It’s difficult to think that Australia’s Wet Tropics may be at risk of a water security crisis, but Cairns Regional Council has told us that we are at ‘real risk of a drinking water shortfall by 2026’. What they mean is that Cairns’ demand for water is projected to surpass our current supply of water. A crisis like this can be solved by lowering our demand for water or by increasing our supply of water.

Cairns Regional Council has a Demand Management Strategy, but has neglected to make a start on 14 of the 19 actions outlined in the strategy since its inception in 2015. Council started a community water education program then promptly cut spending on it, allowing their water education team to fold. More recently, Council stopped including water usage data in State of Environment reports and delayed implementation of the smart water metre initiative in favour of the Esplanade development. Furthermore, CRC’s Demand Management Strategy (2015) outlines a goal for reducing water demand to 377 litres per person per day by 2025/26. This is only a 10% reduction over 10 years. For context, South East Queensland was able to reduce their water usage by 53% in just 3 years during the Millennium Drought.

This past year, Cairns Regional Counil started a campaign to receive $215 million in funding from State and Federal governments for their Cairns Water Security Strategy – Stage 1 Project proposal which seeks to build infrastructure to source water from the Mulgrave River and increases the volume of water being drawn from CRC’s existing Behana Creek water supply. 

They have successfully secured State and Federal funding for the project. 

CRC has yet to release their Detailed Business Case for the project, so we haven’t seen evidence of their efforts to ensure the least possible impact to ecological flows and cultural flows, nor protect the cultural heritage of the Traditional Owners, the Dulabed and Malanbarra Yidinji peoples.