happening, offer compensation and support for people who are at most, at risk and do something about it. That's what we should be doing. But that doesn't always happen. Governments can come back and they say, oh, we'll just build again. The idea of saying, this was a one on a hundred year flood, don't worry about it. We had it last year. There's this notion which is correct that the non-stationarity, in other words, we are in a world now where we can't just base our decisions on historical, weather or climate data.
We have to base it on what we expect will be happening. The expectation is change, and the expectation is exactly what you highlighted, Bridget, the potential for these very extreme flooding events, so they're obviously more extreme of floodplains. But, will exist in many cities of the world, of course, are right on the coast and it may or may not be floodplains, but there's a whole series of issues that, how to manage that effectively.
And so we have to plan for it. We can't bury our heads in the sand. We can't pretend it's not happening. We can't pretend that climate change is not going to get worse for climate change. It is going to get worse. There's no question about that. So we have to plan for it and do so now. And if we don’t, primarily the poor and vulnerable will suffer the most because they're the ones who are living on the floodplains or whatever, and they have the least ability to you. They probably don't have insurance or can't afford the proper insurance, et cetera, et cetera. So if we are going to have just societies, if we are going to actually live in a world where we take care of each other, we have to plan for those events and act accordingly and not just floods, droughts.
Where I live, of course the drought are coming back, so there's a flood now's a drought coming or whatever, so we have to prepare for that and that's a different sort of preparation, but it's the same sort of thing. It's looking to the future, understanding what the possibilities are, thinking through the options and the risks, and doing something investing, adapting, and prioritizing. What we need to do.
[00:14:00] Bridget Scanlon: And I guess, in terms of flooding, Brisbane and Sydney and many of these cities were really devastated. And I think you mentioned previously Lismore.
[00:14:09] Quentin Grafton: Yeah. Lismore particularly, Lismore was in fact one of the most, the fact that there are also smaller communities that were equally affected, but Lismore was the largest of the communities that was affected. There are residents in Lismore who are still without homes. They're having to live with it right now. The floods are over. At least, for now. And but they're still having to manage as best they can.
It's not that there hasn't been government support. There has, but there is never enough. And then if you are a homeowner and your house is now viewed as uninsurable, you're in a difficult situation you may have no equity in, what do you do? And there's already a housing crisis. This is quite separate to flooding. Australia has a housing crisis as indeed in many places in the world. And that means that we have very low vacancy rates, very hard to rent, and housing prices are very high. Interest rates are going up. All of those sorts of challenges for people just to secure a roof over their head.
[00:15:07] Bridget Scanlon: I was reading that the river rose to 40 feet in Lismore.
[00:15:12] Quentin Grafton: Oh, huge. Yeah, 40 feet. it must have been crazy. I saw the video, the films of it, it's just unbelievable. As you pointed out, Bridget, it's meters. Meters. so many people think of flooding. You think of, you've got some sandbags and a bit of something's coming down through the ground floor. If you've got a multi-story house, that, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about, it's going over the top. It's over the top of the houses, so people had to be rescued, they would've died. So people actually rescued people on the roof just as the flooding was rising.
And if they hadn't been pulled out when they were, they would've drowned because there's no place to go, at the top of the roof of your house. And of course, the floodwaters went over the roof of a bunch of houses. Wow. So that's the sort of scale and it happened very quickly.
It was not flooding was expected, but the magnitude of that flooding and how quickly it happened, at least in the first set of floods was a surprise.
[00:16:12] Bridget Scanlon: And then before, so I really like those Bureau of Meteorology maps that show annually this situation. How wet or how dry it's since 1900.
They're fantastic. Yes. but then 2018 and 2019 were very dry years, especially 2019. And you had the bush fires and, or maybe 2019 and 2020.
[00:16:34] Quentin Grafton: You're right. 2018 was a very dry year, as was 2019, and then the bush fires that we experienced in Australia. Through Queensland, Victoria, Australian Capital territory, and also Tasmania, but primarily the southeastern part of the mainland of Australia was devastated.
It was, we went, at least where I'm living, which is the nation's capital. We went for months with appalling air quality. Now, I know other people in other parts of the world put up with that regularly. I, for example, I've visited New Delhi several times and the particulate matter in New Delhi. Of course, it depends on the time of the year is particularly bad, we were having extreme levels of particulate matter.
You couldn't see more than 30 or 40 meters in some of the worst days. So you had to wear masks outside and that went on for weeks and months and and of course a bunch of people died. Huge devastation to fauna and flora. This was a major burning event. By however way you define it, deaths, property lives, in terms of flora, et cetera.
Then the sad thing is, that hopefully not any anytime soon, this is coming back. We've just finished the La Nina events, three La Nina events, but when we have a series of El Nino events, that's when it gets dry and very hot. Where I live in southeastern Australia. When they happen, then we get the droughts and that coincides with also what's also going on in the Indian Ocean.
And so it's not just a simple relationship to do with El Nino and La Nina, but nevertheless, that's going to be an ongoing challenge and we'll get more extreme for us. So we have to plan for it. We have to plan for it, not only with firefighting equipment, but planning where we live and how we live and the buildings we live in. And all of that stuff is all gotta be part of, our climate adaptation and water's part of it.
[00:18:34] Bridget Scanlon: When I look at these Bureau of Meteorology maps, and I look at 2019 as extremely red, and you had the millennium drought, which lasted almost a decade, or some people say have it starting at different times. The only year that seemed to come close to how red it was in 2019 was possibly 2002. Even though they talked about the millennium drought, you had some wet years, some dry years, really dry years, but not enough moisture to break the drought until the extreme rains in 2010 and 2011. That's exactly right when you had flooding.
So it seems like you need a flood to break the drought, especially such an extreme drought.
[00:19:12] Quentin Grafton:. Yeah, and we certainly got the flooding last year and of course into this year, the drought that we had, and 29 is long gone, very large record flows in the Murray Darling Basin. Cleaned the system, so to speak.
It does cause devastation of course, but yes, there's been restoration of wetlands, groundwater recharge. There's a number of benefits that come from that removal of salts from the soils. So we do need our floods. So I'm not against floods, it's just we need to manage ourselves so that when the floods happen, we can, save properly save lives and make the most of that, what opportunities we get with floods, but manage 'em in an effective way.
And then of course, drought is the other side of the coin that we have to effectively manage. So we do have very large storages. Most of Australia water storages. That is so not only for communities for drinking water, but also for agriculture. And so all our water storage is essentially full. So we've got a couple of years of grace. If it were not terrain, we still have got lots of water in our storages for the time being. But as I said, it takes two to three dry years and then you're in a different world altogether.
[00:20:27] Bridget Scanlon: And I was looking up the other day, you've got about 80 cubic kilometers of reservoir storage and that can get you by for a couple of years or two or three years.
That's right. Yeah. But then if the drought lasts longer than that, then it becomes problematic. That's not enough storage.
[00:20:43] Quentin Grafton: That's right. Yeah. And that's what all of us do.
[00:20:45] Bridget Scanlon:. And that's relying on surface water storage. if you get you by for a short term drought of a few years, but after that then gets really difficult.
[00:20:55] Quentin Grafton: Yep. And that's the challenge that we face, and certainly most Australians live very close to the ocean and so at least the big cities, because desalination is expensive, the multi-billion dollar plants is what they are. So you can't put it into a small community. Can't possibly afford it.
But, in our larger cities we did build desalination plants, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Southeast Queensland, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Perth has, there's two plants, in fact, one for water recycling, and then also one from seawater as well. And the third one has been approved as well. So that's been part of the strategy to respond to those droughts in the sense that groundwater accesses and so readily available.
At least some places it is in others, but some places it isn't. So we're looking to alternative sources of supply for those drought periods. Typically not needed. We're not in drought, the exception being Perth in Western Australia. And what Perth has been experiencing is definitely a climate change in the sense that there's increasingly less precipitation. It's a statistically significant trend downwards. For example, Sydney, which is in Eastern Australia, there's no trend in precipitation downwards. It's, there's increasing population over time, but nevertheless, during the drought periods, even though there's very large water storages in the Sydney catchment, nevertheless, it is finite. Hence the creation of this option of desalination.
[00:22:32] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, and your being an economist, I guess you have to evaluate the trade-offs between building something like this in case you run out of water, and also the economic costs of not having water. Yeah,
[00:22:45] Quentin Grafton: That's exactly right. So ideally what you want, you make a decision about the reliability of your water supply, which is typically for big cities, is you want it to be very reliable. And of course, that not only, in terms of availability, but also of course water quality. So if you know you've got limited capacity in the sense that your water storages are only 50% full and you're in a drought and the drought's continuing, then you'd want to have a backup. Type of strategy, desalination being one of them, but there are other ways as well.
You can affect water demand by raising the price, and typically you'd have to raise the price quite a lot. Economists, we call it price inelastic. So you have to raise the price by much higher proportion than the impact on water consumption. So there are a number of strategies that are available in a lot of places in the world of course, have used these water saving devices, both in toilets and showers and washing machines and et cetera.
And so all of that is part of the way to try and reduce overall water use at least at a household level. So prices one smart meters, that's another thing. So when you see how much it's costing you tend to, they tend to respond, at least most people do. So there's a number of strategies that have to be thought through.
And so it's not just a water supply approach, which has been typically, I think the engineering approach as the engineers build stuff. And I can see why they would want to adopt supply as a first priority. Water demand is part of it, and they go together. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but you need a combination of them to be able to get, I think your optimal strategy when it comes to managing water.
[00:24:27] Bridget Scanlon: And you mentioned day zero in Cape Town, approaching day zero and they reduced irrigation water demand. They transferred that to Cape Town. They started looking for increased supplies from groundwater. They really were entirely dependent on surface water reservoirs. And then they had temporary desalination plants, I think, so they no longer have it. So they had a temporary desalination. So it's all sort of insurance and it's a portfolio of options that you can consider to try to make the system more resilient. But then of course, yes.
[00:25:01] Quentin Grafton: I think that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. that's how I see resilience is normally defined as the ability to bounce back, but really resilience is operationalizing ways to respond to risks and to manage those risks in a more effective way.
So a resilient system is a system that is able to manage shocks in a more effective way than a system that's less resilient. That typically means having options or portfolio. If you just have one big dam that's maybe that would work if live in Bergen, Norway. Okay. But it gets a lot of rainfall and it's very regular and you can probably say that's probably gonna work for us.
If you have, just rely on one big dam for Cape Town. I'm just making an example up. I'm not saying that wasn't the case, but then, that's not resilient because, South Africa is also subject to these weather extremes that we experience in Australia and other parts of the world, the middle latitudes.
And so you need to have alternative sources of supply to manage that in an effective way. And that includes, as you said, groundwater. Potentially desal, water recycling. That's another way of managing it as well. And then of course, it's water planning as well. So in the case of Cape Town, the issue also was how much water farmers were getting.
So you often get this situation, we certainly get in Australia, in rural areas and not in the Sydney catchment. For example, all the water storages are exclusively for Sydney households and industry, okay? It's not that does, multiple uses are not there, but if you get into rural areas of Australian, many parts of the world, dams are used for multiple purpose.
Sometimes they're used for energy in a generation, sometimes for low flood control, but often for multiple uses. So yes, it can provide water to communities, but often it'll provide water to irrigators. And that's a good thing. There's nothing wrong with that. We need to have food and fiber produced, but the point is you have to have a planning strategy.
When droughts come, who gets the water and when do they get it? And how do you, and it needs to be triggered based on how much water's left. So you, what you don't want is to provide all the water to irrigators. And then you find out that the highest value use, which is drinking water in a city, Cape Town, they don't have it. So you don't want to do that. You want to have a planning strategy that allocates water an effective way and prioritize it and adapts as flexible to how much water you have.
[00:27:31] Bridget Scanlon: The desal plants that were built in Perth, as you said, made perfect sense because it's been on a declining trend for decades.
Yes. I think at one point when I visited many years ago, they were concerned about dryland salinity and increased recharge and stuff, but it, it didn't go that way. So we're oftentimes very good at predicting. But Sydney, the desal plant there has been mothballed, I was looking it up the other day.
It seemed like it was mothballed after 2012 for many years. And then it takes, it's very expensive to bring it back online and stuff. And so it's a really difficult thing to consider, building such large plants and the economics of.
[00:28:13] Quentin Grafton: Yeah, so this is the point. The idea is to have highly reliable water, but you want it at the lowest cost. Okay? So if you build a multi-billion dollar desalination plant, billions, I'm talking thousands of millions, okay? and you don't use it then? It's a white elephant, isn't it? So someone pays for it. In the case of Sydney, the water consumers, they have to pay for it. The households pay for it.
It's built into their price of the water that they pay for. So yes, desalination is good to have. It's a great option, but you don't want to build your desalination plant too soon. So if you build it a decade too soon, then you've got a decade of these costs that you unnecessarily.
So in the case of Perth, made sense to build those two plants. They have absolutely made sense. I can only talk to Sydney, but I did the analysis for Sydney. I made the point at the time, it's not just ex post, but that they did not need to go ahead and build that plant when they did. Because the amount of water in the Sydney catchment and the water storages was more than 50% at the time, and they're very large storages, so they didn't need to trigger the decision.
When they did, it was a political decision. This often is the challenge with water is there's obviously a lot of politics around us because it's so important. But that, anyway, that they made that call and the plant was built and essentially, beyond some trials and minimum operation that hasn't been used.
I wasn't alone in making that call, but others did make it as well, but turned out we were right, but, so I'm not against desal plants. Just make sure you build them at the right time.
xxxxx[00:29:46] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah. So it can be very expensive. To a point that you made earlier was how much water is used for irrigation and that's globally, 70% of global water withdrawal, 90% of global water consumption.
Yes. So that's a big issue for you in the Murray Darling Basin 1 million square kilometers approximately, and so you have a lot of irrigation. You've had the Murray Darling Basin plan. You've been involved in that. Maybe you can describe a little bit about what's been happening and how the government has been trying to deal with water scarcity issues in the Murray Darling Basin.
[00:30:20] Quentin Grafton: Yeah, as you highlighted Bridget, the only way we can respond to the world water crisis is actually responding to how where and when we use water irrigation, because it's so big, it's, as you say, it's Australia's in fact, about the same as it is on the global level.
So it's close to 90% of the water consumed in the Murray down basin is consumed by irrigation. It depends on the year. It's not a constant. That's huge. So it's a very, we're talking very large volumes of water. We often talk in Australia about Sydney harbors, so some of Sydney harbors.
So anyone who's fortunate enough to spend any time in Sydney or visit Sydney, it's a pretty big harbor and so it's 550, giga liters. and so they talk in, how many of those Sydney harbors there are? So that's, and many Sydney harbors are being used, in a normal year, if you want to call it a normal year for water for irrigation. Not just used but consumed. So we've had a challenge, since the 1980s, but we've spawned as a nation in the 1990s, following a huge bluegreen algae event on the one of the major rivers that the Murray Darling and a series of reforms got underway, first of all, a cap on surface water extractions in the mid 1990s, and then a series of additional reforms.
We called a thing called the National Water Initiative, where we have state governments and the federal government got together and agreed to a, I think, a really good document with a bunch of really good principles. Unfortunately, quite a number of those governments never adhere to those principles. So they signed on the bottom line, yes, we do, we'll do x, y, but they didn't match do X and Y. And so the highlighted earlier you mentioned about the millennium drought. So things were getting pretty bad by 2006. And the Prime Minister at the time, John Howard, put a bunch of money at the time was $10 billion to respond to the crisis, in the Murray Darling Basin that ultimately, through a series of reforms led to a, basin plan for the Murray Darling Basin, was enacted in the Parliament in 2012, and that basin plan is coming to an end. And we are going to, we're already thinking now about what next, what will be in the next basin plan. And an obvious one given our discussions today, Bridget, is climate change.
Maybe shocking to your listeners, but in 2012 in the basin plan, they didn't account for climate change. You'd think they would in 2012. We're not talking in 1982 here, but they didn't, so obviously that's going to have to be part of that, the discussion and debate. We also need to have a discussion and debate about extractions. So at times, the floods, it's not an issue. There's plenty of water to go around for every purpose, for communities, for irrigators, everybody, it's water is in surplus, it's overflowing our dams, that sort of thing. but that's not the problem. Period in relation to trade-offs, it's the droughts.
So we are definitely going to get more droughts. So the question is who gets the water? And the prioritization has been made that communities actually should get first access to it. Understandably enough, you should be able to at least get water to a community for drinking and cooking, cleaning purposes.
But that. What's been happening the state of New South Wales. The way the planning happens is that you are allowed to have much greater extractions than you should, over extraction, as the term would use, and that has absolutely disadvantaged downstream communities. So we gotta do our water planning much better.
We can have irrigation, we can continue to have irrigation in the Murray Darling Basin, but we have to do it with extracting less water. Not more water and so it's about extracting less and then ultimately it's not just the extraction, it's the consumption. Because if you extract less but then consume more. So consuming for your listeners is about turning the water in a liquid form into water vapor through evapotranspiration. If you end up consuming more, then there's gonna be less water returning to streams and aquifers, et cetera. So that's gotta be part of it. So we have to measure what's going on.
We have the means to do is we've got remote sensing that does a very good job, even at a field level, there's errors associated with it, but we can measure these things. So we need to audit what we're doing, how water's been used and consumed, prioritize and plan for it and do all the things that we need to be doing whilst accounting for climate change.
[00:34:52] Bridget Scanlon: yeah. Yeah. I think one of the important points, and one of a really great paper that you had was about the irrigation paradox. So with some of that funding, then they lined canals. They may have saved water at the field scale, but that water previously probably recharged aquifers and discharged at the rivers and things like that.
So they didn't do a full accounting at the basin level.
[00:35:13] Quentin Grafton: Unfortunately that was the problem. So we've done estimates on it and, we don't know because there wasn't field level measurements of this, or even farm level measurements, but there's no question that billions of dollars were spent, to increase on and off farm irrigation efficiency. So that's a simply a ratio of the amount of water that's consumed, beneficially, let's say, for growing crops as a proportion of the amount of water that's withdrawn. So a lot of money was spent, taxpayers dollars to subsidize farmers or irrigators to increase irrigation.
Efficiency measurements weren't essentially taken that needed to be taken, but there's no question that has reduced the return flow, so it's reduced stream flow. So the stated intent, in fact was to increase stream flows. But in fact, it's done the exact opposite. So this is the idea of, quick fix solutions, things that superficially sound good? Hence the paradox. Okay, increasing irrigation efficiency must save water. Actually it doesn't save water. it ends up typically meaning more consuming water consumption. So we've gotta be sensible about it, but we've known this for decades. This is not new, right? Yeah, science, but we need to put the science and understanding and evidence, into our planning. So we don't do stupid things. We do wise things and stupid decisions often lead to very bad outcomes in the water space.
[00:36:39] Bridget Scanlon: I think maybe some of the irrigation paradox may be a little bit counterintuitive to some people's thinking, and it takes a little while to get accustomed to it, but it's certainly something we need to consider.
I think yes, absolutely. One of the things that came up today in the webinar for preparing for the UN water conference, was too much, too little and too dirty. Yes. sometimes we were always talking about scarcity, but I think it's the extremes that are really challenging to manage. And then we haven't talked at all about too dirty and the US currently is investing $50 billion on water infrastructure and a lot of that is related to water quality and equity issues.
And I think you guys are doing the same in Australia. And you are involved with environmental justice issues, you were explaining, some of the issues to me with the rural water and the inability to get to these, taking days to get to sample wells or whatever. Yes. So I think the US and Australia are going down the same path, maybe different scales, but I think becoming more and more aware of water quality issues and equity concerns.
[00:37:49] Quentin Grafton: Yeah, look, the water quality issue, people in the global north tend to think, oh, it's a global south issue, it's not our concern. and certainly someone living in Sydney or where I live in Canberra, we don't have to worry about the water. It's very good quality water, 24 7, all that stuff. But, you get in a car and start driving a few hours, into rural communities and that's a different story. So in, in the smaller rural communities, and particularly, so I use the term rural for places that a few hours drive away remote communities could be days of driving. So that's what I would consider, a couple of days driving is, they would consider that as remote. Remote from any center. yeah, so those places are suffering. So they have a mix of different water options that are available to them. Some of them are using surface water and in droughts, of course there is no surface water available. So yeah, they just don't have water. And if where it is available, it's very poor quality. Some are using groundwater or combination thereof. And in some places, the groundwater is contaminated. And I say contaminated, and I don't mean contaminated necessarily from human pollution. it could be, naturally occurring, fluoride and uranium, for example, exist in groundwater in parts of Australia. So unless you've got a very good plant to to manage that and measure what's happening with the quality of the water, you'll end up with people drinking on an ongoing basis that they shouldn't be. It will affect their health and in some of these places when water quality is bad, people leave. It's like they vote with their feet. They can't, if it doesn't get fixed, they leave. And so the people who leave are the ones typically have the greatest opportunity elsewhere, more employable, whatever. So it affects the communities in all sorts of adverse ways in addition to just, having poor quality drinking water. And so we did measurements. We created a, Australia didn't have this. We created a database of drinking water quality by communities. And you can measure it in multiple ways. There's not just a single way of measuring it. The one way you could measure, there were a couple of hundred thousand Australians drinking water that they most certainly shouldn't be drinking. And if you measure another way with aesthetics, it could be up to 600,000 Australians. Now population of Australia is over 26 million. So this is a small proportion of the population, but nevertheless, they are Australians. And they should have access to safe drinking water, on an ongoing basis, and so to me it's a big issue. and, and it's very much in rural and especially remote communities and, in Australia, not exclusively but, in remote communities you do find a very high level of indigenous population as a proportion of the total population. So it is also a justice issue in that context as well, that it does adversely affect a particular segment of the population, and we need do something about it.
[00:40:55] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah. And the government is putting forward some money to address some of those issues, and the indigenous community is also subjected to what a quantity injustice is.
Correct.
[00:41:07] Quentin Grafton: it's not just Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it's quite separate to the drinking water issues, which is, as you said, rural, remote communities. but there is another issue around history in Australia. So it's not a surprise to your listeners that Australia was colonized by the United Kingdom. The treaties were not signed. It was viewed at the time, terras, so no one owned it. Land was acquired and along with acquiring the land, the water was acquired. So because most of Australia is, semiarid or arid, land doesn't have much value without access to water. So acquiring the land is about also acquiring water. And so we end up in a situation today in 2023 that indigenous Australians own control it, that's not always standard ownership, but it's certainly their land, their country, but perhaps up to 40% of the Australian land mass. But in terms of water, it’s maybe 1 - 2%. And then certainly in the major agricultural regions, we know where there is in fact water. It's in fact less than 1%. So that's clearly an injustice. They didn't, they didn't sign over, treated the handover. They landed, sign over the handover the water, and keep in mind, these indigenous communities, they have been living in these places, in some cases for tens of thousands of years.
Okay? So we're not, we're they have a deep history and a deep connection to their country. And, water is absolutely fundamental to it and not having water is deplorable and it's something that needs to change as well. So there have been initiatives, I don't wanna be negative here.
There have been initiatives that there's not enough, has been money has been allocated for it, and it hasn't been treated as the priority that it needs to be, in my view. And so we are way, way behind where we need to be. But you can talk to indigenous Australians to give you their sense.
I'm. responding to you today because it's important that at least that be the highlighted, and of course it's for them to explain the history and what's happened but it's important also for me to highlight that this is, this is a big challenge.
[00:43:23] Bridget Scanlon: We're no shortage of challenges. Quentin? Oh, no. Shortage.
[00:43:27] Quentin Grafton: I'm still optimistic, Bridget. There are a number that I mentioned earlier about remote sensing. There are things we can do that can help us a lot and how we manage water in a more effective way. It’s really around planning. It's about going through. it sounds boring. What do you mean water planning? But water planning is about how we allocate water over time, under different circumstances, and that's, it may sound boring, but it's actually incredibly important, right? Yeah.
[00:43:56] Bridget Scanlon: yeah, there are many issues it seems like, governance issues, water rights, who owns, and this linkage between land and water ownership, property, all sorts of things
but I think the thing that becomes more obvious recently is these floods and droughts and how to manage them. And it's heartbreaking to see people lose their homes and all of these sorts of things, but our ability to forecast them is improving. I know, Chris Funk in east Africa, he can forecast the droughts six months ahead of time.
Yeah. And then he can get all the agencies to work together to provide funding to try to prevent famines, a lot of opportunities also, but I really appreciate, it's great that you have an economics background because, you can bring that perspective, but you've also been working in many different, fields and working with different groups.
I know you were up early this morning for the webinar on the UN Water Conference and you're preparing for that. I hope you guys have a great conference and that you get to communicate many of the issues that are front and center and connecting with agriculture, energy, urbanization as population grows, and climate, it's a lot to deal with, but it should be very exciting.
[00:45:13] Quentin Grafton: Yes, it is, when there's a challenge, there's an excitement in the sense that you wanna overcome it. Look, it's been a real pleasure talking to you, Bridget, and, I just want to compliment you on your work and, working with you as well has been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
[00:45:27] Bridget Scanlon: Thank you so much. Quentin. So our guest today was Quentin Grafton from Australian National University, and he will be participating in the UN Water Conference in the near future. And good luck with that.
