Know about the water management crisis in Australia including the development of a mathematical system to get a complete water balance
Know about the water management crisis in Australia including the development of a mathematical system to get a complete water balance
Learn about the water management crisis in Australia.
© University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Transcript
IVEN MAREELS: Every World Water Report-- and we are now on the fifth-- says that we have a water management crisis. We don't have a water crisis. There is plenty of water on this planet. We are the blue planet. We have plenty of water, but we waste it.
We are extremely wasteful. Ninety-five percent of all our rivers are overused, and yet we only need fifteen percent of that water. So that tells you the gap. What we actually need for our purposes and what we use is a factor of five [INAUDIBLE].
So cutting those losses in half should be possible, at least from an engineering point of view. But nobody cares, partly because water doesn't cost you anything. And everybody grows up believing that water is their god given right, and they will kill you for it if necessary.
PETER SCALES: Iven is the Dean of Engineering, and I'm the Deputy Dean of Engineering. And it's interesting he works in networks and water supply, and I work in water quality. And it's just very interesting that those two have always been seen as completely separate areas.
MAREELS: Australia has a third world country problem in a first world country environment. Our water is significantly under stress. Climate change is going to make significant differences for us and El Ninos that are much larger and longer lasting than what we had in the past. So drought periods that are longer than the 10 years than often in our history is remembered will be commonplace.
SCALES: If I look at something like Melbourne, around ninety percent of the water that comes into the city actually goes out through its wastewater treatment plant and gets thrown away.
MAREELS: Typically, with an open channel, you would deliver forty to fifty percent more water than necessary. As a consequence, the farmer took what he needed, and then all the water was just past. So we re-installed an entire measurement infrastructure to develop a mathematical system that then could estimate how much water was in the channels, where it was, and how fast it was flowing. So we got a complete water balance.
RUSSELL PELL: I've certainly grown a better product, a cleaner product, a better product. And with that, I'll achieve that by fast watering and control watering. I've been irrigating for close to 40 years, might be even a bit more. And to actually learn so much in one year made my other 39 years look pretty average.
SCALES: The rule we used to always have was we could dilute pollution away. We can't do that anymore. There's too many chemicals in our society to do that. We've got to actually break the pollution cycle, and that's the main philosophy that we're using.
MAREELS: The farmer can say, OK, I'm buying. If they buy, then the computer will instruct the entire system to automatically adjust its water flows in order to deliver that farm the water that they requested-- fully automated without any intervention of any human beings.
So we've reduced water losses and given a superior service. And at this point in time, we're just doing some evaluations of the system. And farmers indicate 100% productivity gain on their farm with the same amount of water.
SCALES: If you think that you can solve a problem in the Murray-Darling basin of Australia and you're really good at it, you should be able to solve a problem in the Mekong Delta. You should be able to solve a problem in the Yellow River.
We are extremely wasteful. Ninety-five percent of all our rivers are overused, and yet we only need fifteen percent of that water. So that tells you the gap. What we actually need for our purposes and what we use is a factor of five [INAUDIBLE].
So cutting those losses in half should be possible, at least from an engineering point of view. But nobody cares, partly because water doesn't cost you anything. And everybody grows up believing that water is their god given right, and they will kill you for it if necessary.
PETER SCALES: Iven is the Dean of Engineering, and I'm the Deputy Dean of Engineering. And it's interesting he works in networks and water supply, and I work in water quality. And it's just very interesting that those two have always been seen as completely separate areas.
MAREELS: Australia has a third world country problem in a first world country environment. Our water is significantly under stress. Climate change is going to make significant differences for us and El Ninos that are much larger and longer lasting than what we had in the past. So drought periods that are longer than the 10 years than often in our history is remembered will be commonplace.
SCALES: If I look at something like Melbourne, around ninety percent of the water that comes into the city actually goes out through its wastewater treatment plant and gets thrown away.
MAREELS: Typically, with an open channel, you would deliver forty to fifty percent more water than necessary. As a consequence, the farmer took what he needed, and then all the water was just past. So we re-installed an entire measurement infrastructure to develop a mathematical system that then could estimate how much water was in the channels, where it was, and how fast it was flowing. So we got a complete water balance.
RUSSELL PELL: I've certainly grown a better product, a cleaner product, a better product. And with that, I'll achieve that by fast watering and control watering. I've been irrigating for close to 40 years, might be even a bit more. And to actually learn so much in one year made my other 39 years look pretty average.
SCALES: The rule we used to always have was we could dilute pollution away. We can't do that anymore. There's too many chemicals in our society to do that. We've got to actually break the pollution cycle, and that's the main philosophy that we're using.
MAREELS: The farmer can say, OK, I'm buying. If they buy, then the computer will instruct the entire system to automatically adjust its water flows in order to deliver that farm the water that they requested-- fully automated without any intervention of any human beings.
So we've reduced water losses and given a superior service. And at this point in time, we're just doing some evaluations of the system. And farmers indicate 100% productivity gain on their farm with the same amount of water.
SCALES: If you think that you can solve a problem in the Murray-Darling basin of Australia and you're really good at it, you should be able to solve a problem in the Mekong Delta. You should be able to solve a problem in the Yellow River.