Paradigm shift to enhanced water supply planning through augmented grids, scarcity pricing and adaptive factory water: A system dynamics approach☆
Section snippets
Socio-environmental system context
Potable water security is a growing concern, as population growth, development and climatic change increasingly limit the potential of traditional rain-dependent sources for augmenting supply. This poses new challenges to the governance of potable water resource systems.
Whilst Australia may appear abundant in its water supply, only utilising approximately 5% of its total renewable freshwater resources (SoE, 2013), it faces gross geospatial supply-demand mismatches and is afflicted with the
Approach to representing systemic change
Previous water resource system models have typically been supply-side oriented. This research sought to integrate demand, supply and asset management processes, to create a more holistic representation of the coupled socio-environmental system, as illustrated in Fig. 1 and discussed below. For the purposes of this paper, asset management encapsulates both the financial interactions influencing the management of water infrastructure, and the operating procedures that determine the utilisation of
Systems model development and exploratory sCenariOS
Voinov (2008) explains that when a model can effectively take into account the essential features of a real-life system, its behaviour under stress will likely be similar to the behaviour of the prototype model. Essential variables for model operation were identified by reviewing locally based literature for region specific inputs and examining world literature for more generic variables and their behaviour. System norms and rules were informed by the SEQ Water Strategy Reports in combination
Forecasts for water supply and demand
1.5% population growth sees the SEQ population rise to 4.13 million by 2031, 5.57 in 2051 and 13.6 million by 2110. Annual Water Demand is highly sensitive to population growth, per capita water use and climate variability. For fluctuating population growth between 1.5 and 2%, and varying per capita demand as outlined in the previous section, Annual Water Demand ranges from 1.86 million ML/year to 3.65 million ML/year at the end of the 100 year simulation. 30 years from today, the minimum
Diversifying the traditional rain-dependent water supply portfolio
As set out by the SEQ Water Strategy (QWC, 2010, QWC, 2012b), the drought storage reserve is defined as the stock of water below 60% of the working capacity of the region's working water supply capacity. This is the current means for the system to deal with uncertainty over adverse short to medium term climatic conditions. The drought response plan states that the drought storage reserve, in combination with rain-independent supply, must provide at least 36 months' supply under water
Conclusions
This paper detailed the development of an SDM developed to explore the behaviour of the SEQ water resource system over the next 100 years under systemic change brought about by climate change and population growth. The current supply-side oriented approach to water governance was found to be ill-equipped to cope with these changes, leading to economic hardship and chronic water shortages.
Reorganisation of the system through new water governance practices were proposed and simulated. These
Acknowledgements
This research is part of a study on desalinated water in Australian bulk water supply networks, funded by a grant from the National Centre of Excellence in Desalination Australia (NCEDA) to the Alfred Deakin Research Institute (ADRI) at Deakin University, in a project jointly managed with the Smart Water Research Centre at Griffith University, and with technical cooperation from AECOM Ltd. The authors acknowledge valuable comments on this paper from Dr Helen Scarborough, David Downie, Dr Joel
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Thematic Issue on the Modelling Systemic Change.