Ludwig the article suggests one way that it can be done. At its heart is what bureaucrats call hypothecation dedication.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothecation

Whenever a proposal such as in the article is suggested the word hypothecation is immediately wheeled out to stop the proposal. (I know because I have been proposing various schemes based on this idea for many years) Note that politicians use it when it suits them as a way of increasing taxes without appearing to increase taxes so it can be done. (The Ansett airticket tax, the petrol tax etc).

The idea is to ask consumers of resources to pay extra for something but to tag the money collected for some other purpose. Politicians like the idea of collecting money to spend particularly if it is disguised but they hate the idea of being held to account for the expenditure. Hence the idea of tagging money for sustainability is resisted. Even more so if the expenditure is controlled by people who are elected by those whose actions say they believe in sustainability.

It the system can be introduced it will "solve" the problem because once a system, as envisaged in the article is put in place, it will fight to preserve itself as is the way of all systems.

The article proposes giving rewards to consumers who act in a sustainable way and giving those same consumers the right to control the expenditure where the use of the rewards is restricted to sustainability. This will work in all areas where sustainability is an issue be it water, transport, education, health care, land etc. The reasons why it will work is that it brings “the market principle” to expenditure as well as consumption, it has a system to keep it in place and it is more democratic as it gives power over sustainability expenditure to more people not to the elected few.

I appreciate the idea Fickle, although I must say I have never heard of hypothecation.

Not meaning to be a total pessimist, I can point out a couple of problems.

Firstly, it is the government that is horribly antisustainability-oriented, not the general community. If the community could see that extra charges were rendered in the genuine interests of sustainability, then they would very likely accept them. There is no reason for the government to be cryptic about it.

Secondly, in order for those charges to be accepted as genuine, the whole growth paradigm will have to change, and the government would have exhibit sustainability ethics across the board.

Hypothecation is thought of as sneaky. Hypothecation in the interests of sustainability, implemented by governments that continue to promote grossly unsustainable ever-increasing demand on resources, can only be thought of as doubly sneaky, if not outrightly perverted.

It is not appropriate for a government to reward consumers for being more frugal and sustainability-oriented, if that same government is going to continue to facilitate ever-more consumers. A system of sustainability-oriented consumption and expenditure sounds good. But again, if it is overridden by a government that it hell-bent on increasing the scale of operations with no end in sight, then it is just another blind alley that we are being led up.

Ludwig your objections are cause for hope. They are based on the belief that most politicians and people have growth as a prime if not only objective. I believe this is true.

What is being proposed will achieve economic growth. Here is the argument

We can increase economic growth with respect to water by using it more efficiently to achieve the desired outputs. One way to do this is to reward people who use less water for their needs, require the rewards to be spent on methods to increase sustainability and give control of the reward funds to those who have the rewards.

What is proposed is pro-growth and so is likely to happen. ALL economic growth PER HEAD of population occurs because we get more outputs from the same inputs - i.e. we use our resources more efficiently - not because we use more inputs.

We need a trial to show that the proposal works. Watch this space as there is a good chance we will get a trial and you and others can help by supporting the concept.

Fickle, what you appear to be suggesting is improvement in the per-person usage of water while the number of users continues to increase. This is exactly the sort of thing that I very strongly object to, because it amounts to pretending to do something about sustainability while the magnitude of increasing demand on the resource rides right over the top and renders it meaningless. Continuous increase in the number of consumers, in places like the Gold and Sunshine Coasts and just about every other large centre, will very effectively cancel out improvements in per person efficiency.

Yes the average economics per person would be improved if the average usage declined. But overall economics wouldn’t be improved if the overall resource continued to become more stressed.

With your idea, you are pandering to continuous economic growth, which is fundamentally opposite to a stable economic regime and hence sustainability. Yes your ideas might work in the context of the continuous growth paradigm in the first instance, but the very purpose of those ideas would be lost.

We do need real per-person economic growth, instead of the current situation of overall economic growth where the average per-person growth is nil or negative. But even per-person economic growth must realise limits, not continuous increase.

We simply MUST fight the very foundation of continuous growth thinking and not pander to it in any way, if we are to regain a healthy and secure water resource supply vs demand ratio and hence a high and secure quality of life.

Ludwig it depends on the arithmetic. If "productivity" causes a decrease in demand of 5% per year and population increases by 3% then we are in front. If productivity is -5% and population increase is -3% then we behind. With water recycling we can probably do much much better than 5%. As mentioned previously at Sydney Olympic Park residential only 6% of the water used comes from mains. If we did the same thing for other population centres as we are doing at Olympic Park we could reduce our water demands on dams by 94%. Putting it another way we could increase the population of Sydney by 16 times and not use any more water from dams.

Yes it does depend on the arithmetic, or more precisely on the rate of improvements in per-person efficiency compared to the rate of increase in ‘per-persons’.

On the Gold and Sunshine Coasts we would have to see an enormous rate of increased efficiency just to break even with the growth rate.

We can potentially do much better than 5% improvement in water-use efficiency. But even in slow-growing areas really significant gains of say 20% are going to be quickly cancelled out or at least greatly diluted, all else being the same.

I think we could potentially improve water usage from dams by 50% or more, if we all had large water tanks, implemented recycling and had to pay through the nose for town water. But why should we be forced to go down that sort of a path when the public water supply system has proven to be very good for a very long time, and is mainly being threatened now by blindly stupid overextended growth?

Yes, we have arguably come into drier times, or times of less reliable rainfall. This is a good reason to prepare the whole community to be able to get by on much-reduced water provision when necessary. And of course, it presents an absolute imperative to stop increasing demand on now unreliable water resources.

But it should not be used as an excuse to make everyone tighten their belts so that human expansion can continue unhindered