SEQ Water Strategy - 50 Year Vision or Blind Faith?

This week the Queensland Water Commission released its 50 year water supply strategy. You can read it on the QWC website at www.qwc.qld.gov.au/SEQWS

Public Comments are due by end of July and Queensland Conservation will be preparing our response in due course. However, on initial reading of the strategy, we can only conclude that the QWC just don’t get it.

Planning for how many?

For a start they are planning for a projected population of six million people in the region by 2050. The vital question - and the QWC don’t appear to be asking it - is ‘can SEQ support six million people without destroying our environment and our quality of life?’.

Imagine what they are planning for - the tripling of our population in just 40 years. That’s a lot more urban sprawl, roads and traffic jams, stretched essential services and queues at the supermarket.

We believe that the question must be answered BEFORE we start planning our future. What is the carrying capacity of this region? Once we have that answer we can start to plan accordingly - and we'll have a template for the future of Queensland's regions.

A new Silver Bullet

The other thing we notice is that the QWC believes that dams are no longer a viable option (we agree) but desalination is now the silver bullet.

They suggest that, despite being ‘world champion water savers’, - a somewhat offensive turn of phrase given the plight of many in the third world - that we should relax our water saving habits and aim for a 230 litre per day target.

In other words “let’s use over 100 litres per person, per day more than we do now”.

According to QWC we can relax because desalination will provide all the water we need and more. The fact that it is costly, potentially harmful to the environment and adds considerably to greenhouse gas emissions appears to have escaped their attention.

Don't forget the SEQ Water Grid will be continually pumping water - a huge power guzzling exercise in its own right. Quite apart from the process itself desalination, by its nature, pumps water from sea level uphill to the storage dams - adding considerably to power consumption and greenhouse emissions.

Conserve for the future

The bottom line is that saving water and using it according to need is far and away the best solution. Having spent millions educating the public on how precious water is and how to save every drop, why change the game plan?

We believe that desalination could be a part of the answer for South East Queensland’s future water supply.
But first :

• we need to know what population our region can sustain;
• we need to embed our current water consumption habits;
• we need to ensure that all new developments and industry users meet best practice targets;
• we need to recycle.

Once we have those things in place - and if it’s still thought to be needed – we can talk desalination.