Fifteen years ago this month, Tim Flannery announced the Australian permanent drought.
“Perth is facing the possibility of a catastrophic failure of the city’s water supply,” says Tim Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum and Australia’s most high profile scientist and ecologist. His next book, to be published in October, will feature the water crises faced by Perth and Sydney.
“I’m personally more worried about Sydney than Perth,” Flannery told me. “Where does Sydney go for more water? At least Perth has a buffer of underground water sources. Sydney doesn’t have any backup. And while Perth is forging ahead with a desalination plant, Sydney doesn’t have any major scheme in place to bolster water. It also has nowhere to put the vast infrastructure of a desalination plant.”
Climate change is working against Sydney. “There’s only two years’ water supply in Warragamba Dam,” says Flannery, “yet Frank Sartor [NSW Minister for Energy and Utilities] is talking about the situation being stable … If the computer models are right then drought conditions will become permanent in eastern Australia.”
Most of NSW is, yet again, experiencing drought with 76 per cent of the state officially drought declared. Drought is the term used, but it is the wrong term. A better term is climate change. Much of western NSW has been strip-mined by hopeless farming practices and when the landscape is changed, the climate changes.
“Water is going to be in short supply across the eastern states,” says Flannery. Pumping water from catchment areas near Sydney is not going to be enough, and will create knock-on effects in those catchments. The water restrictions now in force in Sydney are never going to be lifted, except after a run of freak conditions, just as Warragamba Dam is never again going to be full unless there is a freak period of high rainfall unlikely to be sustained.
