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Stormwater Victoria’s annual conference was held recently at the Bayview Eden Hotel in Melbourne. The presentations ranged from technical, across environment and society, to economics as the industry grapples with a range of drivers guiding recent work. One of the main areas of interest for the industry recently has been how to build the business case for the delivery of integrated water services in a way that will satisfy the State’s economic regulator. 

My conference highlights included a presentation from the Office of Living Victoria discussing ‘shadow pricing’ for water, wastewater and stormwater services. A ‘shadow price’ estimates the cost of providing these services and illustrates the variation in that cost spatially across Melbourne. It aims to include life cycle costs, including future infrastructure requirements. This is useful when comparing conventional with alternative systems. While the price itself would be a useful indicator of viability, of greater importance is the robustness and transparency of the models and its assumptions if it’s to gain industry acceptance.

The role of water in liveability and measurement of benefits continues to present a complex problem. It was timely for the forum to hear economist David Pannell from the University of Western Australia discussing the relative merits of evaluation methods and the common pitfalls for engineers. For an area where on-ground data is hard to come by, David reminded us that the community’s perception of value is a valid starting point when dealing with the questions surrounding integrated water service delivery and liveability.

Another highlight was hearing about the Bolin Bolin Billabong (Bulleen, Melbourne) project, which aims to use stormwater to improve the health of the billabong by achieving multiple positive social and environmental outcomes. We learned that, despite the best efforts of the project team, the stormwater harvesting element had been removed (in favour of river water) due to sufficient recent rainfall. It was a good reminder of the importance of retaining flexibility in integrated water management systems to ensure they can deliver over the longer term given likely changes in climatic, social and economic conditions to avoiding costly retrofits in the future.


Bolin Bolin Billabong sourced from http://bushwalkjournal.blogspot.com.au

Last Tuesday (23 April 2013) the Essential Services Commission (ESC) released a draft decision on the price review process for the metropolitan water businesses for Melbourne. This covers Melbourne Water, City West Water, Yarra Valley Water, South East Water and Western Water.

Every five years, water businesses submit a request for prices that, once approved, govern how much our water bills are and what they will spend the money on. On 1 July, the next five year period commences.

The price review decision from the ESC was that the metropolitan water businesses were asking for too much and needed to cut back. And when I say cut back, the retail businesses ‘lost’ $793 million from their claim for a combined revenue of $12,266 million over five years. And Melbourne Water ‘lost’ $489 million and was approved revenue of $8,123 million over five years. I say lost in inverted commas because if it wasn’t raised in the first place, it isn’t really lost!

The desalination plant makes up 36 per cent of the operational costs that Melbourne Water needs to cover over the next five years (and thus requires in revenue).  We can now safely say that Melbourne is paying $593 million a year as insurance for our water supply. The merits of this insurance probably need another blog (or book).

From an initial glance, I don’t think there are substantial implications for the cut back to revenue that the ESC has recommended. Normally it might result in less capital works, less maintenance, or reduced targets (which translates into a reduced level of service or reduced ambition for environmental protection). But when you take desalination out of the equation, and note that there are probably efficiencies, delayed capital works and reduced borrowing rates, there is still scope to do creative and innovative things that will keep Melbourne moving towards a resilient and sustainable water system and ultimately a liveable city.

Either way, water business is big business.


Wonthaggi desalination plant

Last week The Australian reported that the South Australian government was to announce a plan to reduce stormwater and wastewater pollution * going into Gulf St Vincent. The targets they refer to included:

• Reduce nitrogen discharge from the 2003 level of 2400 tonnes to 600
• Reduce total suspended solids (TSS) by half the 2003 level
• Reduce stormwater, wastewater and industrial discharge
• Reduce organic matter flowing into the gulf

There has been no official statement from the government, but also no denial, so for the time being I’ll assume this is true and could become government policy. The science behind the plan is based on the Adelaide Coastal Waters Study, which was initiated in 2001 on the back of the concern for the Gulf and seagrasses. The 2007 final report had 14 recommendations.

Targets are an important mechanism to drive stormwater management controls, wastewater treatment and catchment management in general. In Victoria, similar targets have initiated a change in approach and water authorities and local councils have embraced water sensitive urban design.

The use of targets to drive environmental change (or minimise environmental impact) is particularly relevant for the drive to improve skills and knowledge in the industry, referred to as ‘capacity building’. When we did the ‘Business case for WSUD capacity building in SA’, last year, there was always a need to tie capacity building back to a ‘problem’. Pollution is a key issue and regional targets will help drive a change in capacity to manage stormwater and wastewater.

I suspect the future of these types of water quality and urban runoff targets will move towards focusing on stormwater harvesting, whereby the target is to prevent x % of the stormwater discharging, on average, into the receiving environment. Such an approach would be driven by a ‘liveability agenda’- a move to retain the water, reduce potable consumption and create the green cities that are being discussed so often these days.


Adelaide coastline (Gulf St Vincent)

* Please note link my require cookies enabled and works best in Firefox and Chrome.

The Commonwealth Environmental Water Office 2011-12 Outcomes Report is now available online.  In 2011–12, 680 GL of Commonwealth environmental water was delivered across the Murray Darling Basin (MDB), together with environmental water from state and Australian government agencies and nongovernment organisations. Between 2009 and 2012, 1,233 GL of Commonwealth environmental water was delivered for the environment across the Basin. This water has been used to target various ecosystems and ecosystem functions in need, such as providing fish refuge from the impact of poor-quality water in the Murray River.


The Murray River near Mildura during a period of environmental watering, May 2012. Photograph by Stephanie Secomb, Commonwealth Environmental Water Office

While the name of the game is ecosystem response, these numbers are interesting in themselves. Here are some related numbers for context. These statistics vary a fair bit depending on their source, and also naturally between years and over decades, but they’re in the ballpark. The MDB is one of 12 Drainage Divisions in Australia and is comprised of 23 – 26 river basins, depending on how they’re defined. On average, it receives about 520,000 GL/year of rainfall and yields an average run-off of approximately 23,000 GL/year. Annual surface water use in the MDB can be up to 10,000 GL or more. Average annual outflow at the Murray River mouth is around 12,000 GL under natural conditions and around 5,000 GL under current conditions.

Averages are the worst of statistics for most natural resource management data and need to be treated with caution, but nonetheless you can see we’re talking about some big numbers here. Once upon a time, runoff in the Murrumbidgee River Basin alone was around 3,500 GL, with probably about half that number flowing into wetlands and the Murray.

So, 680 GL of environmental watering across the Basin in a year may look impressive, but in the big scheme of things it isn’t that massive a number. Nonetheless, targeted at the right places and at the right times, it’s very valuable and a lot more water than has been available for a long time owing to agricultural development and more recently drought. It’s an increasingly large step in the right direction.

The Victorian Government has recently released the results of community consultation on their draft Victorian Waterway Management Strategy. This strategy replaces the 2002 Victorian River Health Strategy and will guide the future direction of the management of Victoria’s rivers, estuaries and wetlands for the next eight years. It is a pivotal document for those working in catchment management in Victoria.

The draft Victorian Waterway Management Strategy was released late last year and was followed by a six week consultation period that ran from late October to early December 2012. The consultation has cumulated in the release of a Community Feedback report that outlines the key comments and themes put forward by the community.


Image: Report from the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment

I was involved in a couple of formal submissions, both as an individual and as part of the River Basin Management Society, and have been really impressed to see how the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) have responded to our feedback. The Community Feedback report is one of the best examples I’ve seen of government responding to a formal consultation process.

The Community Feedback report provides a high-level overview of the main themes from submissions and outlines how DSE intends to amend the strategy to reflect the feedback. Some interesting stats in the report include:

• a total of 1,159 individual comments on specific issues were identified from 78 submissions
• there was a pretty even split between positive (29%), mixed (35%) and negative (21%) comments (plus 14% not applicable)
• most of the submissions came from government agencies (37%) and individuals (26%)
• environmental water management was by far the most frequently discussed theme, popping up in about 10% of all comments
• riparian management and community rounded out the top three themes.

But beyond the stats, what was more heartening is seeing how DSE are using the feedback to revise the strategy. The report lists 17 high level changes to the draft strategy in response to common themes. It’s rewarding and comforting to see that many of those 17 changes address the comments raised in the submissions I was involved with.

My only concern is that the submissions have not been published on the DSE website. Publishing submissions online (provided the author hasn't asked that it remain confidential) is a great way of boosting transparency and informed discussion – which is always a good thing. The published submissions on the Murray Darling Basin Plan provided a good example of that.

For those interested in reading more, you can find a selection of publically available submissions below:
• River Basin Management Society
• Environment Victoria
• Municipal Association of Victoria
• Barmah, Millewa Collective – Friends of the Earth
• Connecting Country (a landscape restoration project in central Victoria)