Efficiency, the para-commons, and being a waterist

So it’s now about a month since I met with Professor Bruce Lankford at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, but I think it’s worth touching on some of the interesting ideas that he shared with me. Bruce has just published a book, Resource Efficiency Complexity and the Commons, which examines resource efficiency from the perspective of common pool resources. One of the key questions is: who gets the saving when efficiency gains are made? Who wins, and just as importantly, who loses?

When we make an efficiency saving in water resource use, it means that water that was considered ‘unused’ is converted into useful resources. This includes situations like the irrigation infrastructure projects in Australia, where most of the savings so far have come from improving the delivery infrastructure, so that less water is lost through seepage from delivery channels. But where did those losses go? For the most part, they entered groundwater systems, and in some cases, ended up in rivers or wetlands.

In the western US, ‘unused’ extracted water, may end up being available for other users (via groundwater or returned flows to the river), at which point it may no longer be the property of the original extractor. In some states, and depending on the historical use data, efficiency on the part of the original extractor, by using more of the water that they pump from the river or their groundwater bore, may in fact be viewed as theft from the downstream users.

All water goes somewhere, and approaching these questions from the perspective of a common pool resource highlights the difficulty of efficiency as a solution to water scarcity. Bruce introduces the concept of the ‘paracommons’, which reflects the uncertain nature of the ownership of efficiency savings, and the uncertain nature of the benefits of efficiency.

This is not to say that there aren’t any, of course. But it does require you to engage with the question on a more nuanced scale. Returning to the Australian example of irrigation infrastructure improvements, one of the early elements of this project was to figure out where the leaked water was going: which of the wetlands and aquatic ecosystems was dependent on the system operating in its current form? Some of the high value ecosystems were insulated from the efficiency calculation: the water they depended on was not included in the calculation of the savings, and their water was protected. Further, the saved water was split three ways: one third to irrigators, one third to the city of Melbourne and one third went to the environment. This water has been made available as an entitlement in storage, which means it can be used in a more targeted fashion to deliver environmental outcomes: at the right time, in the right places, at the right flows.

Consumptive water users aren’t the only ones having to consider efficiency. As I discussed in an earlier post, there has been tremendous work to get the environment on the efficiency band wagon too. Bruce came up with one of the earliest statement of principles around environmental efficiency in 2003, and these principles are at work in Australia today, where environmental watering infrastructure is being used to deliver flood events that would otherwise require substantially higher flows (see, for example, my earlier post on the regulator at the Hattah Lakes in Victoria).

After all this, one of the big ideas that Bruce left me with was the idea of being a ‘waterist’. In chapter 7 of his book, he makes the point that when asked to find solutions to complex problems, most of us reach back to our career specialisation. For example, economists tend to reach for markets or pricing solutions, lawyers offer governance or legal solutions, and engineers can focus on the technical and physical aspects of the system. In a world where the interdisciplinarity of complex problems has been well-recognised, it’s important to be able to reach beyond our own preferred modes of thinking and find truly transdisciplinary solutions. Bruce’s suggestion here is to be a waterist: someone who seeks out water users who are already operating at the margins, and who have experience in managing their resources prudently, carefully and sometimes innovatively. By becoming the champion of the users of the resource, solutions can be embedded in what works, and can take advantage of innovations that have already emerged at the margins to deal with scarcity. For Bruce, being a waterist is about reaching beyond our ideological boundaries, investigating systems on the ground and engaging directly with those "least likely to represent themselves... but if engaged with might contribute their experience".

Privatisation, financialisation and neoliberalisation of water

Following on from my discussions with Sarah Hendry in Dundee, I’ve been exploring the idea of privatisation of water resources, and how this is playing out in the UK and around the world.

In London, I met with Dr Kate Bayliss, who has worked extensively on the issues surrounding the privatisation of water utilities, particularly in sub-Saharan African countries. Water has a dual nature: it is a human right, whilst also often being a commercial input, for the production of crops as well as industrial uses. Kate’s work highlights the challenge of retaining a focus on social justice and equity, when water utilities are privatised and operate under commercial principles. She has also recently engaged with the issue of financialization of water, when water utilities and water services are treated as financial products. She told me about a new trend in financial markets: water-related exchange traded funds. Water is an essential service, and exists in a highly specific local context – but these new financial instruments extend the process of commodification into financialization, further separating water from its context.

I went on to met with Dr Jessica Budds of the University of East Anglia. Jessica has been a critic of Chile’s water markets for many years, and one of her most recent papers examines the political ecology of water, and in particular, the relationship of water to power structures in Chile. Her historical analysis of the privatisation and creation of water markets in Chile demonstrates the link between not only the ideology of the powerful, but the way in which the privatisation of water strengthened their position. She also introduced me to the concept of the neoliberalization of nature. The tools that we use to manage our natural environment shape the discourse that we use to describe and engage with it – so the commodification of water can extend the neoliberal ideology to our relationship with nature. 

Jessica gave me a lot of new ideas to get my head around, and a new perspective from which to engage with the way that environmental water management in the context of a water market is changing the way that we perceive of and engage with the natural environment. Of course, political ecology always asks us 'what is the natural environment?', so I'm trying to disentangle the layers around that concept. In many ways, it's not really possible to separate the environment from humanity, as we define the environment as a social construct, as well as physically shaping it through our actions (even where and when we lived in it much more harmoniously than we do now).

Catchment management and conservation covenants

The UK is doing some very interesting things with their catchment management program. After my meeting with Chris Spray in Dundee, I was keen to hear more, so I met with Laurence Smith, head of the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy, at SOAS, University of London, who’s been exploring the response of farmers to NGOs seeking to arrange payment for ecosystem services, and in particular, what sort of legal arrangements they’d be willing to enter into and what sort of payments they would require. This work is feeding directly into the catchment management activities of the West Country Rivers Trust, as well as helping to inform the development of new legal instruments that enable the protection of changed land management practices in perpetuity, in the form of conservation covenants. We have similar legal instruments in Australia, but the current state of property law in the UK requires some substantial legal changes to make these instruments available. 

Laurence also shared some valuable insights into the way that farmers often prefer to work with a non-government organization, rather than the environmental regulator. This tendency is similar to what I’ve observed in the USA, and highlights the importance of separate decision-making roles. When one agency is responsible for regulating activities, it’s very hard for that agency to also explore other opportunities, as people can be unwilling to have open, frank discussions with an agency that has enforcement powers.

One of the fascinating aspects of the catchment management approach being piloted by the UK is that they are actively encouraging a diverse range of local agencies to take a lead role (called the catchment ‘host’ organisation) in the development of catchment management plans. Organizations interested in this role can ‘bid’ for the opportunity to host the plan development. This is a policy that creates space for non-government organizations to get involved, and really encourages the involvement of NGOs in catchment management. I’ll be really interested to see the results of the next round of catchment management planning, and see how the NGOs facilitate (or not!) the development of plans that the local community can embrace. 

Water reform in the UK: abstraction licences on unregulated rivers

London welcomed me with all its traditional charms: it rained. All day. Unceasingly. Coming from south-eastern Australia, I wasn’t entirely sure that such a thing could actually happen, so it had all the delights of novelty.

Fortunately, because as nice as my raincoat is, it’s not really a fashion piece, London then remembered that it was having the warmest, sunniest summer since 2006, and the rest of the week was glorious – golden, warm and lots of other words not usually associated with south-east England.

England and Wales are currently pursuing a range of water resource management reforms. I was lucky enough to meet with Henry Leveson-Gower, Head of Future Water Resource Management Project in DEFRA’s Water Availability and Quality Programme. He and his team are exploring policy options to facilitate water trading, and have been examining ways to unbundle water abstraction licences in England. This is quite similar to the water reform in Australia, where water licences have been separated into a permanent right (in Victorian parlance, a water share), a temporary right (a water allocation), a water use licence (which specifies where and how water can be used, and is attached to the land on which the water will be used) and a delivery share. However, in Australia, we’ve really only been successful at unbundling water licences on regulated systems, where water is held in large storages and called out for use. In England, they are attempting to do this for unregulated river systems, where the water licence gives you the right to extract a share of the available flow. This makes unbundling more complicated, as the location on the river is much more important in determining what the share of that flow will be, and the capacity to determine physical allocations of water (temporary rights) depends on predicting the flows in the river at a given period. I’m going to be very interested to see how they solve some of these problems, and whether any of those solutions might be transferable to Australia’s unregulated systems.

One of the components of the policy reform is using smart water metering technology, so that water meters provide water use data in real time to water managers, and access to water can be linked to real-time stream flow data. Australia has also been exploring the use of such smart meters in some rural catchments, and there’s a real opportunity to share some of these lessons with the UK. For example, in Victoria, Melbourne Water, in partnership with the Victorian State Government, have been piloting the use of smart meters in several of their rural catchments. I’m hoping that we can encourage policy makers everywhere to get better at sharing and learning from these sorts of projects.

Interestingly, there are some environmental charities (such as RSPB) who are purchasing land to restore and protect wetlands. In some cases, this includes a licence to extract water from the river to recreate flooding in the wetland. These environmental groups will also be able to trade their water under the new arrangements, and it will be interesting to see whether more environmental organizations enter this space and become environmental water managers in the UK. 

Murray Cod in the Murrumbidgee

This is a great little video released by the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, showing how environmental flows have been used in the Murrumbidgee River (part of the Murray-Darling Basin) to help support and maintain populations of the Murray Cod, Australia's best-known freshwater fish.

For any international readers that I've introduced to the Murray Cod previously - I wasn't kidding! They really are that big, and they live for up to 80 years. 

Thanks to the Australian River Restoration Centre for the share. 

Flood risk management and Jane Austen: all part of a day out in Edinburgh

One of the serendipitous delights of this visit to the UK is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The city is almost overwhelmed with visitors from all over the world, flocking through the streets in search of the fun and frivolity of the Fringe.

It can also be a bit much. The main streets and places like the Royal Mile are all but immovable, and the tourists (yes, that’s me too, I know) have taken over. I’m pretty sure that you’re not really supposed to pet police horses, for example, but the pair I observed yesterday were taking it all very patiently. Does it count as bribing a police officer if you’re making friends with his horse?

Luckily, I had the insights of an almost-local. Vanessa Collins lives just over the border in Newcastle and she braved the slightly dysfunctional rail network on Thursday morning to pop over for some brunch, a chat about water resource management and a viewing of Austentatious.

I think Edinburgh forgot it was still summer, and I woke up to mist snuggled up around the castle and the Scott monument. The Georgian terraces were equal parts obscured by mist and road works (apparently one must not mention the tram works. At all.), but the brunch was excellent (if you’re after something tasty and inexpensive, try Cafe Milk).

Vanessa is working for the Environment Agency, an extraordinarily large public agency in the UK responsible for sustainable development and environmental management, including water licensing and flood risk management. Apparently there are over 10,000 staff in the agency, working all over England. 

Vanessa is a civil engineer working as a project manager in the flood risk management area. England is trying to find ways to reduce flood risks to lower catchment towns, using a range of engineering solutions, including building bigger flood walls in towns, and finding ways to store more water in the upper catchment. What I find most interesting about this issue is that climate change is likely to make floods more frequent, and more extreme, but probably less predictable. So how do you invest in the flood mitigation measures, knowing that you’ll really need them at some future point, but until then, they aren’t really useful at all? Even more challenging: how do you hold space in a water storage to retain flood waters when storage levels are dropping? The corollary of increased flooding under climate change is that periods of low flow and drought are also likely to be more frequent. From what I can tell, this is less of a problem here in England than it is in Australia, for example, but it wasn’t so long ago that parts of England were drought stricken. Managing uncertainty and variability requires a new mindset, and it’s one that sits uncomfortably alongside accounting measures of capital investment. I think there’s going to be some interesting learning curves as our understanding of the new hydrology of many of our river systems develops over time.

I’m reminded of the work of Chris Spray at the University of Dundee in the Eddleston catchment, where upstream storage mechanisms are being enhanced using a combination of engineering solutions and ecosystem services like re-inserting meanders in the river, building wetlands and revegetating upper catchments. Researchers at the University of Newcastle are also working with the Environment Agency on a range of catchment management approaches to mitigate flooding in Belford (check out this and this).

None of these activities are cost free, and they all impose a trade-off between what you can use the water, space and money for now, as opposed to what you might need to use it for in the next flood. We don’t know when that will be, but we do know it will happen.

After all that, it seemed only logical to weave our way through Edinburgh’s mist-shrouded streets and parks, claim a space in the queue, and enjoy the hilarity of Austentatious. Improv comedy in the style of Jane Austen: who could ask for more?

Re-embedding economic relationships within the social context: what does this mean for environmental water trading?

When we use the market to facilitate the acquisition and management of environmental water, how much are we giving up to market norms? Are we redefining the environment in the context of the water market, and if so, what does that mean?

This tension between the drive to protect the environment, and the methods we can use to achieve this protection, is emerging as one of the critical issues for my research. I’m interested in what happens to legal and policy definitions and perceptions of the natural environment when it is clothed in a corporate form, given tradeable water assets and the legal and institutional capacity to operate within the water market and the water supply systems as just another user. In Australia, our environmental water holders are using the market to acquire and manage their water portfolios. I think there’s some evidence that this is changing the way that the environment itself is seen (and which I’ll explore another time), and it connects broadly to the behavioural economics research into the way that market norms can overwhelm and irreversibly replace social norms of interaction.

But is this tension always apparent? Is there a way of reconceptualising the market so that it operates within a social context? Can we use the market to strengthen social values around the environment, so that social norms are actually enhanced as a result of environmental water trading? I think this may be what is happening in the western USA, where environmental water trusts require a social relationship with the local community. Unless other water users can see that there is a win-win, then there is no support for trading water to the environment. In this context, the activities of the environmental water trusts are actually enhancing the understanding and support for environmental protection, in a non-confrontational way.

I’ve been searching for an analytical tool that can help me to understand the differences I can see in the way that environmental water is being managed in the US and Australia. On Wednesday, I was lucky enough to meet with Dr Bettina Lange, a specialist in socio-legal theories of regulation at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University. She shared her insights into the way that markets can be seen as embedded within a social context. She edited a special issue of the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly in 2011, which drew on the work of Karl Polanyi to discuss the way that capitalism can disembed the market from its social context, and whether there can be a corresponding ‘counter-movement’ to re-embed the market within social norms.

Bettina generously helped me to understand this approach, and the opportunities it offers to understand the shifting relationship between market norms and social norms. It’s early days, but I feel like this could be a watershed moment in the development of my thinking.

(And apologies for the pun. It’s just not possible to talk about water resource management without punning from time to time.)

Water markets, ecosystem services, corporatisation and the role of NGOs in catchment management: perspectives from the University of Dundee’s IHP-HELP Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science

Thanks to the generosity of the British Council, I'm continuing my exciting adventure around the UK.

The University of Dundee’s IHP-HELP Centre for Water Law,Policy and Science is recognised as an international centre of excellence in water law and policy. I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last two days meeting with and speaking to academics from this centre and other parts of the University. I’m beyond grateful for the time these generous people made available to me; and I’m particularly grateful to Dr Sarah Hendry, who helped to arrange my visit and encouraged her colleagues to attend my presentation.

My first meeting with with Professor Chris Spray, who shared his insights into the role of the Tweed Forum, a non-government organization acting as an intermediary between local communities and government to implement environmental projects. Tweed Forum has been around since 1991, and is now a model for participatory catchment organizations around the world. I was fascinated to learn about this organization and the role it plays in connecting government to communities, and the trust it has built through its ongoing relationship with both. It reminded me of some of the environmental water trusts in the western USA, which help bring together government and individual water users and ranchers to deliver win-win environmental outcomes. I'm very interested to see whether this is a model we could explore in Australia, in addition to our government catchment management authorities.

Next, I met with Dr Sarah Hendry, who has a deep background in the legal and organizational structures for the industry in the UK. Sarah patiently answered my questions and helped me understand the historical differences that have underpinned the different policy approaches taken by Scotland, England and Wales, and the different legal forms used to manage water in each jurisdiction. I'm particularly interested in whether there's any evidence of a statutory corporation, or a state-owned corporation, demonstrating the attributes we associate with a privately owned, for-profit corporation (a corporation limited by shares). Can we use the corporate model in a state-owned capacity to obtain a commercial operating environment without losing control of the public services it's providing? Are there essential attributes of the corporate form that are common to all it's iterations, inescapable features of using this particular legal structure? 

As is often the case, I also met up with some fellow Australians. Dr Francine Rochford and I had some fascinating discussions around the nature of property rights in Australian water, how to engage with different water user groups and the nature of the public/private divide. Dr Michelle Lim, another Australian, is here in Scotland working on a project to examine the way that ecosystem services can act to alleviate poverty in Bangladesh. 

On Tuesday afternoon, I gave a seminar to about 15 highly engaged audience members. My presentation focused on my work on examining the way that environmental water organizations are emerging to manage environmental water in the context of water markets, and to use this as a tool to explore the tension between the need to extend environmental protection into the ‘everyday’ and the potential loss of the social norms that drive the need for that protection in the first place. Using markets to manage the natural environment runs the risk of replacing social norms (which stipulate for environmental protection) with market-based norms, which can put a price on the environment and perhaps weaken or erode the social norms. This topic is central to my thesis (and definitely worth a blog post of its own) so I’ll probably leave it at that for the moment – but more to come! If anyone is interested in seeing a copy of this presentation, please leave a request in the comments and I can email you. 

I really enjoyed this opportunity to speak with this audience. They were very interested and kept me on my toes with lots of intelligent questions during the presentation, and a broad discussion of both the content and my research directions afterwards. This presentation was tremendously helpful for me, as it gave me a chance to test some of my new ideas with an international audience, and to lift the level of discussion beyond the detail of Australian environmental water management. 

Following the seminar, I had a brief but interesting discussion with Professor Colin Reid about markets in biodiversity. Market-based tools can be highly effective, but one of the big limits for natural resources like biodiversity is that they are context specific - timing, location and scale are all important factors in defining the 'product', which can make finding appropriate trade-offs challenging. 

PhD students and staff who kindly invited me to lunch

I also managed to inspire some interest in Australian water law and policy more generally. Andrew Allan and I spent the afternoon discussing Australia's legal construction of water rights, water allocation policies and how the environment is operating within Australia's water markets. 

It was a fascinating two days. I'm only sorry that it was such a short visit, and I can't possibly do justice to the fantastic conversations in this blog. Thank you to everyone who spent time with me!

Climate change and water law: my chance to get a UK perspective

Today’s blog post is brought to you all courtesy of the British Council – a non-political organisation working to build mutually beneficial and lasting relationships between the future leaders of the UK and over 100 countries worldwide.  

Thanks to their generous funding arrangement through my home university (University of Melbourne Law School), I’m heading to the UK tomorrow, where I’ll be meeting with academics and policy makers in water resource management.

The prospect of future climate change and the increasing variability and frequency of extreme weather events is forcing water resource managers everywhere to embrace new methods of managing water that enhance flexibility and responsiveness to changing environmental conditions. Both Australia and the UK have experienced severe drought and flood over the past decade, and in both countries, this is inspiring change and reform in water resource management.

The UK and Australia have a combination of some common experiences, along with differences in water law and hydrology, which provides an excellent opportunity to examine how water reform can play out in different circumstances. Australia and the UK have a history of sharing information and working together on policy issues, including water management, and I hope to build on this relationship (for a recent example, check out Professor Mike Young’s report for University College London’s Environment Institute).

English water law was the basis for early Australian water law, as the riparian rights regime was imported to Australia during colonization. In both cases, the original common law water rights have been overlaid by more recent statutory water rights. Following the release of the Water White Paper in 2011, the UK is looking to improve its statutory regime, leading to more flexible, responsive, environmentally sustainable and tradeable water licenses, and in particular, how to stimulate a water market, for retail, industry and agricultural water users. There are many points of similarity between the reforms the UK is currently experiencing, and those pursued in Australia as part of the National Water Initiative, including a need for change to ensure water use remains sustainable in a climate change world.

One of the big questions for such reform is: where does the environment fit when water markets are created? I'm looking forward to providing an Australian perspective on how the environment can be protected and managed within a water market, and the trade-offs that come with this approach. In addition, I hope to learn from the UK water resource managers how the environment can be managed and protected in systems that are not yet fully-allocated, and where riparian rights (rather than a full extractive rights regime) still have a role in water resource management. In particular, the Water Framework Directive requires focus on both quantity and quality. In Australia, the emphasis for environmental water managers has been almost solely on quantity of water, so there is much to learn about effective and efficient management of water quality for the aquatic environment.

The UK’s leadership in regulating privatization of its corporate water managers is also an area I am keen to explore. In Australia, corporatization has been used as a means to improve efficiency of operations, without proceeding to full privatization of water resource managers (which is often prohibited under state constitutions). Successful implementation often depends heavily on the power and capacity of the regulators. Corporatization is an ongoing process in Australia, and it is a very recent phenomenon for environmental water managers to use the corporate form. I’m really looking forward to discussing this with water corporatization specialists in the UK, such as Dr Sarah Hendry at the University of Dundee.

So, tomorrow I’m off to the UK. I’m heading to the University of Dundee first, then Edinburgh, back to London, where I’ll be visiting DEFRA and the Centre for Water and Development at SOAS London, and then out to the University of East Anglia. To finish up, I’ll be speaking at the Water and Society conference in New Forest in the first week of September. I promise to keep up a much more regular posting schedule this trip, so there’ll be more to come soon!

Collaboration and environmental water management

This year, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's Western Water Program held its second annual western water transactions workshop in Bend, Oregon. This workshop brings together the organizations (NGOs and government agencies) that work with NFWF in the western USA to restore instream flows to flow-limited rivers, using a water transactions approach. Water is returned to the stream and legally protected as instream flows using a range of legal mechanisms, including short-term leases, split-season leases (where the water is left instream for a short but critical period, such as July-August), donations, permanent sales and efficiency programs, where on farm use of water is altered to improve efficiency and so that savings can be left instream.  Each organization is tackling essentially the same problem: how to improve instream flows and improve aquatic habitat in severely flow-limited rivers (in many cases, the rivers can be completely dewatered during summer). But each organization operates within a highly specific context, a web of state law, local politics and the long reach of local history.

There is almost no limit to what can be written about this program and the work of the individual organizations throughout the western USA. And indeed, I plan on writing a fair bit about it over the coming months.

But for today, I’m focusing on one of the big lessons I gleaned from this week of insightful, inspiring conversation: the importance of collaboration.

The environmental water organizations in the US focus on finding ‘win-win’ outcomes with other water users. Although there are many organizations out there litigating and using whatever tools they can find (or create) to protect and improve instream flows, by and large, the organizations who seek to pay farmers to put water back instream do not operate this way. These organizations find solutions that all participants are happy with. So they don’t buy water if it’s not the right kind – the right place, the right seniority (so that they can depend on having the flows when they need them), delivering real environmental outcomes. But they also focus on solutions that help keep the agricultural community thriving and keep the farmers on their land (for just one example, have a look at The Freshwater Trust in Oregon).

As an Australian, this was a fascinating insight. I'm not saying we don’t seek collaboration with other water users, far from it, as most government policy on water is produced in a heavily consultative fashion. But because most water policy and water resource management is run by government, I think there’s a sense that collaboration is less necessary. In Australia, if you’re in the southern Murray-Darling Basin, you can just go to the water market and buy the water you need. This is a ‘win-win’ in a narrow economic sense – but conversation is completely different. It’s not about finding a way for agriculture and the environment to co-exist. It’s a conversation about price: the person who can afford to pay the highest price gets the water. Sure, the seller gets the money, but I wonder how often they use it to get more water for their own needs, or whether selling their water is a way to exit from their agricultural activities?

This is not a bad thing. In many ways, it’s great that environmental water managers in Australia don’t have to inquire into the operation of farms in order to free up water for the environment: the market does all that for them (which is nice and efficient). But I think we’re missing an opportunity. Collaboration, whilst it may be slower, builds understanding. It forges relationships between people with completely different interests, and this makes it harder to see those people as your enemies. It makes it harder to see the environment as your enemy.

Ultimately, collaboration can build consensus on deeply divisive issues like how to use water in a fully-allocated catchment, where using it for environmental benefit means taking it away from someone else. 

Collaboration and consensus may be something that government is unsuited for: although government can be inclusive during the creation of a policy, once a decision is made, it must be enforced. This is where non-government organizations really come into their own. They can operate inclusively and collaboratively during both the development and the implementation of environmental programs. They exist because they can build these relationships within the local community, at a local level. Australia has only very recently seen much movement in the NGO space when it comes to environmental water management (and I’m not talking about advocacy here – there’s been lots of great work on that front over many years from many organizations, like Environment Victoria, the Environment Defender's Office and Australian Conservation Foundation, just to name a few). 

As I wrote in May, one of the interesting developments is the agreement between the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder and Water For Nature, which sees the CEWH give 10GL each year to WFN for the next 5 years. This agreement seems to explicitly recognise the capacity of the NGO to operate at a local level to both deliver environmental water effectively, but also to generate community support for these activities. I’ll be watching this with a great deal of interest to see how it evolves. This could be a real opportunity for Australia to benefit from the NGO approach to managing environmental water – and we should definitely be reaching out to our colleagues in the western USA, who’ve been doing this for the last couple of decades. 

Rivers of Washington State

A couple of months or so ago, I started this blog with the intention of being able to share stories from my investigations into environmental water management throughout Australia and the USA. I spent 6 weeks in the western USA, meeting amazing people dedicated to improving stream flows and the health of rivers... all of which I thought would make amazing blog fodder. 

Turns out, I was too busy meeting people, learning things and visiting rivers to write anything at all!  So my cunning plan of blogging around the USA has so far been much less of a success than I had hoped.

But it’s not too late! Today is just a short entry to share some of the excitement about the beautiful rivers and waterways of the western USA, but more will certainly follow.

One of the best parts of my trip so far has been experiencing the passion people hold for their rivers. Working on improving instream flows in the western US can mean restoring a stream to life, literally – by protecting enough water to keep the stream flowing over summer, streams can go from dry beds to rich aquatic ecosystems as anadromous fish find their way back upstream to their spawning grounds again. Sometimes, the restored flows means that fish are back in the headwaters for the first time in over 100 years.

For the people who work on restoring flows, this is more than just a job. They share in the delight of a restored river on a very personal level; partly because they are often anglers and outdoorsy; partly because each individual project to restore flows in a section of river can take years to achieve.

Showcasing some of this passion and delight in rivers is this collection of photos, which come from Brian Walsh at the Washington State Department of Ecology. As well as being beautiful, they show the variety of aquatic habitats throughout Washington. On this trip, I only got to see western Washington, around Olympia and Seattle, but I'm definitely coming back for more. 

Hattah Lakes environmental water regulator

The incredibly talented Dr Tamara Boyd shared this yesterday, and it's absolutely amazing. This video shows some of the new environmental water infrastructure up in the Mallee in Victoria, to help get water into wetlands and keep it there longer. This sort of infrastructure can dramatically enhance the efficiency of environmental watering in terms of extent and duration of watering (although we're still waiting to see how it stacks up ecologically, but time will tell, and it's a pretty safe bet it's better than nothing in the current climate!). 

This is also a fantastic introduction to the different agencies involved in environmental water management, and the beautiful landscape of north-western Victoria.

Check it out: 

The emergence of environmental water managers in Australia

Environmental water includes both quantity and quality: the health of aquatic ecosystems depends on having sufficient water of adequate quality. In fully-allocated water systems, quantity is usually the major concern (although of course there is often a complex interrelationship between quality and quantity), as there is often not enough left to maintain a healthy environment.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider the concept of ‘full allocation’. In Australia, it seems to mean that further allocations of water cannot be made without affecting the reliability of supply of existing water users (who are usually extractive users). The concept of ‘reliability’ is also interesting, and reflects the Australian tendency to define classes of water access entitlements, based on their reliability. In water systems that rely on the prior appropriation doctrine (‘first in time, first in right’), this concept of shared reliability may be less meaningful. To me, it can be used to identify a water system where water is a scarce resource: all of the ‘available’ water has been allocated for use (but where, perhaps for political reasons, it’s not palatable to talk about ‘over-allocation’). Any additional allocation involves a trade-off: the ‘new’ water must come from existing users. Fully-allocated systems are usually operating at an imbalance, due to the recent recognition of the environment as a legitimate user of water, so recovery of water for the environment is particularly important.

Bringing together some ideas from my previous posts, as the provision of environmental water transitions from policy commitment to implementation, the management of that water becomes increasingly important. Recovery of water in fully-allocated water systems costs money – it must be found in water ‘savings’ (by increasing water use efficiency) or by purchasing the water from other users. Demonstrating that this water is being used effectively and efficiently is important to reassure investors (usually the public, via donations or taxes) that their money is going to good use.

In Australia, where water markets are particularly active, managing a portfolio of environmental water rights effectively and efficiently requires a new approach. It needs an entity with capacity for independent decision-making, rapid response to changing circumstances and a clear focus on the environmental outcomes. We can see a plethora of new organizations emerging in this space. Perhaps the best known is the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, a statutory function vested in an employee of the Australian public service. The CEWH is now the largest holder of environmental water in Australia, and is well on the way to being the single largest holder of water in the Murray-Darling Basin. It combines both water recovery and management objectives, and is working with state agencies and NGOs to use its water each year.

One of the most recent environmental water holders is the Victorian Environmental Water Holder, a statutory corporation with three commissioners and staff currently seconded from the Victorian public service. It holds all the environmental water in Victoria, but is focused on management, rather than additional water recovery. However, it has recently sold water in northern Victoria to finance water recovery in southern Victoria, demonstrating its willingness to use the markets as a tool for managing a portfolio of environmental water rights.

One of the other fascinating issues here (and deserving of a post all its own!) is the role of NGO environmental water holders in Australia. They have a big role in the USA, but are more limited in Australia. However, during the recent drought, a number of NGOs obtained water for the environment. Now, many are transitioning into a management role. Water For Nature, a water trust established by Nature Foundation SA, has entered into an agreement with the CEWH to deliver 10 GL of water each year for the next five years. This is the first such agreement between the CEWH and a NGO, and I’ll be watching with interest.

There is so much to say about these new entities. But for now, let’s just try to understand what they actually do. Many organizations play a role in environmental water management. Local organizations like catchment management authorities are usually responsible for community engagement, long-term planning and on-ground activities (such as getting water to a site, and monitoring the outcomes of using it). Government retains a role in policy setting and management of the overall water allocation and trading framework. Environmental water holders are responsible for holding (‘owning’) environmental water rights, and making the critical decision on where and how to use it each year (including whether to trade it). The following diagram focuses on the role of the environmental water holders in the Australian context (and comes from my recent article in the Australian Environment Review (see issue 28(3); let me know in a comment if you can’t access Lexis). 

I think the requirement of the environmental water holders to be the decision-makers, as well as their varying capacity to do so (they can be constrained by water policies, Ministerial directions, funding, and/or limits of their operating legislation) is what makes environmental water holders so interesting. 

Effective and efficient environmental water use

In my last post, I wrote about the way that environmental flows management is transitioning from policy, to implementation, to management. One of the fascinating aspects of the requirement for managing environmental water is that in addition to being effective, water use must also be efficient.

One of my favourite authors on this subject, Dr Avril Horne completed her PhD thesis on this topic. She used economic concepts of marginal benefit of additional water to the environment to figure out how to optimise the selection of flow components provided to a river or wetland. She generated environmental response curves for each flow component, which typically have an ‘S’ shape – very little benefit is gained below a flow threshold, then benefit increases as more water is provided, up to the point where benefit gained starts to level off, even when more water is provided (see the diagram below, loosely adapted from Dr Horne's work). This has two really important lessons for environmental water managers, as well as for politicians.

The 's' shape: relationship of environmental benefits to volume of environmental water 

Firstly (and this will likely not be news to many people reading this), benefits are not delivered in a linear fashion (Lin Crase has also written extensively on this), and won't measurably occur until after the first bend in the 'S' shape. This means that half the water may well have substantially less than half the environmental benefits, depending on where that volume of water gets you on the environmental response curve. For example, when bird populations breed in the Barmah Wetlands in the Murray, they do so in response to water levels. If the water then drops below the required level before breeding is complete, the nests will be abandoned. If environmental watering can’t be maintained until the birds have fledged, the benefit of using that water would be zero. The Victorian Environmental Water Holder has been using water in the past year to maintain required water levels for bird breeding events in Gunbower Forest and Barmah-Millewa Forest.

The understanding that thresholds must be met before any benefit can be realised is one that politicians can struggle with. Watching the way the new Murray-Darling Basin Plan operates will be interesting on many levels, but one of the most interesting things will be to see how this concept feeds into analysis of how effective the plan (and the accompanying water recovery) has been. The water provided under the plan is already less than that recommended to maintain the health of the Murray-Darling Basin.  If the benefits achieved are lower than we thought, we must consider whether we had sufficient water to exceed the lowest benefit thresholds.

Secondly, after the second bend in the 'S' shape, more water is no longer better, in terms of the benefits obtained per volume of water used. More benefit could potentially be obtained by using that water in another catchment, or to provide another flow component. Environmental water managers in Australia have never before had so much water requiring active management. At the Commonwealth level, most of the water entitlements held by the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder are entitlements in storage, and these entitlements are incredibly flexible – access to interconnected water delivery systems and the water market means that water can be delivered to a wide variety of locations. Each decision to use water is also a decision not to use it somewhere else. As a result, environmental water managers must not only consider effectiveness, but also efficiency.

Transition to efficiency as well as efficacy is not easy, and depends on detailed understanding of the response curves of the environment. In many cases, this science won’t exist yet, and environmental water managers will be learning on the job. But as the industry matures, we should start to see efficiency playing a bigger role in environmental water decision-making.

Transitions: policy to implementation to management

Environmental flows are recognised (and, increasingly, provided) by an ever-growing list of jurisdictions around the globe. As the number of countries with basic environmental flows commitments grows, I think it’s helpful to examine the way environmental flows is transitioning from policy, to implementation, to management. In particular, in locations where water recovery has been substantial, there has been a real shift in focus from the ‘more is better’ mantra of water recovery, to using existing environmental water effectively.

How do jurisdictions go from paying lip service in policy documents and legislation, to actually putting more water back in rivers and wetlands? In 2010, the WWF and Nature Conservancy released this report, The Implementation Challenge, on the challenge of transitioning from environmental flows policy to implementation. It draws on case studies from around the world, including Europe, the Americas, Africa, Australia and south-east Asia, and generates some helpful guidelines for enthusiastic environmental flows policy makers, helping them navigate the difficult transition from policy to implementation.

The first step is recognising the need for environmental flows, and doing the science and community engagement in local catchments to identify what the environmental flows should be, in order to protect the ecosystems and assets valued by that community. This is not a trivial step, but there are a number of well-documented processes that can be used in different water management regimes to get this done.

The next step, which is when I think it gets interesting, from a legal and policy perspective, is when the recommended flows are identified, and the responsible organization has to figure out how to deliver them. This can happen in three types of situation: (1) full allocation of water rights in the catchment, and existing rights or historical use patterns are being respected; (2) full allocation, but all rights to water are being renegotiated as part of setting the environmental flows; or (3) something less than full allocation, so that more water can be set aside for the environment without affecting existing users (if any).

Clearly, it’s easiest to implement environmental flows under scenario 3, and they become a constraint on future uses of water in the catchment. This can also represent the best outcome for the ecological health of the river, as it’s more likely to be maintained from the outset (rather than being clawed back from a state of degradation later).

Scenario 2 is possibly the most challenging, as everything is up for grabs. I think one of the best examples of scenario 2 is the water reform still underway in South Africa. Following constitutional reform in 1994, South Africa committed to major water reform. The 1998 National Water Act legally set aside water for basic human needs and an ecological reserve (flows to protect the ecological health of the water systems), which must be met before economic uses of water. Whilst this legal reform was a world first, and created a model for defining environmental water that has inspired other jurisdictions (including Australia), implementation has lagged well behind the law. There are many reasons for this, and I suspect one important reason might be that negotiating everything takes a long time, especially when there are historical uses of water for economic purposes. Even if these historical uses are legally downgraded, the former owners won’t want to give them up for nothing.

Scenario 1 is happening now, in many developed and developing countries. Scenario 1 happens after many years of water extraction, when communities and governments recognise the need for environmental flows to protect the health of rivers and wetlands. Enabling the environment to legally use water is the first step – but when all the water has been allocated to others, how do you give any to the environment? There are some great examples from the western USA and in the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia, where water has been recovered using a combination of purchase of water entitlements from existing users, and investment in water savings (through efficiency measures, or alternative water uses). In Australia, the environment is now one of the largest single holders of water entitlements, and the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder has large volumes in many catchments throughout the Murray-Darling Basin.

The final step in this transition is to management, and this step is the most recent. Where environmental flows policy programs have been successful, environmental water managers are now facing the task of managing this additional water. In some places, this water is only held as instream flows or rules-based water, requiring little to no management. But where environmental water entitlements are held in storage, and can be called out to extend or top-up natural flooding events, or keep wetlands alive during severe drought, management is essential. Environmental water managers now need to demonstrate that they are using this water effectively to deliver real, measurable, on-ground improvements in river health.

This transition from ‘more is better’ to effective management of the environmental water available is enabled by large volumes of environmental water. In most cases, there is still not enough water to restore complete health to the river in question, but the water hasn’t come for free, and there is often ongoing competition between private uses (such as urban water supply, irrigation and mining) and environmental uses of that water. In the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, we are coming to the end of the current water recovery phase, with the release of the new Murray-Darling Basin Plan. The challenge of taking a management approach to this new, massive portfolio of water entitlements is driving a raft of changes in the environmental water management industry, and the organisations responsible for managing the water. 

Welcome to the blog!

Environmental water management is changing. Driven by factors like climate change, drought, flood and increasing awareness of the plight of threatened species that depend on healthy rivers and wetlands, around the world, policy programs to restore environmental flows have proliferated. In some places, we are investing huge sums of money in recovering water for the environment. For example, in the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, the Commonwealth Government is investing AUD3.1 billion in water purchase, as well as another AUD5.8 billion in efficiency projects, which will also increase water availability. Under the newly released Murray-Darling Basin Plan, this will deliver 2750GL of environmental water (with another 450GL to follow).  Whilst this is the biggest program of its kind in Australia, state governments have also been investing large sums in environmental water recovery. This sort of investment is also taking place in the western states of the USA, where a range of government and not-for-profit environmental water organizations work with irrigators to restore instream flows.

In some ways, we've got more environmental water than we've ever had, since extractions reached their modern levels. Whilst recovery is still important, in many places, the emphasis is switching to the importance of managing the recovered water. Environmental water managers have to show their investors (taxpayers, or donors to private organizations) that they can get 'bang for buck' with their water. In some places, this is as simple as protecting the improved instream flows (not actually all that simple in practice!). In others, it can include making use of the opportunities and increased flexibility offered by active water markets, to move water around geographically, and convert water into money that can be invested in alternative methods to improve the health of aquatic habitat.

With more water, and more active management required, the role of environmental water managers, and the process of environmental water governance, has never been more important. How can environmental water be managed effectively, and efficiently? How can environmental water managers ensure they have sufficient flexibility to manage changing water needs, especially in a climate change future when extreme weather events might be more frequent? How should environmental water managers retain some independence from the politics of the government of the day, yet remain responsible to the public for managing a public resource?

It's never been a more exciting time to be an environmental water manager, or to be researching those who are. This blog will consider all these questions, and more, and will hopefully also include some guest authors who know far more about the activities of their own organizations than I do.