Sustainable water systems and household practices

The fundamental challenge for urban water management today is unsustainable consumption. Water is essential to earth's living creatures and central to maintaining the earth's ecosystems. If we do not respect the environmental processes that provide clean water, and use water wisely, we undermine the earth's basic building blocks of life (Postel 2005). The environmental impacts of inefficient water use highlight the critical importance of designing and implementing sustainable water management practices. In part, this chapter seeks to redress an imbalance in current literature (Heathcote 2005), emphasizing the importance of agricultural, rather than urban, water consumption. While acknowledging that large complexes such as hospitals and casinos consume disproportionately large amounts of water (Age 2006), this chapter focuses on domestic water use in Australian cities, where most homes are connected to, and reliant on, metropolitan-wide distribution systems. We examine ways that water is used in such settings, review various programs and policies aimed at changing urban water use behaviour, analyse methods for (and barriers to) achieving change, and propose future directions for sustainable domestic water consumption. The Melbourne case studies discussed have relevance for all urban environments.