Taking the deep uncertainty out of water security
The Water Security Technical Report, released in September 2025, could not be clearer.
‘Future climate risk to Australia’s water security is extreme. Projected continued widespread declines in rainfall and streamflow, a more variable climate, and extensive dry conditions will coincide with warming that raises evaporation, reducing soil moisture, runoff and groundwater recharge. Increased severe floods and bushfires will further degrade water quality, straining already limited water sources. Every region will face serious water security challenges, with natural environments enduring the most severe impacts. Effective water management will be one of few adaptation measures to mitigate ecosystem function risk. Water scarcity will threaten primary industries and remote communities, posing risks to food security and regional economies.’
– Water Security Technical Report, input to the National Climate Risk Assessment, September 2025
Water sector organisations will need to bridge the gap between information about system-level phenomena of the kind we see in the report and local-level knowledge and information about what is exposed in their domain of governance and how it is vulnerable to shocks and stresses.
This domain-specific assessment will need to include
- how events and conditions could, would or might compound and cascade, causing harm, loss and damage in their areas of operation
- potentially new linkages between hazards and their impacts and implications
- possibilities not projected by models or which can’t be measured with a probability
- tail-end risks: events at the edges of the data, such as the rare events of heavy rainfall that may become more intense or more frequent.
To do this, decision makers will need to integrate information and knowledge from a range of sources and evaluative frameworks, not only climate and environmental sciences. Planners and policy makers will also need to use analytical techniques that are suited to this kind of information and knowledge. Finally this information needs to be made intelligible to partners and stakeholders in government and the wider economy.