I just love the way Australians name things.
The Millennium Drought or the "Big Dry" was a massive drought that started at
the end of the 20th century and went 10 years into the 21st.
This drought fundamentally changed Australian society. It forced both the state and central
governments to drastically reform how they managed and sourced their water.
In this video, we take a brief look at Australia's Millennium Drought.
## Drought Country
Australia is familiar with droughts.
In the 150 years from 1860 to 2010,
Australia has had a major drought somewhere on the continent in 82 years of them. So drought
is a normal part of Australian history. And Australians have seen some bad ones.
There was the Federation Drought - sometimes called the "Great Drought"
or "Long Drought" - which lasted from 1895 to 1902. Measured by the number of animals lost,
it was the worst drought in Australian history.
The Murray-Darling river systems are critical to much of Australia's
agricultural industry. The Darling River was dry for over a year. The
Murray River fell to just 2% of its normal flow during the summer months.
Thanks to effective government, little to no people died from thirst or starvation. However,
the drought devastated animal populations. Over 52 million sheep and 40% of Australia's
cattle died - mostly from starvation with serious economic repercussions.
The Australian colonies had just experienced a bad economic
depression a few years earlier. Rural workers suffered poverty, isolation and hardship as
their livelihood literally dried up, shriveled and died in front of them.
Australia's second pretty bad drought in recorded
history happened from 1937 to 1945 during World War II.
Compared to the Federation Drought, the World War II drought had more days
of rain but the periods of intense dryness were far worse. Strangely,
it affected both the northwest and southeast Australian areas at the same time.
Forests dried out, leading to a series of massive bushfires in the
state of Victoria in January 1939 called the Black Friday Bushfires.
Fanned by extreme heat and high winds, the fires killed 71 people and burned
down 650 buildings including entire towns. Ash fell as far as New Zealand.
## The Pacific Ocean
So drought is a way of life in Australia. What
is it about the climate that makes droughts so frequent?
The big difference between Australia's climate and that of many other temperate regions in the
world is that it is influenced by conditions in its surrounding oceans that can last for years.
Over in the Pacific Ocean we have El Niño. This is where the waters off Australia get relatively
cooler as compared to the Pacific waters off South America, which get relatively warmer.
This leads to high atmospheric pressure. In high pressure systems,
air goes downwards and winds blow outwards away from the high pressure zone.
This hurts cloud formation, creating warm and dry conditions in Southeast Australia.
## La Niña
El Niños are frequent causes of drought in Australia's heavily populated southeast region.
The Federation Drought for instance was caused by sustained El Niño activity.
Such droughts are often broken by La Ninas, which are the inverse situation of the El Niño
- abnormal warming of the waters off Australia as compared to the waters off South America.
These in turn can bring low atmospheric pressure, more evaporating ocean water, and rising hot air
to create clouds. More clouds mean big rains and possibly floods in southeast Australia.
I should note that the presence of a La Niña does not always one-to-one lead to storms.
There are other influences too - particularly involving the polar oceans below Australia.
The Southern Annular Mode or Antarctic Oscillation describes a belt of winds
that continuously circle around Antarctica in a westerly direction.
The winds can either be "positive" or "negative" - and that describes their
north-south location. If they are positive, the winds contract towards Antarctica,
which can bring less winter rain to certain parts of Australia.
## The Drought Begins
We generally say the drought began in 2001,
but there is an argument for it starting all the way back in 1997.
The 1997-1998 water season had been an El Nino year, so it had been pretty dry. But then in the
years after that until 2000, rainfall over the whole country was near the long term average.
The year 2001 had been normal for most of
Australia. The middle two-thirds of the continent including North,
Central, and most of the Western Australia received an above-average amount of rain.
However, other parts of Australia did not fare so well. Eastern Australia
received below average rain. And the country's southwestern region
fell into a drought with some of the lowest rains on record.
The next year 2002 was Australia's fourth driest year since 1900. 99%
of the state of New South Wales was declared to be in a drought.
## Relentless
This dryness had been caused by an El Niño that finally broke down at the end of 2002.
As a result in 2003, Australia as a whole experienced about as
much rainfall as the long-term average - with some areas like the north receiving
above average rains and the southeast at about average or slightly below average.
This became a defining trait of the Millennium Drought. The drought was
not super-dry. Australia has experienced much more intense dry droughts before.
The drought in 1982-1983 for instance had been pretty bad.
During that 1982 drought, caused by a particularly strong El Niño,
it was reported that trees that had been around since Captain Cook succumbed to the dryness.
Entire wheat crops died out for the first time in decades, costing billions of Aussie dollars.
And then a massive fire called the Ash Wednesday Fire killed 75 people.
Newspapers described the damage to the city of Adelaide as like being covered in napalm.
So things did not get quite as bad as that. Throughout its life,
the Millennium Drought's only truly bad dry years across the whole country were 2002 and 2006.
The thing about the Millennium Drought that made it so distinct was that there
was no above-average rainfall in between all those dry years.
There was no La Niña at all from 2000 to 2006, and when La Niña events did take place in 2007
and 2008, they did not cause as much rain as it should. That is because the South
Annular Mode - those westerly winds near Antarctica - were in their positive phase.
Long story short, Australians could not recharge their aquifers and reservoirs
with above-average rains. Combine that with consecutive dry seasons
and exceptionally high heat levels and you got a slow but relentless drain on water storage.
## Cutting Demand
Australian cities started experiencing water shortages as soon as 2004.
Each of the cities manage their own water supply and storage
systems so the amount of water they had available to them varied. For example,
Brisbane's existing water storage facilities were capable of storing 6 years of water use.
Adelaide on the other hand can store only about 10
months since most of their water came from the rapidly drying Murray River.
This lack of water became a frequent discussion topic. Photographs of dry
lakebeds made the news. The publicity pushed state and city governments to pass
policies to address the water shortages from both the demand and supply sides.
Demand-wise, the main policy the cities used were water restrictions - implemented over
a series of stages targeting highly visible uses of water.
Sydney's Level 3 restrictions in 2003 for instance banned sprinkler
usage as dam levels dropped below 40%. Other residential restrictions include car washing,
hard surfaces washing, and garden work. So on.
In practice, they were difficult to enforce and
mostly depended on people's community spirit, volunteers, and self-policing.
Yet it does seem like they did work, despite some murmurs by a few disgruntled people.
Government statistics show that household water consumption per capita declined 20%
overall from 2004-2005 to 2008-2009. And all the states and territories cut
their water usage except for those guys up in the Northern Territory.
## Expanding Supply
All of the mainland Australian capital cities
started building desalination and water recycling plants.
The water recycling plants were supported in these efforts with funds from the Australian
central government's National Water Commission. The commission ran until 2012
and provided $1.48 billion for projects. Many of them involved water recycling.
I talked about water recycling before in my video about Singapore's Newater. In it,
I mentioned that one town in Queensland that refused to accept an advanced water
recycling plant because of the "toilet to tap" issue.
The Queensland government had scheduled a vote on the issue May 2007. But with
the water crisis intensifying - Brisbane's daily water consumption had been cut from
300 to 139 liters per person - Queensland Premier Peter Beattie canceled the vote.
The government then just went ahead to develop a large water
recycling project - the Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme.
It quickly added 3 advanced water treatment plants which drew their water from existing
wastewater plants and injected the water into the state's Lake Wivenhoe reservoir.
The scheme is Australia's largest recycled water project and cost about
$2.5 billion - $400 million of which was funded by the aforementioned National Water Commission.
Similar resistance to the water recycling issue caused problems in other towns in Queensland,
New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory. In many cases,
the government opted for alternatives rather than building new water recycling plants.
## Desalination
The desalination plants have been some of the
most public government responses to the water shortage situation.
Australia has had desalination plants since the turn of the century,
but the drought saw five cities spend $13.2 billion to rapidly build these
facilities. These are some of the largest infrastructure projects in Australian history.
Perth kicked off the trend with the Kwinana Desalination plant, a wind-powered reverse-osmosis
plant that is one of the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere.
Completed in 2006, it today generates 45 billion
liters of water a year - slaking the thirst of 17% of Perthians.
Next was the city of the Gold Coast,
where Margot Robbie grew up. They built a Desalination Plant in the suburb of Bilinga.
Then after that came another Perth plant, a Sydney plant, an Adelaide plant, and a Melbourne plant.
There is nothing wrong with desalination plants. The issue is that they have
well-known environmental, financial, and energy costs. For instance, their usage of power.
One of the issues is that when it started raining again,
desalinated water - as well as recycled water for that matter - became no longer
economically competitive according to the way the accounting works.
So these facilities get mothballed as spare capacity in case of an emergency where dam
levels drop to a specific level - 60% in the case of the Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme.
I am not necessarily sure whether this is the best use of all that heavy invested capital.
Water recycling and desalination plants - like semiconductor fabs - are the most economically
efficient when they are constantly being used. But it is good to have the capacity.
## Agriculture & Rivers
All in all, however, the wealthy cities were okay. The same can't be said for the farmers.
The drought wreaked absolute havoc on them. Intense heat and lack of
rain dried up the dirt, destroying crops and kicking up dust storms.
It is claimed that the country's agricultural sector lost $7.4 billion in production and
70,000 jobs in the 2002-2003 years alone.
I should note however that this number is based on the theoretical value of crops not planted.
Australian sheep farmers saw the numbers in their flock decline by half,
the lowest since 1905. Dairy cow herds declined by 25%.
In annual crops like wheat and rice, there was major volatility. Rice is
a particularly water-thirsty crop and farmers got flak for growing it.
That is despite the fact that Australian rice farmers are some of the best in the
world when it comes to yields and growing premium-priced variants.
Nevertheless, rice production plunged from a peak in 2000 to a low in the 2006-2008 period,
which helped contribute to the great Asian rice price crisis that happened in 2008.
Australian wheat farmers suffered other issues. For a long time,
the Australian Wheat Board served as a single desk negotiating and
setting export wheat prices. Domestic prices are completely deregulated.
But after a series of embarrassing scandals,
this was replaced with a free market export system. Grain farmers now have
to negotiate and set their own prices of export grain. That took some adjustment.
The biggest rumble of all was the country's water markets reform. In 2007,
the Australian government passed the 2007 Water Act which expanded a long-running series of
reforms to regulate water usage allocation rights in the critical Murray-Darling Basin.
Economists argued that this water market would create a more economical outcome
overall. But you also have to admit it will not benefit everyone. In the market's early years,
more than a few farmers suffered in selling off their rights early
on only needing to buy them back at elevated prices due to low allocations.
## Agricultural Responses
The farmers struggled financially.
A farmer might spend $200 dollars Australian per hectare to plant
wheat. If the drought kills the crop then the farmer gets nothing from it.
At the same time, market prices for some of their most valuable crops like wine grapes were
at a multi-year low due to a worldwide glut. It is easy to see how this combo can rack up debt.
In 2007, the National Australia Bank mentioned that the average farm held
debt in excess of $412,000 dollars. To help keep the farmers and other small businesses afloat,
the Australian government spent $4.5 billion in transfer payments.
Some policymakers argued against this - pointing out that many lands in Australia
are not economically sustainable without low cost water. In 2007,
the government offered $150,000 Exit Grants for the farmers to walk away from their farms.
In the end, the biggest and the smallest farms made out the best. The biggest farms
because they were big. The smallest - family farms with less than $100,000
in income - because they made money doing something else off the farm.
The drought ended a generation of future Australian family farms. A
survey taken at the end of the drought finds that less than 30% of Australian
farmers expect their children to take up the job.
## The Drought Ends
The drought began to lift at about the 2008-2009 water season.
Some areas exited the drought sooner rather than others. In November 2008,
there was an above-average amount of rain falling on much of Australia - including South Australia,
the Northern Territory, and Western Australia.
Farmers were able to start planting some of their crops. Cotton and canola
plantings were up 50% - a sign that things had started to turn.
However, the drought continued for the heavily populated areas of southeast
Australia - with devastating consequences.
In 2009, a massive heatwave sparked a series of bushfires that ripped through Victoria. The fires
were called Black Saturday and killed 173 people and burned over a million acres of land.
Finally in 2010, the drought broke with a very strong La Niña causing massive floods
called the "Big Wet". The rains came so hard that it became a natural disaster in
of itself. 35 people died in the flooding and billions of dollars of damages were incurred.
Shortly after that, the western Queensland and northeast New
South Wales regions experienced yet another drought. And so it goes.
## Conclusion
Up until the 1980s, droughts were seen and treated as natural disasters.
A climate abnormality similar to floods or cyclones. But throughout the 1980s,
scientists began to argue that we should treat these droughts
more as part of Australia's natural rainfall variations.
This change in policy sparked a great deal of controversy. Farmers pointed out that they were
feeding the nation, and that they couldn't control whether or not a drought would happen to them.
But the government was working off data that was essentially correct. Droughts
were already a way of life in Australia before the world's climate started to
change. The Millennium Drought was a only herald of things to come.