Australia needs to further develop its vegetated stormwater harvesting technologies, as they currently lag far behind other water treatment technologies.
Stormwater is a valuable potential resource for Australian towns and cities that is currently drastically underutilised. Better stormwater management would reduce pollution and erosion of urban waterways, while providing a significant alternative water source for a range of productive applications. Existing technologies are capable of providing these services, but urban water governance frameworks need to be updated to enable wider deployment of these distributed systems.
Key points:
- Better management of urban stormwater is essential. Poor management of stormwater leads to costs on society, the economy and the environment
- The full potential of urban stormwater is still to be realised
- Technological solutions to manage stormwater and provide community, economic and environmental benefits are ready to be deployed
A way forward
Australia has made major advances in stormwater management in the past decades. For example, our stormwater technologies have been exported to some of the most advanced water management regions in the world, including Israel and Singapore. However, to stay at the global forefront of stormwater management, and ensure that we keep providing responsible levels of flood and pollution protection for our growing cities, while taking full advantage of stormwater’s untapped potential, ATSE proposes the following actions:
Functional
- Australia needs to further develop its vegetated stormwater harvesting technologies, as they currently lag far behind other water treatment technologies. There should also be a strong commitment to maintaining these green, de-centralised systems, as well as investigation of potential potable use of stormwater through further treatment such as reverse osmosis.
- The nation needs to secure ongoing investments to implement stormwater water sensitive urban design technologies. This will ensure that we can delay augmentation of existing drainage infrastructure, making considerable savings. Whenever possible, renewal of ageing infrastructure should be undertaken in line with water sensitive urban design principles.
- Australia needs to develop robust economic evaluation models that can assess the total community costs and benefits of complex stormwater systems. The present models are too narrow in scope and cannot assess the true value of investments made into green stormwater systems that provide high amenity value to our cities while delivering on basic water services.
Policy-related
- Australia needs more sophisticated governance frameworks for managing multi-functional stormwater assets to transition its cities to more liveable places. For example, the key issues we face in the implementation of green systems pertain to the prevalence of an outdated paradigm of centralised water assets in our water sector. Stormwater systems are decentralised in nature. As such, they are notably different from single-function water systems for which the current governance models have been primarily developed.
- The nation needs to link stormwater management strongly to urban planning processes to maximise the wider benefits of green stormwater infrastructure and technologies to Australian communities. Currently water infrastructure plans are not strongly linked with urban planning processes, thus leading to ‘lost opportunities’ in the development of Australian cities – including the potential for broader rooftop capture and use.
Stormwater management should form part of a forward-looking strategic reform agenda, building on the lessons learnt through past national water reform, and stormwater research should be part of any national strategy for water science and research – as identified in ATSE’s 2014 position statement National Water Management: new reform challenges.
