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Metropolis 'may become ghost city'
By Maggie Ayre
BBC Costing The Earth

People in Perth use more water than any other city in Australia
The Australian of the year 2007, environmentalist Tim Flannery, once
predicted that Perth in Western Australia could become the world's
first ghost metropolis, its population forced to abandon the city due
to lack of water.
While some critics scoffed at this idea, there's no doubt that it has
forced the city to wake up to the fact its water is running out and
that it can no longer rely on its natural supply.

Australians are some of the world's greatest energy consumers, and
people in Perth use more water than any other city in Australia.

Yet theirs is also the driest climate in the world, and Perth sits
right on the edge of a vast desert, an island of greenery in the form
of European style parks and gardens.

Consumption paradox

The city's case is a fascinating paradox of over consumption matched
by a dawning awareness of climate change that's resulting in an urgent
response to safeguard the city's water supplies for the future.

Perth sits above a vast ancient aquifer of 40,000-year-old water that
has traditionally been the main source of drinking water. But in the
mid 1970s there was a dramatic shift in climate that resulted in a
decline of between 15% and 20% in winter rainfall.

The combination of rising temperatures and a lack of wet winters has
meant a steady decline in water levels in the aquifer and they are not
being recharged.

By the mid 1990s scientists realised they were facing more than a
prolonged drought, that this was in fact climate change.

Don McFarlane of the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research
Organisation (CSIRO) says: "Climatologists tell us that it is the most
profoundly affected city in the world. People have accepted that it is
climate change.

"In other parts of the world people are thinking it's something that's
going to happen to them in the next ten or thirty years and that
they've got time to adjust. We've found we've been living with it for
thirty years now and we're having to adjust very quickly."

City of industry

Although perhaps the residents of the city have been slow to respond
to the threat of climate change, there has been intense pressure on
water experts to find new sources of water for the city.

Australia as a whole is facing a water shortage
Perth is growing rapidly thanks to its thriving mining industry and
the population will soon top two million people, attracted there by a
high standard of living.

The city is made up of suburbs that stretch for more than 70km along
the coast of the Indian Ocean.

People consume a lot of energy. It's a car dependant city with little
public transport. Many of the luxury houses overlooking the ocean
(known locally as "starter mansions") boast currently fashionable
black roofs that soak up the heat in temperatures of up to 42 degrees
in summer, and produce a greater need for air conditioning inside.

And ironically, although it's a desert climate, Perth prides itself on
being a garden city boasting vast expanses of beautifully kept lawns
and parks complete with water hungry plants and flowers.

And many residents can extract water for these gardens directly from
the aquifer. There are over 150,000 unlicensed boreholes in Perth's
back gardens that allow householders unlimited access to groundwater
for watering.

Yet the Water Corporation is reluctant to clamp down on private water
usage even though before current restrictions people were often
watering their gardens in the middle of the day when the water was
most likely to evaporate and be wasted.

'Mining water'

One gardener we spoke to for Costing the Earth told us that 90% of his
water usage is for his garden and that it would break his heart if he
ever had to stop watering and give up his beloved green lawns.

But Pierre Horwitz, Associate Professor of Eco systems of the
University of Perth questions why drinking water is being used for
gardens to such an extent and says people have got to start using less
water.

"If you compare our individual consumption rates they're almost a
third higher again than those in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

"Now you just can't continue to sustain that." Horwitz says people
have been too complacent about the availability of water because of
the vast ground water resource.

"We're actually mining water. This is a non-renewable resource and we
have to constrain our behaviours so that we use what's replenishable
rather than eat into our reserves."

Following this early wake up call to the onset of climate change,
Perth's water experts are now leading the way in exploring new ways of
providing water for this thirsty city. One of them involves recharging
the aquifer with treated waste water - left over from people's washing
machines and dish washers.

There's plenty of it available because of the increasing population.
Until now, most of it has been going straight out of the kitchen into
the ocean. That's 111 billion litres of "wasted" waste water.

Environmental concerns

That water is now being put into some of Perth's lakes to be treated
naturally in the soil before topping up the groundwater in the
aquifer.

At the moment it's not going to be used for drinking water but for
irrigation and in the lakes for the benefit of wildlife. But there are
concerns about potentially harmful effects on the environment, which
scientists are monitoring very closely.

Research scientist Simon Toze says "The biggest impact for the
environment are nutrients which could cause algal blooms. Also trace
chemicals like hormones, things we excrete. We know most nutrients are
taken out naturally by processes. We don't know so much about the
trace organics."

There are well documented concerns about the so called "gender
bending" hormones in water causing fish to change sex, but Toze says
that so far resulsts seem to show that things like oestrogen are
stripped out during the bio processes taking place in the aquifer.

Sometime soon though, the citizens of Perth could be looking at
drinking recycled water, and currently Toze and his colleagues are
doing a lot of work to try and persuade people to get over what they
call "the yuck factor".

Current prices

He says that the recycled water would remain even longer in the
aquifer to allow nature to remove any harmful nutrients, possibly for
up to fifty years, before being used for drinking water.

Toze claims by then it would too pure to drink, better than what comes
out of our taps at the moment. This is one solution to Perth's water
crisis, although it may not be the most popular one.

There's a joke doing the rounds that goes: the good news is we'll all
soon be drinking recycled sewage. The bad news is there won't be
enough to go round. These may be desperate times for Perth's water
supply, but the city is in the fortunate position of being fairly
wealthy with a government that is prepared to invest in expensive
water projects.

The latest is a state of the art desalination plant that came online
last November and will supply 17% of the city's drinking water.

It's partly powered by a wind farm further up the coast and the city's
Water Corporation claims it's the most efficient and environmentally
friendly of its kind anywhere in the world.

Gary Crisp, the Corporation's Desalination Engineer is proud of their
achievements: "What we've done (in Perth) is truly pioneering stuff.

"There's no one else really to help us so we have to bite the bullet
and do the job ourselves."

However, he does concede that ultimately Perth is going to have to pay
more for its water.

"At the current prices in Australia there's not enough water to go
around and there's not enough incentive for people to use less.' And
that is the only true solution to Perth's water crisis - learning to
live with less water and maybe even giving up some of those Astroturf
green lawns.

Otherwise that prediction that it could become a ghost town may yet
come true.