As Dorothea Mackellar so eloquently captured in 1908 with her “of droughts and flooding rains” line in the poem that came to be known as My Country, Australia’s see-sawing weather predates World Environment Day.
But as our warming climate results in hotter temperatures and increasingly irregular rainfall patterns – even as the overall amount of rainfall decreases – it is likely that Mackellar would be shocked by what is transpiring.
Indeed, as this illustration from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes report, The State of Weather and Climate Extremes 2023, highlights, climate change is happening Australia-wide, and the see-saw is swinging ever wider.
Those “flooding rains” might suggest that water conservation is unnecessary, but river flows are expected to drop by up to a quarter over the next decade even as our major cities experience rapid population growth. With reduced inflows to catchments, water scarcity is on the increase, leading to towns running out of drinking water, more toxic cyanobacteria blooms, and construction of energy intensive desalination plants.
And where residential water conservation can be promoted via a single figure – Melbourne’s Target 155, for example – there is no single-figure equivalent for industry use. Instead, best practice water consumption measures need to be developed industry-by-industry and applied individually, which is a complex process for companies not currently assessing water use within their facilities.
Glisk is assisting industry via water efficiency audits that assess production water consumption practices and recommend ways to reduce water use. Typically, we tie water saving recommendations to energy use as combined cost of water and cost of energy support more robust investment decisions, but wherever heating, cooling, or pumping water is required, we usually find a cost-effective water conservation opportunity.
We have so far identified hundreds of millions of litres of potential water savings for industrial clients and expect to significantly increase that next financial year as we align with the “Drought Resilience” theme of World Environment Day.
Through Glisk’s expanding environmental consultancy, we combine our project delivery expertise and desire for a better world to assist customers realise their sustainability goals. We believe that the IT industry can be a catalyst for positive environmental change and that we can act as a force multiplier for our clients as we collectively restore and regenerate our environment.
For more information about our ESG offerings, please reach out via our contact form.
