I am utterly convinced that one of the more interesting growth areas for employment of water professionals is in corporate risk management. Almost every manufacturing and agricultural process requires water, and any firm in the business of making or selling things will find water inputs at some stage of their supply chain. Since most power stations are massive water users, any business that uses power also has a water risk profile. Water risks are both quantitative and qualitative, temporal and spatial.

In a recently published report the Pacific Institute listed a number of approaches corporates should take to water risk management.

• Measure the company’s water footprint (i.e., water use and wastewater discharge) throughout its entire value chain, including suppliers and product use.
• Assess physical, regulatory and reputational risks associated with its water footprint, and seek to align the evaluation with the company’s energy and climate risk assessments.
• Engage key stakeholders (e.g., local communities, non-governmental organizations, government bodies, suppliers, and employees) as a part of water risk assessment, long-term planning and implementation activities.
• Integrate water issues into strategic business planning and governance structures.
• Disclose and communicate water performance and associated risks.

If I had any kind of manufacturing in China in my supply chain, I would be looking very carefully at my water risk, given the impending water crisis there.

After writing the last post about pipes, I was interested to come across a company called Driptech on Linkedin. The founders studied  the  Stanford Institute of Design: Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability  course. Driptech aims to deliver an extremely low cost drip irrigation system to developing country farmers, who cannot afford the currently available drip technology, so now use low efficiency flood irrigation.

Their innovation is in the manufacturing and distribution process rather than in the technology itself, but has the potential to have enormous impact on global water efficiency and food production. Well done guys.

The Entrprenurial Design for Extreme Affordability course  looks amazing, and it is well worth checking out their website. They have a definite water focus, with a number of projects focusing on developing low cost human powered pumping solutions.

In my view, the biggest winner from climate change and water scarcity will be the pipe industry.

It is no secret that there is a global crises in agricultural water supplies which could threaten world food supplies in the not so distant future. The good news is that agricultural water use is so inefficient that the shortfall should be easily made up with efficiency gains. The main way to improve irrigation efficiency? Replace open channels with pipelines to reduce evaporation.

Pipelines are also a way to manage climate uncertainty for urban populations. We have seen already in Australia that the impacts of climate change are highly localised, a town dam in one area may have unprecedented low levels of inflow, while 100 kilometres away rainfall has increased in the catchment of the neighboring town. Pipelines linking dams throughout a region is one way to guarantee urban water supply.

Meanwhile in China, the same principle is operating on a much larger scale, with the South-North Diversion Project connecting all of China’s major rivers to supply the water-short North.

Of course, where you find pipes, you also find pumps. Norit Nijhuis is supplying the pumps for the Eastern section of China’s  pipeline.

Keep an eye out for growth in the pipes and pumps sector!

Well, Melbourne desal has been awarded to the Thiess-Degremont-Mac Bank consortium. Compared to Veolia-John Holland-ABN, the winning team is coming off a relatively low base of work. Veolia and John Holland are now in an unenviable sitution of coming off a massive 08/09 and facing a very quiet 09/10.

This was the outcome that would cause maximum impact on the labour market; let the adjustment begin.

Things are a bit grim in the water jobs market in Australia currently. The GFC effect has combined with a significant but unconnected drop-off in the volume of infrastructure projects. With $9b Western Corridor project and Gold Coast Desal  wrapping up in Queensland, and design work on Sydney Desal largely complete, the engineering consultancies and construction firms suddenly have a lot of free staff on their books.

With skill shortages fresh in their memories, firms have been reluctant to lay off good people, but are certainly not hiring. This has been compounded by the GFC related slow-down in mining, and overseas markets. Consultancies are moving people across from mining into water projects, and from slow markets overseas into Australia. Consequently large projects like Perth2 Desal and Adelaide desal have not resulted in significant new job creation.

This has been compounded by the situation in regional NSW, where stalled governance reforms have basically stopped all infrastructure work while local governments wait to see what the outcome will be.

Looking on the bright side, there is still some significant treatment plant work on the horizon in Queensland, with governance reforms being finalised. Tasmania, suffering from a changed rainfall regime and run-down infrastructure, has just completed their water and wastewater governance reforms, which will release plenty of work there. Melbourne’s dams sitting at 27% as I write, and with another El Niño on the way, I can see a major  infrastructure round coming up.

On the subject of Melbourne, everyone is waiting with bated breath to see which shortlisted alliance will win the $3b desal project. Depending who wins, this may actually produce fewer new jobs than expected. The Veolia/John Holland Alliance has recently completed the Gold Coast and Sydney Desal plants, and should be reasonably well resourced if they win Melbourne, but substantially over resourced if they don’t. Degremont/Theiss will have some ramping up to do.

My forecast is that things will get worse in the water job market before they get better.

So where are the jobs? There is always a steady trickle of opportunities outside the major cities, particularly with regional water authorities, and for civil water & wastewater engineering consultants willing to work outside the major cities. Most consultancies are still willing to bring on board people who they know will win them business, i.e. locals with an established network and reputation for good work…there is still a shortage of  experienced wastewater and water treatment process engineers for example. Some firms that missed the boat on the 2007/2008 boom are not over-resourced, and are more open to hiring than others.

The longer term prospects are good for water work here. Australia will continue to be a case-study for climate change, and much of the talent in the industry is still due to retire in the next 5-10 years. Watch this space.

We already know that in natural systems of all kinds change happens in big jumps. Systems tend to be resilient to change up to a point, but when pushed to a certain limit, a dramatic change occurs and the system enters a new state; a step change occurs.

Step Change in Perth Inflows

The general public in Australia is quite familiar with step change. The water utility in Western Australia, Water Corporation had always looked at long term average inflows when doing their supply planning. This had always worked well, until their rainfall took two dramatic steps down, with an even more dramatic fall in inflows. The reduction was not gradual…rainfall patterns changed overnight.

Other major capital cities in Australia have had similar experiences, requiring something like 10 billion dollars worth of infrastructure in the form of desalination plants, reuse plants and pipelines to secure water supplies for major cities.

Global climate change promises to follow a similar pattern. It won’t be long until step change is the phrase on everyone’s lips.

I am interested to get people’s thoughts/perspective on this.

In Australia there is a rapidly growing market for small (kilolitres rather than megalitres a day) grey water and blackwater recycling systems for office buildings and residential estates. It is interesting to see that the design/fabricate/install/operate industry serving this market is still dominated by small players, mostly owner managed firms operating on a regional level.

We had a recent case in Queensland of a successful small business going bankrupt through trying to grow too quickly.

I will be very interested to see how this industry matures. Is there something about decentralised systems that makes them inherently suitable for small businesses to deliver? The margins are relatively small compared to large projects, and perhaps the customisation required means that it is difficult to reap the benefits of economies of scale.

This could be an important question. Climate change drivers make centralised systems start to look less attractive, and decentralised water/wastewater systems could start to take significant business away from the major utilities. Will we see utilities move into this space? Will a major private sector environment business start to buy up small firms? Or will it remain a cottage industry?

It has begun. Government money is starting to flow into water sustainability here in Australia, and we are starting to see the emergence of real jobs in the area.

Because water has so many aspects, and any kind of water resource has a gazillion stakeholders, water sustainability is inherently a cross-disciplinary pursuit. You must cross-over the natural and engineered water-cycles and hence have a working knowledge of both hydrology/hydrogeology and civil/chemical engineering. You have to know behavioural science, economics and finance, advanced project management techniques, water science and urban planning.

I already have job opportunities for these people, so if you are one then get in touch!

visited a major water utility today. The hr manager told me they don’t really hire people with water industry experience. my jaw dropped; how can you run a water utility without water people?

I am blogging from the Sydney Water Sensitive Cities Workshop. The conference has been a mix of presentations by leaders in the area, and workshops by attendees and has been  co-hosted by the International Water Centre, the National Urban Water Governance Program and Monash University.

The attendees come from all sorts of organisations, but because local government in Australia has responsibility for managing urban planning and stormwater, there are a lot of local government people here. Professions represented are engineers, landscape architects and scientists.

It has been made clear that we are very much at the beginning of the journey towards water sustainable cities.

Listening to the views of the urban planners and architects, it was an interesting insight to hear that water sustainability can be a driver for creating more livable, greener cities that are just more pleasant places to be. Yet again Singapore has emerged as a leader in WSUD, with Tony Wong from EDAW presenting the work they have done to increase the utility provided by Singapore’s waterways, converting concrete channels into water parks with integrated stormwater management and treatment.

The unfortunate reality is that our cities here in Australia are still very poor at managing water, and there is so much to be done in terms of regulation and governance to create water sensitive cities. One striking feature and focus of this conference has been wicked problems and the challenge of  driving change in a complex sociopolitical environment.