Water management beyond the fortressed COVID-19 world: considerations for the long-term

2020 has been a year many of us may prefer not to remember. For a large but sparsely populated region, Australasia has so far been partially spared the levels of direct human devastation from COVID-19 due to our ability to close our island borders and severely restrict and monitor incoming arrivals. This of course takes other tolls on families unable to reunite, joblessness, mental health, human disconnection and unavailability of some vital supplies and services. Locked-down and locked-in to such challenging and ongoing or reoccurring spirals makes it difficult to rise above the current challenging state of affairs to imagine new alternative futures.

1. Political considerations for the long term

Those with the capacity have been thinking to the future, taking this ‘window of opportunity’ while living in our fortressed world to think about what directions are needed in the future and how to rapidly invest in these and implement them – sometimes before most people notice. As with all windows of opportunity, those best placed with the power of government, industry-backing, technological capacity and media support will likely have their preferred futures come out on top. What we understand, though, is that even if policy is effectively developed and changed, a range of barriers are still likely in the implementation phase that need as much attention as the policy change part. This is the focus of Kirk et al.’s (2020) paper in this issue for the case of working through barriers to New Zealand’s freshwater policy. Even though this research pre-dated COVID-19, the recommendations for implementation of collaborative policy aspirations remain pertinent. In a fortressed world, where even residents on one side of the river or upstream and downstream have been legally banned from travelling, participatory and collaborative whole-of-basin approaches to river management appear to be at least partly in jeopardy. But as always, there are still some glimmers of hope, with researchers, communities, policy-makers and other stakeholders seeking positive change.

If we take the goings on in Australia as an example, we can see a range of potential futures posited and supported through different investment and media channels. The current Federal budget has a number of water-related aspects, many focussed on reducing risks of a variable and changing climate – explained as ‘services to support risk management in all aspects of Australian society’ in the Bureau of Meteorology’s budget funding paper (Australian Government 2020a). There is also a significant shift in approach with the importance of community resilience being highlighted, including the top-up of a drought rebate scheme for drought-affected farmers to invest in water projects including bore drilling or dam cleaning (Goetze and Sullivan 2020). The novelty is rather the proposed new assurance mechanism for increasing metering and monitoring to ensure greater compliance with the Basin Plan to be carried out by the Inspector-General of Water Compliance, split off from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (Australian Government 2020b). This is a significant change of policy implementation direction, and one that will likely lead to a range of technological, metering and sensing equipment, plus additional human resources for monitoring over the Basin, and will stimulate additional knowledge of how water is being used in the basin. This shows the growing maturity of basin planning and the new entity will have done a good job if it can determine where the additional 20% of water expected under the current Basin Plan can be found and properly accounted for (see Wentworth Group 2020). Monitoring groundwater on top of surface water usage, as well as developing more high-definition capabilities to understand surface-water/groundwater interactions, would also be a welcome outcome and allow continued investigations and risk assessments, like that of Walker et al. (2020a) in this issue on understanding the cumulative impacts on river flow volume from increased groundwater extraction under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

However, these Australian budget spends are dwarfed by the additional 2 billion dollars allocated to investment in water infrastructure like fast-tracked dams, weirs, pipelines and water recycling plants as part of its economic plan for recovery, with much to be led by the National Water Grid Authority. Although not yet on the Federal table, schemes that have been on and off the table for decades like the Bradfield scheme are again back in the media in full swing (Johnson 2020), despite a set of credentials many still question. This second set of directions and preference for investment in ‘big’ infrastructure seems to be in strong competition with recent academic reviews (e.g. Crase et al. 2020), as well as many of the submissions to the most recent National Water Inquiry run by the Productivity Commission in its regular review of progress on the National Water Initiative. Here there was a diversity of perspectives, which included a range of alternative systems-focused approaches to water management, making room for decentralised solutions, improved data governance systems and improvements in decolonising current water management practices to support Indigenous water values, livelihoods and futures as an important part of future reforms. These were even strongly advocated for by groups who may have traditionally fully supported the Australian Bradfield-type pipe dreams, such as Engineers Australia (2020).

Competing water futures of ‘big water grid infrastructure’ vs ‘market-based solutions’ vs ‘decentralised and collaborative community-informed’ vs ‘high-tech control systems’ and others are thus increasingly obvious and vying for attention. In the Murray-Darling Basin, despite multiple assessments, including those that are advancing the scientific assessment and debate in this journal on return flows and groundwater-surface water connectivity factors (e.g. Williams and Grafton 2019; Walker et al. 2020b in this issue), it is suggested that water efficiency infrastructure investments are of questionable value on a number of indicators, and particularly in relation to the scrapped water buybacks which were considered to be more economically efficient (see a recent review in Wheeler et al. 2020). This is just one part of the markets vs infrastructure debate. Of course, we are likely to require hybrids of many of these imagined futures, but we do need to be careful about which voices are not getting cut-through in the media and political budget processes, in order to ensure they are not forgotten and that space is made to right the current and past injustices (Sultana 2018). This can extend to giving living waters rights to voice like the recent journal paper by Martuwarra et al. on ‘Recognizing the Martuwarra’s First Law Right to Life as a Living Ancestral Being’, where the river itself, the Martuwarra (Fitzroy River in Western Australia), is the official first author, but where it is asking for legal recognition within colonial state laws to support its right to life. There are obviously close analogies to the Whanganui River’s legal personhood and other cases of sacred rivers seeking protections (O’Donnell and Macpherson 2019).

2. Climatic considerations for the long-term

With talk of budgets and major economic struggles caused by the deepest recession in decades in Australasia (BBC 2020a, 2020b), memories of fires, hail and floods are rapidly being distanced. Even when we see the west coast of the United States in a similar situation and can now feel their pain in the suffocating smoke, eerie red skies and remembering what it was like to escape from the ravenous fires. In Australia, it still feels surreal in areas where the green and life has returned. And, indeed, that internal personal feeling of climatic phase change is backed up by scientific observations. We are now into a La Nina, declared by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on the 29^th of September 2020, signalling the likelihood of above average spring and summer rains in much of Australia and particularly the east coast (BoM 2020), and higher temperatures in New Zealand with a bit more rainfall in the North Island and drier conditions on the South Island (NIWA 2020).

Despite flooding that has already occurred in previously drought-affected regions in some parts of Australia, some dams are already overflowing, whereas others are still only at a fraction of their total storage. This is particularly the case in the Northern Murray-Darling Basin, where it sits at 27% (as of 30 September 2020), with some catchments significantly lower. Nevertheless, there is some relief in seeing all of the green grass and regrowth from the burnt forests, including rivers and waterfalls trickling again – new life is often spectacular and we quickly blinker ourselves again to the likelihood of ongoing summer fires and the need for massive adaptation of our water policy settings. Recent weather warnings signal that at least in Eastern Australia the wet will continue and now farmers who have not yet been able to harvest their winter crops are worried about their biggest crops in years (Vistonay 2020). With its particular climate drivers and the non-stationarity of Australasia’s hydroclimatic time series data, and variety of local hydrologic properties, including accounting for changing land-use, flood estimation and modelling have undergone many changes in methods.

As Kemp and Daniell (2020) in this issue outline in their review paper, the ways flood hydrographs have been estimated in Australia since the 1960s have mostly been undertaken using runoff routing models. In recent years, as exemplified through Australian Rainfall and Runoff (Ball et al. 2016), there has been a move from a design flood model to a joint probability model. However, there are a number of required features for these models to address the limitations of current models and consider that ‘The catchment is best represented by a non-linear storage on the hillsides, followed by a linear response in the channel system. A separate loss model is required for each runoff process’ (Kemp and Daniell 2020). In New Zealand, Singh et al. (2020) in this issue focus on physiographic factors such as topography, soil type and vegetation in order to derive improved regional parameters for the TopNet hydrological model in the Bay of Plenty region. They studied the suitability of five regional parameterisation methods and found that all provided improvements in Mean Annual Low Flow predictions in comparison to application of ‘the same model with a prescribed spatially distributed set of the key model parameter’, but that improvements were not so marked for mean or high flows (Singh et al. 2020). New work from Brodie (2020a, 2020b) then shows how hydrological science and practice in our region is influenced by other international work. Specifically, he has been investigating multi-day rainfall – runoff volume – peak discharge transforms for design flood estimation (Brodie 2020a) using the GRADEX method (Guillot 1993) with a focus on South-East Queensland. In the second paper, the French ‘SPEED’ transform of this GRADEX type (Cayla 1993) was used for estimating 1 in 100 annual exceedance probability (AEP) discharges in 40 non-urban Australian catchments in South-East Queensland and Northern New South Wales (Brodie 2020b). Preliminary results of these methods appear to show they can be simple and effective (the SPEED model developed had a Nash-Sutcliffe model efficiency co-efficient 0.82), and further research is required to test their applicability to other Australian catchment types, including urban catchments.

3. Population considerations for the long-term

As we continue to urbanise, it is not only our hydrological models that need to be adjusted for new conditions. With urbanisation can come many benefits, but not for all future residents. If not properly planned and governed, inequalities can be easily pushed into our cities. New suburbs often do not have the same levels of amenity – the tall trees and the green infrastructure – of the more established and well-to-do parts. With increasing heat waves, costs of electricity, and unavailability of water, developing appropriate infrastructure in our cities will be one of the biggest challenges over the coming decades (see, for example, Alexandra 2017). As the last couple of droughts have also shown us, many of our most valuable agricultural areas are severely threatened by climate change impacts, but they are also under threat from urbanisation, with peri-urban agricultural holdings, often on good quality soil near water reserves, the first to go. This may mean that we need more urban agriculture including vertical farms, which will require more water in urban areas, but will not likely be feasible for many of our agricultural needs in the near-term (O’Sullivan et al. 2020). Like horizontal spread of urbanisation, vertical spread of urbanisation can also create a range of problems (Al-Kodmany 2018), including access to sunlight, challenges to the use of particular energy and water designs, and accessibility challenges in less than ideal vertical and higher density urban development. All of these challenges of changing population structures and the impacts of urbanisation on the rural environment and vice-versa are universal water challenges; not just for Australia, but for New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and across the rest of the world.

Each urban and rural area is at a different maturity level for its water management and planning strategies and has experimented with different forms of decision-making, including both a range of traditional and community operational research methods, including various forms of citizen, stakeholder and community participation to inform decision-making. In some more mature urban water management jurisdictions where many of the more traditional water sources have been tapped, interest is turning to new sources and paradigms for managing water, including investigating what cultural and ecological rights might mean for future practices. Provis (2020) in this issue investigates how urban ‘cultural flows’ for First Nations might be enacted through the Victorian planning scheme, specifically on how recycled water and urban stormwater runoff governance could be improved to meet Indigenous communities’ objectives. He concludes that given the right investment in both legal reform and water treatment, there is an opportunity for realising urban water entitlements for Indigenous community purposes.

Although many water authorities in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere may have decades of attempts at decision-making innovations due to available expertise and resources, and some are trying to right some of the now evident wrongs of their approaches (see the discussion in Taylor, Longboat, and Grafton (2019) on whose rules and principles are used for ‘good’ water governance), other smaller settlements with fewer resources may rely on more ad-hoc and often contracted expertise that may or may not be well aligned with their needs and local politics. This has previously led to issues of water strategies that do not have local champions and strong institutional backing, so fail to reach implementation even if they exist in draft form (see overview of Pacific Island Countries in White and Falkland, 2015). However, sometimes patience and collective work between community insiders and outsiders over decades can be rewarded, as was the case in Tonga last month that now has a Water Resources Bill 2020 (Government of Tonga, 2020) that passed parliament almost four decades after being first drafted in 1983 (White, personal communication). This means that in each place, first steps and follow-up ones are important.

In this issue, we have one such preliminary piece of work for Dili in Timor-Leste where a strategic plan to deal with water scarcity and demand for water for the city was developed (Takeleb, Sujono, and Jayadi 2020). The process was based on a collection of multi-criteria and planning support tools: the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) and Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix (QSPM) and used inputs from 25 stakeholders and other information to work through the process and to set weights to develop and rank priorities for the Government to consider, including strategies for infrastructure development, demand management, integrated water resources management, community and stakeholder participation and capacity strengthening of water managers (Takeleb, Sujono, and Jayadi 2020). While Governments like Timor-Leste work to meet their National Development Plan objectives for water, a new range of additional challenges has impacted our region. Specifically, the COVID-19 pandemic has had some strange impacts, including labour shortages for our agricultural industries and adjusting needs for food security, particularly in import-reliant countries and territories, such as many in Oceania (Farrell et al. 2020). Luckily in some ways, the relative ability to close borders in our region has meant that it has not so much been a health crisis (bar outbreak areas such as Victoria) as a socio-economic one. There are also strong signs that the resilience of Pacific Island Countries and Territories has put some communities used to disruption in a good position to be able to adjust to seeking local produce and fish (e.g. Steenbergen et al. 2020), but impacts are quite uneven across the region, as a two-stage rapid assessment carried out by researchers for ACIAR has discovered .

4. Environmental considerations for the long-term

The COVID-19 pandemic has also thrown up how our health and that of the environment are so tightly coupled. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) investigations now indicate which areas have prevalence of viruses, providing a signal for where further testing of the population and where feasible public health containment measures can be implemented (e.g. Ahmed et al. 2020; Daughton 2020). Reduced mobility of people and goods linked to lockdowns and border closures, as well as the ensuing economic slow-downs in many sectors, is having significant and positive impacts in reducing greenhouse gas emissions; a − 26% average drop in national CO2 emissions at their peak levels of reduction according to Le Quéré et al.’s (2020) global study. Although these and other authors suggest that some reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over the longer term is likely as the economy remains depressed and some new habits become engrained, other authors have been lobbying for months that careful recovery policy choices need to be made to have positive chances of continuing on a path of reductions over the longer term (e.g. Gillingham et al. 2020) and working towards the Sustainable Development Goals in all countries (e.g. Barbier and Burgess 2020). In the water domain in lower and middle-income countries, this could include the reallocation of irrigation infrastructure subsidies for investment in water supply, sanitation and wastewater infrastructure (e.g. Barbier and Burgess 2020). Often the development of more sustainable regional water systems requires the connection of all four of these systems and more, specifically that if wastewater is to be reused down the river or directly recycled for purposes such as irrigation, then the quality of treatment needs to be high. In this area, there are many new studies like Bahrami, Amiri, and Badkubi (2020) horizontal series filtration study in this issue where they are developing different techniques to ensure reusable quality water on multiple quality metrics.

The development of water infrastructure is, however, notorious for creating other ecological problems and changes, even if they are originally foreseen and agreed to. Current good practice design carefully weighs up both ecological and other design needs, such as ecological connection through systems for habitat continuity and migration. This is just as important in urban landscape design as in rural areas and river development. One of the most common issues in previous years was the cutting of fish passage through rivers when large dams were built, and so some of the largest dams in the world have been developing retrofitting plans on gigantic scales like in Itaipu, one of the world’s most productive hydro-electric dams on the Paraná River, the border between Brazil and Paraguay, that has a 10 km long ‘Canal da Piracema’ to support some types of fish passage (Makrakis et al. 2019), with options for design improvements still being investigated. China has been undertaking similar programmes and reviews to review their policies (see, for example, Chen et al. 2019). But big dams are not the only structures in need of careful design and Leng and Chanson (2020) in this issue have been studying how fish passage and discharge requirements can be managed in box culverts. They specifically look at how full-height sidewall baffles on these structures have been designed to assist upstream passage of small-bodied fish, but that further design work needs to be undertaken to also account for the adjusted discharge capacity of these box culverts and how such designs could be effectively maintained for both effective fish passage and discharge capacity over the longer term.

These kinds of dilemmas highlight the challenges of retrofitting traditional modes of development (e.g. concrete and fossil fuel based) and that entirely different lower-impact, renewable resource driven and more respectful forms of development are going to be required rapidly if we hope to have a more positive and less inequitable future. In the water landscapes, these histories and futures are developed in Postel (2017) for which Arthington (2020) in this issue provides a valuable and succinct review.

Although we feel like we may not be able to take much more of the struggles of 2020, this is really the time to look forward. A fortressed world – one of rivers blocked by concrete not letting fish through or police patrol cars not letting humans through, and one where the freedoms to move and consume as we want are not based on sustainable means – is one we need to urgently rethink and act on, so that we all have the opportunity to move, reconnect and fully live again.