Water shortages: It's the population stupid!

Southeast Queensland is Australia’s fastest-growing region. In the 1950s the Gold Coast was a sleepy village of fibro holiday homes and there was all the water the population could ever need. Now, the State Government has announced it will fund about $2 billion in new water infrastructure, but insists that another $1 billion will have to come from water users.

Ultimately, said Queensland Natural Resources Minister Henry Palazcuzuk, higher water charges will occur. The Southeast Queensland branch of Sustainable Population Australia commented that the need for the community to contribute to the $3 billion package was a simple but clear sign that southeast Queensland’s growth was not paying for itself.

“Three billion dollars is a very significant amount of public funds to be diverted away from important infrastructure and services such as hospitals, transport infrastructure, police and protection of open space and bushland simply to accommodate more growth,” said the branch’s president, Mr Simon Baltais. “We call upon all levels of government to recognise that there are limits to growth, and to keep development within the carrying capacity of our region.”

Population pressures on Australia’s water resources are showing at a national level. The key findings of the Federal Government’s State of the Environment Report, published in 2001, and available on the Department of Environment and Heritage website are that “increasing pressures to extract surface and groundwater for human use are leading to continuing deterioration of the health of water bodies”.

Surface water quality has deteriorated further in many areas because of increasing salinity. Difficulties of managing water resources across state borders continue to hamper effective management, the report stated:

About 26 per cent of Australia's surface water management areas are close to, or have exceeded, sustainable extraction limits. Water use has increased from 1985 to 1996/7 by 65 per cent and water is overused in some regions. Water extracted for irrigation has increased by 76 per cent from 1985 to 1996/7.

The increase in salinity in the Murray-Darling Basin and other areas is causing water quality decline and land degradation. River water in several catchments is predicted to have salinity levels that will exceed drinking water guidelines within the next 20 years.

Although it is difficult to determine, the frequency, size and persistence of harmful algal blooms in inland waters seems to have increased over the past 50 years. Algal blooms in dams cost farmers more than $30 million per year, and in rivers, storage and irrigation channels about $15 million per year.

As former NSW Premier Bob Carr observed in a newspaper article “the Doomsday Millienium” on the first day of 2000, “Population growth, of course, is the factor that drives or multiplies or accelerates global warming. And deforestation and loss of groundwater and every other indicator of environmental damage”.

Or, as Jared Diamond warned in his essay The Lost Americans in 2004, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.

"Because peak population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production are accompanied by peak environmental impact, we can now understand why declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks."

To summarise: water “shortages” are but one of the many problems caused by population growth, and the best thing we can do about water is to stop growing our population, now.