But with population increases putting further pressure on demand and dam levels, Evan Hambleton said efforts to conserve water were more important than ever.

I'm not really a fan of the ideas promoted by Abundance, i find they're a little too neo-liberal, but the gist of their ideas should be applied when it comes to our water strategy in WA.

The last thing we should be doing is focusing the Water Corp's efforts on conserving water. We should be tasking them with the mega-project supplying water for communities and also long term environmental water flows mitigating for the human induced absence of naturally occuring flows. Otherwise eventually its goodbye Jarrah Forrests, and the whole ecosystems around them, and goodbye farms and orchards that rely on that same environment for the wonderful standard of food security we have in this State.

We have to at least make sure the "sponge" is replenished. See the below quote,

"The catchments are like a big sponge," Mr Hambleton said.

"It's only when that sponge is fully saturated that we start to see some run-off into streams then into our dams.

"Over many years, that's gotten drier and drier, so it takes more and more water effectively to saturate the sponge before we see some run-off."