The New York Times, November 2016
MELBOURNE, Australia — On his first visit to Melbourne in 2009, Stanley Grant, a drought expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, had a question for his taxi driver.
“How’s the drought?” he asked.
“It’s about 28 percent,” came the reply.
Grant was puzzled. But shortly afterward, they drove past an electronic road sign announcing that the city’s reservoirs were indeed at just 28 percent of capacity.
The taxi driver knew the state of the reservoirs exactly. “In California you might get people saying, ‘I don’t know, it’s not my department, I let the government take care of that,’ ” said David Feldman, a colleague of Grant’s and a co-author with him of a paper on Melbourne’s innovations in water management.
It was this high level of public engagement, and the water-savings that came with it, that helped stop the city of Melbourne from running dry during a recent decade-long drought.
This feature looks at how the city did it, and draws out lessons for other drought-prone urban centres.
Sylvia Rowley 