Exactly right, same point as a few of us have made (including me).. The catchments are simply in the wrong places. Which is all a bit to late to counteract now. We've been having alot of rain here also, which is good.
The catchments aren't in the wrong place- when the dams were built, they were in all the right spots.
We can't go on building more dams where the water happens to be falling now- imagine spending billions of dollars and several years on a new dam- only to have the weather patterns change again?
Its like arguing that to fix the traffic problems, we need to build more roads- that just creates an incentive for more people to drive, creates more traffic!
Increasing water supply will only allow our wasteful management and use habits of water to continue for a few more years, until we need to find more supply!
How about making the most of the water falling on/ all around us.💡
Like I mentioned before: a recent report (Australia institute?? I think??) calculated that if every house had a rainwater tank, we would not need a new dam/ desalination plant for 20 years!💡
Do a few other things (not overly difficult or expensive) and we would have plenty of water for another 100 years, like for instance:
-If you legislated that toilets should only use grey water (eg from your washing machine/ rainwater tank) instead of drinking quality water to flush.💡
-Re-use grey water/ tank water for gardening
-Plant more natives, that typically require less water
-Fix leaking water supply pipelines, currently leaking BILLIONS of litres a year
-Make water more expensive? It's dirt cheap- just look at your water bill! No wonder people don't value it!
-Ban water intensive crops, like rice (
) and cotton
-Ban selling artesian water (for next to nothing) to water companies- Coke pays about $2 for enough water to fill an olympic pool- drained from our underground water supplies.
This stuff is really simple, easy to do, relatively cost-effective. If you really wanted to go the 'full hog', you could start doing things that actually inconvenience you/ require real lifestyle changes, like getting composting toilets.
The solutions are all there- there are plenty of experts telling us what we can do, lots of people willing to try to fix the problem too.
Problem seems to be that our leaders lack vision, and people don't tend to do these kind of things until it is really having a big, personal impact on them- in the case of water/ climate change- by the time this happens, we may be too far down the track!
💡 Some really simple, ultra low-tech, NO COST things you can do:
We have been re-cycling the water from our washing machine- simply putting the hose to one of our bins- (you would be amazed at how much water you get) - and then use it to water the plants- easy, and you save literally hundreds of litres of water! Some of us also do little things, like put a bucket in the shower, by the end of your shower, it has collected a bunch of water you can use in the garden!
