Thirsty world faces up to water fears

“We want to make the young water professionals understand that they are the future of the global water industry,” said Rita Henderson, a senior research associate at the University of New South Wales, which hosted the conference.

“We all feel passionately about water. We believe water is a human right.”

Experts from Oman, Kenya and Austria joined others from across the world to discuss sustainability and how communities in drier regions must adapt to warmer temperatures to safeguard precious supplies into the future.

The meeting dealt with basic issues of survival, said Katerina Ruzicka, a research assistant at the Institute of Water Quality at Vienna’s University of Technology.

“A huge problem we are facing besides climate change is water for food,” Ms Ruzicka said. “We have to feed a growing population and you need water to produce food.

“Somehow we will be able to cope with it because humans do always somehow cope with huge challenges in one way or another.”

Ensuring that supplies continue to flow to the nation’s homes and businesses has been a pressing concern for authorities in Australia.

It is the world’s driest inhabited continent and rainfall patterns have become increasingly erratic.

State governments have bickered with each other over irrigation rights in prized river basins as a long drought strangles parched areas of the country’s outback.

Professor Richard Stuetz, a leading authority on the environment at the University of New South Wales, believes that quarrels over water could boil over into serious disputes between competing interests.

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