In Australia, a land of drought and flooding rains, the institutions and government departments responsible for water policy have no common definition of water security.
Just three years ago, towns in Western Australia, Queensland, and New South Wales were running out of drinking water.
This year, the sewage systems of communities along the Murray River and its tributaries have been failing and making people sick.
The Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO have warned Australia is already experiencing the impact of climate change, bringing increasingly intense heatwaves.
Inflows to the nation's largest river system, the Murray-Darling Basin, have halved over the past 20 years.
Australian policymakers often frame water security in terms of availability. How much sits in a dam, or how many months of drinking water a town has left.
Will Fargher has worked in water policy for the past two decades, as a former general manager of the National Water Commission, before co-founding the water-focused consultancy Aither.
Mr Fargher told the ABC's Country Breakfast radio program that water security as a broad concept remained poorly understood, despite its importance.
"We're not just talking about having sufficient quantities of water, but about its quality, affordability, and access," Mr Fargher said.
"For all its importance as a concept, critical to communities around Australia, we don't have a shared definition of water security which is nationally agreed.
"Nor do we have an approach to assessing water security nationally and the ability to report on that."
As the Australian National University's Katherine Taylor identified in 2019, none of Australia's key water policies "directly defined water security, including the Water Act 2007, the Basin Plan 2012, and the National Water Initiative".
"Even the National Plan for Water Security did not explicitly define 'water security'," Ms Taylor's report said.
Mr Fargher said failing to properly define water security made it difficult for different levels of government, environmental, agricultural, and water departments and agencies to work toward common goals.
"If you sat [everyone down], you would get a general consensus on the notion of water security," he said.
"But as soon as you dig into the detail, it's clear it means different things to different people".
Slowed to a trickle
Australia emerged from the Millennium Drought with a bold, overarching water policy known as the National Water Initiative.
This policy has guided federal, state and territory water management and policy for the environment, agriculture, cities, and towns over the past two decades.
Over the past two decades, "material benefits have flowed from these reforms, lower average water use by households, more efficient use by industry, more water for the environment, and better adaptation to uncertainty", according to the Productivity Commission.
However, the Productivity Commission also believes the policy is now outdated and in need of renewal.
In 2013, the Abbott government disbanded the Ministerial Council of state, territory and Commonwealth ministers that oversaw water reform in Australia.
The following year, the National Water Commission was scrapped, which was responsible for auditing and monitoring water policy reform, including the National Water Initiative.
The sum of these actions amounted to what the Productivity Commission described in 2020 as a "significantly eroded" governance of the National Water Initiative's implementation.
"Since the abolition of the National Water Commission, it is fair to say governments have substantially retreated from national water reform," Mr Fargher said.
"And we've got a question for a country like Australia, with water being central to climate adaptation, whether we can afford to drop the ball like this."
Over the course of the National Water Initiative, Australia has experienced some of the driest and wettest years on record.
Mr Fargher said today, by global standards, Australia was doing well to ensure that water needs were met in the long term.
"But we can't afford to be complacent", he said.
Renewal ahead
Questions about water security have been answered with infrastructures, such as new dams, pipelines, and groundwater bores.
But Mr Fargher said governments needed a more holistic approach to deal with the challenges presented by climate change and a growing population.
"Infrastructure will be part of the solution, he said.
"But we need to be thinking more about governance, institutional arrangement, management, planning, and information."
In the most recent budget, the federal government committed to "scope the establishment of a National Water Commission".
The government has also said it was "committed to working with states and territories to renew the NWI".
It has also expanded the remit of the National Water Grid Authority to include funding for projects that deliver water supplies in regional and remote communities.
"The commitment to establish a National Water Commission and to renew the NWI really provides a great opportunity to revitalise water reform, with refreshed vision and objectives," Mr Fargher said.
"One of the areas of success of the NWI in the past was in working with all governments in Australia to drive the thinking and progress of water scarcity and variability, which is being amplified by climate change.
"And where the National Water Commission has been successful in the past has been in funding water science and economics, using its convening power to shape the national conversation."
More progress needed
Despite these successes, University of Melbourne water law and policy export Erin O'Donnell says First Nations water rights have consistently been sidelined and ignored in the conversations around water policy.
"We need to begin by acknowledging the enduring sovereignty of First Nations people," Dr O'Donnell said.
"That means tackling the assumption of 'aqua nullius' that is embedded in every single piece of water legislation in every jurisdiction in Australia.
"A National Water Initiative needs to acknowledge there is a legitimacy problem for every price of water legislation because it assumes that water belonged to no-one."
Dr O'Donnell said First Nations groups had spent decades consulting and engaging with governments about the return of water rights, and a renewed National Water Initiative should include concrete commitments around the return of water rights.
She said power needed to be transferred to First Nations people so they could enact their water laws and obligations.
"Aboriginal people have been shut out of economic development related to water because they own less than 0.2 per cent of water rights in Australia," Dr O'Donnell said.
"That is a major economic development problem and a justice problem that can be solved with the return of water."
Dr O'Donnell said setting a target for Aboriginal water ownership was being discussed as part of the Closing the Gap process.
"A target would be a really useful place to begin. But the crucial part of having a target is developing a pathway to deliver it," she said.
"And that is where a refreshed National Water Initiative and a National Water Commission dedicated to achieving that target could actually drive change."
