Dealing with drought: Projections and solutions
Our 7 Sep 2022 Australian Water School webinar “Megadrought: the new normal?” explores the current crisis in the Colorado River Basin and the challenges behind implementing conservation measures like greywater recycling to alleviate shortages.
View the recording on the AWS YouTube channel here:
The webinar description and additional details on the expert presenters and panellists are available here.
Practical Engineering’s Grady Hillhouse provides an excellent summary of the current situation here:
Grady asks an intriguing question: If water storage reservoirs are optimally sized, shouldn’t they go dry every once in a while?
He also provides an example of a dam that was constructed and then never filled due to deviations from the historical trends that were applied in the design. How many similar mistakes are we currently making with our infrastructure designs when we ignore non-stationarity in the data?
Drought-related Resources:
- Colorado River Basin conditions from drought.gov
- University of Arizona’s Centre for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions (Kathy Jacobs, Director)
Greywater Resource
Australia:
- Australian Government – Wastewater reuse
- Greywater Fact Sheet and introduction video from Gardening Australia
- New South Wales: Sydney Water Greywater Use
- Victoria: EPA Victoria – Household Greywater reuse
- South Australia: SA Water – Greywater
- Tasmania: What Is Greywater?
- Queensland: Greywater Installation Guidelines
- Queensland: Greywater use in the home
- New South Wales: NSW Health Domestic Greywater Reuse
- Western Australia: Water Corporation’s Greywater Guide
- Western Australia: Code of Practice for the Reuse of Greywater in Western Australia
United States:
- Use of Greywater in Urban Landscapes in California
- Greywater Recycling in Santa Clara County: A Quantitative Study and Financial Analysis
University of California at Berkeley Masters Project, K. Price, 1996
International:
- World Health Organization Overview of Greywater Management
- World Health Organization Guidelines for the safe use of greywater
Related Australian Water School webinars:
Relevant articles:
- The Vanishing River, ABC foreign correspondent article, 8 Sep 2022
- As Colorado River Dries, the U.S. Teeters on the Brink of Larger Water Crisis, ProPublica article, 25 Aug 2022
- ‘Hunger stones’ resurface across Europe as a warning from droughts past, LeMonde article, 10 Sep 2022
- Megadrought intensifies, NBC News, 16 Aug 2022
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