Water systems and disruptions: the ‘old abnormal’?

ABSTRACT

The dual nature of water – giver of life and massive disruptor – is not new. There is rarely one equilibrium state for a water system; there are multiple different states natural water systems cycle through. And human-induced changes to water systems, including through the use of technologies to modify and exploit them, and through climate change, further accentuate the opportunities for extreme disruptions to society. Human history is dotted with examples of challenges in managing water systems and disruptions. This year, parts of Australasia have seen widespread drought, massive fires, smoke pollution, ecological destruction, hail storms, cyclones and now a pandemic, COVID-19, protection from which requires adequate safe water and space for hygiene and limiting transmission. Our notions of time, space and connection to others and our environment, including water, have again come into focus as we search for a new equilibrium after this wave of disruptions – a ‘new normal’. But is this just a very human desire for stability amid the seeming chaos? Instead, do we instead need to get better at managing more appropriately through the ‘old abnormal’: the continuous variability, change and increasingly extreme events due in part to human modification and societal expansion across the planet?

This editorial paper provides a reflection on the moment we have found ourselves in at the beginning of 2020. It draws together insights from a range of water science and management challenges presented in the papers of this issue, in order to chart some positive ways for more appropriately navigating water systems and their future disruptions.

KEYWORDS:

• Bushfires
• floods
• COVID-19
• water management
• extreme events
• governance
• planning

1. Summer Disrupted.

Our Black Summer has now officially come to an end. 2019 was a tough year: drought, scorching temperatures, bushfires and smoke. These challenges were not only in Australia that had its hottest year on record (BoM 2020), but also in many places around the world, from California, to the Amazon basin, to Russia. New Zealand counted its fourth warmest year on record (NIWA 2020) and a range of local records were made, including its largest aerial firefight for a scrub fire in Pigeon Valley near Wakefield in February 2019 (NZ Herald 2019).

On 31 December 2019, Canberra recorded the worst air quality in the world due to fires encircling much of its territory. There were no fireworks to bring in the new year in Canberra, even though Sydney kept theirs amid large protest. Photos in the paper saw children in facemasks sheltering in boats in the sea with a blood-red sky off the town of Mallacoota in Victoria and a burnt-out Cobargo in New South Wales (Smee 2019).

It was a strange and anxiety-filled end to the year for much of the Australian population, with little cause for celebration, except to hope for a quick end to the tragedy that was threatening huge numbers of communities and ecosystems simultaneously. An end only foreseeable with a rapid shift in climate drivers with long drenching rains – something that seemed unimaginable to many, despite heartfelt prayers and deep-felt wishing for an end to the fires.

For many, the beginning of 2020 has been catastrophic. Many of the fires in Australia became more ferocious in the new year. Not only was most of the south-east of the country choking in smoke, but fires also raged in Western Australia and South Australia. On the 3^rd of January, a fire began burning in the north western corner of Kangaroo Island wilderness. By evening on the same day, the unrelenting heat and winds caused the whole Island to be put under an evacuation order, such was the ferocity and speed with which the fire spread south and east across the 150 km long island (see Figure 1). Later in the day, the cool change came through South Australia, changing wind direction and sending fires south on the island. However, in the eastern states the warm front headed east with Canberra recording 43.6 degrees and Penrith in Sydney 48.9 degrees fanning multiple fire fronts – the same day the Prime Minister of Australia decided to call up Army Reservists to support the emergency effort (Pickering 2020).

Figure 1. Phone screenshots of fire warning situations on 3 January 2020 in (a) NSW with fires surrounding many population centres and (b) Kangaroo Island in South Australia. Red alerts are Emergency Warnings (too late to leave, seek shelter) and Yellow (watch and wait, enact fire safety plan and/or evacuate if it is safe to do so).

The fires from the week continued on at slightly lower levels of intensity after the cooler weather came through. They created massive plumes of smoke – easily seen from space – that even turned the skies in New Zealand orange and some glaciers pink (Salinger 2020) and headed over the Pacific Ocean to Chile and Argentina. This extreme weather had become an event of a scale that meant it was being followed by media organisations all over the world, with many Australians receiving messages from friends and relatives horrified by the images and scale of devastated landscapes, communities and wildlife (e.g. BBC, 2020). For some cities in mid-January, the smoke was punctured with large hailstorms, giving a day of blue sky to offer a view of devastation of another type. Streets were carpeted in green from trees that had been stripped of foliage and carparks looked like war-zones. Seas of blue tarpaulins on roofs were, however, rapidly obscured as the thick smoke made a rapid return. In many places, the damage from both events is yet to be repaired, with roofs, windows and tens of thousands of cars written off in the hail, and blackened structures, crumpled piles of metal and brick and lone chimneys dotted through townships through the fire-affected regions.

2. Managing multiple disruptions to water systems

What typically comes after drought, fires and hail? Soft rains? Rarely in Australia. More typically, when there are droughts and fires, they are often followed by floods (Steffen et al. 2018). Indeed, the deluges started in early February bringing very welcome rain and not so welcome flooding to many areas across much of the drought and fire-affected areas. Foreseen by catchment managers and researchers, these rains brought new risks and challenges. Our journal’s first policy perspective by Alexandra and Finlayson early in 2020 was an alert that we needed to turn our attention from the immediate threat of fire, to the risks that Australian history shows come with the drenching rains on our burnt-out catchments. This involves the risks of sediment, ash and nutrients running off the catchments that can clog rivers and destroy water quality, leading to fish kills and riverine ecosystem damage and issues for water treatment for nearby populations.

Australia now has decades (and indeed millennia) of knowledge on the variability of and changes in our environment. ‘Danger’ signals indicating likely extreme events – often sensed in impending weather patterns – and even likely response behaviour of humans and the environment to these events, is known in some communities. This knowledge covers multiple facets of our hydrological, climatic and constructed water systems: from rapid events (e.g. flash floods, cyclones, hailstorms, firestorms, heatwaves), measured in minutes to days; to slower-onset events (e.g. drought, landscape riverine flooding, landscape mega-fires, sea-level rise, global temperature rises), measured in weeks to decades. Over millennia, Indigenous people adapted their society and the environment to navigate and manage climate variability and change, bringing much of this knowledge into the present day. More recent arrivals to the island continent also learnt of the cycles of extremes but were so hard-wired to want to tame water systems and landscapes into more attractive European-style ‘countryside’ that they wilfully and repeatedly ignored the signals that the Australian water and environmental systems were not interested in being tamed and were instead fragile to excessive intervention and control.

Extreme events and damaging impacts have occurred regularly to those who remain fixed in their path, and damages are intensifying as we create more and more ‘unnatural disasters’ through our human impacts and settlement choices (Abramovitz 2001). We ignore these signals and local and scientific knowledge to our peril, including how underlying climate change trends appear to be increasing the magnitude of some extreme events. For example, our recent mega-fire behaviour in Australia is attributed, at least in part, to underlying anthropogenic climate change (e.g. van Oldenborgh et al. 2020), as is the increasing average and extreme rainfall from cyclones, although scientists point out there are still large uncertainties here due to general climate variability (Patricola and Wehner 2018).

On climate variability and impacts on stream-flow around Australia, we only need to look at the history of our reservoirs and dams compared to the world to understand the extreme nature of our hydrology. As McMahon and Petheram (2020) investigate in this issue, Australia is found to have larger reservoir capacities and spillway capacities for a given catchment area, and higher dam walls for a given capacity. This practical outcome – the construction of infrastructure that can hold and release greater volumes of water at once – is a reflection that Australia has the highest coefficient of variation for rainfall and streamflow in the world, measured as the standard deviation divided by the mean of the time-series record (see McMahon 1988; Finlayson and McMahon 1988; Daniell and Daniell 2006 for calculations and discussion). Consequently, our water infrastructure has been built to deal with the inherently high levels of uncertainty in our Australian climate and to provide more control of water at all times. This has resulted in higher levels of river regulation (McMahon and Petheram 2020).

Thus, from a need for consistency in a highly variable environment comes relatively irreversible engineering interventions and a greater perception of control and construction of ‘the average’ which will make life easier and more stable. Although having benefits for a number of years, sometimes decades, this stability and control is a mirage, found to be unattainable as soon as yet another ‘outlier’ event shapes the recent record books. Each of these ‘surprises’ or outliers are also part of our ‘old abnormal’ and only appear to be unknown unknowns for some people. For other people, they are entirely known unknowns – having been seen in the distant past or envisaged as a distinct possibility – and on occasion known knowns when they follow clear climate drivers.

3. Planning and levers for change in the ‘old abnormal’?

Managing effectively for variable and changing systems – this ‘old abnormal’ – is a real issue for planning. Unless we accept that many of our systems have been designed on flawed logic – for example, stationarity (e.g. Milly et al. 2008) or optimising within a system which should have had its boundaries drawn differently (e.g. Nabavi, Daniell, and Najafi 2017; Barry and Coombes 2018), as has been discussed in previous volumes of AJWR, including our last editorial (Daniell and Daniell 2019) – and will as a result fail regularly. Though we do not have to take a fatalistic approach. There is instead information and knowledge that can be drawn on to better understand our past variability profiles and reduce the bounds of uncertainty that can help to inform future infrastructure planning, design and policy.

As shown for floods, we can improve our flood record for planning purposes. Allen et al. (2020) in this issue highlight that there are a range of sources that can be drawn on to go beyond the ~30-80 years of gauged streamflow records. Many of these include a variety of natural archives (e.g. corals, sediments, lake and cave deposits, and trees) and documentary sources (e.g. paintings, marks on buildings, written/oral accounts and stories), which can take knowledge of flooding back centuries or millennia, allowing more informed extrapolations in flood frequency analysis (Allen et al. 2020). Although some types of palaeoflood data may more easily provide accurate records, all types, including oral accounts based on Indigenous knowledge have proven valuable for flood prediction (e.g. O’Gorman 2012). The importance of developing longer records through palaeoflood/hydroclimatic reconstruction are acknowledged in Australia’s Rainfall and Runoff (Kuczera and Franks 2019; Nathan and Weinmann 2019) and by other authors (e.g. Wasson 2016), including for droughts (Kiem et al. 2020). Even if not perfect, palaeoclimate data can offer an alternative means to apprehend the potential magnitudes of extreme rainfall predicted under climate change and manage some of the inherent uncertainties and ambiguities associated with flood risk, which are not adequately accounted for in many traditional flood-forecasting statistical methods. These types of knowledge extension activities are particularly important as they can help us to recalibrate both what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ depending on what we are measuring (e.g. temperatures vs extreme flood events) and on what scale, for example, over space or time.

Planning for slower-onset risks – those that emerge slowly over time, often linked to a collection of different drivers, like drought or sea-level rise – can be equally as complex, especially where reconstruction of past environmental states may make little sense for our new human-made or ‘novel’ landscapes. Our environments are now so modified that their behaviour bears little resemblance to whatever the ‘natural’ systems of ancient times prior to substantial human population in that location would have been. For example, city ecosystems are novel landscapes that often vary greatly from their rural vegetated counterparts due to ‘heat-island’ effects and higher levels of impermeable surfaces such as roofs, roads, carparks and concrete drains. Therefore, estimating impacts of a heat-wave or the hydrology of an urban landscape bears little resemblance to that of rural areas unless the urban zone is heavily forested and only sparsely populated (historic Canberra perhaps?!). Traditional planning regimes in urban areas have been developed to focus on the built environment and zoning protocols for different types of land use. Industrial areas are separated from commercial and residential areas of varying densities, and are carefully managed in relation to parks and greenspaces, especially those dedicated to conserving the habitat of threatened species. What can be put where in an urban environment: fences, buildings, temporary structures, roads and paths, trees, play equipment and more, are all specifically defined in codes and planning documents. Once these rules become habit for designers and developers, especially those seeking the mass market and profits, it makes newer forms of integrated spatial planning, such as water sensitive urban design/development (e.g. Whelans, Maunsell, and Thompson 1994; Coombes, Argue, and Kuczera 2000), solar urban planning (e.g. Palz 1995; Amado and Poggi 2014) or ecological/biophilic city planning (e.g. Downton 2002; Beatley 2017) difficult to implement (e.g. Brown 2005; Daniell, Coombes, and White 2014).

Due to the alternative paradigms that many of these design and development philosophies take, which are likely more appropriate for managing in the ‘old abnormal’, understanding what arguments and other actions for an effective transition away from traditional development regimes is becoming more important. One option outlined by Gunawardena, Iftekhar, and Fogarty (2020) in this issue is to look at economic arguments for water sensitive urban design (WSUD). Specifically, they review the potential values provided in over 190 non-market valuation studies that can be used to quantify intangible benefits associated with water sensitive urban systems and practices. To date, the evaluations of both tangible and intangible benefits from WSUD projects are rare, although this synthesis paper may now provide a basis for its more widespread use.

Another option to encourage the adoption of water sensitive urban design is to directly adjust regulation in urban areas including statutory land use planning law. Williams (2020) in this issue takes an empirical approach to investigating the influence of statutory planning on the adoption of WSUD practices in two Victorian and two Western Australian case study sites. In all cases it was positive, and he found that this impact ‘was enhanced when statutory planning included specific quantitative targets and when it encouraged the adoption of these practices at the localised, street scale’ (Williams 2020). More generally, though, the translation of WSUD principles into prescribed practices into land use planning, also has the associated impact of shaping the adopted ‘concept’ of WSUD, that is considered in that jurisdiction for years to come. From the cases studied, Western Australia appeared to maintain a broader concept of WSUD and collection of practices supported by their statutory land use planning settings, than Victoria, which had a stronger focus on stormwater quality treatment targets.

Another empirical study in this issue, Jaravani et al. (2020), also points to the drivers in water quality improvements, but this time in a case study of drinking water quality in the Hunter, NSW. Following a number of governance changes including increasing water quality compliance testing for E. coli and a change to the NSW Public Health Act, sampling adequacy and E. coli detections significantly improved over the period 2001–2015. Disease prevention has been a relatively long-term objective of water governance right from the time of John Snow’s maps of infection hotspots during the cholera epidemic of 1854 in London. This time in 2020, the technology for testing and surveillance is heightened. As water scientists and epidemiologists start gathering data on COVID-19 in wastewater (Kitajima et al. 2020; La Rosa et al. 2020; see also https://covid19waterblog.wordpress.com/ for regular updates on advances). However, we will need to determine to what extent society is ready for what the water might show us, including the ethical and legal implications of this new knowledge (Gable, Ram, and Ram 2020), as well as how we might want to assess these tracing and surveillance technologies (see, for example, Broad et al. (2020) on contact-tracing technology evaluation using the ‘SOAP’ method). Water has always been a mirror of our societies, but we are not yet sure whether we are all ready for the implications of such capability, technology and associated insights, including who is able to access, interpret and act on these data. Already home smart water metres can show an alarming level of detail that can prove dangerous to some residents if it gets into the wrong hands, as it can show who is home and what they are doing when read by a trained eye.

The ability to develop monitoring systems for gathering knowledge for water governance is not typically focussed on adapting to a ‘new normal’ but instead forms part of the patchwork of reform that is open to change and regular improvements based on new knowledge and our ‘old abnormal’. Such openness to change and using all levers available: legislative, administrative, scientific, economic, behavioural, infrastructure (including green infrastructure) and more, is something we are again needing to contemplate and discuss in this current wave of important changes and extreme events/disasters (e.g. Colloff et al. 2020).

4. Responsibility for living with disruption and disrupted water systems

One of the other challenges of such extreme water-related events and disasters is that their impacts are typically greater for the socio-economically disadvantaged, as they more commonly lack the means to protect themselves or physically move from the onslaught. Changing management paradigms and envisaging improvements is also much trickier due to vulnerabilities on a range of fronts (including education, health, housing, basic necessities) and hence a lack of capacity to invest effectively across all of these. Although the smoke and bushfires directly affected approximately 80% of the Australian population (Biddle et al. 2020), those who could afford to buy air purifiers, masks, sprinkler systems and water pumps and protective gear for firefighting, or leave to escape the fire and smoke by plane, were not as seriously affected as those who were effectively trapped, including those made homeless.

When news of COVID-19, another impending extreme event, and the possibility of lock-downs and supply-chain breaks started trickling into Australia, the already primed Australian population, still reeling from multiple disasters and traumas, jump-started their preparation engines and checked how many P2 masks they still had, preparing as they would for any other typical major disruption and disaster. Pantries were stocked with staples including water, long-life milk, pasta, flour and yeast, nurseries were cleared out of vegetable seedlings in case the pantry was not enough and we would need to grow our own food (!); home pharmacies were well stocked with hand-sanitiser, disinfectant, soap and medications; toilet paper and wood for fires was bought; and those who could afford it and realised early enough emptied out the electronics stores of laptops, webcams and home office equipment. But for all of those who could afford to set themselves up for an uncertain future, many more fought in desperation for the last few toilet rolls, and tried to find a space to perch to work until they were laid off. Those in the bushfire-affected areas were still suffering from a lack of basic services like internet and electricity, if they were lucky enough to have a habitable space to connect it to.

And further afield in many of our near neighbouring countries other communities were particularly at risk of COVID-19 due to the lack of basic access to clean water and sanitation, which inhibited one of the most important and first lines of defence against the virus – washing our hands. This was the message put out by the Pacific Water and Wastewater Association (2020), even though they also outlined that many communities still lack basic access to water. Many of the Pacific Islands had just been slammed by Cyclone Harold, so were also still trying to rebound and fix their water and other systems when yet another disaster loomed. So far, many of the smaller Pacific Islands have been not been so affected by virus transmission due to their isolation, but this has also led to supply issues for other products. It has also again highlighted the enormous inequities and vulnerabilities of communities in many parts of the world due to water-related disasters and systemic risks (Wyrwoll et al. 2018), of which UN and Government officials and scientists are in agreement that COVID-19 is one (Neal 2020).

The extreme weather, heat, drought, bushfires, hail, and now COVID-19 are all causing us to rethink how our water systems, and urban and rural development plans, are configured. Much of this rethinking is again not new, but the scale of the impacts and new changes/challenges for our current generations can help to bring this existing knowledge back into focus (see, for example, Karlen (1996) on the epidemic of epidemics), along with catalysing the will required for action. Many of these extreme events have shown us again just how interconnected and vulnerable to particular impacts many of our water systems and the populations they service are. From a breakdown in mobility, to changes in how we are required to use our environment and relate to one another (e.g. sheltering away from bushfires, or in our homes away from smoke and COVID-19), to the simple meaning of the value of water (e.g. for firefighting, ecological restoration, required sanitation measures to guard against COVID-19, and cultural continuity and rejuvenation), to how we might now meet the Sustainable Development Goals, these periods of disruption allow us to re-evaluate what is important. And also how we might need and want to reconfigure our systems for greater robustness and resilience to such events which will no doubt likely continue and get more extreme in the future.

5. Moving beyond collective trauma of accepting the ‘old abnormal’: rekindling connections and cooperations for the future

In many places around the world, but particularly Australia, we are likely yet to feel the full psychological impacts linked to the trauma of this past six months from repeated extreme events and associated economic, environmental and social turmoil. Studies from other parts of the world on extreme events, such as Hurricane Katrina (Rhodes et al. 2010), show that mental health impacts can be significant and long-lasting, especially for people unable to maintain their social networks. Thus, with approximately 445 people estimated to have died from the bushfires and smoke (Burgess 2020) in Australia – fourfold our current number of COVID-19-related deaths to date – plus many of the bushfire victims who lost their homes and property no longer being able to get the close personal support they need to effectively recover (Albeck-Ripka 2020), we will likely have a significant national mental health crisis to manage that is in part linked to our water management and development choices.

Again, mental health issues in Australia, in particular linked to droughts, are not new (e.g. O’Brien et al. 2014; Vins et al. 2015). But as this one is touching so much of our population simultaneously, it might present an opportunity to focus attention on the underlying environmental and social stressors and to invest in people’s wellbeing. It may be the set of events and collective trauma we need to reason and support each other differently and with increased respect and care, including for how we choose to manage our water and systems and their underlying climate drivers and next set of extremes into the future. If these events have (re)taught us anything, it is that safe and healthy water and environmental systems and strong human connection – being in tune with both the environment and each other – is vital for both human and environmental flourishing.

The double-faced nature of water has also manifested as either conflict or cooperation over water by different parties (Delli Priscoli and Wolf 2009). But to date, even in the most conflict-ridden zones – including between Israel and Palestine, and the States in the Senegal River Basin in Africa – coordination and governance of water has been possible and successful, even when it has been impossible for any other subject to be addressed. Through our water systems and disruptions can come separation, conflict and destruction. But in the face of this adversity, let us instead draw on what scarce resources and goodwill we have to respectfully manage our water for all. Through respect and care of water there can again come connection, cooperation and renewal so we can navigate this ‘old abnormal’ together.

Acknowledgments

This issue and the passage of some of the current papers submitted to the Australasian Journal of Water Resources have been delayed due to the impacts of the extreme events highlighted in the article on many of our editors and reviewers. Many of us were impacted by multiple events and have been juggling multiple responsibilities, including home-schooling and work while trying to support those around us who are struggling with multiple challenging situations and have not been so fortunate. Our thoughts go out to those across Australasia and the globe who are still severely impacted by one or more crises.

Thank you to my parents who provided our family and extended family with refuge in Adelaide over 6 weeks of summer when Canberra was largely inhabitable.

A/Prof Trevor Daniell has served as Co-Editor of the Australasian Journal of Water Resources for the past 5 years and has been a great source of support and inspiration for managing the complex journal transition from Engineers Australia Media to Taylor and Francis, and expanding the journal into the regional multi-disciplinary journal that it is today. I am pleased that in his retirement he will still remain on the journal’s editorial board as an Associate Editor.

Many thanks to Ellen O’Brien for conversations related to, and editing of, this manuscript. Many group and individual discussions have provided insights for elements of the content, including with colleagues and friends from the Initiatives of the Future of Great Rivers, the Peter Cullen Water and Environment Trust, the National Committee on Water Engineering and its Symposia, the International River Symposia, the ANU Institute for Water Futures and the 3A Institute.