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Lets start with water. It creates and nurtures life.  It’s the most precious item in our lives and the one thing we are most careless with. Will the human species survive or will we fail.

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Global water woes: Australia's looming water crisis

 Kellie Tranter 28 March 2015, 7:00am  30

 PoliticsEnvironmentAgricultureFood

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(Image courtesy www.bookofjoe.com)

With the world facing a 40% water shortfall by 2030 threatening Australia's food and water security, Kellie Tranter calls on the Abbott Government to urgently address the need for investment in water research and development.

NO-ONE cares about water until the taps run dry. It’s a reality now facing the residents of Broken Hill. In time we all will, including our Asian neighbours, unless we confront and plan for our water-insecure future.

In October 2010, the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council report, ‘Challenges at Energy-Water-Carbon Intersections’, highlighted that

‘Australia faces major challenges at energy-water-carbon intersections to mitigate climate change while continuing to supply energy and to cope with limited water availability while maintaining and increasing population. These challenges will demand transformational responses.’

Last year researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, Vermont Law School and CNA Corporation in the United States warned that

‘by the year 2040 there will be not be enough water in the world to quench the thirst of the world population and keep the current energy and power solutions going if we continue doing what we are doing today.’

Calls for transformational responses are still lacking. Baker & MacKenzie’s April 2014 submission to the Government’s issues paper on Agricultural Competitiveness said that over 50 per cent of those surveyed believed the greatest challenge to Australia’s food supply was the availability of water.

Iron ore billionaire, Andrew Forrest, recently called for the harvesting of 5,000 gigalitres of water from underground aquifers and rivers to drought proof existing agricultural areas and open up thousands of hectares of land for new agricultural projects. 

Good in theory perhaps but such plans would require a thorough study of the over-exploitation mistakes made in countries like Pakistan and India and, closer to home, the over allocation of water licenses in the Murray Darling Basin.