Globally

About one-third of the world’s population lives in countries suffering from moderate-to-high water stress - where water consumption is more than 10 per cent of renewable freshwater resources. Some 80 countries, constituting 40 per cent of the world’s population, were suffering from serious water shortages by the mid-1990s. Increasing water demand has been caused by population growth, industrial development and the expansion of irrigated agriculture. For many of the world’s poorer populations, one of the greatest environmental threats to health remains the continued use of untreated water. While the percentage of people served with improved water supplies increased from 79 per cent (4.1 billion) in 1990 to 82 per cent (4.9 billion) in 2000, 1.1 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. Most of these people are in Africa and Asia. Lack of access to safe water supply and sanitation results in hundreds of millions of cases of water-related diseases, and more than 5 million deaths, every year. Large, but poorly quantified adverse impacts on economic productivity have been noted in many developing countries. Emphasis on water supply, coupled with weak enforcement of regulations, has limited the effectiveness of water resource management, particularly in developing regions. Policy makers have now shifted from supply to demand management, highlighting the importance of using a combination of measures to ensure adequate supplies of water for different sectors. Measures include improving water use efficiency, pricing policies and privatization. There is also a new emphasis on integrated water resources management (IWRM), which takes into account all the different stakeholders in water resource planning, development and management.

Locally - Australia

Australia is the highest user of water per capita in the world, despite being the driest inhabited continent

Over a quarter of Australia's river systems are close to, or have exceeded, sustainable extraction limits, and two-thirds of water extracted is from these stressed systems. More groundwater is used than ever before.

Median annual Murray River flows to the sea are now around one-fifth of what they were at Federation in 1901. The occasions when there is no flow at the River Murray mouth have increased from 1 year in 20 under natural conditions to 1 year in 2 under current conditions.

50 - 80% wetlands in MDB have been severely damaged or completely destroyed. Coorong Lake near the Murray mouth has lost 90% of the migratory wader birds that once inhabited the estuary. In fact, there is only 11% of the natural estuary at the Murray Mouth left intact.

Excessive regulation of flows and over extraction from rivers for irrigation has reached such levels that many floodplains are severely degraded, e.g. the frequency of medium-sized floods at the South Australian border has fallen by 57%.

Water use has increased from 1985 to 1996/7 by 65% and water is overused in some regions. Water extracted for irrigation has increased by 76% from 1985 to 1996/7.

More than 80% of the average annual volume of water in the Murray is diverted for industry and domestic use - Irrigation accounts for 95% of this.

There are 30 big dams and 3,500 weirs in the Murray-Darling Basin, and nearly three times the annual average flow in the Murray River is stored in dams and weirs.

The threat of dryland salinity now extends across 6 million hectares of country, rising to an area more than twice the size of Tasmania by 2050 - nearly three times more - with up to 20,000 km of streams affected.

The Murray River supplies approx. 40% of Adelaide's drinking water supply. Within twenty years, on current trends, salinity levels will exceed World Health Organisation limits for safe drinking water two days out of every five on average.

A half to a third of freshwater fish species native to the Murray-Darling Basin are threatened with extinction.

In 1994 the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) set in place a Water Reform Framework, identifying critical environmental water issues including:

allocation of water for the environment;

ecological sustainability of new developments;

institutional reform;

the incorporation of environmental costs in water pricing;

ecologically sustainable water trading;

protection of groundwater; and

implementation of the National Water Quality Management Strategy.

In 2003 COAG agreed that there is a pressing need to refresh its 1994 water reform agenda to increase the productivity and efficiency of water use, sustain rural and urban communities, and to ensure the health of river and groundwater systems, stating:

'Investment in new, more efficient, production systems is being hampered by uncertainty over the long-term access to water in some areas. Fully functioning water markets can help to ensure that investment is properly targeted and water is put to higher value and more efficient uses. However, current arrangements are preventing those markets from delivering their full potential. Furthermore, there are significant concerns over the pace of securing adequate environmental flows and adaptive management arrangements to ensure ecosystem health in our river systems.

COAG has therefore agreed to develop a National Water Initiative to:

improve the security of water access entitlements, including by clear assignment of risks of reductions in future water availability and by returning overallocated systems to sustainable allocation levels;

ensure ecosystem health by implementing regimes to protect environmental assets at a whole-of-basin, aquifer or catchment scale;

ensure water is put to best use by encouraging the expansion of water markets and trading across and between districts and States (where water systems are physically shared), involving clear rules for trading, robust water accounting arrangements and pricing based on full cost recovery principles; and

encourage water conservation in our cities, including better use of stormwater and recycled water.’

Key points of the National Water Initiative are:

Nationally Compatible Water Access Entitlements

Nationally Functioning Water Markets

Best Practice Water Pricing

Integrated Management of Environmental Water

Measuring, Monitoring and Information

Urban Water Reform

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