Drought-stricken California can learn from Australia

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

It has been well documented that the state of California is in the midst of a historic drought, and unless something is done, the state may soon run out of water. But what can be done?

A team of researchers from the University of California-Irvine looked to answer that question by reviewing how Melbourne, Australia officials dealt with a similar issue during what is called the Millennium Drought. This drought reportedly started before the turn of the century, and it lasted more than a decade before officially being declared over in 2012.

As the UCI team reported Tuesday in the journal WIREs Water, Melbourne officials turned to “innovative ways of increasing water supply and decreasing water demand” in the city of more than four million people, creating a “culture shift” among water users that helped reduce their water use to just 41 gallons per day by 2010.

By the end of the drought, one-third of all Melbourne households had a rainwater tank (similar to the rain barrels used in the US) and many had constructed retention bonds in order to contribute to the city’s water supplies in exchange for credits on their bills. In addition, highly treated sewer water was used to irrigate farms, and programs that added water to streams in to help local wildlife were halted during the Millennium Drought.

Could Melbourne’s approach work in California?

In a statement, senior author and UCI civil and environmental engineer, Stanley B. Grant, said that looking at the approach used in Melbourne during their prolonged drought was “a real eye-opener” and that it could be a glimpse into California’s future “if we got our act together.”

California’s drought is currently four years old, and the average water use among residents in Los Angeles is currently twice that of Melbourne’s, with report placing it at approximately 83 gallons per day in January. The state average is 109 gallons, and residents of Palm Springs use eight times as much water as Melbourne’s: a whopping 347 gallons per day.

Grant, who is also affiliated with the UCI Water-PIRE (Partnerships for International Research and Education) program, told redOrbit that the “main take-home lesson from Melbourne is that experimentation pays off. They tried lots of different approaches to both reducing demand and augmenting supply, some of which were effective, and some of which were not.”

While the two situations are not directly comparable, Grant explained that there are “definitely” lessons that California can learn from Australia. “The magic of Melbourne,” he said via email, “is that ultimately they settled on a combination of approaches that reduced demand in the short term (water restrictions, rebate programs for water saving appliances) and increased their water security in the long term through water augmentation schemes” such as desalination plants, an interbasin water transfer pipleline and rainwater tank distribution.

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