coolmelbourne.org

Well, according to the CSIRO our water resources are likely to keep shrinking due to growth in demand and less rainfall. This will affect irrigation, our Melbourne environment, industry and river flows.

Less rain with more evaporation leads to less runoff into rivers – we expect less runoff by 2030 in all 29 Victorian dam catchments.

Melbourne households (although we have improved) are terrible at conserving water – the great news is that we can only get better.

A recent study found that Victorian households (along with the rest of Australia) held the worst record for water use, despite industry and farmers being fairly good at it. When they looked at household water use per person we were …well …we are ordinary!

The average person in Melbourne uses 341,000 litres (that’s more than eight backyard swimming pools) worth of water each year – the most in the world on the driest inhabited continent.

The closest to us is Canada with 279,000 litres per year (around six or seven backyard pools).

The Americans use 217,000 litres per person (five or six backyard pools), the Chinese 26,000 (just over half a backyard pool) and Bangladesh just 16,000 litres (less than half a backyard pool).

The world average is 57,000 litres (almost one and a half backyard pools).

We need to lift our game. Using water tanks to capture all the rainfall from our roofs will be a great start. Today, all the rainfall on that falls on Melbourne just goes down the drain. Even though our recent rainfalls have been the lowest on record, enough rain still falls on Melbourne every year to supply us with our drinking water.

This map of Victoria shows that we are having less rain than we have ever had before. The parts with the darkest red show which places have been having the lowest amounts of rainfall EVER!!! - Click image to enlarge.