Last week I talked about some of the ways that urban water is management in my home city, Adelaide. I had a challenging comment on how water should be freely available. It was interesting today to read what Professor Mike Young of the University of Adelaide and the SA Government’s Sustainability Roundtable said. I really like his view point. This is summarised in several dot points below:

• Water management has become highly political and used simultaneously to pursue equity objectives.
• The main role of price is to reveal value and setting the price of water according to value, stimulates innovation.
• Governments are currently crowding out private investment in water management and this has led to a lack of innovative solutions to water management.
• Having water as a tradeable commodity generates an extremely strong interest. People generally want to be able to buy water and be free of water restrictions.
• Discussion about water at the moment focuses on shortages but if an urban water management system was based on its value, this could open up opportunities for innovation and investment.
• Government is reluctant to allow private enterprise to enter the system. Under the current system, business is hesitant to enter the water market because it is too risky to compete with government monopolies. Water is still a political football.
• The current water management system is based on a grant/subsidy culture. Governments have subsidised and controlled water management systems in Australia rather than looking for alternative solutions and allowing business investments.

Perhaps not so popular politically with some sections of society but this is the direction we need to move.

One of the problems identified as the EcoForum I attended in Sydney 2 weeks ago was that while we need companies to compete and innovate to enable us to come up with the new technology we so desperately need, 50% of our population is philosophically opposed to competition. Here is another debate we have to have.

Technorati Tags: Pricing water, water, give it value, value, EcoForum, Sydney, Australia, Adelaide, SA Government’s Sustainability Roundtable, Mike Young, University of Adelaide, ISO 14001

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 9:45 am and is filed under water resources & pollution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.