Award-winning water sensitivity strategy drives climate resilience through collaboration

Addressing the severe impacts of climate change in south-west Western Australia requires innovative solutions. Perth’s award-winning Waterwise Perth Action Plan is a prime example of how cross-sector collaboration can lead to greater water sensitivity and climate resilience.

Sponsored by Hydroflux, the Organisational Excellence Award was presented to the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, Water Corporation and other contributing agencies at Ozwater’24 for the incredible work in delivering the Waterwise Perth Action Plan 2019.  
 
The Australian Water Awards stand to recognise innovation and excellence within the water community, with state and territory project awards now open for nominations.    
 
The Waterwise Perth Action Plan involves collaboration and partnership across key portfolios including water, planning, community and urban development, and provides a model to achieve transformational change through collective action. 
  
Water Corporation Water Sensitive Cities Principal Antonietta Torre said the effects of climate change are felt acutely in Perth and surrounding regions, which has created a lot of motivation to address water sensitivity from different areas of government and industry.  
 
“Since the mid 1970s, we’ve had an 80% decrease in stream flow. We see records being broken all the time. During our last summer and autumn, we had the driest six months on record,” she said.  
 
“The impacts are being felt by everybody, including sporting clubs and local governments managing parks and ovals. We've seen all the agencies across those sectors come together to work on water security.” 
  
Department of Water and Environmental Regulation Waterwise Cities Program Manager Winsome MacLaurin said much of the work underpinning the Waterwise Perth Action Plan was established via relationships already built under the Cooperative Research Center (CRC) for Water Sensitive Cities. 
  
“Being given the opportunity to lead a plan like this doesn't happen very often. But stakeholders were very much welcoming a strategic space for this water sensitivity work, particularly given the impacts of climate change and the rapid urbanisation of Perth,” she said.  
 
“Perth itself is the most sprawling capital city in the world. The city stretches 150kms up and down the coast, which impacts the environment. We've lost 80% of our wetlands since colonisation. That's enormous, and it means that an urban water plan is really timely and needed.  
 
“There was already good work going on, but something this plan does is bring all that work together. It all connects now and really amplifies the work that's going on across all of our agencies. And it helps us stay connected and continue to work in step."

Developing the plan

Informed by the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, the Waterwise Perth Action Plan is all about working alongside all stakeholders to develop effective collaboration – ways of working that ensure current and future programs are strategically aligned with water sensitivity principles.  
 
“WA partners were keen to join the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities. And we were happy to be the test case for how to transition a city into a water sensitive way of operating,” Torre said.  
 
“The Waterwise Perth Action Plan 2019 covers the broad goals of a water sensitive city, including governance, planning and community engagement. This really helped accelerate Perth's journey and get that momentum for the WA Government to prepare and implement the next iteration of the plan.” 
  
MacLaurin said the second iteration of the Waterwise Action Plan was informed by reassessment of Perth’s urban water management performance using the Water Sensitive Cities Index benchmarking tool. This gave all parties a clear indication of how much had or had not been achieved across the 34 indicators that characterise a water sensitive city.  

“It gave us a strong argument for bringing on new partners, and growing the program to focus on water quality, ecological health and urban livability. It gave us a very strong evidence base for implementing improvements,” she said.  
 
Torre said one of the lasting benefits of the plan has been the insight it has given different agencies and stakeholders in terms of what everyone is aiming to achieve, providing opportunity to identify synergies and create more efficiencies.  
 
"One of the benefits around understanding each other's objectives is that we can work together to achieve more. For example, with the Waterwise Social Housing Project, we wanted to reduce water use. But the government also had objectives around affordable living and helping their tenants save money on their bills,” she said. 
  
"So Water Corporation and Department of Communities came together to retrofit social housing properties and make them water efficient, and delivered an education program along with that. It was a win-win. We've now saved close to 500 million litres of water from that work, reducing average household water use by 20 per cent, and it was much more effective because we worked together.”

Future of the plan

WA agencies have now almost completed delivering the second two-year Waterwise Perth Action Plan, named Kep Katitjin-Gabi Kaadadjan, which are the Whadjuk and Bindjareb Noongar terms for ‘water knowledge’.  The success of the first plan is an excellent outcome, as future iterations continue to build and grow from the initial plan and its strong foundation.  

"We won the award for the first Waterwise Perth Action Plan, but there's a really high degree of correlation of actions that progress from one plan into the next. The deliverables or the scope either evolves, broadens or deepens,” MacLaurin said.  

When it comes to water sensitivity, MacLaurin said it’s important to remember that the plan is about more than creating water efficiency, it’s about supporting livability and is a fundamental part of WA’s response to the impacts of climate change.  

“We're talking about the whole picture of a water sensitive city. We are talking about greening, cooling, tree canopy, biodiversity, urban heat mitigation and wise water use; it’s a climate resilience response,” she said.  

"When we have particularly intense summers where it does not rain for five months, we need to be able to maintain tree canopy and healthy vegetation. The actions and themes within the next iteration of the plan help us to do this.  

“The Waterwise Program will continue to develop and grow through to 2030 and deliver 10-year targets and the vision for leading waterwise communities for Boorloo (Perth) and Bindjareb (Peel). We are soon to launch the third plan, which will run for three years, and then we will create the final plan in 2027 that will take us to 2030." 
  
Torre said one of the incredible things about the plan is the impact it is having in terms of embedding water sensitive principles.  
 
“There are all kinds of different organisations that now have waterwise principles in their policies and standards. The fact that those agencies have become champions for water sensitivity and have built it into their policies is a really unique and amazing outcome of this program,” she said.  
 
"Another area that was quite new at the time was getting a much better understanding of water and Aboriginal culture. That’s another area of this work that was developed under the first Waterwise Perth Action Plan and has continued to grow. We developed a school education module around Aboriginal water stories – it’s now our most popular school incursion and contributes to our Waterwise Schools Education Program which currently engages with approximately 40,000 students each year.” 
  
MacLaurin said 70% of Perth’s total water supply comes from groundwater, but there is recognition that aquifers need to be rebalanced for sustainable use.  
 
“For such a long time, we had access to this wonderful source of water to keep Perth green and thriving. But we know we need to be managing our aquifers more sustainably,” she said.  

“We have Water Corporation’s Groundwater Replenishment Scheme, where treated wastewater is purified to drinking water standards at an advanced water recycling plant and then pumped and stored in deep groundwater aquifers, but all sectors are looking at how to reduce use to bring our aquifers back into balance.”   

The Waterwise Program has saved around 1024 million litres of residential water and 22,770 million litres of non-residential water as well as co-funded planting of 10,110 trees and 295,400 waterwise plants from its beginning in October 2019, to June 2024.  
 
Even with these huge achievements the challenge of adapting to the drying climate, urbanisation and population growth requires the kind of collaboration and multi-disciplinary approaches that the Waterwise Program fosters. 

Interested in nominating an outstanding project for the Australian Water Awards? Take a look at nomination categories here.