The City of Sydney is seeking tenders to develop a Decentralised Water Master Plan aimed at producing more than 10% of the City’s water supply from local sources.

Currently, the inner city imports drinking-standard water from Warragamba Dam, but only 20% of this is used for drinking, cooking and washing. 80% is used for purposes like toilet flushing (19%) and air conditioning cooling towers (15%) which do not need drinking-standard water.

The tender, which closes on September 7, will explore different business models to implement the master plan, including a private sector water services company or a public/private joint venture.

The infrastructure required to capture and treat the recycled water would piggyback the council’s plans to install trigeneration power plants in buildings in the city. Trigeneration power plants use the waste heat from electricity to heat and cool buildings.The recycled water would be treated by waste heat from the trigeneration system and would be cheaper than importing treated water from Warragamba Dam.

The CSIRO’s Water for a Healthy Country Flagship and the Smart Water Fund have announced that they have developed a practical, robust, sustainable method for testing whether greywater treatment technologies meet Australian standards.

Currently, there is no standard national testing method; states and territories each have their own legislation for greywater collection, treatment and use.

CSIRO Land and Water scientist, Melissa Toifl, says the protocol could be used to establish a national greywater treatment testing regime. “With this protocol we are anticipating a national approach in the way greywater treatment technologies are tested and regulated,” Ms Toifl says. “This would simplify the process for manufacturers with the aim of increasing consumer adoption rates of greywater technologies.”

A big cloud seeding trial is being credited for a positive turn-around in lake levels in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains.

For the first time in five years, water storages are rising after droughts that had seen lake levels fall to their lowest since the opening of the Hydro Electric Scheme in the 1950s.

Snowy Hydro spokesman Paul Johnson said that the expanded cloud seeding program is paying off. "Preliminary data indicates that you could be seeing up to about a 10 per cent increase in snow over a 10 year period on average," he said. But Snowy Hydro warns that it is going to take at least 10 years of above average inflows to restore the dams to capacity.

Penny Wong, Australia’s Climate Change and Water Minister, has announced that 6.3 billion litres of stormwater, which currently run into into the South Australia’s Gulf of St. Vincent, will be harvested annually for use in Adelaide’s northern suburbs.

The project will demonstrate the value of water re-use and stormwater recycling through the construction of manmade wetlands. The wetlands will act as filters for urban and polluted stormwater that would otherwise run into the Gulf St Vincent. Stormwater will be diverted to wetlands that will be developed at the Grange, Royal Adelaide and Glenelg golf clubs. This pre-treated water from the wetlands will then be pumped, through bores, back into the underground water supplies beneath Adelaide for use as needed.

5 billion litres of the water will be used for civic irrigation for which drinking water would otherwise have been used. The raemainder will be used to replenish the aquifers below the Northern Adelaide Plains.

Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has warned farmers that in the future the Government will not provide drought relief unless they adapt their farming practices for climate change.

He said that the current policy " is based on a model of a one-in-25-year drought and assumes rainfall will return to past seasonal conditions and does not factor in climate change". He stressed that the Government would not abandon struggling farmers but said that it wanted a situation in which, every time a farmer sought relief, they  would be  better prepared  to cope with a changing climate.

Phillip Glyde, head of the Australian Bureau of  Agriculture and Resource Economics added that he had discussed the current Exceptional Circumstances assistance scheme with state agriculture ministers and obtained agreement to a wide-ranging review. The review would take into account the effect on farming communities and would not apply to farmers currently receiving Exceptional Circumstances assistance. He also said that the Government would offer more research grants for techniques to help farmers adapt to climate change.