Outline Future Options for Melbourne's Water Resource

Outline future options for Melbourne’s water resource

Abstract

Melbourne’s water reserves in the past 10 years have been exhausted; meanwhile climate change predictions indicate the pressure of water lack will be increasingly serious (Howe et.al 2005). This problem is not just for Melbourne, Australia and many other parts of the world also face to the water shortage problem. Since there is a grave water shortage in Melbourne, the policy of sustainable water management is becoming very important. In order to prevent further deterioration of water shortage in the future, the Victorian Government made a series of countermeasures. There are several projects to solve the scarcity of water problem in the future and work out Melbourne’s future water supply needs, such as water restriction in Melbourne; spending nearly 2 billion dollars to build one of the world’s biggest water desalination plants at South Melbourne; building catchment to collect and feed rain into eight of Melbourne’s reservoirs and protecting the water catchment area; establishing two large sewage treatment plants in east and west Melbourne. The other countries also did a lot to protect water resource such as Singapore used nearly half of the national area to build water reservoir; Moscow had developed high technology for Sewage treatment system. The Victorian Government dedicated in long-term water management to protect water security and in responding to Victoria's population growth and economic development; the government is confident in the face of drought and climate change challenges to reduce the influence of water shortage in the future.

The World Resource Institute’s statistic shows Australia is one of the countries whose consumption of energy and water resource per capita are most in the world. Each person living in Melbourne spends 392 Liters of water per day; it’s more than basic water requirement and comfortable water requirement (Hurlimann, 2008), even worse there is almost 10% of water has been wasted, not to be used efficiently, by household and industries in Melbourne. There are 3.6 million people living in Melbourne, in 2020 the population will increase 1 million in Melbourne (Australian social trend, 2010), as the Grove’s lecture ‘integrated catchment management’ covered ‘future water demand increases of population growth combined with an increase per capita usage’, which means these 392 Liters of using water will increase with the population’s growth, Melbourne needs more water supply but the climate change problem increases difficult in water supply, therefore several projects need to be implemented to protect water resource in the future.

In 2011, the Victorian Government told to people, because the climate change problem, from 1950,