Queensland's Model For California's Drought Response

There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about how it is illegal to collect rainwater in Colorado, even if your intent is just to move the water a short distance in order to water plants, because the state's water compacts already incorporate where and how the rain falls, and it's illegal to mess around with the laws of either Man or Nature:

Colorado, like most Western states, lives by a rigid and byzantine knot of water laws. Vast quantities of river water are made available, free of charge, to a variety of public and private interests, including oil companies, ski resorts, fire districts and breweries. The international food conglomerate Nestlé has applied for a permit to draw water from a Colorado aquifer and sell it in plastic bottles under its Arrowhead brand.

Those appropriations are made under a seniority system based on first-come first-serve claims staked out as far back as the 1850s. Colorado law explicitly states that every drop of moisture suspended in the atmosphere must be divvied up according to those claims. That means each drop must be allowed to hit the ground and seep through the watershed into distant rivers, where it can be doled out to claimants ranging from alfalfa farmers to ExxonMobil.

That would make people laugh in Queensland. Particularly in the Outback, if you don't collect rainwater, you die.

Australia in general, and Queensland in particular, provide many excellent models for dealing with the effects of prolonged drought. California needs to adopt similar ways of thinking:

At the forum, The Bee interviewed Greg Claydon, director of strategic water initiatives for the state of Queensland, Australia. That state will spend $9 billion on three wastewater recycling plants, a desalination plant, two new dams and 120 miles of pipe to link them in a flexible new supply network.

Similar solutions – desalination, wastewater recycling, dams and major diversions of river water – also are on the table here, as California struggles through water-supply threats in a third year of drought.

Australia's work has been sweeping, from severe water rationing and new plumbing standards to rainwater catchment and ocean desalination.

That's just the hardware.

Australia also assessed the true yield of all its watersheds and is buying back water to protect the environment.

It rewrote water laws to give agriculture a legal entitlement to water akin to a property right (as in California, farmers are Australia's biggest water consumers). This seems counterintuitive, but was necessary to ensure a supply for everyone. It also created a cap-and-trade water market to prevent waste, similar to efforts to control greenhouse gases.

Rather than use water for low-value crops like cotton, some Australian farmers now earn a living selling water to cities or other farms that grow high-value crops, like grapes.

How would these changes fit in California's water culture?

"They would be very radical," said Eric Garner, an attorney in Riverside and chair of the International Bar Association's water law committee. "Quantifying all (water) rights in California would be a very radical shift, and allowing them to be traded – to be bought and sold freely – would be a very significant change."

Queensland's Claydon explained how they're doing it in Australia:

...What have you asked the public to do?

We started something called Campaign 140, to encourage residents to reduce water use to 140 liters per person, per day (about 36 gallons). They've more than met that goal. Many people have reduced their consumption as low as 120 liters per day. Before the drought, the average person used 300 liters per day. (The average Sacramentan uses about 1,000 liters daily.)

How did you get this message to the public?

We handed out egg timers to encourage four-minute showers, and ran advertisements where people give tips on how they do it. We offer subsidies for rainwater catchments ($1,000 for a 3,000-liter or bigger tank), and for pool covers (now mandatory). In the last three years, we've installed more than a quarter-million rainwater catchments on existing properties. In new developments, it's now mandatory. We also made water-saving toilets, faucets and other plumbing mandatory. There was a directive to power stations to go off the mains for their water usage. They all had to go onto recycled water.

...What about water rates?

The residential cost is now $1.20 (Australian) per kiloliter (about 10 times more than metered customers pay in the Sacramento area). It will increase as the additional infrastructure comes online. In 10 years' time, the price will double or more. The cheap water sources have been developed and now we're into more expensive ones. Those cheaper sources aren't reliable in a highly variable climate scenario. That's the reality.

Are people upset about these changes?

There hasn't been a big political outcry – yet. No one likes paying more. But people don't like severe (water) restrictions either. If you want a more reliable supply, you've got to pay for it. By early 2007, our water supplies declined to only 17 percent of storage. People began to recognize there's a real risk we'd even run out of water totally. For a number of reasons, there's been an embedded behavior change.