SYDNEY — California has turned to the world’s driest inhabited continent for solutions to its longest and sharpest drought on record.
Australia, the land that poet Dorothea Mackellar dubbed “a sunburnt country,” suffered a torturous drought from the late 1990s through 2012. Now Californians are facing their own “Big Dry,” and looking Down Under to see how they coped.
Australia also faced tough water restrictions — along with dying cattle, barren fields and monstrous wildfires that killed 173 people. But when the rains finally returned, Australians had fundamentally changed how they handle this precious resource. They treat water as a commodity to be conserved and traded, and carefully measure what’s available and how it’s being used. Efficiency programs cut their average daily use to 55 gallons, compared with 105 gallons per day for each Californian.
The lesson: Long droughts are here to stay, so societies had better plan ahead, says drought policy expert Linda Botterill of the University of Canberra.
“We can expect longer, deeper and more severe droughts in Australia, and I believe the same applies in the U.S.,” Botterill says. “As a result, we need to develop strategies that are not knee-jerk responses, but that are planned risk-management strategies.”
California water officials now routinely cite Australia’s experience. But Californians may find Australia’s medicine tough to swallow.
Australians are accustomed to living in a dry land, expect government intervention in a crisis and largely support making sacrifices for the common good. For much of their history, many Californians have enjoyed abundant water, or were able to divert enough of it to turn deserts green, and lawyers make sure property rights remain paramount.
From an Australian perspective, California’s response has been “absolutely pathetic,” says Daniel Connell, an environmental policy expert at the Australian National University.
Australia’s drought response was hardly perfect, and some of its gains might be slipping away, but Americans suffering their own “Big Dry” may benefit from some comparisons:
Do more with less: Australians began conserving long before their drought. In 1995, Sydney’s water authority was ordered to slash per-capita demand by 35 percent by 2011, and it met that target by reducing pressure and leaks in pipes, boosting businesses’ water efficiency, and offering low-cost, water-saving technologies in homes, such as dual-flush toilets, low-flow showerheads and rainwater tanks for gardens, toilets and laundry. Communities across California offer rebates on drought-friendly plumbing and appliances, and a growing number of local ordinances are being rewritten to allow families to recycle water from rains and from showers.
Technology: Billions were spent on desalination plants in major Australian cities, and many are not operating because cheaper water is now available, prompting critics to dismiss them as expensive flops that will create greenhouse gases and worsen the continent’s climate-change woes. Supporters say the plants will protect Australia from the next drought.
California Gov. Jerry Brown has called for conservation while focusing on an ambitious, $17 billion plan, opposed by environmental groups, to build 39 miles of tunnel to take northern California water to Southern California’s bigger farmers. Desalination plants also are envisioned: San Diego’s would be the biggest in the Western Hemisphere.
