Home > Events > Public lectures > Water management options for urban and rural Australia

PUBLIC LECTURES

Water management options for urban and rural Australia 2009

Converging insecurities: The water, energy, carbon and food nexus
Wednesday 4 November 2009

Andrew Campbell Managing Director Triple Helix Consulting Andrew Campbell is the Managing Director of Triple Helix Consulting and, for the foreseeable future, its sole employee. Andrew has been at the cutting edge of natural resource management in Australia for 25 years.  He has played influential roles in research (notably as CEO of Land & Water Australia from 2000-2006), in policy as a senior executive in the Australian Government, and in extension with the Victorian Government.  Andrew was instrumental in the development of Landcare, working with Rick Farley from the National Farmers' Federation and Phillip Toyne from the Australian Conservation Foundation to develop the proposal to then Prime Minister Bob Hawke that catalysed the Decade of Landcare.  Andrew was Australia's first National Landcare Facilitator from 1989-92. He also pioneered the concept of Whole Farm Planning as Manager of the privately-funded Potter Farmland Plan initiative in western Victoria in the 1980s.

MP3 format – 70MB

Recent modelling from the CSIRO suggests that the world will need to produce as much food over the next fifty years as it has in previous human history. Rapid increases in global food production have historically been driven in large part by clearing more land, cultivating more land, irrigating more land and using inputs of energy and nutrients more intensively.

The next agricultural revolution will need to deliver more and better food using less water and less land, in generally more variable and difficult climates, with steeply increasing prices for energy, nutrients and, hopefully, carbon. The age of abundant, cheap fossil fuel energy is coming to an end, for transport fuels in particular.

All of the world’s great irrigated food bowls have fully- or over-committed their surface water and groundwater resources. Global freshwater availability per capita is declining sharply. The implications of the looming oil crisis for Australian agriculture in particular are profound, irrespective of one’s views about climate change, but are receiving little policy attention.

This forbidding macro context is thrown into stark relief at the level of the farm, the rural community, the irrigation district or the regional economy. It is at this ‘real life’ scale that the convergence (and often collision) of water, energy, carbon and food becomes tangible, and the integration challenge crystallises. Yet at our national policy level, we continue to consider these issues as if they are separate, distinct, discrete. Our current approach is dis-integrated and myopic, centralised yet fragmented, and eerily complacent.

Drawing on current work on a National Water Knowledge and Research Strategy for Council of Australian Governments (COAG), and strategic planning work with Murrumbidgee Irrigation and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, this public lecture will attempt to weave together the intertwined threads of water, energy, carbon and food policy in an Australian context, sketching the contours of a forward-looking agenda for science and policy, commensurate with the immensity and urgency of the challenges before us.