Pooling knowledge for water reform
Pooling knowledge for water reform
For a nation suffering from a major water crisis, our water information is currently in a state of disrepair. Can the Federal Government’s $480 million national water information strategy finally provide the means to measuring, what we can then move on to manage?
A plague of wild camels is currently wreaking havoc across Australia. Just like the country’s people, they’re competing for one precious resource. Their thirst cannot be quenched from the sky, so they scour the landscape, damaging property and the environment as they hunt for any information that can lead towards water.
Australia is a nation of extremes. Where wild camels battle for water across the Western Desert, NSW farmers shoot the cattle they can’t feed. Across the border into Queensland and the land is drowning in an abundant water supply. Even without the added stakes of climate change, water mismanagement in the Southern states has yielded the cry of over allocation of supplies, increased competition for what’s available and put a kick in the side to the health of our river systems.
According to Dr John Williams the NSW Water Commissioner, drought is no longer an appropriate word for describing the state of the country. “I think when we use the word drought it’s a little too comfortable. Drought has about it that we are conditioned to thinking a ‘return to normal,” he said at the national media briefing on 2006: A Year of Drought. “The signals that I’ve been reading as a scientist is that we need to be adjusting our thinking. We need to be adjusting to increasing temperatures and increasing variability.”
Adjusting our thinking around water is just one process of reform. With a population dislocated from reliable sources of water, water management is the only way forward. But if we can’t measure it we can’t manage it and unless we take a national approach to the collection of information on water, we will never be able to affectively understand the conundrum of supply and demand.
A Federal plan
For all the bickering over water management, the need for water information is rarely disputed and was formalised in the Federal Government’s $10 billion water reform package in January this year. The $480 million allocated to build a national water resources information system recognises the hi-tech water measurement and management systems currently being developed by the likes of the CSIRO and National ICT Australia. The initiative intends on coordinating the more than 100 different agencies currently collecting water related data-sets.
ccording to Peter Schwerdtfeger, Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at Flinders University Airborne Research Centre, Howard’s Australia Day announcement is a leap forward for water reform. “The four states sharing the Murray-Darling Catchment have been making a most unseemly and uncoordinated hash of it,” he says. “The thousands of kilometres of porous earthen irrigation channels in eastern Australia are totally unforgivable.”
Howard’s water information management plan is to be overseen by the Bureau of Meteorology. The Bureau is keeping a relatively low profile over the announcement yet says it graciously accepts the challenges ahead. In a written statement, Gary Foley, then acting Director of Meteorology at the Bureau said they “appreciate the recognition by the Government of the Bureau’s ability to develop the rigorous and nationally-consistent water monitoring network they consider necessary in support of good decision-making.”
Raining rewards
According to a 2006 report from the National Water Commission, ‘there are many gaps in available data and the overall national water resources knowledge base, which if left unfilled will impede progress towards the objectives of the National Water Initiative.’
It is these gaps the Federal Government’s water information proposal intends to address through a mix of customised and off-the-shelf technologies, enabling over 100 agencies currently collecting water information to work together. It’s an information base that harnesses the capabilities of innovative technology, centralising disparate knowledge sources. This will help future planners rethink the way we manage such a climatically heterogeneous environment in Australia.
The ultimate goals of a trusted water information network will not only improve our knowledge of sustainable yields, but also work to determine the relationship between surface and groundwater systems and uncover further means for clever and efficient water use.
More importantly, a centralised water information system could underpin proposed water trading schemes. A system of this nature would require high quality and trusted water data that can support water accounting standards and processes. Like any traded commodity, the nature and size of the available resource needs to be identified. To ensure an equitable system, standards formalising the gauging, metering, monitoring and reporting of the water base will also be required.
The collection of water data also comes down to the contestability of science and the need to back up policy with substantiated evidence. A successful knowledge base will work to support the decision making process at the political level and allow citizens to directly acknowledge what scientists might already know on the availability of water resources. Irrigators, farmers and regular household users might react more positively to water restrictions if they can access the solid facts and figures.
Works in progress
Obtaining water related data from an agency a decade ago was a time-consuming and manual-intensive process. The request would involve finding the agency contact, signing a declaration form, making a formal request then waiting on the response.
Most agencies now offer the information they have online. But for the CSIRO, it’s now time to harness next-generation Web technologies, automate the information, deploy a centralised web interface and filter all information through to the one source – a system that would fit neatly with the Federal Government’s plans.
The CSIRO are fulfilling this mission through their Water Resources Observation Network (WRON.) Put simply, it’s a national information system seeking to tell us just how much water we have now and what we can expect to have in the future. The goal is to create a ‘national water account’ available to all and accessible through next-generation Web-based reporting tools. By 2010, the CSIRO hopes it is this system that will work with the Government and other agencies to underpin national water resource management in Australia.
“The vision is to be able to pull all our knowledge together and agree on the parameters we use to describe water,” says Ross Ackland, team leader of WRON. “The WRON vision starts at this point, let’s put information in an architecture and have everyone agree on a defined set of standards.”
An architecture of this nature could suit individual needs for water information while also supplying the raw data and foundations required for predictive models and forecasting. “While we don’t get an A+ for data capture we are ok with it,” says Ackland. “But once you capture it, you really have to be able to do something useful with it!”
Smart tools for healthy systems
Publishing data could come down to engaging next-generation web technologies as much as possible. Call it Web 3.0, the Sensor and Semantic Web, Web 2.0 has been a great precursor to what we can expect. It should provide the groundwork to prove how we can use applications through web technologies.
Ackland believes we are still in desperate need of nationally agreed standards on how to publish public data. “Someone needs to come along and say, ‘this is the architecture’ to develop the interface and make this happen,” he says.
The Sensor Web opens itself up to a whole new world of environmental possibilities. By attaching devices to monitor sprinkler systems, cooling and heating devices and other relevant systems we can enable them to have their own independent monitoring devices. With so much water regularly stolen because it simply can’t be monitored, Sensors could deliver real-time data sets immediately to the Web, telling us what is where and who is using it.
Drowning in data
Paul Roe from the Queensland University of Technology believes providing the smart ICT tools for research is the best way forward for grappling Earth sciences. Sensor networks are high on the agenda for the recently opened QUT/Microsoft eResearch Laboratory given their ability to monitor the environment and collect data in real-time.
“It’s all to enable new kinds of sciences,” says Roe. “Science and research is becoming more data driven research and we’re able to collect and analyse it.”
But as much as data can be collected, managing and using it effectively is a whole new challenge. “Scientists are drowning in data, they can no longer manage it manually…This kind of work is driving a whole new science here,” says Roe. “In the end, the general population and the Government have to make decisions based on this information, why shouldn’t people have access to what scientists already know?”
The CSIRO have explored dam level data as an initial example of how Web 2.0 technologies can be harvested to offer useful analysis of the information. The CSIRO collects information from the websites of over 40 different agencies including the Sydney Catchment Authority, NSW Water Information, SA Water and Melbourne Water and explores different Web 2.0 tools for publishing the combined data. “It brings in data from a number of different websites, relying on screen swapping technologies,” says Ackland.
Ackland points to examples such as the now familiar Google Map interface, widgets on the desktop or dashboard style gauges for publishing water related information. “Web 2.0 enables us to share information and make it accessible throughout the world. It also means we can present data in a number of different ways,” says Ackland.
With wireless networks growing, it makes sense to attach mobile devices to the Web and monitor them. These data-sets are the pretext for an intelligent water knowledge base.
Small steps forward
$485 million in funding towards the work of national water information system is definitely a welcome step forward. But over in South Africa, where a similar water crisis plagues the drought frequent nation, water information research has become second nature.
The one suggestion Professor Tally Palmer, Director of the Institute for Water and Environmental Resource Management at UTS would offer the PM, is to take a serious look at this South African model to engineer the means to manage water with the best in information, “And consider serious commitment to water research in engineering, science and social science so we manage this resource with the best possible information, knowledge and wisdom.”
“Australia may have limited water resource, but it is rich in innovation and excellent water researchers who are able to translate research into practical solutions,” says Tally.
If we are to make an adjustment to our thinking on water, we need national water initiatives that actually work, a predicament that places a burden on information and calls for it to be collated and collected in a manner that addresses the need.
Our water information is in a state of disrepair, but thankfully we have the expertise and people power to work for its future. Water information requires a whole new consciousness where blame games are put aside and egos forgotten. “We must act now, we must get together, work together, get on with the job and that’s really critical,” says Williams. “I can only emphasise that this is an issue of adjustment, we must make the changes, get on the job, stop blaming each other, start helping each other and solve the problem.”