Australasian water and the meaning of ‘resources’: the dawn of a new era

Welcome to the first issue of our newly renamed Australasian Journal of Water Resources!

It is wonderful to now have the official recognition of being able to inclusively support the water-related work and research across our region: the Pacific Islands, New Zealand and Australia.

Before discussing what we have in store for you in this edition, we first wanted to reflect briefly on a number of key events of relevance to water resources in our region since our last journal issue.

1. Beyond water ‘resources’: giving legal rights to rivers

First, we are keen to note the momentous occasion of the passing of the New Zealand Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017¹ on the 20 of March. In what many believe is a world first, the Whanganui River has been granted legal personhood rights, officially acknowledging it as a living entity (Lui 2017). It has been a long and hard-fought legal battle for the Whanganui Iwi² but one that means the river will now officially have the right ‘to represent itself through human representatives, one appointed by the Iwi and one by the Crown [New Zealand Government]’ (NZN 2017). This means that the river now has ‘standing’ and the river’s representatives cannot only sue others for wrong-doings to its person, but could also become subject to legal challenges, as is the case for business corporations (O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones 2017). The New Zealand decision came only days before two rivers in India – the Ganga and Yamuna – were also granted legal personhood (Das 2017).

To some it may seem crazy or extreme to give rivers rights, but these decisions represent another important step in the growing social movement around the world to stop treating nature, such as rivers, water, plants, animals and more, as ‘resources’ for use by humans, but as interconnected, living and self-supporting systems that have their own intrinsic value and relationships to others, including humans. These decisions indeed follow as another key global example – following Equador and Bolivia giving rights to nature in their constitutions – of the increasing interest in Earth Jurisprudence or ‘wild law’ and related thinking on how legal and property rights systems should be restructured to give equal standing to nature (see for example: Stone 2010; Cullinan 2011; Burdon 2014; Maloney and Seimen 2015).

Exactly how nature can effectively represent itself and its rights, and how this may have desirable or non-desirable impacts on communities and economies connected to them are still under investigation, but it is likely that there will be continued world interest in the Whanganui River to understand how others might emulate and adapt such approaches when challenges and opportunities of the new legal rights and responsibilities become clearer (e.g. Talbot-Jones 2014). It is also particularly significant in shifting power and thinking towards indigenous peoples and their understandings of the world, and enshrining such understanding in contemporary legal frameworks and policy practice.

2. Water in a world of sustainable development: the UN High Panel on Water

Also of potential interest to the Australasian water community is the work of the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, other global leaders and their support staff on the United Nations High Panel on Water³. Designed to drive greater political action on valuing water (HLPW 2017a, 2017b) and achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – specifically No. 6 on ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all – the panel will run for just two years from 2016 to 2018, with results being presented at the 2018 World Water Forum in Brazil. Australia’s inputs are supported through the Australian Water Partnership (AWP) and include work around the World Water Data Initiative (much through the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) (HLWP 2017c), and around water use efficiency (HLWP 2017d).

Part of the efficiency work seeks to specifically draw on lessons from Australian water management to inform practice for other countries through the use of a ‘WaterGuide’ document (AITHER 2017). It is likely the emphasis will be on countries with basins under significant water stress and where large efficiencies and potential to work towards the SDGs is possible. In our region, that means that apart from Papua New Guinea and Asia, it is unlikely at this stage that much attention will be given to Pacific Island water issues through the High-Level Panel, even though AWP is working with the Pacific Water and Wastewater Association to support training for utilities staff (AWP 2016).

There are thus, some interesting questions around developing alternative and complementary mechanisms for developing knowledge exchange, relevant mechanisms and support for working towards the SDGs in the Pacific Islands that fit the needs of the context, if the high-level Panel is not specifically thinking about the specifics of such countries and territories. This includes basic water resources assessments, demand and water use monitoring that could be feasibly used in different countries and territories across the Pacific to inform better Government, community and individual or household water use decisions. There are options for thinking these through under the innovation section of the HLWP ‘Water Data Challenge’⁴ though, so perhaps across Oceania we can all get our thinking caps on! We can also continue to raise the importance of water and climate in our own region at the Fiji presidency COP23 climate change summit to be hosted in Bonn, Germany, in November this year.

3. Water reform futures for Australia – national inquiry in progress

Finally, for our Australian and other interested readers, it is worth noting the important National Water Reform Public Inquiry that is currently being held by the Australian Government’s Productivity Commission to examine potential reform options in Australia’s water resources sector. The inquiry aims to assess the progress made under the National Water Initiative (NWI) (COAG 2004): specifically, to what extent it has achieved its stated objectives and outcomes and the need for any future reform of the Australian water management systems. Eighty-one submissions were made in the initial part of the inquiry⁵ covering a large range of issues and sectors, with just some key themes requiring significant thought including: a need to reconsider the role of climate change on water system management; clarifying property rights regimes, including for multiple types of urban water and wastewater; water data systems, especially the lack of streamflow data in urban catchments; developing better whole-of-systems analyses for water resources that allow analysis at multiple interconnected scales from individual behaviour to higher population and spatial levels; and the need to rethink current Government policy approaches to Aboriginal rights to water, sometimes considered under the idea of cultural water, despite it being a contested issue.

There are clearly many competing priorities and views represented in the submissions, which will take significant effort for the Commissioners to tease out. These submissions, however, present a rich trove of contemporary thinking on Australian water policy and we would invite readers to consider submitting papers or policy perspective pieces on their own analyses for ways forward linked to your reading of these submissions, either before the final report is due out in December or following it with your own assessments of the proposed directions.

Following this rapid overview of just a few selected issues of current topicality for the Australasian water community, we will now lead you through a few of the highlights of this issue, to entice you to read further.

4. To the heart of the issue: Trans-Tasman Munro Orations

Firstly, to mark this first Australasian edition, we are most fortunate to be able to bring you two Munro Orations, one from either side of the Tasman Sea (Te Tai-o-Rehua).

These are the written versions of the Orations presented on invitation at the Hydrology and Water Symposium held in Hobart, Australia, in 2015 and the joint Conference for the NZ Hydrological Society, the Australian Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium and the IPENZ Rivers Group held in Queenstown, New Zealand, in November 2016. The first oration by Blair Fitzharris and the second, the 2015 oration, by George Kuczera both reflect on issues of great importance to the Australasian region in the areas of climate, water modelling and flood frequency.

Specifically, in his Munro Oration paper, Fitzharris (2017) reflects on changes in the way that hydroclimatology has evolved over the last 50 years, linked to the ‘growth and analysis of big data, understanding the role of teleconnections, linking of the water and energy balances, increasing power of climate modelling, and assessment of the impacts of climate change on water resources and our vulnerability’. The written version reflects the stories and passion of the original Oration, with notable lessons being drawn on the importance of ‘never ignoring groundwater’, better using ‘our understanding of process to more intuitively mine the data’ required for hydroclimatic studies; remembering and investigating how ‘climate around the world is inter-connected’, drawing on his examples of snow-melt accumulation and hydrology being impacted by far-away volcanic eruptions; that ‘The energy balance controls important aspects of hydrology’, specifically around evaporation and water storage, and hence eventual water availability; that ‘we now have very sophisticated and powerful tools to make predictions of future climate’; and finally that ‘the value and distribution of our water resource are going to change’ (Fitzharris 2017). Fitzharris specifically notes, related to this last lesson, that societal and cultural analyses of value and vulnerability to hydroclimatic changes and events are one of the areas requiring greater exploration in the future, to allow us to more effectively adapt to such changes. Fitzharris thus, provides a rich global analysis of hydroclimatology history and potential future needs for us to consider.

Also looking to the future, now the 2016 version of Australian Rainfall and Runoff (ARR) is available,⁶ George Kuczera and colleagues reflect on ‘ARR, Hinc Quo?’ which asks in Latin ‘ARR, from here to where?’ (Kuczera et al. 2017). They carry out a post-mortem of flood frequency estimation in ARR 2016, thus, providing ‘a critical but purposefully constructive commentary’ which is based on personal experience with ARR, flood frequency estimation and the literature on the subject (Kuczera et al. 2017). Specifically, they use uncertainty analysis to assess accuracy of ARR2016 flood frequency estimation procedures and provide guidance for how skill in flood frequency could be further improved into the future to better serve the ARR, Australian and other communities. Issues around a lack of gauged data to support the new regional burst method are highlighted, as are needs to improve knowledge about uncertainties and risk communication with clients of flood frequency estimation analyses. Kuczera et al. (2017) thus, highlight how far we have come, but also how far we have to go.

5. Bringing Australian Indigenous water to the forefront

Such a theme on progress, but also an awareness of how so much more progress is needed, is highlighted in the next special paper on ‘Australian Indigenous Water Policy and the impacts of the ever-changing political cycle’ by Taylor et al. (2017). It is special as it is one of the first Australian national review paper of Aboriginal water policy and initiatives: those written by First Peoples in Australia. It is co-authored by Indigenous (Bradley Moggridge and Anne Poelina) and non-Indigenous (Katherine Taylor) scholars. Such policy documents rarely make it into the academic literature, especially on mass, and thus, this part of our Australian water history and policy is typically neglected in much mainstream water resources debate. To illustrate the issues, the authors use three main case studies on Strategic Indigenous Reserves in the Northern Territory, the First Peoples’ Water Engagement Council and the Fitzroy River Declaration. Through these and other policy documents, they are able to outline the history and basis of

(1) First People’s expressions of the right to self-determination in relation to water; (2) First Peoples’ contributions to integrated water resource management principles and water governance in Australia; and (3) that State/ Commonwealth Aboriginal water initiatives are often discontinued when elected government changes, and rarely given strength through legislation. (Taylor et al. 2017)

With this paper, and the ongoing efforts of many others, we hope that the cycle of small amounts of investment and then neglect by Governments that the authors outline in their review can be broken, and a more sustainable trajectory for Aboriginal water policy in Australia developed. As highlighted in the introductory sections on the rights of rivers and the National Water Reform Inquiry, there is increasing movement towards re-imagining our water governance systems, and this review provides further information on the substantial work and engagement of indigenous peoples in valuing and managing water that often goes unnoticed in the Australian water policy and practice space.

6. Alternative water sources in drying climates

Our next paper in the issue moves from issues of policy to management, focussing on the option of ‘Urban subsurface drainage as an alternative water source in a drying climate’. Specifically, Davies et al. (2017) carry out investigations in the Swan Coastal Plain in Western Australia to examine the potential for using subsurface drainage in developments on low-lying land as a source of water. Through subsurface drain and quality monitoring, they demonstrate the potential for use of such water for direct irrigation in the dry season, and that there is additional opportunity for such systems to be used with wet season storage of additional flows through aquifer storage and recovery (Davies et al. 2017). Further work and testing may be required to verify water qualities, but there appears to be potential for the use of such alternative water sources to support current rapid urban growth on the Plain.

7. Methodological and modelling advances in water resources

In the final section of this issue, we move to methodological and modelling advances. Firstly, the paper of Diermanse et al. (2017) proposes ‘An efficient sampling method for fast and accurate Monte Carlo Simulations’. Specifically, they develop an alternative sampling technique – ‘importance sampling’ – for estimating design floods in Australia, and incorporate it into the Cooperative Research Centre–Catchment Hydrology (CRC-CH) method. It was shown by the authors, using a pilot study, that the method results in reduced variance in design flood estimates for large to extreme events and therefore increases the potential of Monte Carlo methods to be used in applications for dam design.

Last but not least, the paper by Qin et al. (2017) carries out a ‘Comparison of Newton-type and SCE optimisation algorithms for the calibration of conceptual hydrological models’.

Over the last few decades, computing power has advanced considerably and this has benefited hydrological model calibration by allowing the use of improved optimisation algorithms. The authors revisited the use of modern gradient-based algorithms by calibrating two models, SIMHYD and FUSE-536, on three Australian catchments and testing the performance of quasi-Newton and Gauss–Newton algorithms in the calibration. It was established that the SCE search approach performed better for calibrating SIMHYD, but struggled for the FUSE-536 model. However, the Newton-type algorithms required ‘20 times fewer objective function evaluations than the SCE search for SIMHYD and 50 times fewer evaluations for FUSE-536’ (Qin et al. 2017).

It is concluded by the authors that Newton-type algorithms can challenge, or outperform, the SCE search and that improving the robustness of Newton-type algorithms is likely to increase their competitiveness for calibrating hydrological models.

We hope you enjoy this issue and the resources herein.

Katherine A. Daniell
Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University
[email protected] 
Trevor M. Daniell
School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, The University of Adelaide

Acknowledgements

We would also like to note the sad passing of Dr Stephen John Perrens (1944–2017), a recognised global expert in water resources and catchment management. We are most grateful to Alison Tourle for putting together an Obituary for AJWR to celebrate his life and significant contributions to the water industry. He will be greatly missed.

Notes

1. The full act of the New Zealand Parliament is available at: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2017/0007/latest/whole.html#DLM6830854 [accessed 26/07/2017].

2. Largest social units of Maori society (equivalent to ‘people’, ‘nation’ or a confederation of tribes). See the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 for a full list of Iwi with interests in the Whanganui.

3. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/HLPWater

4. https://waterdatachallenge.globalinnovationexchange.org/

5. https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/current/water-reform/submissions

6. E-book version is available here: https://book.arr.org.au.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/