Australia - the Driest Continent : Melbourne Water's Conserve Water
Australia's rainfall is the lowest of the continents (excluding Antarctica). This low rainfall combined with very high evaporation leads to low river flows. Despite this, Australia has one of the highest per capita water consumption rates in the world.
Since 1939 restrictions have been applied in metropolitan Melbourne on 15 separate occasions to conserve water during drought. Drought is a natural occurrence that we must plan for and respect - we need to manage our water resources with utmost care. When it comes to resource planning, we need to increasingly look for innovative ways of doing more with less.
While two thirds of all the people on Earth use less than 60 litres of water a day the average Australian uses more than twice that amount during a single shower. In fact, Australians are among the biggest users of water in the world, especially around the home.
El Nino
Although the El Nino effect has only come to media prominence in recent times, El Nino has affected Australia since perhaps 5000BC and has played an important role in shaping our natural environment. Most distinctively Australian animals, like the kangaroo, are adapted to withstand long periods of drought and breed only when the rains come. Similarly, many native Australian plants have life cycles designed to take advantage of heavy rains, whilst producing seeds well adapted to survival for years during long droughts. As fully three-quarters of documented Australian droughts occurred in El Nino years, there is little doubt that our dry continent is the way it is because of El Nino.
Our people and culture, too, have evolved to cope with El Nino. Many scholars (for example, Bruce Chatwin, in his best seller The Songlines) believe that the Aboriginal Dreamings and their intense relationship with the land evolved at least in part because of the need to co-operate over vast distances to escape the tyranny of El Nino's droughts. Similarly, the very Australian concept of mateship probably also springs from the essential nature of co-operation in the harsh Australian outback.
Indeed, it was an El Nino inspired drought in 1812 that finally inspired Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth to find a path across the Blue Mountains, in search of new pasture. Ever since, El Nino (and its sister event, La Nina) have had a huge impact on Australian settlement.
In 1817, the explorer John Oxley turned back at the Lachlan River, convinced that at the continent's heart was an "inland sea". He was travelling during a La Nina, when rains were plentiful. When Major Thomas Mitchell explored the same region in 1835-36, he and his party lugged heavy whaleboats over 600 miles across arid terrain to find the Lachlan River "gone, with the exception of a few small ponds". Mitchell, of course, was travelling in an El Nino year.
Whether or not global warming is having an impact on the frequency and severity of El Nino events remains unclear, but it is a fact that two of the most severe El Ninos on record have occurred in the past 25 years. In this driest of continents, managing our water resources is crucial, and the uncertainty associated with weather patterns driven by recent El Nino effects has introduced an added complexity.