Drought, bushfires, and flooding. Are we ready?

Australia has experienced all manner of extreme weather including drought, bushfires, and flash flooding over in the past 20 year. These extreme weather events are not typically expected to occur in such a succession in a short period of time.

Unfortunately, some of these conditions have affected the same areas of the country (particularly our east coast) leading to often long period of socioeconomic disruption. While most people think of State Emergency Services (SES) when they hear of these disasters, our water industry plays a critical role in responding to these disasters and managing the impact to our communities.

Victoria was hit by a prolong period of drought between 1998 and 2009. As a result, Environment Protection Agency (EPA) had predicted in 2007 that freshwater resources will be under extreme stress in the next 30 years specially in Victoria’s western catchments. This and other similar warnings prompted water corporations to launch water reduction campaigns in the state. Most of Victoria’s potable conservation programs such as Target 155 were established around this time.

Bushfires, most recently of which was experienced in the summer of 2019, put similar pressure on our water resources. Parks Victoria, DELWP and Melbourne Water collectively control over 150,000 hectares of catchments all over Victoria which makes them particularly vulnerable to natural disasters of any kind including bushfires. The bushfire in 2019-2020 were so extreme, Canadian and American firefighters were requested to assist with the firefighting effort in Victoria and NSW. Water corporations such as Melbourne Water are generally the first in responding to bushfires and they have programs in place for planned burns and increased monitoring and grass-cutting over summer months as preventative and early warning measures.

This of course takes us to the recent flash flooding around Australian east coast . Aside its devastating effects on people’s livelihoods in these areas, flash floods can also move both sediments and nutrients across vast areas of land and pollute catchments and degrade water quality (source). Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) in Victoria is responsible for flood warning and mapping and has programs in place to improve these systems such as FloodZoom.

It is important to acknowledge that these natural events are not necessary always negative. In fact, they are crucial in our environment’s health and regeneration. Changes in our climate however has increased their frequency and intensity which has made their management increasingly challenging for emergency services and water corporations alike. To effectively manage these types of events, we need to have preventative programs and disaster response capabilities embedded within our water authorities. The ultimate questions is how these programs will be funded in perpetuity and how they are centrally coordinated when the need arises.