Remote Indigenous Communities

Sustainable water management in remote Australian communities is a delicate balance between sufficient and acceptable supply options and appropriate and effective demand approaches. This paper focus on the evaluation of community-based water demand management strategies piloted in four remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities in Australia. Findings of the pilot demonstrate that from a systems perspective, community-based demand management centred around education and encouragement of residents to conserve and use water efficiently, provide greater opportunities for long-term sustainable water management outcomes that support building of social capital. To ensure truly transformative management outcomes, a toolbox of socio-technological strategies should be used including, where possible, smart metering of water consumption and use of water-efficient devices. A key element of this approach to demand management calls for a shift away from business-as-usual policy towards a flexible learning approach that involves genuine collaboration between water managers and Indigenous communities.

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Safe drinking water and effective sanitation is a basic human right. The health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples living on traditional Country in remote Australia can be supported or undermined by these essential services. Despite global and Australian commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals, water and sanitation service levels have regularly been identified as unreliable, unsafe, and of a lower standard than non-Indigenous and non-remote settlements. This research sought to identify the optimal conditions to enable consistent delivery of safe water and sanitation in remote Indigenous communities of Australia. Using a combination of literature reviews, interviews with key stakeholder groups and applied research findings, key conditions for improved water and sanitation outcomes were identified. These included technology for water and sanitation that is fit for purpose, people and place; capacity-building, training and ongoing support for local Indigenous service operators; and that all personnel involved in delivery require a level of cultural competency to the local and Indigenous context. These findings are intended to contribute to informing more sustainable water and sanitation outcomes in Indigenous communities.

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Ensuring safe, accessible and acceptable drinking water in remote communities in Australia requires culturally and socially appropriate, technically feasible and economically viable approaches. Arguably, technical and economic factors have been the main focus for remote communities in the water sector, as engineers historically drove the design, planning and construction phases of water supply management options.

More recently, increasing focus has been on understanding and integrating local people and place into water supply and demand management. This paper focusses on community-based water demand management in the inner Torres Straits community of Kirirri. The aims and methods are outlined, along with a discussion of the findings which describe the community-preferred demand management tools that were piloted in 25 households between 2018-2019.

The paper concludes that individual household water use feedback and strengths-based community messaging are promising tools for achieving sustained outdoor water conservation behaviour.

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Managing water demand by reducing water consumption and improving water use efficiency has become essential for ensuring water security. This research aimed to identify the primary determinants of household water consumption in an Australian Indigenous community to develop evidence-based water demand management policies and strategies that might be implemented by the water service provider. A behavior change framework was applied to investigate the opportunity, ability, and motivational determinants affecting household water consumption and conservation in an Australian Indigenous community. The lack of water conservation knowledge and skills of high water users could be barriers to saving water. Low water users have positive attitudes towards water conservation and a higher level of awareness about their own water use. While there is a lack of a belief that water shortages will occur, low water users do have concerns of vulnerability to droughts, and that could be a driver for their sense of obligation to engage in water conservation practices. The research recommended communication messages and tools to address identified barriers to enabling positive changes to water use behaviors, which have wider applications in remote Australian Indigenous communities.

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Collaboration between government agencies and communities for sustainable water governance in remote Indigenous communities is espoused as a means to contribute to more equitable, robust, and long-term decision-making and to ensure that water services contribute to broader considerations of physical, social, and economic prosperity. In Australia, the uptake of collaborative water governance in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island contexts has been slow and few examples exist from which to inform policy and practice. This study identifies barriers to uptake of collaborative sustainable water governance, drawing from qualitative interviews with water practitioners working in remote Indigenous Australia and analysis of key project documentation. Thematic analysis revealed discrete barriers across five key categories: (1) governance arrangements, (2) economic and financial, (3) capacity and skills, (4) data and information, and (5) cultural values and norms, with many barriers identified, unique to the remote Indigenous Australian context. The paper provides insights into how to address these barriers strategically to create transformative and sustainable change for Indigenous communities. The results contribute to the greater body of knowledge on sustainable and collaborative water governance, and they are of relevance for broader water management, policy, and research.

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Managing water demand in many remote Indigenous communities is critical yet often poorly implemented due in part to a lack of understanding of the volume and nature of water use. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data has enabled a deeper understanding of water consumption patterns and drivers in three remote Australian communities as part of Stage 1 of the Remote and Isolated Communities Essential Services (RICES) project. Total daily per person use averaged from 270 L/p/d to over 1,500 L/p/d and outdoor water use activities comprised up to 86% of total residential water consumed. Structured interviews with participants identified five main drivers for outdoor water use of which some are traditionally the role of local government service provision (e.g. dust control) and all are closely linked to day to day functioning (e.g. cleaning food, cooling). Traditional demand management strategies such as pricing are not yet appropriate, nor is a reliance on improving local government service provision, due partly to the resource challenges in remote communities. Community-based engagement and education, supported by local government role modelling, has been identified as a more suitable approach and will be tested in later stages of the RICES project.

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