As we bake, remember to save water

An editorial in Adelaide Sunday Mail (Australia, where it’s now summer) sounds a theme that will probably soon spread to the South in the United States: The blowtorch outside your front door today – masquerading as an autumn heatwave – is killing your garden. It's stopping you filling the new pool and keeping the car clean. So what? Today's heat is another – and we would say a welcome – reminder that water management remains one of South Australia's biggest issues.

SA Water figures show water consumption this year is down, sadly not by much, on last year. But salinity levels in the River Murray continue to rise, the Coorong fades to what author Germaine Greer describes elsewhere in this newspaper as the "Dead Sea", an unscrupulous few flout watering restrictions with shamless conviction, while farmers in the Riverland wage a daily struggle to stay upright.

There is some progress. All states have agreed to SA's $6 million plan to save the Lower Lakes by pumping water from Lake Alexandrina into Lake Albert with the Murray-Darling Commission footing the bill.

As well, an extra $5 million will be spent to save "hot spots" along the Murray. Rightly, Water Security Minister Karlene Maywald labelled Friday's meeting with her fellow Water Ministers "the most productive" she had attended. But SA is not a "nanna state" and it is not up to her and the Government alone to fix the problem. It's up to all of us to take ownership of the crisis and treat water as liquid gold.

Climate change, and by extension water shortages, has been identified by the prestigious Oxford Research Group as having serious environmental, socio-economic and security consequences for developing and developed nations. There is an element of doomsday scenario in this, but the message is clear. We must continue to act with alacrity to preserve and increase our water supplies, because soon it will too late to do anything about it.

The confluence of the Murray and Darling Rivers, Australia, "Antonov14," Wikimedia Commons